Imperialism K Neg

1NC
Retrenchment increases military efficiency and is a tool to
strengthen hegemonic power
MacDonald and Parent 11(Paul K., Assistant Professor of Political Science
at Williams College, and Joseph M., Assistant Professor of Political Science, Spring
2011, Vol. 35, No. 4, Pages 7-44, accessed 7/29/15)
*Modified to avoid ablest language

We advance the neorealist argument that states, competing for

security in anarchy, respond with rough rationality to their
environment. They do this because, in the competitive arena of
world politics, inert or improvident great powers receive negative
feedback until they are disabused of their delusions or replaced at
the top rungs by more sensible states. Great powers that do not
react with agility and alacrity to a lower position are unlikely to last
in the unforgiving game of power politics. Rivals will be quick to detect and exploit
incompetence. The underlying logic of this behavior is solvency. States, like firms, tend to go bankrupt
when they budget blithely and live beyond their means. When ends are too ambitious for available means
a situation sometimes called the Lippmann gap39states are overextended and open to predation. To
avoid insolvency,

states adopt retrenching policies as a way to gain

breathing room, regroup, and retard if not reverse their decline. In the
long term, decline is inevitable, but in the short term it is anything but.40
States can improve their relative growth by imitating the practices
of lead states. And, like firms, states are capable of recovery if they
make astute adjustments. Reorganization requires some
combination of resources and time, which states can generate by
paring back military expenditures, avoiding costly conflicts, and
shifting burdens onto others. The alternatives resignation to continual decline, disregard
of risks, unbalanced ends and meansare worse. Negative feedback drives this
process, if states rationally adjust their commitments in response to decline. What matters most in
explaining the extent of retrenchment is not geography, leadership, or regime type; the most important
factor is the rate of decline relative to other great powers. Consequently, our central hypothesis is that
declining power generates prompt and proportionate declines in grand strategic interests. We do not claim

great powers prudently

scale back their grand strategic interests when they experience
acute relative decline because they feel their power ebbing. The basic
that all states retrench rationally all the time. What we claim is that

logic of neorealism is clear, but it is not clear how quickly that logic applies.41 Kenneth Waltz, neorealisms
founder, argues that explaining foreign policy outcomes is too specific for a theory at such a high level of
abstraction. He speculates that systemic pressures might manifest themselves in foreign policies over tento fifteen-year time spans, maybe longer.42 Colin Elman argues that a neorealist theory of foreign policy is
logically possible, but he preaches agnosticism on whether such theories are useful. Like Waltz, Elman
does not contend that neorealism functions as a theory of foreign policy over brief time spans.43 Despite
their differences, neither Waltz nor Elman generates a detailed neorealist theory of foreign policy. We

neorealism can illuminate foreign policy

details, such as the form and timing of retrenchment. With regard to
the forms that retrenchment can take, balance of power politics is a
central concept in neorealism, and states seeking to preserve their
autonomy can do so in two ways: internal or external balancing.44 Internal
dissent from both Waltz and Elman;

balancing is increasing ones capabilities through economic growth,

decreased military expenditures, or both. As a rule, this is the best form of
balancing because, other things equal, in a self-help world it decreases reliance on others.
External balancing involves the formation of alliances to collectively
check rising powers. This is a secondbest form of balancing, given
the unreliability of alliance partners and the inevitable problem of
free riding. States unable to balance are forced to side with the strong, or bandwagon. This
framework for understanding alignment can be applied to
retrenchment. States suffering from relative decline should prefer to
reverse their fall through internal retrenchment. States may try to
ease the burden of their defense policies by cutting back defense
spending or decreasing the size of their militaries . They may also
try to increase the efficiency or effectiveness of their military
forces. As part of such a policy, states may attempt to imitate the innovations of superior states.45
These innovations may take the form of military, economic, or social reorganization, but for the purposes
of this article we concentrate on military reforms because neorealism puts theoretical priority on military
power. Even though internal retrenchment is the most desirable course of action, states suffering acute
relative decline may be unable to balance their commitments and resources through domestic innovations
alone. In these situations, states may have to retrench through external means, forming or reinforcing
alliances that will help them meet their overseas commitments. There are obvious risks to relying on
alliance partners to help defend overseas commitmentsalliance partners may demand a high price for
support; they may refuse to defend commitments in sensitive areas; and they can abandon you when
called upon. Yet for states suffering from large declines, these risks may be worth taking if domestic reform
alone is unlikely to check decline. States in the most dire straits may be forced to forsake their
international commitments altogether. Rather than attempt to stem the tide by internal reform or external
assistance, they will simply bandwagon, or make massive sacrifices in the hope of salvaging some
semblance of sovereignty. This form of retrenchment has the most in common with appeasement in the
sense that concessions to potential adversaries are asymmetrical and sustained. With regard to the timing
of foreign policy responses, at critical junctures, structural incentives can influence retrenching states over
time periods as short as five years. Power is often difficult to measure, and decisionmakers are sometimes
poor at measuring it. But if neorealism is a powerful theory, it should apply when power shifts are most
dramatic, and ordinal changes in the great power ranks fit this description. We admit that in some sense a
five-year time horizon is aggressive and atheoretical, but theory informs our belief. It would be difficult to
describe international politics as a competitive system if, within five years, major power shifts did not cue
states to pull back or cause rising states to push declining states back to more defensible positions.
Beyond this, neorealism admits ignorance on the details of state behavior, and we concede the same.
States have a variety of ways in which they may pursue a policy of retrenchment: they may attempt to
bargain away their commitments or bluff in the face of new challenges. They may raise taxes, cut
spending, or implement some combination of domestic fiscal reform. They may recruit new allies through
appeals to geopolitical threat, ideological affinity, or promises of future spoils. They may not even be
rational, though there are strong incentives to act that way. That is, we are not structural determinists;
states have wide latitude to chart their course when retrenching, and some will do so with more skill and
success than others. At a minimum, however, states should be sensitive to international constraints, and
periods of acute relative decline should trigger or accelerate retrenchment in short order. In sum, this
section has outlined a neorealist theory of great power retrenchment. If declining states mismatch their
foreign policy means and ends for a significant length of time, they will hemorrhage resources and be
contemptible competitors in the game of great power politics. To avoid this fate, states are apt to align
ends and means and decline gracefully. Research Design From our interpretation of neorealism, we distill
two simple hypotheses. First, states suffering from acute relative decline should adopt a policy of
retrenchment within a small window of time. Second, the rate of relative decline should explain the extent
and form of retrenchment. This section describes how we define and measure our main variablesacute
relative decline and retrenchmentdiscusses case selection criteria and the universe of cases, and notes
some important caveats. independent variable: acute relative decline In theory, states should retrench
whenever they experience declines in their relative power. In practice, some periods of relative decline are
of more analytical interest than others. For the purposes of this article, we focus on periods of what we call
acute relative decline. These are periods characterized by two features. First, a great power suffers a
decline in relative power that decreases its ordinal ranking among the great powers. Second, this decrease
in relative power remains evident for at least a five-year period. In making this argument, we are assuming

that states are most likely to retrench when they have lost their position in the rank order and that loss
does not appear to be temporary. We measure relative power by examining a countrys share of gross
domestic product (GDP) among the great powers since 1870the period for which we have reliable
data.46 If a countrys ordinal share of GDP drops a rank and remains there for at least five years, we
classify this as a period of acute relative decline. To be included in the study, states must have at least a
10 percent share of total great power GDP. We also rank the severity of relative decline by calculating the
total decline in great power share of GDP for the five years following the shift in ordinal rankings. To take a
familiar example: in 1908 Germany accounted for 15.69 percent of great power GDP, surpassing Great
Britain for the first time in German history. Over the next five years, Great Britain continued to lose ground
relative to Germany, with its share of great power GDP reduced by a total of 1.41 percent. No measures
are perfect, even when they are the best among flawed alternatives. Although parsimonious, crossnational GDP data must be viewed with skepticism, especially over long periods of time. GDP was invented
as a concept relatively recently, and projecting it backwards in time is a difficult feat. For some countries in
the data set, we have had to estimate total GDP using less reliable measures of output from specific
economic sectors.47 Furthermore, GDP is not the optimal measure for this study. GDP, like income, is a
flow measure and gauges the market value of all finished goods and services produced within a country in
a given year. If money were power and it is only imperfectly sothe best measure would be national
wealth, a stock measure.48 Unfortunately, no one keeps such a measure for the period under
consideration. Ultimately, the rank ordering depends on who makes the most, year in and year out. In any
given year, a lackluster income can be compensated for by a large nest egg from prior years. Conversely,
poor investment, profligate consumption, or high debt can mute the advantages of an enviable income. In
this sense, GDP, like income, is a leading indicator, but one whose effect can be dampened or amplified by
the national balance sheet. Lastly, economic decline may not be the best measure of relative decline
overall. States could care more about military, political, or cultural declineor about some dynamic basket
of these. Decisionmakers may not have a clear ranking of great powers, may not even know an ordinal
transition is taking place, and have only an inkling that their decline is significant and sustained. One must
keep in mind that many policymakers had faulty or imprecise GDP data for large stretches of the period we
consider, while others had no GDP data at all.49 As a rebuttal to these concerns, we argue that using GDP
data is an elegant and conventional approach to analyzing relative power. Most studies of the balance of
power use some measure of economic output, whether energy consumption, steel production, or GDP.50
We assume that decisionmakers acted as if they had access to GDP data, or something close to it. This is
not unrealistic; political elites monitor a variety of economic indicators including agricultural production,
industrial output, commodity prices, tax receipts, and import and export totals. These measures may have
been imperfect, but many of them correspond to what we now call GDP. With regard to the income versus
wealth distinction, we address this by examining periods of ordinal transition. Fundamentally, states
cannot maintain their position in the system if others have a persistently higher share of GDP. No other
form of power is as fungible as economic power, and it can be converted, with various lags, into political,
military, or cultural clout. Other, more nuanced forms of decline may also encourage retrenchment, but if
there is a situation that should elicit a retrenchment response, relative economic decline is it. It should be
noted that measuring great power relative decline using GDP has advantages over well-known
alternatives. The Correlates of War national material capabilities data, for example, is often used to track
the relative balance of power among the great powers. By aggregating measures of economic output with
military indicators, however, this index conflates the causes of relative decline with its consequences. A
decision by a great power to reduce its military expenditures, for example, may reflect a decision to
retrench, and thus be an outcome rather than a marker of relative decline. coarse-grained overview
Based on our universe of cases, the predictions of retrenchment pessimists receive little support. In
contrast to arguments that retrenchment is rare, we find that great powers facing acute relative decline
adopted retrenchment in at least eleven and at most fifteen of the eighteen cases, a range of 6183
percent. By any accounting, a majority of the countries in these cases retrenched shortly after their ordinal
transition. Nor does the evidence support the view that domestic interests constrain retrenchment. Every
one of the great powers in our sample that chose to retrench did so within five years of the ordinal
transition. This suggests timely responses to external constraints rather than domestic intransigence.
Moreover, there does not appear to be a strong connection between regime type and retrenchment.
Democracies account for about two-thirds of the great powers in our study, and are slightly more likely to
face acute relative declines, accounting for thirteen of our eighteen cases, or 72 percent. Of the twelve
democracies, seven retrenched, two did not, and three are debatable, yielding parameters from 58 to 83
percent. There are only three cases of autocracy, which makes comparison among groups difficult, but of
these, two retrenched and one case is arguable, producing a range of 67100 percent.59 In short, evidence
at the coarse-grained level tentatively supports the neorealist approach outlined above: during acute
relative decline, a significant majority of great powers of differing regime types elected to retrench.

Wars, preventive or otherwise, do not appear to be a common fate

for declining states, and recovery of lost rank was fairly frequent.
Declining great powers found themselves embroiled in an interstate

war in only four of the eighteen cases, and in only one of these
cases1935 United Kingdomdid the declining power go to war with
the power that had just surpassed it in ordinal rank. 60 In addition,
in six of fifteen cases, declining great powers that adopted a policy
of retrenchment managed to rebound, eventually recovering their
ordinal rank from the state that surpassed them . These findings suggest that
retrenching states rarely courted disaster and occasionally regained their prior position. Further, even if
retrenchment was not successful, this does not prove that a preferable policy existed.61 In many cases of
decline, there are few restorative solutions available; politics is often a game of unpalatable alternatives.
Short of a miracle, it is hard to say what great powers such as Britain, France, or the Soviet Union could
have done to stay aloft, even with the benefit of hindsight. There is more room for debate on how well a
neorealist approach helps explain the extent of retrenchment. Seven cases do not appear to fit our
explanation: 1883 France; 1935 and 1956 United Kingdom; 1924 France; 1903 Russia; 1931 Germany; and
1992 Japan. Six additional cases are arguably borderline cases: 1873 and 1893 France; 1908, 1872, and
1930 United Kingdom; and 1967 West Germany (this last case, if it works, may do so for the wrong
reasons). Depending on how one codes the half dozen controversial cases, the depth of decline correctly
predicts the extent of retrenchment in somewhere from 28 to 61 percent of the cases. Although we believe
the actual figure to be on the high end of this range, even the low end is a respectable performance for a
single variable. The cases that failed to t our predictions did so at the margins. There were a handful of
cases of great powers facing moderate declines that retrenched more aggressively than we predicted and
another handful of cases of great powers facing large declines that retrenched more cautiously than we
anticipated. With the exception of the 1992 Japan case, however, none of the great powers facing large
declines ignored systemic pressures and refused to retrench. Conversely, none of the great powers
experiencing small declines erred by conceding too much, too quickly. Great powers may not perceive
decline perfectly, but they appear to have the capacity to judge the magnitude of their decline within a
general range, and to respond accordingly.

<Specific Link>
This imperialism creates a violent global police state
which normalizes endless cycles of racism, sexism, and
heterosexism
Mohanty 06 (Chandra Talpade, Department of Womens Studies, Syracuse
University, Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 720, February 2006,
US Empire and the Project of Womens Studies: Stories of citizenship,
complicity and dissent,
http://www.uccs.edu/~pkeilbac/courses/intlpol/readings/US%20Empire.pdf)
The clearest effects of US empire building in the domestic arena are
thus evident in the way citizenship has been restructured, civil
rights violated and borders repoliced since the commencement of the
war of drugs, and now the war on terrorism and the establishment of the
homeland security regime. While the US imperial project calls for
civilizing brown and black (and now Arab) men and rescuing their
women outside its borders, the very same state engages in killing,
imprisoning, and criminalizing black and brown and now Muslim and
Arab peoples within its own borders. Former political prisoner Linda
Evans (2005) calls the US a global police state one that has adopted
a mass incarceration strategy of social control since the Reagan
years. Analyzing the militarization of US society, Evans argues that the new

definition of domestic terrorism heralds the now legal return of the

Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that conducted illegal covert
operations in the 1960s and 1970s against the Black Panther party, the
American Indian movement, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and
left/socialist organizations. Racial profiling, once illegal, is now
legitimated as public policy, including a requirement that Arab and Muslim
men from over 25 countries register and submit to INS interrogation.
Similarly, Julia Sudbury analyzes the global crisis and rise in the mass
incarceration of women, suggesting that we must be attentive to the ways in
which punishment regimes are shaped by global capitalism, dominant and
subordinate patriarchies and neocolonial, racialized ideologies (see Sudbury,
2005, p. xiii). This prison industrial complex is supported by the
militarization of domestic law enforcement. As Anannya Bhattacharjee
(2002) suggests, there have been dramatic increases in funding, increasing
use of advanced military technology, sharing of personnel and equipment
with the military, and the general promotion of a war-like culture in domestic
law enforcement and also in a range of public agencies (welfare, schools,
hospitalsand now universities?) that are subjected to an accelerated culture
of surveillance and law enforcement (see Silliman & Bhattacharjee, 2002).
The effects of these conjoined economic/military policies of the US
imperial state represents an alarming increase of violence against
women, children and communities bearing the brunt of US military
dominance around the world. In the US, policies clearly target poor
and immigrant communities. In her new work, Jacqui Alexander (2005)
analyzes the primacy of processes of heterosexualization in the consolidation
of empire. She suggests that the mobilization of the loyal heterosexual
citizen patriot is achieved through the collapse of constructions of
the enemy, the terrorist and the sexual pervert. Similarly, Jasbir Puar
and Amit Rai (2002) analyze the terrorism industry since 9/11, exploring the
production of the monster, the fag, and the terrorist as figures of surveillance
and criminalization. This clearly gendered, sexualized, and racialized
culture of militarism and surveillance is buttressed by a hegemonic
culture of consumption and neo-liberal conservatism wherein
discourses of advancement and technological superiority, antiimmigrant, anti-Muslim sentiments dovetail with ideologies of
patriotism, and faith-based initiatives and ideologies to justify the
war at home and the war abroad. Take Abu Ghraib for instance.

Alternative: Vote negative to interrogate the

epistemological framework of the 1AC. Breaking down
boundaries of knowledge is key to counteract otherwise
inevitable neo-imperialist violence
McLaren and Kincheloe in 05 (Peter Professor of Education,
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies @ UCLA and Joe,

professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill

University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Sage Handbook of
Qualitative Research, Third Edition, Eds Norman Denzin and Yvonna
Lincoln)
In this context, it is important to note that we understand a social theory
as a map or a guide to the social sphere. In a research context, it does
not determine how we see the world but helps us devise questions and
strategies for exploring it. A critical social theory is concerned in
particular with issues of power and justice and the ways that the
economy; matters of race, class, and gender; ideologies; discourses;
education; religion and other social institutions; and cultural dynamics
interact to construct a social system (Beck-Gernsheim, Butler, &
Puigvert, 2003; Flccha, Gomez, & Puigvert, 2003). Thus, in this context we
seek to provide a view of an evolving criticality or a reconceptualized critical
theory. Critical theory is never static; it is always evolving, changing in
light of both new theoretical insights and new problems and social
circumstances. The list of concepts elucidating our articulation of critical
theory indicates a criticality informed by a variety of discourses emerging
after the work of the Frankfurt School Indeed, some of the theoretical
discourses, while referring to themselves as critical, directly call into question
some of the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Thus, diverse
theoretical traditions have informed our understanding of criticality and have
demanded understanding of diverse forms of oppression including class, race,
gender, sexual, cultural, religious, colonial, and ability-related concerns. The
evolving notion of criticality we present is informed by, while critiquing, the
post-discoursesfor example, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and
postcolonialism. In this context, critical theorists become detectives of
new theoretical insights, perpetually searching for new and
interconnected ways of understanding power and oppression and
the ways they shape everyday life and human experience. In this context,
criticality and the research it supports are always evolving, always
encountering new ways to irritate dominant forms of power, to
provide more evocative and compelling insights. Operating in this way,
an evolving criticality is always vulnerable to exclusion from the domain of
approved modes of research. The forms of social change it supports
always position it in some places as an outsider, an awkward
detective always interested in uncovering social structures,
discourses, ideologies, and epistemologies that prop up both the
status quo and a variety of forms of privilege. In the epistemological
domain, white, male, class elitist, heterosexist, imperial, and colonial
privilege often operates by asserting the power to claim objectivity
and neutrality. Indeed, the owners of such privilege often own the
"franchise" on reason and rationality. Proponents of an evolving
criticality possess a variety of tools to expose such oppressive power
politics. Such proponents assert that critical theory is well-served by
drawing upon numerous liberatory discourses and including diverse groups of

marginalized peoples and their allies in the nonhierarchical aggregation of

critical analysts {Bello, 2003; Clark, 2002; Humphries, 1997). In the present
era, emerging forms of neocolonialism and neo-imperialism in the
United States move critical theorists to examine the wavs American
power operates under the cover of establishing democracies all over
the world. Advocates of an evolving criticality argueas we do in more
detail later in this chapterthat such neocolonial power must be
exposed so it can be opposed in the United States and around the
world. The American Empires justification in the name of freedom for
undermining democratically elected governments from Iran (Kincheloe,
2004), Chile, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to Liberia (when its real purpose is
to acquire geopolitical advantage for future military assaults,
economic leverage in international markets, and access to natural
resources) must be exposed by critical-ists for what it isa rank
imperialist sham (McLaren, 2003a, 2003b; McLaren & Jaramillo, 2002;
McLaren & Martin, 2003). Critical researchers need to view their work in
the context of living and working in a nation-state with the most
powerful military-industrial complex in history that is shamefully using
the terrorist attacks of September 11 to advance a ruthless imperialist
agenda fueled by capitalist accumulation by means of the rule of force
(McLaren & Farahmandpur,2003). Chomsky (2003), for instance, has accused
the U.S. government of the "supreme crime" of preventive war (in the case of
its invasion of Iraq, the use of military force to destroy an invented or
imagined threat) of the type that was condemned at Kuremburg. Others, like
historian Arthur Schlesinger (cited in Chomsky, 2003), have likened the
invasion of Iraq to Japan's "day of infamy'' that is, to the policy that imperial
Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor. David G. Smith (2003) argues
that such imperial dynamics are supported by particular
epistemological forms. The United States is an epistemological
empire based on a notion of truth that undermines the knowledges
produced by those outside the good graces and benevolent authority
of the empire. Thus, in the 21 st century, critical theorists must develop
sophisticated ways to address not only the brute material relations
of class rule linked to the mode and relations of capitalist production
and imperialist conquest (whether through direct military
intervention or indirectly through the creation of client states) but
also the epistemological violence that helps discipline the world
Smith refers to this violence as a form of "information warfare" that
spreads deliberate falsehoods about countries such as Iraq and Iran. U.S.
corporate and governmental agents become more sophisticated in
the use of such episto-weaponry with every day that passes.
Obviously, an evolving criticality does not promiscuously choose
theoretical discourses to add to the bricolage of critical theories. It is highly
suspiciousas we detail laterof theories that fail to understand the
malevolent workings of power, that fail to critique the blinders of
Eurocentrism, that cultivate an elitism of insiders and outsiders, and
that fail to discern a global system of inequity supported by diverse

forms of ideology and violence. It is uninterested in any theoryno

matter how fashionablethat does not directly address the needs of
victims of oppression and the suffering they must endure. The
following is an elastic, ever-evolving set of concepts included in our evolving
notion of criticality. With theoretical innovations and shifting Zeitgeists, they
evolve. The points that are deemed most important in one time period pale in
relation to different points in a new era.

Links

Generic Military Reduction

Affs reduction of military presence is a perfect fig leaf for
imperialism the juxtaposition between Bush preaching
tolerance and the violence of the War On Terror are a
perfect example reducing military presence in a way
that is not threatening for the US merely legitimates
violence towards those who challenge the military
Brown 06 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at the University of California in Berkeley, 2006,
Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the age of Identity and Empire, pg 99-101)//TR

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist episodes,

George W. Bush surprised many Americans with his frequent
remarks about the importance of treating Arab Americans with
respect, his effort to distinguish Islamic belief and practices from the

violence of the perpetrators, and his warnings against scapegoating

and stereotyping as well as abuse and vigilantism. His efforts in this
direction were sometimes fumblinghe spoke of women of cover
when expressing his dismay about intimidation of Islamic Americans
wearing religiously sanctioned clothing and he stuttered over the
formulation of an American we that was not normatively Christian:
Our nation must be mindful that there are thousands of Arab
Americans . . . who love their flag just as much as . . . [we] do. And we
must be mindful that as we seek to win the war that we treat Arab
Americans and Muslims with the respect they deserve.31Following a
meeting with American Islamic leaders in Washington, D.C., on
September 17, he declared, It is my honor to be meeting with leaders
who feel just the same way I do. Theyre outraged, theyre sad. They
love America just as much as I do.32Multiculturalist talk does not
come easily or naturally to Bush: he reinstalls a we and a they
at the very moment he is trying to dispel the distinction; he tacitly
represents Muslims as outsiders to America; and he can establish
belonging only by asserting subjective identicality they feel
exactly the way I do. Still, the very earnestness and the repetition of
these efforts to staunch bigotry and racial violence took many by
surprise. But while Bush continuously urged citizen regard for the rich

diversity of the American population, while he preached respect and

tolerance as model citizen behavior, this was hardly the states
bearing either in prosecuting the war in Afghanistan or in fighting
terrorism on the domestic front. Even as the populace was suborned

to civility and tolerance, state practice was immediately and flagrantly

extralegal, violent, race-conscious, and religion-conscious. The
prosecution of the war on Afghanistan involved substantial collateral
damage that is, civilian Afghan casualties at rates that would have

been flatly unacceptable if suffered by Europeans or Americans.33 The

state detained thousands of Arabs and Arab Americans after the
September 11 attacks, several hundred of whom remain in custody
without being charged, despite subsequent revelations that
evidence linking them to any illegal, let alone terrorist, activity is
nonexistent.34 During these detentions, near relatives of the
detainees were not informed of the names or whereabouts of the
detainees, nor were the detainees permitted legal counsel .35

Interrogation at their residences of another 5,000 young men on

student, tourist, or business visas who were reputed to have come to
the U.S. from countries with suspected terrorist links began in
December 2001; Miranda rights were not read to these men, and those
questioned who had expired visas joined the growing numbers of
individuals from the Middle East targeted by the Immigration and
Naturalization Service for immediate deportation or indefinite
detention.36At the same time, the state was rapidly creating an
increasingly wide domain of unaccountable power for itself . The first
USA Patriot Act, signed into law shortly after September 11, licensed
not only unprecedented levels of surveillance of the citizenry but also
court strippingremoving authority from the judiciary in times of
crisis and, in particular, circumventing judicial powers that protect civil
liberties. In early October 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft also
instructed all federal agencies to resist Freedom of Information Act
requests made by American citizens whenever institutional,
commercial, and personal privacy interests could be implicated by
disclosure of the information;37 in effect, he single-handedly
overturned the FOIA in the name of national security. Meanwhile,
federal investigators began to chafe against civil and criminal rights
provisions protecting detainees who refuse to speak . In November
2001, the FBI and the Justice Department raised the possibility of
using truth serums or torture to extract information, or of sending
detainees to countries where such means of interrogation are legal
or routine.38 (Four years later it has come to light that many of the
torture techniques involving sexual humiliation and religious
desecration performed at Abu Ghraib were also used on Arab

detainees in domestic custody, and were directly sanctioned by

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.)39Then came Bushs mandate
that terrorists be tried in military tribunals rather than federal courts
and his refusal to abide by Geneva Convention standards, coupled with
images of Afghan prisoners of war in Guantnamo Bayshackled,
blindfolded, shaved, gagged, caged in the open airand in crowded
prisons in Afghanistan, starving, sometimes to death. Thus, in the
months after 9/11, the states own vigilantism, violence, and racial

profiling, at home and abroad, did not simply stand in contrast with
the states proscription of citizen vigilantism and calls for tolerance.
Rather, it was legitimated by this proscription and these calls; as
long as the state implores its subjects to be peaceful , law-abiding,
and without prejudice, it can use its prerogative power and even
mobilize the citizenry for the opposite practices . The state can

abrogate its commitments to upholding civil liberties and to egalitarian

enjoyment of these liberties by substituting a discourse of tolerance for
a practice of equal protection or equal treatment. Moreover, the state
issues calls for tolerance not because it is or can be tolerant, but so
that we will be and it does not have to beso that it can act like a
state. This is not to say that the state is forthrightly intolerant, but that
neither equality nor tolerance nor protection of civil rights is within the
ambit of raison dtat.

Horn of Africa
All strategic military activities in the Horn of Africa
perpetuate American imperial desires for dominance in
Africa
Azikwe 13 (Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, an electronic press
agency6/12/13 The war on Africa: U.S. imperialism and the world economic crisis Pambazuka News
accessed 8/1/15 from http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category.php/features/87805 LC)

For more than two decades the United States and other Western
European imperialist states have been escalating their military
intervention in Africa and other geo-political regions of the world. This
has been taking place during the so-called Post-Cold War era with the collapse of the Eastern European

Africa was viewed

during the period after the Second World War II as an ideological
and political battleground between the emerging national liberation
and socialist movements on the one hand and the imperialist states
led by the U.S. on the other. One major outcome of World War II was the consolidation of
socialist states and the Soviet Union during the late 1980s through 1991.

economic and political hegemony of Washington and Wall Street. During the Second World War the U.S.
established military outposts in Algeria, Libya and Liberia. After 1945, the struggle for national
independence in Africa, the Middle East and Asia would accelerate. In Latin America, even though an
independence struggle was waged in the 19th century, the phenomena of neo-colonialism became the
dominant character of relations between the states in South America and the U.S. In the Caribbean, the
struggle for genuine independence was waged from the 19th through the 20th century in Cuba, Puerto

In the
U.S. itself with the advent of Cold War ideology and political
repression under McCarthyism, perspectives and political organizing
around Africa became a highly contentious arena of struggle. The
Council on African Affairs (CAA) and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)
during the early 1950s came under fierce attack by the U.S.
government and were driven out of existence. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley
Rico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and other territories.

Graham Du Bois, both leading figures in the CAA and the CRC, were persecuted in the early 1950s for their
interventions in the movements for world peace and solidarity with African liberation. The Du Bois wrote in
December 1958 for the All-African Peoples Conference held in Accra, Ghana that the future of Africa lies in
socialism. The Du Bois said that Africa, ancient Africa, has been called by the world and has lifted up her
hands! Africa has no choice between private capitalism and socialism. The whole world, including capitalist
countries, is moving toward socialism, inevitably, inexorably. You can choose between blocs and military
alliances, you can choose between political unions; you cannot choose between socialism and private
capitalism because private capitalism is doomed! (The World and Africa, p. 307) IMPLICATIONS OF U.S.
DOMINANCE IN THE WORLD IMPERIALIST SYSTEM Later during the 1960s when the various national
liberation movements and independent African states embarked upon the armed struggle as a necessity to
fight the U.S. and NATO backed colonial and settler-colonial states in Africa, Pan-Africanist and socialist
strategist Kwame Nkrumah identified U.S. imperialism as the major force in the movement for genuine
territorial sovereignty on the continent. The U.S., although paying lip service to supporting the anti-colonial
movements, sought to stifle and manipulate the national liberation movements for the benefit of Wall

The modifications introduced by

imperialism in its strategy were expressed through the
disappearance of the numerous old-fashioned colonies owing
exclusive allegiance to a single metropolitan country through the
replacement of national imperialism by a collective imperialism in
which the USA occupies a leading position. (Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare,
Street and the Pentagon. Nkrumah wrote that

p. 5, 1969) Nkrumah continued noting that The US-European post-war alliance not only enabled the USA
to benefit from the advantages of the European market, which had hitherto been largely closed to its
penetration; but also opened up new horizons in Asia, Africa and Latin America where the USA had already

superseded European supremacy and established neo-colonialist domination. The militarization of the US
economy, based on the political pretext of the threatening rise of the USSR and later of the Peoples
Republic of China as socialist powers, enabled the USA to postpone its internal crises, the first during the
hot war (1939-1945) and then during the cold war (since 1945) (ibid., p. 6) The postponement of these

Imperialist war no long delays the

impact of the inherent failures of capitalism related to its incapacity
to provide housing, jobs, medical services, education and municipal
services to the majority of its people. Nonetheless, in its destructive
character, imperialism continues on the path of endless war and
pursuit of ever-rising rates of profit. Since the advent of the first
Gulf war in 1990-91, going through the occupation of Somalia during 1992-94,
through to the failure of U.S. policy in Egypt to the second occupation
of Somalia through proxy between 2006 to the present period , where in
the aftermath of the war on Libya and the imposition of sanctions against Zimbabwe and Sudan, the
capitalist system in the West continues to decline economically . No
matter how many Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) field stations are constructed or
drone attacks carried out throughout Africa, Washington has not
been able to address the rising rates of poverty, joblessness and
austerity throughout the capitalist states in Western Europe and
North America. The U.S. ruling class through its quest for mineral resources and strategic
internal crises has apparently run its course.

dominance has focused a tremendous amount of attention on Africa and the so-called Middle East. The
founding of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008 under Bush has enhanced its operations under
Obama. The first full-scale operation of AFRICOM was the war of regime-change carried out against Libya
in 2011 in cooperation with other European imperialist states and their allies. It is no accident that Libya
has the largest known oil reserves in Africa and had under the Jamahiriya, the highest living standards on
the African continent. In Somalia, the CIA and AFRICOM have been involved in propping up the Ethiopian

The African Union

Mission to Somalia, AMISOM, is largely a U.S.-controlled military
operation which is financed by Washington and provided with
political, intelligence and diplomatic cover. Somalia is the source of
oil and other strategic interests for imperialism and both the U.S. and
NATO have large-scale naval vessels off the coast of the Horn of Africa
nation in the Gulf of Aden. The intervention into Somalia of the Kenyan Defense Forces in
occupation and the latter Transitional Federal Government regime since 2006.

2011 had been planned by the Pentagon for at least two years. Despite efforts by Washington and its
allies, the situation in Somalia is by no means stable. A French Special Forces commando units attempt to
free intelligence officials from Paris being held in Somalia proved to be a disaster as Al-Shabaab wiped out
the entire crew and eventually executed the leading commander of the failed raid. In Mali and Niger, the
U.S. is backing up French military intervention. The Pentagon had trained the Malian army prior to the
March 2012 coup and is largely responsibility for the incapacity of the national military to address the
Tuareg rebellion in the north.

Africa is the new battle ground for strategic military

engagement the goal is to acquire resources from the
region and strategically manipulate military levels to
compete with china in the region
Foster 06
(John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at
the University of Oregon, Monthly Review, June 2006. A Warning to Africa:
The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy
http://www.marcbonhomme.com/files/17-juin-2006.pdf accessed 7/31/15)

Imperialism is constant for capitalism. But it passes through various phases

as the system evolves. At present the world is experiencing a new age
of imperialism marked by a U.S. grand strategy of global
domination. One indication of how things have changed is that the
U.S. military is now truly global in its operations with permanent
bases on every continent, including Africa, where a new scramble for
control is taking place focused on oil. Elite opinion in the United States
in the decade immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union often
decried the absence of a U.S. grand strategy comparable to what George
Kennan labeled containment, under the mantle of which the United States
intervened throughout the Cold War years. The key question, as posed in
November 2000 by national-security analyst Richard Haass, was that of
determining how the United States should utilize its current surplus of
power to reshape the world. Haasss answer, which doubtless contributed to
his being hired immediately after as director of policy planning for Colin
Powells State Department in the new Bush administration, was to promote
an Imperial America strategy aimed at securing U.S. global dominance for
decades to come. Only months before, a similar, if even more nakedly
militaristic, grand strategy had been presented by the Project for the New
American Century, in a report authored by future top Bush-administration
figures Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Lewis Libby, among others.1
This new imperial grand strategy became a reality, following the
attacks of September 11, 2001, in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraqand was soon officially enshrined in the White Houses National
Security Strategy statement of 2002. Summing up the new imperial thrust in
Harvard Magazine, Stephen Peter Rosen, director of the Olin Institute for
Strategic Studies at Harvard and a founding member of the Project for the
New American Century, wrote: A political unit that has overwhelming
superiority in military power, and uses that power to influence the
internal behavior of other states, is called an empire. Because the
United States does not seek to control territory or govern the overseas
citizens of the empire, we are an indirect empire, to be sure, but an
empire nonetheless. If this is correct, our goal is not combating a rival, but
maintaining our imperial position, and maintaining imperial order. Planning
for imperial wars is different from planning for conventional international
wars....Imperial wars to restore order are not so constrained [by deterrence
considerations]. The maximum amount of force can and should be used as
quickly as possible for psychological impact to demonstrate that the
empire cannot be challenged with impunity....[I]mperial strategy focuses
on preventing the emergence of powerful, hostile challengers to
the empire: by war if necessary, but by imperial assimilation if
possible. 2 Commenting in late 2002 in Foreign Policy, John Lewis Gaddis,
professor of military and naval history at Yale, stated that the goal of the
impending war on Iraq was one of inflicting an Agincourt on the banks of the
Euphrates. This would be a demonstration of power so great that, as in
Henry Vs famous fifteenth-century victory in France, the geopolitical
landscape would be changed for decades to come. What was ultimately at

issue, according to Gaddis, was the management of the international system

by a single hegemonthe United States. This securing of hegemony
over the entire world by the United States by means of preemptive
actions was, he contended, nothing less than a new grand
strategy of transformation. 3 The Nature of Grand Strategy Since the
time of Clausewitz, tactics has been designated in military circles as the art
of using troops in battle; strategy as the art of using battles to win the
war. 4 In contrast, the idea of grand strategy as classically promoted by
military strategists and historians, such as Edward Meade Earle and B. H.
Liddell Hart, refers to the integration of the warmaking potential of a state
with its larger political-economic ends. As historian Paul Kennedy observed in
Grand Strategies in War and Peace (1991): a true grand strategy is
concerned with peace as much as (perhaps even more than) with
war....about the evolution or integration of policies that should operate for
decades, or even for centuries. 5 Grand strategies are geopolitical in
orientation, geared to domination of whole geographical regionsincluding
strategic resources such as minerals and waterways, economic assets,
populations, and vital military positions. The most successful grand
strategies of the past are seen as those of long-standing empires, which have
been able to maintain their power over large geographical expanses for
extended periods of time. Hence, historians of grand strategy commonly
focus on the nineteenth-century British Empire (Pax Britannica) and even the
ancient Roman Empire (Pax Romana). For the United States today what is at
stake is no longer control of a mere portion of the globe, but a truly global
Pax Americana. Although some commentators have seen the latest U.S.
imperial thrust as the work of a small cabal of neoconservatives within the
Bush administration, the reality is one of broad concurrence within the U.S.
power structure on the necessity of expanding the U.S. empire. One recent
collection, including contributions by administration critics, is entitled The
Obligation of Empire: United States Grand Strategy for a New Century. 6 Ivo.
H. Daalder (senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former foreign
policy advisor to Howard Dean) and James M. Lindsay (vice president of the
Council on Foreign Relations, previously employed by Clintons National
Security Council) argue in their book America Unbound that the United States
has long had a secret empire, disguised by multilateralism. The Bush White
Houses unilateral policy of building empire on American power alone has
changed things only to the extent that it has stripped away the empires
hidden character and reduced its overall force by relying less on vassal
states. According to Daalder and Lindsay, the United States is now under the
command of hegemonist thinkers who want to ensure that the United
States dominates the entire globeboth in its own national self-interest and
in order to reshape the world in tune with democratic imperialism. But such
an aggressive posture, they point out, is not outside the historic range of U.S.
policy. A unilateralist imperial thrust can be traced back to Theodore
Roosevelt and was present from the beginning of the Cold War era
in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Still, Daalder and Lindsay
hold out the possibility of a more cooperative strategy, with the other great

powers falling in behind the United States, as a superior approach to running

an empire. 7 Such cooperative imperialism, however, becomes more difficult
to achieve once the hegemons power begins to wane. Not only is the United
States suffering increased economic competition, but with the demise of the
Soviet Union the NATO alliance has weakened: Washingtons European
vassals do not always follow its lead, even though they are unable to
challenge it directly. The temptation facing a waning hegemonic powerstill
armed and dangerouscaught in such circumstances is to attempt to rebuild
and even expand its power by acting unilaterally and monopolizing the
spoils. The War for the New American Century Capitalism is a system that is
worldwide in its economic scope but divided politically into competing states
that develop economically at different rates. The contradiction of uneven
capitalist development was classically expressed by Lenin in 1916 in
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: There can be no other
conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of
influence, of interests, of colonies, etc., than a calculation of the
strength of the participants in the division, their general economic,
financial, military strength, etc. And the strength of these participants in
the division does not change to an equal degree, for under capitalism the
development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or
countries cannot be even. Half a century ago, Germany was a miserable,
insignificant country, as far as its capitalist strength was concerned,
compared with the strength of England at that time. Japan was similarly
insignificant compared with Russia. Is it conceivable that in ten or twenty
years time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained
unchanged? Absolutely inconceivable. 8 It is now widely acknowledged that
the world is undergoing a global economic transformation. Not only is the
growth rate of the world economy as a whole slowing, but the relative
economic strength of the United States is continuing to weaken. In 1950 the
United States accounted for about half of world GDP, falling to a little over a
fifth by 2003. Likewise it accounted for almost half of the worlds stock of
global foreign direct investment in 1960, compared to a little over 20 percent
at the beginning of this century. According to projections of Goldman Sachs,
China could overtake the United States as the worlds largest economy by
2039. 9 This growing threat to U.S. power is fueling Washingtons obsession
with laying the groundwork for a New American Century. Its current
interventionism is aimed at taking advantage of its present shortterm economic and military primacy to secure strategic assets that
will provide long-term guarantees of global supremacy. The goal is
to extend U.S. power directly while depriving potential competitors
of those vital strategic assets that might allow them eventually to
challenge it globally or even within particular regions. The National
Security Strategy of the United States of 2002 gave notice that Our forces
will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a
military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United
States. But grand strategy extends beyond mere military power. Economic
advantages vis--vis potential rivals are the real coin of intercapitalist

competition. Hence, U.S. grand strategy integrates military power with the
struggle to control capital, trade, the value of the dollar, and strategic raw
materials. Perhaps the clearest ordering of U.S. strategic objectives has been
provided by Robert J. Art, professor of international relations at Brandeis and
a research associate of the Olin Institute, in A Grand Strategy for America. A
grand strategy, he writes, tells a nations leaders what goals they should
aim for and how best they can use their countrys military power to attain
these goals. In conceptualizing such a grand strategy for the Untied States,
Art presents six overarching national interests in order of importance:
First, prevent an attack on the American homeland; Second, prevent greatpower Eurasian wars and, if possible, the intense security competitions that
make them more likely; Third, preserve access to a reasonably priced and
secure supply of oil; Fourth, preserve an open international economic
order; Fifth, foster the spread of democracy and respect for human rights
abroad, and prevent genocide or mass murder in civil wars; Sixth, protect
the global environment, especially from the adverse effects of global
warming and severe climate change. After national defense proper, i.e.,
defense of the homeland against external attack, the next three highest
strategic priorities are thus: (1) the traditional geopolitical goal of hegemony
over the Eurasian heartland seen as the key to world power, (2) securing
control over world oil supplies, and (3) promoting global-capitalist economic
relations. In order to meet these objectives, Art contends,
Washington should maintain forwardbased forces in Europe and
East Asia (the two rimlands of Eurasia with great power concentrations) and
in the Persian Gulf (containing the bulk of world oil reserves). Eurasia is
home to most of the worlds people, most of its proven oil reserves, and most
of its military powers, as well as a large share of its economic growth. It is
therefore crucial that the U.S. imperial grand strategy be aimed at
strengthening its hegemony in this region, beginning with the key
oil regions of South-Central Asia. 10 With the wars on and occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq still unresolved, Washington has been stepping-up its
threats of a preemptive attack on these states more powerful neighbor,
Iran. The main justification offered for this is Irans uranium-enrichment
program, which could eventually allow it to develop nuclear weapons
capabilities. Yet, there are other reasons that the United States is interested
in Iran. Like Iraq before it, Iran is a leading oil power, now with the second
largest proven oil reserves behind Saudi Arabia and ahead of Iraq. Control of
Iran is thus crucial to Washingtons goal of dominating the Persian Gulf and
its oil. Irans geopolitical importance, moreover, stretches far beyond the
Middle East. It is a key prize (as in the case also of Afghanistan) in the New
Great Game for control of all of South-Central Asia, including the Caspian Sea
Basin with its enormous fossil fuel reserves. U.S. strategic planners are
obsessed with fears of an Asian energy-security grid, in which Russia, China,
Iran, and the Central Asian countries (possibly also including Japan) would
come together economically and in an energy accord to break the U.S. and
Western stranglehold on the world oil and gas marketcreating the basis for
a general shift of world power to the East. At present China, the worlds

fastest growing economy, lacks energy security even as its demand for fossil
fuels is rapidly mounting. It is attempting to solve this partly through greater
access to the energy resources of Iran and the Central Asian states. Recent
U.S. attempts to establish a stronger alliance with India, with Washington
bolstering Indias status as a nuclear power, are clearly part of this New
Great Game for control of South-Central Asia reminiscent of the nineteenthcentury Great Game between Britain and Russia for control of this part of
Asia. 11 The New Scramble for Africa If there is a New Great Game afoot
in Asia there is also a New Scramble for Africa on the part of the
great powers.12 The National Security Strategy of the United States of
2002 declared that combating global terror and ensuring U.S.
energy security required that the United States increase its
commitments to Africa and called upon coalitions of the willing to
generate regional security arrangements on that continent. Soon
after the U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, Germanyin
charge of U.S. military operations in Sub-Saharan Africaincreased
its activities in West Africa, centering on those states with substantial oil
production and/or reserves in or around the Gulf of Guinea (stretching
roughly from the Ivory Coast to Angola). The U.S. militarys European
Command now devotes 70 percent of its time to African affairs, up from
almost nothing as recently as 2003. 13 As pointed out by Richard Haass,
now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in his foreword to the 2005
council report entitled More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S.
Approach Toward Africa: By the end of the decade sub-Saharan Africa is
likely to become as important as a source of U.S. energy imports as the
Middle East. 14 West Africa has some 60 billion barrels of proven oil
reserves. Its oil is the low sulfur, sweet crude prized by the U.S. economy.
U.S. agencies and think tanks project that one in every five new barrels of oil
entering the global economy in the latter half of this decade will come from
the Gulf of Guinea, raising its share of U.S. oil imports from 15 to over 20
percent by 2010, and 25 percent by 2015. Nigeria already supplies the United
States with 10 percent of its imported oil. Angola provides 4 percent of U.S.
oil imports, which could double by the end of the decade. The discovery of
new reserves and the expansion of oil production are turning other states in
the region into major oil exporters, including Equatorial Guinea, So Tom
and Principe, Gabon, Cameroon, and Chad. Mauritania is scheduled to
emerge as an oil exporter by 2007. Sudan, bordering the Red Sea in the east
and Chad to the west, is an important oil producer. At present the main,
permanent U.S. military base in Africa is the one established in
2002 in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, giving the United States
strategic control of the maritime zone through which a quarter of
the worlds oil production passes. The Djibouti base is also in close
proximity to the Sudanese oil pipeline. (The French military has long had a
major presence in Djibouti and also has an air base at Abeche, Chad on the
Sudanese border.) The Djibouti base allows the United States to dominate the
eastern end of the broad oil swath cutting across Africa that it now considers
vital to its strategic interestsa vast strip running southwest from the 994-

mile Higleig-Port Sudan oil pipeline in the east to the 640-mile ChadCameroon pipeline and the Gulf of Guinea in the West. A new U.S. forwardoperating location in Uganda gives the United States the potential
of dominating southern Sudan, where most of that countrys oil is to
be found. In West Africa, the U.S. militarys European Command has
now established forwardoperating locations in Senegal, Mali,
Ghana, and Gabonas well as Namibia, bordering Angola on the
southinvolving the upgrading of airfields, the pre-positioning of
critical supplies and fuel, and access agreements for swift
deployment of U.S. troops.15 In 2003 it launched a counterterrorism
program in West Africa, and in March 2004 U.S. Special Forces were directly
involved in a military operation with Sahel countries against the Salafist
Group for Preaching and Combaton Washingtons list of terrorist
organizations. The U.S. European Command is developing a coastal security
system in the Gulf of Guinea called the Gulf of Guinea Guard. It has also been
planning the construction of a U.S. naval base in So Tom and Principe,
which the European Command has intimated could rival the U.S. naval base
at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The Pentagon is thus moving
aggressively to establish a military presence in the Gulf of Guinea that will
allow it to control the western part of the broad trans-Africa oil strip and the
vital oil reserves now being discovered there. Operation Flintlock, a start-up
U.S. military exercise in West Africa in 2005, incorporated 1,000 U.S. Special
Forces. The U.S. European Command will be conducting exercises for its new
rapid-reaction force for the Gulf of Guinea this summer. Here the flag is
following trade: the major U.S. and Western oil corporations are all
scrambling for West African oil and demanding security. The U.S. militarys
European Command, the Wall Street Journal reported in its April 25th issue, is
also working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to expand the role of U.S.
corporations in Africa as part of an integrated U.S. response. In this
economic scramble for Africas petroleum resources the old colonial
powers, Britain and France, are in competition with the United
States. Militarily, however, they are working closely with the United
States to secure Western imperial control of the region. The U.S.
military buildup in Africa is frequently justified as necessary both to
fight terrorism and to counter growing instability in the oil region of
Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2003 Sudan has been torn by civil war and
ethnic conflict focused on its southwestern Darfur region (where much of the
countrys oil is located), resulting in innumerable human rights violations and
mass killings by government-linked militia forces against the population of
the region. Attempted coups recently occurred in the new petrostates of So
Tom and Principe (2003) and Equatorial Guinea (2004). Chad, which is run
by a brutally oppressive regime shielded by a security and intelligence
apparatus backed by the United States, also experienced an attempted coup
in 2004. A successful coup took place in Mauritania in 2005 against U.S.supported strongman Ely Ould Mohamed Taya. Angolas three-decade-long
civil warinstigated and fueled by the United States, which together with
South Africa organized the terrorist army under Jonas Savimbis UNITA

lasted until the ceasefire following Savimbis death in 2002. Nigeria, the
regional hegemon, is rife with corruption, revolts, and organized oil theft,
with considerable portions of oil production in the Niger Delta region being
siphoned offup to 300,000 barrels a day in early 2004. 16 The rise of
armed insurgency in the Niger Delta and the potential of conflict between the
Islamic north and non-Islamic south of the country are major U.S. concerns.
Hence there are incessant calls and no lack of seeming justifications for U.S.
humanitarian interventions in Africa. The Council on Foreign Relations
report More than Humanitarianism insists that the United States and its
allies must be ready to take appropriate action in Darfur in Sudan including
sanctions and, if necessary, military intervention, if the Security Council is
blocked from doing so. Meanwhile the notion that the U.S. military might
before long need to intervene in Nigeria is being widely floated among
pundits and in policy circles. Atlantic Monthly correspondent Jeffrey
Taylor wrote in April 2006 that Nigeria has become the largest
failed state on earth, and that a further destabilization of that
state, or its takeover by radical Islamic forces, would endanger the
abundant oil reserves that America has vowed to protect. Should that
day come, it would herald a military intervention far more massive than the
Iraqi campaign. 17 Still, U.S. grand strategists are clear that the real
issues are not the African states themselves and the welfare of
their populations but oil and Chinas growing presence in Africa . As
the Wall Street Journal noted in Africa Emerges as a Strategic
Battlefield , China has made Africa a front line in its pursuit of more global
influence, tripling trade with the continent to some $37 billion over the last
five years and locking up energy assets, closing trade deals with regimes like
Sudans and educating Africas future elites at Chinese universities and
military schools. In More than Humanitarianism, the Council on Foreign
Relations likewise depicts the leading threat as coming from China: China
has altered the strategic context in Africa. All across Africa today, China is
acquiring control of natural resource assets, outbidding Western
contractors on major infrastructure projects, and providing soft
loans and other incentives to bolster its competitive advantage.
18 China imports more than a quarter of its oil from Africa,
primarily Angola, Sudan, and Congo. It is Sudans largest foreign
investor. It has provided heavy subsidies to Nigeria to increase its
influence and has been selling fighter jets there. Most threatening
from the standpoint of U.S. grand strategists is Chinas $2 billion
low-interest loan to Angola in 2004, which has allowed Angola to
withstand IMF demands to reshape its economy and society along
neoliberal lines. For the Council on Foreign Relations, all of this
adds up to nothing less than a threat to Western imperialist control
of Africa. Given Chinas role, the council report says, the United States and
Europe cannot consider Africa their chasse gard [private hunting ground], as
the French once saw francophone Africa. The rules are changing as

China seeks not only to gain access to resources, but also to control
resource production and distribution, perhaps positioning itself for
priority access as these resources become scarcer. The council
report on Africa is so concerned with combating China through the expansion
of U.S. military operations in the region, that none other than Chester
Crocker, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Reagan
administration, charges it with sounding wistfully nostalgic for an era when
the United States or the West was the only major influence and could pursue
its...objectives with a free hand. 19 What is certain is that the U.S empire is
being enlarged to encompass parts of Africa in the rapacious search for oil.
The results could be devastating for Africas peoples. Like the old scramble
for Africa this new one is a struggle among great powers for resources and
plundernot for the development of Africa or the welfare of its population. A
Grand Strategy of Enlargement Despite the rapidly evolving strategic
context and the shift to a more naked imperialism in recent years,
there is a consistency in U.S. imperial grand strategy, which derives
from the broad agreement at the very top of the U.S. power
structure that the United States should seek global supremacy, as
President Jimmy Carters former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski put it. 20 The Council on Foreign Relations 2006 report on More
Than Humanitarianism, which supports the enlargement of U.S. grand
strategy to take in Africa, was cochaired by Anthony Lake, National Security
Advisor to Clinton from 19931997 and Christine Todd Whitman, former head
of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush. As Clintons National
Security Advisor, Lake played a leading role in defining the U.S. grand
strategy in the Clinton administration. In a speech entitled From
Containment to Enlargement, delivered to the School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University on September 21, 2003, he
declared that with the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States was the
worlds dominant power...we have the worlds strongest military, its largest
economy and its most dynamic, multiethnic society....We contained a global
threat to market democracies; now we should seek to enlarge, their reach.
The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of
enlargement. Translated this meant an expansion of the sphere of world
capitalism under the U.S. militarystrategic umbrella. The chief enemies of
this new world order were characterized by Lake as the backlash states,
especially Iraq and Iran. Lakes insistence, in the early Clinton era, on a grand
strategy of enlargement for the United States is being realized today in the
enlargement of the U.S. military role not only in Central Asia and the Middle
East, but also in Africa. 21 U.S. imperial grand strategy is less a
product of policies generated in Washington by this or that wing of
the ruling class, than an inevitable result of the power position that
U.S. capitalism finds itself in at the commencement of the twentyfirst century. U.S. economic strength (along with that of its closest
allies) has been ebbing fairly steadily. The great powers are not likely to
stand in the same relation to each other economically two decades hence. At
the same time U.S. world military power has increased relatively with the

demise of the Soviet Union. The United States now accounts for about half of
all of the worlds military spendinga proportion two or more times its share
of world output. The goal of the new U.S. imperial grand strategy is to
use this unprecedented military strength to preempt emerging
historical forces by creating a sphere of full-spectrum dominance so
vast, now encompassing every continent, that no potential rivals will
be able to challenge the United States decades down the line. This is
a war against the peoples of the periphery of the capitalist world and for the
expansion of world capitalism, particularly U.S. capitalism. But it is also a war
to secure a New American Century in which third world nations are viewed
as strategic assets within a larger global geopolitical struggle The lessons
of history are clear: attempts to gain world dominance by military means,
though inevitable under capitalism, are destined to fail and can only lead to
new and greater wars. It is the responsibility of those committed to
world peace to resist the new U.S. imperial grand strategy by
calling into question imperialism and its economic taproot:
capitalism itself.

AFRICOM
Military Strategy change in Africa risk the same
imperialist outcomes that lead to Americas occupation of
Africa, a quest for natural resources and a paternalist
approach to control the markets.
Hermann 13(1/12/13, Burkely, Activist for Nation of Change. Information
Clearing House. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33597.htm
accessed 7/31/15)
January 12 2013 "Information Clearing House" - In the morning after
Christmas, I listened to a video from Democracy Now! detailing the days
headlines. What I heard announced by Amy Goodman angered me greatly:
U.S. Army teams will be deploying to as many as 35 African countries early
next year for training programs and other operations as part of an increased
Pentagon role in Africa. The move would see small teams of U.S. troops
dispatched to countries with groups allegedly linked to al-QaedaThe teams
are from a U.S. brigade that has the capability to use drones for military
operations in Africa if granted permission. The deployment could also
potentially lay the groundwork for future U.S. military intervention in Africa.
President Obama echoed this sentiment when he nominated John Kerry; he
congratulated his previous Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on restoring our
global leadership and declared triumphantly: the United States will continue
to lead in this world for our lifetimes. These statements and the headline
from Democracy Now! didnt surprise me one bit. Already, I had heard that
an imperialist intervention will begin in the West African state of
Mali next year, fighting over uranium deposits, gold deposits and
untapped oil deposits, which is exactly what I predicted back on
November 3rd. I had already written a year earlier, criticizing the war for oil
in Libya for the same reasons, saying that the extent of imperialism in
this war is very troubling[and] is not debatableThe war is
imperialist, unconstitutional and illegal[and] is very costly. If this
isnt enough, the latest data from the Pentagon notes that 851
soldiers are already stationed in countries across Africa. Still, one
might argue these are isolated incidents. That is incorrect. Michael T. Klare, a
defense correspondent for The Nation magazine noted in his movie, Blood
and Oil, that the four-year old military command, AFRICOM (Africa
Command) was the first new regional command created since the
Central Command was created in 1980and [its creation] in my view
is directly related the growing importance of African oil in the United
States. The question that begs to be answered is: does AFRICOM want to
spread imperialism across the continent in the name of American
democracy, or is it working for noble purposes? One hint at answering this
question comes from the director of the AFRICOM office of public affairs,
Colonel Tom Davis said a revealing statement. After saying that the
amount of troops in the continent wasnt fast growing, he admitted

that We also conduct some type of military training or military-tomilitary engagement or activity with nearly every country on the
African continent. This is part of our effort to enable African nations
to increase their defense capabilities. This statement is very telling of
US intentions to come. Nick Turse conveys this clearly, a process which seems
to have sped up since Obama has been in office. Turse writes that since 2003,
the modern American scramble for Africa, has begun, as in quiet and
largely unnoticed ways, the Pentagon and the CIA have been spreading their
forces across the continent. Todaythe U.S. maintains a surprising
number of bases in AfricaUnder President Obama, in fact,
operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited
interventions of the Bush yearsTo support these mushrooming missions,
near-constant training operations, and alliance-building joint exercises,
outposts of all sorts are sprouting continent-wide, connected by a sprawling
shadow logistics networkThe U.S. is now involved, directly and by
proxy, in military and surveillance operations against an expanding
list of regional enemies [in the continent]U.S. special operations
forces are stationed at a string of even more shadowy forward operating
posts on the continentU.S. troops are also working at bases inside
UgandaThey now supply the majority of the troops to the African Union
Mission protecting the U.S.-supported government in the Somali capital,
Mogadishuthe U.S. is conducting counterterrorism training and equipping
militaries in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia
[recently] AFRICOM Commander General Carter Ham explained the
reasoning behind U.S. operations on the continent: The absolute
imperative for the United States military [is] to protect America,
Americans, and American interests; in our case, in my case, [to]
protect us from threats that may emerge from the African
continentWith the Obama administration clearly engaged in a twenty-first
century scramble for Africa, the possibility of successive waves of
overlapping blowback grows exponentially. These words are
confirmed by the evidence from the Congressional Research Report,
Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2012, which
shows, among other aspects, the amount of military interventions in Africa
since 2008: 1. 2008:The President reported that various U.S. combatequipped and combat-support forces were deployed to a number of
locations[including] Africa Command areas of operation and were engaged
in combat operations against al-Qaida and their supporters 2. 2009:The
United States has deployed various combat-equipped forces to a number of
locations [including]African Command areas of operation in support of
anti-terrorist and anti-al-Qaida actionsthe United States continues to
deploy U.S. combat-equipped forces to assist in enhancing the
counterterrorism capabilities of our friends and alliesin the Horn of Africa
region 3. 2010:...The United States has deployed combat-equipped
forces to a number of locations [including]African Command areas of
operation in support of anti-terrorist and anti-al-Qaida actions 4. 2011:

The United States has deployed various combat-equipped forces to a

number of locations inthe African Command areas of operation in support
of anti-terrorist and anti-al-Qaida actions A combat-equipped security force
of about 40 U.S. military personnel from the U.S. Central Command were
deployed to Cairo, Egypt, on January 31, 2011, for the sole purpose of
protecting American citizens and property. That force remains at the U.S.
Embassy in Cairo 5. 2011: [Libya war] Libya. On March 21, 2011, the
President submitted to Congress consistent with the War Powers Resolution,
a report stating that at approximately 3:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, on
March 19, 2011, he had directed U.S. military forces to commence
operations to assist an international effort authorized by the United Nations
(U.N.) Security Council and undertaken with the support of European allies
and Arab partners, to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and address the
threat posed to international peace and security by the crisis in Libya. The
President said that the actions he had directed were in the national
security and foreign policy interests of the United States.After April
23, 2011, the United States supported the coalition effort in Libya through
use of unmanned aerial vehicles against a limited set of clearly defined
targets there. Except in the case of operations to rescue the crew of a U.S.
aircraft on March 21, 2011, and deploying 16 U.S. military personnel to aid in
re-establishing the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli in September 2011, the U.S.
deployed no ground forces to Libya. On October 27, 2011, the United
Nations terminated the no-fly zone effective October 31, 2011. 6. 2011:
Central Africaa small number of combat-equipped U.S. forces [were]
deploy[ed] to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces that are
working toward the removal of Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance
Army (LRA), from the battlefieldon October 12, 2011, the initial team of
U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment deployed to
Uganda. In the next month, additional forces will deploy, including a second
combat-equipped team and associated headquarters, communications, and
logistics personnel.elements of these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda,
South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of
the Congo. 7. 2012: Other military operations reported by the President
include the deployment of U.S. combat-equipped military personnel to
Uganda to serve as advisors to regional forces that are working to
apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and other senior Lords Resistance Army
(LRA) leaders from the battlefieldThe total number of U.S. military
personnel deployed for this mission is approximately 90, and elements of
these U.S. forces have been sent to forward locations in the LRA-affected
areas of the Republic of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
and the Central African Republic. 8. 2012: the Presidentordered [the]
deploy[ment of]a security force from the U.S. Africa Command to
support the security of U.S. personnel in Libya. This action was taken in
response to the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that
had killed four America[n] citizens, including U.S. Ambassador John
Christopher Stevens. These eight interventions obviously have a

negative repercussion for American imperial policy. Even more

prevalent is how those in the inner workings of the imperial system
seem to forget history . As George Santayana put it, those who
cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it . By the
start of the twentieth century, 90 percent of Africa was colonized by
European powers. Chris Harman writes in A Peoples History of the World
that the first European attempts to carve out colonies in Africa involved
them in bloody battlesthey often lostbut by the 1880s the accelerated
industrialization of Western Europe was shifting the balance[giving]
European armies the decisive edge in most battlesThe capitalist powers
did not expend money and effort conquering the world out of philanthropy
the motive was profit. The same could be said out of the new scramble over
the continent, and just like back then there is another enemy to fight with:
the Chinese government. The blog, China in Africa: the Real Story, digs
through some of the lies about this enemy, with posts about Chinese
interest in building hydroelectric dams in the continent, a mystery investment
in Mali, a disappeared railway in Mauritania, an agricultural collaboration with
the government of Senegal and a fabled trans-West African highway, among
other projects. Socialist author Alan Maass wrote about the contest of
imperialist countries in his book The Case for Socialism: the twentieth
century has seen two horrific warsabout which imperialist country
would dominate which areas of the globe. Wars are a constant
feature in capitalismthe product of the ruthless competition for
profit at the heart of the free market systemThats why wars are
inevitable under capitalismunless ordinary people fight back
against a system that breeds war. How will one fight back? For one,
pushing the idea that China is an enemy or any of the other rising
powers in the world including Russia, India and Brazil, will result in a
new Cold War-like scenario leading to an increasing imperialist
policy, especially in Africa. Chalmers Johnson writes in last pages of his
book, Nemesis, that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and
commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in
the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalentif we choose
to keep our empirewe will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await
the eventual blowback that imperialism generates. In his earlier book,
Blowback, Johnson offers a solution to the idea that China is an enemy and
pushes to end the empire, saying that the United States should adjust and
support the emergence of China. Even so, it is up to the individual if to take
the stance of Chalmers Johnson, or take action on the streets, in the
communities, and elsewhere to curb imperialist policy of all countries, not
just America. In the end, the only way to use American power wisely,
as Obama mentioned, is to not impose onto the darker people of the
African continent a neo-colonialist policy that will benefit the
wealthy at the expense of the poor.

AFRICOM props up systems of imperialism for the United

States
Pheko 11 (Dr. Motsoko Pheko, former member of Parliament in South Africa 11/16/11 US Africa
Command a tool to recolonise continent accessed 7/31/15 from
http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category.php/features/77978 LC)

America and NATO have the worst records in their dealings with the
African people. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with the connivance of the US and Belgian
governments. Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown with the assistance of Americas CIA. In recent years the
American government and its British ally have plotted regime change in Zimbabwe. In Libya it is America
and NATO that bombed the country and got Colonel Muammar Gaddafi killed. This has happened inside
Africa. How much easily and frequently will this happen, now with the Africom operating inside this
continent? America has sophisticated weapons and intelligence gathering that Africa cannot match at

The ill-intentions of the USA and its NATO allies towards Africa were
exposed recently when these allies made it impossible for a delegation
of the African Union to enter Libya to mediate and bring peace to
Libya between the rebels and Gaddafis government. America and NATO
treated the African Union with contempt and disdain. They literally sabotaged the AU
efforts to bring peace to Libya as well as to Ivory Coast. Africom will
presently.

destroy Africa. Africom will undermine the United Nations and the
African Union. It will deeply divide Africa into moderates and
militants. Africom is a handy imperialist tool for regime change. It
will be used to install puppet governments on the African people to
serve the interests of imperialism .

Northeast Asia
The attempt to have control of logistic spaces in
Northeast Asia is part of an US imperialistic and
militaristic tradition
Davis 15 (Sasha Davis, Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Science at the
University of Hawaii-Hilo, 6/2/15 Chinas New Islands: Dueling Imperialisms and Military Escalation in East
Asia accessed 7/31/15 from http://www.towardfreedom.com/28-archives/asia/3926-china-s-new-islandsdueling-imperialisms-and-military-escalation-in-east-asia LC)

border areas, that they are spaces of intense flows of

resources and trade, is also apparent in the seas around East Asia. A
staggering amount of trade moves through the East and South China Seas. These seas are
therefore not just fortified frontiers they are also "logistic spaces"
The second logic of

where states are trying to facilitate certain movements rather than blocking them. Of course the two logics
of this borderland are often working at cross-purposes. Territorial boundaries function to keep spaces
bounded and to restrict movements and flows, whereas the constellation of ports, ships, and open sealanes function to make the spaces more permeable. The imperatives of states to keep out what they aim to
keep out, while facilitating the quick movement through of what governments and transnational entities

they both
promote militarization. While it is fairly obvious that contests over territory
rely on marshalling military power, the logic of networks and facilitating flows relies on
it as well. Militarization is desired for these "logistic spaces" for two main
reasons. First, militarization serves to determine which state is able to
control these flows. Second, militarization serves to safeguard the
system of trade from disruption by other states, natural disasters, or
threatening non-state actors like smugglers and pirates. This is where
American interests come into the story. The history of American militarization in
the Pacific is marked much more by the logic of controlling and
maintaining flows than territorial acquisition. Even when territorial
ambitions were present - as with the US taking of Hawai'i, the Philippines, and
Guam in the late 1800s, or Okinawa after World War Two -these ambitions
were usually not ends in themselves, but rather a means to create
bases that would allow the US to wrest control over trade with Asia
from competing powers. There is little difference today . US government
want to move through, may clash in some ways but they are symbiotic in another way:

officials - and the transnational business interests that heavily influence them - are not nearly as
concerned with which country gets control over disputed piles of rocks in the South or East China Sea as
they are with making sure that trade is not disrupted around these rocks. They are also concerned that
China, through its aggressive moves in the seas around the region (and its increased military
technologies), may develop the capability to deny the US control over these spaces of trade.

Okinawa
The affirmatives attempt to liberate Okinawa women is
the same radical feminist approach that designates
indigenous as unable to take care of them selves, and
posits the white feminists as the savior. Although the aff
is INFORMED by imperialism, it necessarily represents
imperialism through erasures of how race implicates
prostitution and perceptions of whiteness in Japan due to
militarization
Shigematsu 15
Setsu. Associate Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department of
University of California, Riverside Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia
and the Pacific. Issue 37. March, Intimacies of Imperialism and JapaneseBlack Feminist Transgression: Militarised Occupations in Okinawa and
Beyond accessed 7/31/15
http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue37/shigematsu.pdf)
Rethinking Afro-Asian encounters through Okinawan-Black-Japanese transgression 17. The first film
sequence begins with Hara stating that Takeda left Tokyo in 1972 and went to Okinawa with another
young woman from the movement named Sugako.[24] After arriving in Okinawa, these young feminists,
who were in their early twenties, began working at a club for Black American soldiers. Their decision was
likely informed by their limited understanding of the Black struggle against White oppression in America.
Takeda and Sugako were representative of a small number of uman ribu activists who chose to work in the

This practice
was motivated by a feminist critique of the patriarchal and classist
double-standard that divided women into either good/chaste wives
versus bad/promiscuous women, a binary these feminists sought to
deconstruct through their deliberate participation in this industry.
sex-entertainment industry (mizushobai) during the early years of the movement.

This work also served the pragmatic need to earn money to support their activism and communal life.

They were thus motivated by an anti-Japanese patriarchal feminist

politics and they also sought to transgress class divisions that
discriminated against women in the sex-entertainment industry .[25]
The film portrays Takeda's friendships with other bargirls, expressing her desire for friendship across class
lines. Her previous work reaching out to criminalised women in Tokyo also aligned with this

What remained underdeveloped in the

women's liberation movementand evident through Takeda's actionswas a
better understanding and critique of racism and colonialism globally
and domestically.[26] Despite being able to critique how the
militarised sexual violence against Okinawan's women's bodies was
a result of Japanese imperialism, at the outset of the movement,
Japanese feminists had not yet conceived an effective antiimperialist or decolonial feminist practice. Indeed, this analysis further reveals the
anticlassist/anti-elitist politics. 18.

cleavages between an anti-imperialist feminist critique of gendered violence and an effective decolonial
feminist practice. I make an analytical distinction between anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist

The latter requires an intersectional understanding of class,

gender, ethnicity, race and nation which was lacking in the
movement during the early years of its formation.[27] And as my
practice.

analysis will later demonstrate, anti-imperialist feminism can

involve colonising tactics. 19. EPE depicts a contradictory set of representations of Black
soldiers, Black Power, and Black agency amid the intimacies of Japanese-US neo-imperialism. The third
sequence in EPE depicts the racially segregated A-sign bar for Black American GIs where Takeda and
Sugako work.[28] These scenes document the transplantation and translocal mediation of American
structures of racism and racial segregation, whereby African Americans are drafted to fight and die for the
United States, but are not equal enough to be entertained in the same clubs as White soldiers. Throughout
the film, Black GIs are always depicted in civilian clothing, which de-emphasises their militarised
presence and power. They are seen dancing and lounging in the bar and hanging out with other Black
soldiers.

Through this set of images, overt codes of militarisation are

elided, but function as the necessary suturing logic of such AsianBlack encounters. Black America encounters Asia at the extremities
of the US militarised empire mediated through the transplantation
of structures of racial hierarchy. 20. What is striking in EPE are the multivalent ways that
Hara depicts Black GIs. In the image below, Black GIs pose with raised fists, linking them with other
images of Black Power and resistance. These images and glimpses of Black Power consciousness in Asia
attest to the transpacific movement of liberation consciousness and practice.[29] Figure 2. Black GIs in
Okinawa demonstrating their consciousness of Black Power Source. Hara Kazuo's film, Extreme Private
Eros, Love Song 1974 21. What are the multiple meanings of this scene of Black Power consciousness in
Okinawa, a zone of US military occupation? EPE provides rarely seen images of Black soldiers in Okinawa:
as clientele in the bar and as part of this group expressing the Black Power salute; as Takeda's short term
lover and as the lover of another bargirl named Chi Chi. EPE thus provides a portal to appreciate the
complex status and figuration of the Black American GI at this historical juncture as occupier and lover,

Within such contact zones, these

soldier-occupiers are present because they have been drafted into
larger structures of US militarised imperialism . They may have sought respite
subject of desire and symbol of resistance. 22.

from the racism they faced in the US through companionship with Asian women. What further complicates
the visual representation of Black GIs in EPE is a voice-over during a montage sequence of scenes of this
Asign bar. The voice-over is a dialoguespoken in broken Englishbetween a bargirl named Kaylie (a
friend of Takeda) and an anonymous Black GI client. The dialogue raises questions about the dynamics of
Black-Asian-White power relations and provides viewers with the opportunity to hear the marginalised
perspective of a bargirl working in Okinawa. Bargirl: White people fool Black people right? Ok? Soldier:
White people? Bargirl: White people use Black male right? Ok, long long time ago, right? Remember?
Soldier: That's why we still hold it against them now. The bargirl then states that Black GIs have come to
the "Orient" (sic) and treat Japanese women in the same manner, as if they are doing the same thing that
Whites have done to Blacks. Although it may be a crude comparison, Kaylie expresses her critique of this
racialised-gendered power relation. The Black GI protests her racial analogy. You know that's not true. All
people not do same thing. All GI no come Okinawa, Japan, and treat Oriental woman the same way. Some
come and treat Oriental woman good, you know 23. Even though the bargirl accuses the Black
American GI of acting like the White man vis--vis the Oriental woman, the racialised status of the Black
GI is not equivalent (or even accurately analogous) with that of a White man in these zones of military
occupation. The conditions of White domination over Black people through the history of chattel slavery is
neither equivalent to nor commensurate with the imperial militarism that has brought Black GIs to Asia.
However, the bargirl's critique of the status of the Black GI does attest to an exploitative and contested
gendered-racial hierarchy mediated by the sexual labour of the Asian bargirls. Although Black GIs can
purchase sexual services, these bargirls are not the enslaved property of the soldiers.[30] Rather, as
draftees, GI bodies are disposable property of the US government. Moreover, it is the heterosexist
collusion of Okinawan and Japanese club owners and managers with the US military who support the
maintenance of these gendered and racialised relations of power. Masakazu Tanaka has described this
complex status of the American GI as occupier. In The Sexual Contact Zone in Occupied Japan, Tanaka
writes: Although the US military is on the power end of occupation/colonisation, the American soldiers that
the girls solicited cannot be mass-labeled as the conquerors because of the hierarchy that exists
within the military system. The soldiers are mostly single men who are at the lower end of the military
organisation. The American soldiers, although on the buying end of prostitution, are more intermediary in
their existence than being direct representatives of those in power. They are potential critics of the
military and of racial discrimination (if they are African-American), as well as potential deserters during
the Vietnam War, they (re)emerge within Japan as military deserters, civil rights activists, and soldiers
declaring solidarity with local civilians. In other words, they are rebels.[31] This quote distinguishes
between the status of low-ranking soldiers and African American soldiers compared to those who are in

power (as policy-makers). Black American soldiers are situated as occupiers within a larger racial
hierarchy and have agency to oppress and resist against structures of domination. 24. EPE projects the
image of the Black male as rebel by including scenes of the Black Power salute. This recognition of the
Black Power movement was part of the late 1960s and early 1970s Japanese New Left and student
movement culture. Black liberation movements in the US also informed the Japanese New Left. In 1969,
for example, two Black Panther members (Roberta Alexander and Elbert Big Man Howard) were invited
by student movement activists on a speaking tour in Japan.[32] In the wake of their visit, their works were
translated by well-known leftists such as Muto Ichiyo and others, who formed the Committee to Support

Black
liberation thought also served as an inspiration for activists in the
women's liberation movement. The leading philosopher-activist of
the Japanese uman ribu movement, Tanaka Mitsu writes about how
US-based Black liberation thought helped crystallise her own radical
feminist philosophy. In 1972, Tanaka wrote: By calling White cops pigs, the Blacks struggling
the Black Panthers. These are a few examples of transpacific cross-racial solidarity work.[33] 25.

in America began to constitute their own identity by confirming their distance from White centered society
in their daily lives. This being the beginning of the process to constitute their subjectivity, who then

Anti-racist militancy modelled and

informed anti-sexist militancy for radical feminists in the US and
Japan.[35] In her other writings, Tanaka also cites Angela Davis, indicative of a transpacific
should women be calling the pigs?[34] 26.

crossfertilisation of liberation movements.[36] Black liberation struggle thus served as a transnational

However, like other non-Black feminists and other

leftist intellectuals, Tanaka learned lessons and cues from Black
model of liberation.

liberation, but she did not engage in anti-racist solidarity work and
lacked an intersectional analysis of race, class and gender.[37] Uman
ribu discourse described Japanese women as a discriminated group,
analogous to Japan's racialised minorities such as Okinawans,
indigenous Ainu, and also former colonial subjects such as resident
Koreans and Chinese. However, the claim to the same status of
oppression conflates forms of domination without sufficient
attention to different histories and structures of colonialism . Indeed, the
lack of a racial/ethnic analysis of power differences informs how the activists of uman ribu did not
prioritise solidarity with other ethnic groups in Japan, but initially focused more on their own liberation,

The focus
on one's own liberation (or the liberation of one's own identity
group) is a significant and vital aspect of any liberation struggle.
However, an exclusive focus on one's own liberation can reinforce
individualist/self-centred modes of empowerment and conflict with
other liberation movements.[38] The lack of an anti-racist and antibecause they considered themselves analogous to these other oppressed minorities. 27.

colonial analysis or practice is symptomatic of a single-axis

feminist criticism that focuses on gender oppression , obscuring
and/or excluding other indices of power. The racialised/ethnic
position and class-privilege of Japanese feminist subjects such as
Takeda might be constructively compared with the relative racial
privilege of middle-class White feminists and the relative mobility of
middle-class Asian American feminist women.[39] Historically, many first-world
White and Asian/American women have struggled for their own empowerment according to a liberal
feminist paradigm that has emphasised individual upward mobility. The larger context of anti-colonial and
civil rights movements inspired the women's liberation movements during this era. However, the crossfertilisation of movements was not always mutual.[40] The dominant discursive trajectory of Afro-Asian
scholarship has been largely celebratory; however, this laudatory approach often leaves economies of

Asian anti-Black racism unexamined.[41] It is this under-explored gendered-racial dynamic to which I now
turn. Asian bargirls mediating blacknessChi Chi's remix 28. The fourth film sequence is about an
Okinawan bargirl named Chi Chi. Donning an afro-wig and heavy make-up, Chi Chi's very appearance
transfigures self-expression through a racialised fashionaesthetic that signifies an intimacy with blackness.
[42] The audience is informed by Hara's voice-over that Chi Chi is a fourteen year-old Okinawan girl. The
scene continues with Chi Chi telling Takeda that she is pregnant and does not know who fathered the
child. This young teenager says her mother would kill her if she had the child, revealing her troubled
situation at home. The sequence ends with the camera positioning the viewer in Chi Chi's room, as she
gets undressed and begins having sex with an anonymous Black GI. Hara's camera lens implicates the
viewer in this transgressive moment. Voyeuristic desire and curiosity are at once hailed and potentially
disturbed. By confronting the viewer with this cross-racial scene between an anonymous young Black
American soldier and a fourteen year-old girl the viewer is exposed to a spectacle of the transgressive
intimacies of imperialism which is all the more provocative and unsettling given Chi Chi's age.] Figure 3.
A fourteen year-old Okinawan bargirl named Chi Chi and an anonymous Black GI Source. Hara Kazuo's
film, Extreme Private Eros, Love Song 1974 29. Hara's voice-over refrains from any overt criticism of how
the US military sex industry impacts on Okinawan girls and women, but through the exposure of a

By revealing Chi
Chi having sex with an anonymous Black soldier, the film arguably
stages the Okinawan girl as corrupted, and the Black soldier as an
ambivalent subject of desire and an agent of defilement. His body is
fourteen year-old girl, EPE potentially conjures a narrative of lost innocence.

without a name, without a distinct story. He is client, lover and polluter, and a potential part of a collective

This implicit critique of the corrupting influence of

the US military occupation takes place through the spectacle of this
Black-Okinawan sexual encounter. This groundbreaking and visually transgressive film
struggle for liberation. 30.

enables viewers to see and consume this Black-Okinawan sexual liaison while the White imperial subject
remains outside the frame. The near complete absence of White American GIs from the film erases White
agency from the constructed and transplanted racial hierarchy.[43] White heterosexist military
governance structures these Afro-Asian relations as the authoritative power that imposes the segregation
of entertainment venues by utilising Asian women as mediators of racial power. Although there is no
explicit indictment of the racism of US imperialism in EPE, the Japanese-Black-Okinawan relationships are
constituted within a larger structure of anti-Black racism that meshes with Japanese economies of
light/white skin privilege. 31.

In In the Black Pacific, Bernard Scott Lucious

writes, 'Colorism, therefore, is not simply a Black-White color-line
problem of the African diaspora: it is also a Black-yellow color-line
problem of Asian diaspora.'[44] Asian anti-Black racism in
militarised-sexual contact zones has been described in JiYeon Yuh's, Beyond the Shadow
of Camptown (2004) and Katharine Moon's Sex Among Allies (1997).[45] In these important works, these
scholars describe and detail the expressions, practices, and the effects of anti-Black racism, which is a
much needed arena of historical documentation and analysis. However, such work often remains at the
level of descriptive-reinscription by detailing the actions of women without critical commentary about the

In Sex Among Allies, Moon documents the

violent effects of racialised hierarchies within the militarised
entertainment districts of Korea, known as camptowns.[47] Moon
notes that if the women were found to be consorting with both
Blacks and Whites, the women might risk economic and physical
retaliation by White soldiers, or if they discriminated against Blacks and refused them,
they would thereby risk the wrath of club-owners.[48] Moreover, Moon writes that, For
most prostitutes, racial discrimination served as a means to retain
their limited freedom of choice of customers and their already
compromised sense of self-dignity.[49] In other words, to practice
anti-Black racism is the root/route to preserve a relative degree of
autonomy or dignity for prostitutes, who are already considered the
lowest of the low.[50] According to this logic, (White mediated) Asian
anti-Black racist practice produces an economy of self-value that
racism implied in their discourse.[46] 32.

has material implications for the earning power and safety of

bargirls and sex workers. 33. Euro-American anti-Black racism is thus transplanted and
rearticulated in these militarised contact zones in Asia. These racial economies are re-inscribed, indexing
Asian women's bodies through their intimacy with Black GIs. Such militarised occupations involve an
interpenetrating racialisation between the soldier and the sex worker, each defining the other through the
sexualised encounter. Asian sex workers are evaluated via their relative intimacy with Blackness and
Whiteness as defining signifiers within a global racial hierarchy of life. In such contact zones, t he

American military occupation is maintained by the continued legacy

of Japanese colonial governance producing the convergence of antiBlack and anti-Okinawan racism, both of which are animated by the
logics of colonial racism. 34. Such dynamics warrant a further examination of the complex
roots and modalities of Asian anti-Black racism, which differentially involves the multi-racial category of

further feminist decolonial

analysis of Takeda's contradictory relationship with blackness helps
illuminate these racial optics. By further examining Takeda's contradictions, this paper
demonstrates how certain feminist discourses of women's liberation and
empowerment (re)produce an economy of Asian anti-Black racism in
the context of their intimacies with Black GIs. Asian/Japanese antiBlack racial identity and phobia 35. For many feminist activists of
the uman ribu movement, sexual liberation implied having sex and
giving birth outside the confines of the Japanese family system.
Takeda passionately engaged these forms of anti-Japanese
patriarchal practice; however, her pursuit of cross-ethnic and crossracial relations were contradictory, conflicted and entangled within
the racist structures of Japanese imperialist nationalism. In the fifth
Asians (East Asian, Southeast Asians, South Asians). A

sequence in the film, Hara's voice-over reads the contents of a letter from Takeda. The letter informs him
that Takeda is pregnant and she writes that she thinks that the father is Okinawan. After ten months in
Okinawa, Takeda travels back to Tokyo. She carries out her intention, stated earlier in the film, to give

Her intention to give birth without

assistance on camera expresses her desire to publicly perform her
independence and autonomy, indicative of a particular trajectory of
(liberal) feminism that heralds individual female empowerment.
birth by herself in front of Haras camera.[51]

Figure 4. Takeda gives birth on camera in Hara's Tokyo apartment Figure 5. Kobayashi Sachiko records
sound and Takeda's son Rei witness his mother giving birth. Source. Hara Kazuo's film, Extreme Private
Eros, Love Song 1974 36. The narrative creates the expectation for Takeda (and the viewer) to anticipate a
mixed OkinawanJapanese child. After a highly graphic birthing scene where Takeda pushes out her baby
onto the newspaper-covered floor of Hara's apartment, the child lies crying as Takeda briefly rests and

The birthing
of her Black-Japanese daughter on camera captures the
unanticipated outcome and progeny of her sexual liberation that
transgresses Japanese familial-imperialism. The racial significance of this birth is
recovers. To her surprise, Takeda discovers that her baby daughter is Black-Japanese.

prefigured and contextualised by Takeda's ambivalence about birthing a Black child expressed earlier in
the film.[52] During one of Hara's visits to Okinawa, he and Takeda argue about her relationship with her
Black GI lover, Paul. During this argument (in sequence 7), Takeda states that her relationship with Paul
would only last while she was in Okinawa and that she was holding back because he is Black. One of
Takeda's reasons for holding back is rooted in a fear about the colour of her progeny. During her argument
with Hara, Takeda shouts, What do you think is going to come out? A White kid?![53] This exclamation
reveals her anxiety about the colour of her offspring. This holding back due to Paul's blackness reveals
how her transgressive sexual practice crosses the racialised boundaries of Japanese familial nationalism.
Takeda desires to experience sexual relations with Paul, but she is reluctant to embrace the prospect of
giving birth to a Black child. 37. After giving birth, Takeda phones her mother to tell her about the birth
and that her baby is mixedrace. After discussing the child's skin colour, Takeda says, I can't kill her now,
so I will raise her. Her response to her mother reveals the stakes involved in the economies of cross-racial
(anti-Japanese) sexual practice. This conversation with her mother also reveals Japanese discrimination

against mixed-blood (konketsu) children, and how anti-Black racism can manifest despite the relative
absence of Black bodies in Japanese society. Takeda's phobia of having a Black child is thus arguably
informed by her recognition of the anti-Black racism that she also tries to challenge through her choice to
raise her daughter. 38. While Takeda was in Okinawa, as noted above, she tried to adopt a BlackOkinawan baby boy named Kenny. Although she wanted to adopt a Black baby, she disclosed her

This distinction or contradiction is

arguably rooted in a desire for racial self-recognition in her own
offspring. The Black-Japanese sexual encounter thus involves a
potential loss of racial selfrecognition insofar as Japanese racial
identity is predicated on a non-Black epidermal-spectrum that
coheres East Asian racialisation.[55] According to this racial schema, East Asian
racial legibility and coherence relies on a possessive investment in
non-Black epidermalisation and light/white skin privilege.[56] The racial
coherence of the (East) Asian subject is thus transfigured and
reconstituted through its intimacy with blackness. These BlackAmerican-Japanese encounters provide an opportunity to
interrogate how the racialised identities of East Asians (Chinese,
Japanese, Koreans) are transfigured in relation to blackness. 39. Even
resistance to bearing a Black child.[54]

though transgressive cross-racial reproduction can be understood as an anti-Japanese patriarchal feminist

practice, what was lacking in the women's liberation movement was a critical discourse of how Japanese
(womens) identity was predicated on a racialised imperial-colonial hierarchy of life. Even though their
feminist discourse often acknowledged their positionality as imperialist oppressors (as noted above), their
attempts to defy Japanese patriarchy often lacked practices of solidarity with other oppressed/colonised

The opportunity
for solidarity with Okinawan women or Black soldiers was
underdeveloped and delimited by an emphasis on one's own
liberation. This distinction between striving for one's own liberation and struggling with others for
groups, despite their (mis)understanding of themselves as analogous with them.

collective liberation is a relational dynamic that remains as a tension in the strategic pursuit of liberation.
Imperial feminist critique/critiquing imperial feminisms 40. EPE thus documents and exposes the various
contradictions that arise in Takeda's attempts to forge a transgressive feminist politics.

This
narrative focus on Takeda's will to liberate herself centres her
desire as the driving force that takes the viewer to Okinawa as the
colonised stage for her liberation process. Takeda's desire to have
sexual relations with Okinawan men and Black GIs trumps the
imperative to struggl e for political solidarity with them.

The focus on

sexual liberation in this radical feminist movement was its hallmark and its frontier. 41. After the scenes
of Takeda's argument with Hara about her relationship with Paul, the sequence ends with the following
inter-title: Her relationship with Paul lasted for three weeks. There is no further information provided to
explain their break up. No reasons are offered as to why Takeda proceeds to take an extremely hostile
stance toward all Black GIs. In one of the final sequences of her stay in Okinawa, Takeda writes a
pamphlet to give to Okinawan bargirls in Koza, an entertainment district for the US military. The pamphlet
ends by encouraging Okinawan bargirls to do harm to Black GIs. Takeda specifically warns Okinawan
women, 'Don't fall for Black guys with big cock. Don't ever have sympathy for them. They should all be
castrated.'[57] Through such an expression, Takeda disavows her own desire, and instead calls for
gendered-racial violence against Black soldiers. Clearly, Takeda's conception of women's liberation (for
Okinawan bargirls) is placed in direct conflict with Black American GIs.

Takeda's pamphlet
epitomises a first-world imperialist feminist desire to save brown
(Okinawan) women from Black men. Her discourse demonstrates a
first world (imperialist) feminist desire to rescue the colonised by
giving directives to Okinawan women, telling them what they need
to do to liberate themselves from Black GIs. Indeed, the freedom and

liberation of Black soldiers does not seem to factor into Takeda's

political consciousness. Such anti-male discourse has characterised
first-world radical feminist discourse by focusing solely on sexism
without commensurate attention to the racial and classed power
structures within larger structures of imperialism and colonialism.
Through this inquiry, we can see how first-world Japanese feminists
engage in sexual pursuits that can become colonising even though
they began with anti-imperialist intentions to break down Japanese
familial imperialism. Without adequate attention to racial
hierarchies within colonial histories, even anti-imperialist feminism
that seeks to defy Japanese familial imperialism can remain limited
to a single-axis modality of sexual liberation and can fuel antiBlack
male racism in the name of women's liberation.

As a final point, Takeda's

pamphlet provides an apt example of the distinction between first world anti-imperialism (what we may
call imperialist antiimperialism) and decolonial praxis. Even though uman ribu activists were informed by
an anti-imperialist critique (as seen in the ribu pamphlet cited above), articulating such criticism should

A decolonial
feminist praxis requires that those from the imperialising/colonising
side take heed of the anti-colonial desires and directives of the
colonised, rather than focusing on one's own liberation or telling the
colonised how they need to liberate themselves. Thus, although EPE was in
be distinguished from engaging or sustaining a decolonial feminist praxis.

many ways inspired by a broader antiimperialist leftist sentiment, this analysis demonstrates how such a
highly transgressive and visually pioneering film can reinscribe and expose colonial modalities of being,
seeing, consumption and abandonment.

Persian Gulf
Persian Gulf withdrawal strategies are always a lie told by
imperialists to maintain US regional strength. Strategy in
the Persia Gulf extends from a history of desire to control
the oil and resources in the area
Everst 11(10/27/11, Larry, author for Revcom focusing on the US agenda
in Iraq, Iran, Palestine and India. The Revolution. An imperialist War of Lies
and Horrensoud Crimes Against the Iraqi People
http://revcom.us/a/248/us_troop_withdrawal_from_iraq-en.html accessed
7/31/15)
On Friday, October 21, President Barack Obama announced that all
40,000 remaining U.S. military forces would be withdrawn from Iraq
by the end of this year: "After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will
be over," he said. Obama presented the end of the war as the fulfillment of a
campaign promise, and a proud moment for the U.S. in fulfilling a noble
mission: "The last American soldier[s] will cross the border out of Iraq with
their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American
people stand united in our support for our troops...This December will be a
time to reflect on all that we've been through in this war. I'll join the American
people in paying tribute to the more than 1 million Americans who have
served in Iraq. We'll honor our many wounded warriors and the nearly 4,500
American patriotsand their Iraqi and coalition partnerswho gave their
lives to this effort." Obama also called the withdrawal from Iraq part of "a
larger transition." He said, "The tide of war is receding...Now, even as we
remove our last troops from Iraq, we're beginning to bring our troops home
from Afghanistan..." He claimed "the United States is moving forward from a
position of strength." While Obama talks about "the tide of war
receding," the U.S. is increasing its military presence and aggression
in Libya and Africa. It's escalating drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia. It's waging a bloody war in Afghanistan, where there are still
close to 100,000 troops. And no, the U.S. military role is not being
ended in Iraq either. The U.S. has been forced to withdraw its
military unitsin part because it couldn't forge a new "status of
forces" agreement with the Iraqi government. But thousands of U.S.
diplomats, military contractors, CIA operatives, and other support
personnel will remain in Iraq after the end of the year. The U.S. will
still have tens of thousands of troops, as well as air and naval
power and various military alliances in the Middle East and Central
Asia . And it continues to rattle its sabers against Iran and Syria. The 2003
Iraq InvasionA Towering War Crime, Based on Lies This announcement by
Obama should make people reflecton how and why this war was
launched, what it was actually about, and what it says about the
nature of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist system. Obama and the ruling

class and media have deliberately obscured, covered up, and lied about these
issues for a decadeever since the run-up to the Iraq war began in the hours
after the attacks of September 11, 2001. This war was justified on the basis
of bald-faced lies that were cooked up through a deliberate campaign of
deceit that began soon after Sept. 11. There was the lie that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction. Then there was the lie that Saddam Hussein
had ties to Al Qaeda and was somehow involved in September 11. U.S.
government "investigations" and the media have blamed "faulty intelligence"
or being "suckered" by Iraqi sources for their failure to find a single cache of
WMD in Iraq. This is just another cover-up. There is overwhelming
evidencefrom many sourcesthat prove beyond a shadow of a
doubt that these were deliberate liesconcocted at the highest
levels of government, repeated endlessly by both Democrats and
Republicans, and by the imperialist media, which served as
cheerleaders for the war. And these lies were enforced by threats, smear
campaigns, and retaliation against any government and/or military officials or
former officials who tried to challenge or expose them. (For instance,
government officials and experts knew full well that Hussein was hostile to
Islamic fundamentalism and that Al Qaeda essentially didn't even exist in Iraq
before the U.S. invasionit was only until after the invasion that they arose
within Iraq.) Obama and the rest of the rulers want us to forget about all this.
These lies were designed to cover up the nature of the U.S. invasion: a naked
act of aggression against a small, weak, Third World country which had not
attacked the U.S., and which had been subject to over 20 years of U.S.
military assaults, covert attacks, and political and economic strangulation.
This aggression included the Iran-Iraq War (green lighted and prolonged by
the U.S.), the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and a decade of U.S.-UN sanctions.
These sanctions were responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 children
and perhaps as many 1.7 million Iraqis overall. In short, the U.S. invasion of
Iraq fit the textbook definition of a criminal wara war crime. This basic
and obvioustruth has systematically been censored, suppressed,
and covered up by a decade of ruling class lies and double-talk.
These liesand the lie that this war was about "liberating" the Iraq
peopletwisted the truth inside out, in true Hitlerian fashion. In
reality, this was a war launched by the world's most violent and globally
oppressive power. It was part of a plan to seize on 9/11 to launch a war to
strengthen and extend its empire of exploitation and military domination.
The U.S. imperialists aimed to turn Iraq into a U.S.-controlled
military and political outpostand imperialist gas stationin the
heart of the Middle East. It was to be a first step toward reshaping
the whole region to suit U.S. capitalism-imperialism. It was meant to
be part of defeating and socially undercutting Islamic fundamentalist forces in
the region, which were posing obstacles to U.S. plans. The U.S. rulers planned
to use this oil-rich and strategically located region as a club against any rivals
regional or global. They were driven by a real fear that their "unipolar
moment" of global dominancewhen the U.S. was the only imperialist
Superpower after the demise of the USSRcould be slipping away. And the

U.S. was intoxicated with imperial hubristhey dreamed of creating an

unchallenged, and unchallengeable empiredominating the planet as no
other power ever had before. As Bob Avakian puts it, "These imperialists
make the Godfather look like Mary Poppins." (BAsics 1:7) Horrendous Impact
on the Iraqi People Obama talked of honoring "our many wounded warriors
and the nearly 4,500 American patriotsand their Iraqi and coalition partners
who gave their lives to this effort"the reference to the Iraqi people
inserted in passing, a throw-away line, with no content. But what has the
impact of this war been on the Iraqi people? This realitywhile well
documentedhas been deliberately ignored and lied about by the imperialist
state, and the ruling class' multi-faceted apparatus for shaping public
opinion. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has led directly to
massive slaughter, displacement, torture, sectarian violence,
suffering and death. While the U.S. media occasionally mentions that
100,000 Iraqis have died during the U.S. war and occupation, this number
vastly understates the actual number of Iraqis directly murdered or who died
as a result of the waras well as those whose lives have been drastically
shattered. A 2006 survey published in the British medical journal
Lancet found that there had been more than 650,000 "excess Iraqi
deaths as a consequence of the war" up to that point. In 2008, a
study by the polling firm Opinion Research Business put the number
at over 1 million. According to the UN's Refugee Agency, over 4.7
million Iraqis have been driven from their homestwo million forced
out of Iraq entirely. Three million Iraqi women are now widows,
according to Iraq's governmentmany forced into prostitution.
When government officials and the mainstream media do mention the fact
that the war has left 100,000 Iraqis dead, what's left unsaid is who is
responsiblemaking it seem as if these deaths were accidents or unfortunate
"collateral damage," or the fault of "terrorists" or "age-old conflicts" among
Iraqis. In fact, the U.S. imperialists are directly responsible for most of these
deathseven as reactionary Islamists (whether inside or outside the Iraqi
government)have carried out atrocities was well. First, many of these
millions were killed or displaced directly by U.S. forces. Second, since 1990,
the U.S. had systematically shattered Iraq's civilian infrastructure (water,
power, etc.), and then violently dismantled Iraq's governing structures after
the invasion; both actions had catastrophic impacts on life in Iraq. Third, the
U.S. empowered reactionary forces, including Islamist parties, to govern Iraq
butchers who have carried out widespread massacres and campaigns of
religious sectarian cleansing against the Iraqi people, particularly against the
Sunnis, as well as campaigns to forcibly impose reactionary Islamic strictures
on Iraqi women. The U.S. military has committed widespread war
crimes and crimes against humanity. They have tortured and
sexually degraded and abused countless thousands of Iraqi
prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other torture centers. They've turned
prisoners over to the reactionary U.S.-backed Iraqi regime knowing they
would be tortured. "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of
abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose

conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished," the Guardian

UK reported. ("Iraq war logs: secret files show how U.S. ignored torture,"
guardian.co.uk, Oct. 22, 2010). In November 2005, U.S. Marines murdered 24
Iraqis in cold blood in the city of Haditha, and then blamed it on "insurgents."
In 2006 in Ishaqi in central Iraq, "U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi
civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called
in an airstrike to destroy the evidence." In July 2007, a U.S. helicopter gunned
down 11 civilians in Baghdad. Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar wrote, "A video posted
this week by WikiLeaks [of the helicopter massacre] is not an exception to
how the U.S. occupation operated in Iraq all along, but rather an example of
it. While the video is shocking and disturbing to the U.S. public, from an Iraqi
perspective it just tells a story of an average day under the occupation."
("The Haditha Massacre, and the Bush Regime: Illegal, Immoral, and
INTOLERABLE," Revolution #50, June 11, 2006; "WikiLeaks: Iraqi Children in
U.S. Raid Shot in Head, U.N. Says," McClatchy Newspapers, September 1,
2011; "Video Shows U.S. Killing of Reuters Employees," New York Times, April
5, 2010; Raed Jarrar, "Iraq: Seven Years of Occupation," CommonDreams.org,
April 10, 2010) These are the actions that Obama says Americans should "be
proud of." Not one single major U.S. military commander, U.S. official,
political leader or war-leading media talking head has been held to account
for any of this. The U.S. and its military forces are not beloved by
Iraqis as "liberators"they're hated by millions of people around the
world as savage, violent foreign imperialist occupiers. Withdrawal of
U.S. Troops Amidst Mounting Contradictions For all this violence, the U.S.
has not been able to achieve its grand strategic objectives in Iraq, or
even its scaled-back objectives. When George W. Bush signed the status
of forces agreement in 2008 calling for an end to the U.S. presence in Iraq by
the end of 2011, it was assumed (perhaps even directly agreed upon) that
U.S. forces would remain in Iraq for sometime after that "withdrawal date."
For over a year under Obama, the U.S. has been trying to negotiate
a treaty with Iraq under which as many as 18,000 U.S. military forces
could remain in Iraq. This summer, the U.S. scaled down its demand to
some 5,000 military personnel. But when the U.S. insisted its military forces
be given immunity from prosecution by Iraqi authorities for crimes under Iraqi
law, the negotiations broke down. This breakdown reflects, and is a
product of, the many complex, shifting contradictions the U.S. faces
in attempting to more forcefully assert its domination in the Middle
Eastand how its "war on terror" to forcibly reshape and more
directly control Iraq, Afghanistan, and the region has ended up
exacerbating the very contradictions and obstacles the war was
designed to resolve. All this has also intersected with new, unanticipated
developments across the region and globally. So it was this breakdown (and
ultimately these deeper difficulties)not a deliberate planthat forced
Obama's hand (even as he had strategically aimed to scale back U.S. forces
in Iraq and Afghanistan, in an attempt to better deal with the deep stresses
and strains on the empire). This is but the latest chapter of U.S. ambitions in
Iraq being thwarted, then scaled back, and then thwarted some more. It is

important to recall what exactly the Bush regime dreamed of in Iraq. A March
21, 2003 Wall Street Journal piece spelled some of it out: "[Bush's] dream is
to make the entire Middle East a different place, and one safer for American
interests. The vision is appealing: a region that, after a regime change in
Baghdad, has pro-American governments in the Arab world's three most
important countries, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In the long run, that
changes the dynamic of the region, making it more friendly to Washington
and spreading democracy. Reducing the influence of radicals helps make
Palestinians more amenable to an agreement with Israel." But the U.S. began
to encounter big problems within a few months of invading Iraq. The Bush
regime thought it could quickly and totally remake Iraqi society and start
"fresh"creating a fully subservient neocolony, designed to fit the global
needs of U.S. capital and the regional needs of U.S. power. The U.S.
disbanded the Iraqi Army, barred most Sunnis from holding government
positions, and attempted to install a hand-picked U.S. puppet council to rule.
It even tried, under Paul Bremer, the U.S. "Administrator" of Iraq, to ram
through drastic "free market" capitalist economic restructuring. These
predatory and nakedly imperialist measures soon sparked a growing
armed resistance, centered among Iraqi Sunnis, that led to a 5-plus
year civil war and threatened to both tear Iraq apart and render the
U.S. occupation untenable. The American invasion, coupled with the end
of Hussein's essentially secular regime, fueled Islamic fundamentalismboth
Sunni and Shia. It provided an opening for Al Qaeda and other Islamist forces
to gain a foothold in Iraq. The U.S. was forced to abandon its chosen lackeys
(who had little following inside Iraq) and turn to reactionary Shia religious
forces and parties, willing to work with and under the U.S., to attempt to
govern and stabilize the country. (A majority of Iraqis are Shias, and these
parties have a long history in the country.) These forces have varying ties to
and tensions with Iran; and they have tensions and differences, as well as
common interests, among themselves and with the U.S. Being a foreign
occupying power and creating a new state from the ashes of the Hussein
regime proved to be extremely difficult. Toppling the regimes in Iraq and
Afghanistan, other regional developments, and the hatred the U.S. wars
spawned across the region ended up strengthening Iran. Such tensions and
contradictions, including the mood of the people in Iraq, and the Iraqi rulers'
fear of the kind of popular uprising sweeping the region (perhaps triggered by
a too-close public embrace of the U.S.) factored in to the impasse in
negotiations over U.S. forces continuing in Iraq. None of this is to say that
the U.S. is giving up on control and domination of Iraq, or that it
won't continue to have a presence and shape events there
including with new assertions of political and military intervention.
Iraq's economy, politics, and military remain subordinate to and
dominated by imperialism (even as there are complex, shifting, and
multi-layered contradictions at work). The largest U.S. embassy in the
world is in the heart of Baghdad, Iraq's capital. ABC News reported that the
State Department will continue to have some 5,000 security contractors and
4,500 other support contractors in Iraq, as well as a significant CIA presence.

And U.S. officials have stated there will be a continuing military relationship
with Iraq that will include the training of Iraqi forces. "So we are now going to
have a security relationship with Iraq for training and support of their
military," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, "similar to what we have
around the world from Jordan to Colombia." (Democracy Now, 10/24) Further,
the U.S. has built up a regional military infrastructure over the past 30 years,
and officials have made clear they are not leaving the region: "We're going to
maintain, as we do now, a significant force in that region of the world,"
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated, including some 23,000 troops in
Kuwait and about 100,000 in Afghanistan. "So we will always have a force
that will be present and that will deal with any threats." ("U.S. Withdrawal
Plans Draw Suspicion, Fear in Iraq," Wall Street Journal, Oct 23) Containing,
weakening, perhaps overthrowing Iran's Islamic Republic of Iran has been a
central objective of U.S. strategy since the launch of the "war on terror" in
Sept. 2001. Yet in many ways, the U.S. war and other events have
strengthened Iran. And now, it's possible that the U.S. military
withdrawal from Iraq may strengthen Iran furtherin Iraq and
regionally. "The withdrawal from Iraq creates enormous strategic
complexities rather than closure," one imperialist think tank analysis posed.
"Therefore, if the U.S. withdrawal in Iraq results in substantial Iranian
influence in Iraq, and al Assad doesn't fall, then the balance of power in the
region completely shifts. This will give rise to a contiguous arc of Iranian
influence stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea running
along Saudi Arabia's northern border and along the length of Turkey's
southern border." ("Libya and Iraq: The Price of Success," STRATFOR, Oct 25
2011) This possibility has driven the U.S. to ramp up its threats against Iran.
As soon as the troop withdrawal was announced, Secretary of State Clinton
warned, "Iran would be badly miscalculating if they did not look at the entire
region and all of our presence in many countries in the region." (CNNState
of the Union, 10/23) Grand Schemes.... Profound Difficulties Obama's hollow
claim that "the United States is moving forward from a position of strength"
cannot hide the fact that this entire decade of war has cost the U.S.
enormously. It has greatly aggravated deep stresses in the U.S. empire, and it
has intensified a whole cauldron of contradictions the U.S. faces in the
strategically crucial Middle East-Central Asian regions. Dominance in this area
has been a pillar of U.S. global power in the post-World War 2 era, and to its
current and future status as the world's superpower. So the U.S.
imperialists are compelled to attempt to find ways to maintain their
power, presence, and preeminence in the region. But they're finding
this an increasingly difficult and uncertain endeavor. So yes, let's
reflect on these nearly nine years of war and occupation in Iraq. They
demonstrate that the U.S. is willing to employ massive violence and
commit savage crimes to advance its imperialist interests and stave
off reversals or defeat. It shows that the rulers of this country are chronic
liars who will say anythingincluding the most blatant and obvious liesto
bamboozle people into going along with their program. These eight plus
years prove, once again, that nothing good can come of U.S. intervention and

aggressionno matter how it's dressed up. And they underscore the moral
imperative of exposing the crimes and opposing the aggressions committed
by this country. At the same time, the war's unfolding and now the
U.S. military's ignominious exit from Iraq, also illustrate the empire's
profound and growing vulnerabilities, and how quickly its grand
schemes can backfire. All this points to the potential for even deeper
shocks and crises to jolt U.S. capitalism-imperialism, and the
urgency of revolutionary work today to prepare for such a moment in
order to be able to seize such an opening to sweep this warmongering system away. Then we won't have to mark anniversary after
anniversary of imperialist war after imperialist war.

The construction of the Arab Gulf by the 1ac is one that

recreates the region as a dichotomous other that is
demonized in order to be conquered
Stewart 09 (Dr Dona J. Stewart, director of the Middle East Institute and associate professor of
geography at Georgia State University 2009 The Middle East Today: Political, geographical and cultural
perspectives accessed 8/1/15 from
http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9781135980795_sample_543833.pdf LC)

Though today the term Middle East is very common, it is a

relatively new name, first used by American naval officer and
geostrategist Alfred Thayer Mahan in reference to the area around
the Gulf that made up a British zone of influence in the late
nineteenth century. At that time, parts of the region under French influence were known as the
Near East. Both these terms were designed to distinguish the region from the Far East, composed of East

the term Middle East traces its roots to Western

imperialism, it can have a derogatory connotation. However, the term is used throughout the
and Southeast Asia. Because

region; in fact, the largest Arabic daily newspaper, printed simultaneously in twelve cities, is the London-

despite the role of Western

imperialism in creating the countries of the modern Middle East (the
focus of Chapter 5), few people in the West had detailed first-hand
knowledge of the place or its peoples. Instead, the Middle East and
Asia were part of a much larger, if ill-defined, region stretching all
the way to China and Japan, known as the Orient. The term Orient derived
based Asharq Alawsat, or The Middle East. In reality, however,

from Latin, meaning land of the rising sun, hence East. (The term Occident, referring to the West, but

The Orient was avidly studied by

Western scholars, particularly during the era of Western imperial
expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Departments of
rarely used today, meant land of the setting sun.)

Oriental Studies were set up in numerous Western universities for the study of the Orients languages,
culture and history. Artists tried to capture the essence of the Orient in their paintings, compositions and
literary works. Among the best-known are the operas Aida and Madame Butterfly and the musical The
King and I. Agatha Christies Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile are examples of literary
genres that embraced the Orient. These artistic works were avidly consumed by a European and

This construction of a place

known as the Orient had enormous ramifications for Western
perceptions of the region. In his ground-breaking work Orientalism, Edward Said argued
that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the Orient was
constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture.
Furthermore, this view of the Orient helped to justify European
American public enthralled by the exoticism of the Orient.

imperialism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by casting the Oriental as
uncivilized, backward and in need of Western supervision. The inhabitants of the Orient were
placed low on the racial hierarchy in which Europeans held the
highest position and justified their imperial ambitions.

Democracy
Democracy perpetuates imperialismcreates cycles of
endless violence and oppression
Itwaru 09 (Arnold, psychotherapist, educator, and editorial consultant on
the project named Researching Caribbean Teaching and Learning at
the University of the West Indies, Jamaica Master Race, Murder and Gory
Globalization in The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism, Imperialism,
Colonialism, Racism Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 25-79)
Democracy" is the globalizational credo of the new Western
imperialism. It resounds with the incessant chant of freedom. It talks of
liberating the world. This is its totalitarian thrust. It is about global
control. This means reducing the entire world into a Western
capitalist monopoly and the destruction of other and more
humanizing forms of the organization of political and economic
livelihood. But this seems lost to those who are caught the clamor for
democracy. We have a situation where capitalist White supremacist
Western liberal democracies are invading and destroyirlg people and
countries to increase their exploitative control while the chant for
democracy goes on in other places. This is an ideologized chant. It is
where "democracy" is erroneously seen as a panacea for the resolution of
the forms and practices of oppressive rule everywhere. The spread of
"democracy" is the restructuring of target societies, the reorganization of political and economic formation in the world to
accommodate the interests of the White supremacist West , united
under capital. Democracy is used as the medium for the brutal
globalization of capitalism, and its insertion is enforced by the most
undemocratic of measures - authoritarian, command-obedience violent
totalitarian military control. The use of the concept "democracy" both
romanticizes and violates its Greek originary, demos which idealizes the
notion of people's rule - which has never happened in the history of Greek
imperial state culture. We should note that in its political inception in
Greece women were not included in the state craft of "Democracy."
Democracy was the purview of the male order of state power . It was
the phallocentric elitist politics of the state rule of people through select
male representatives who constituted the echelon of political power. Far
from being people's rule, it was rather the ruling of people by giving
them the illusion that they had a significant say in the rule of the
state over them. And its contemporary Western deployment is.
about the regulation of the lives of peoples to ensure their
exploitation. But there is a great deal of dissembling going on.
Eurocentric master race culture has attempted to sanitize itself of
the odiousness of racism and the smear of racial mastery in its
development of the discourse of "democracy" which it thinks is the

best way to organize the politics of representationality in state power

for the good of all peoples everywhere on earth. This is presented as
being sensible, practical, and "civilized," in fact as the only way to
organize political life. This is the reification of imperialism. It is where
the ordinary Western citizen resolutely believes this and sees it as
commonsense and does not understand what all the fuss is about .
We have here the leveling absorption of the imperial patriot-subject who is
now passionately committed and ready to defend and spread Western
political control in the enforcement of "democracy" every where. And if
you go along with it, you are likely to conclude that there is no racism
here and that it is simply the best culture on earth, doing the right thing.
Armored to the point of having the capacity to kill everyone in the
world several times over, the West has wrapped itself in discourses
of democratizing imperializing "peace"- while it manufactures and
exports arms and other weapons of mass destruction, much of which
it has used against many of the racialized peoples of the world . It
organizes, supports and wages war to construct the peace required
to facilitate its repressive order. It talks of freedom when it has been
the historical destroyer of the freedoms of the millions it has used,
abused, deprived of their independence, tortured, worked to death,
robbed and killed to acquire wealth. It upholds liberty and fraternity - but
only among its own kind - and even here this civic ideal is differentially
implemented. Liberty and fraternity are not meant for the inferiorized
Other. It is for the privileged in the order of White solidarity. And
this order of things is disturbed when its designated inferior tries to
change the terms and parameters of the discourse of the West's claim
superiority.

The process of US democratization focuses on top down

civil society groups and away from grassroots
organizations, furthering imperialist control
Rachner et al. 2007 (Professor, Department of Comparative Politics,
University of Bergen, Norway, Lise,
http://www.cmi.no/publications/publication/?2761=democratisations-thirdwave-and-the-challenges-of)
However, donor support during this period faced a number of criticisms. Firstly, critics argued that donors
tended to reduce the concept of civil society to a depoliticised technical tool (Jenkins, 2001; Robinson and

donors relied on a rather

limited definition of civil society, equating it with Western-style
advocacy groups or NGOs and leading them to concentrate their
assistance on a narrow set of organisations. In particular, organisations
that form an important part of civil society in most advanced democracies,
such as sports clubs, cultural associations and religious associations,
have been absent from most programmes (Carothers and Ottaway, 2000). Thirdly, in many
Friedman, 2005). Secondly, during this first phase of support

the views of NGOs that have emerged as a response to democracy promotion

programmes reflect donors views of democracy, both in their immediate goals and in the
means they use to pursue them. Fourthly, many of the NGOs favoured by democracy
assistance programmes have a small membership and therefore lack a
mandate from a wider constituency, putting both their sustainability and
representativeness in doubt. Finally, there is evidence that donor assistance can
instances,

actually militate against grassroots participation because the NGOs it helps to bring about are perceived as
depoliticised, too closely aligned with donor service delivery agendas, too dependent on external funding,
and out of touch with the grassroots (Howell and Pearce, 2001). Taken together, these factors meant that

donors often focused on particular types of social organisation

(urban-based and poorly rooted in society, top-down rather than grassroots,
trustee rather than representative organisations and heavily
reliant on external funding for their continued existence) and, as
a result, bypassed other significant agents of social and political
change.

Democratization creates a violent, disingenuous imperial

relation to the countries it claims to help
Slater 6(David, Dept of Geography Loughborough University, 2006
Imperial powers and democratic imaginations, Third World Quarterly Vol.
27, No. 8)
But how do these varied points relate to the question of imperial democracy? In the context of global

the attempt to export and promote one vision of democracy as a unifying

project across frontiers clashes with the logic of differences , but in a way
that is deeply rooted in nationalist discourses. In the formulations developed by
politics

Laclau, Lefort and Mouffe there is an assumption that one is dealing with a territorially intact polity, that
the conceptual terrain can be developed in accordance with a guiding assumption of territorial sovereignty.
However, in the context of imperial powers one needs to remember that the autonomy of other democratic
experiments has been terminated by interventions organised by Washington (eg Guatemala in 1954, Chile

the internal tension

between the logic of unity and the logic of difference has been
overshadowed by an imperial logic of incursion, followed by the
imposition of a different set of political rules. In the example of the USA it can be suggested
in 1973, Nicaragua during the 1980ssee Slater, 2002). In this sense

that there is a logic of democracy for export and a logic of terminating intervention for other democratic
processes that have offered a different political pathway. Furthermore, interventions which have led to the
overthrow of dictatorial regimes, as in Iraq in 2003, ought not to lead us into forgetting the realities of
Western support for military dictatorships in the global South throughout the 20th century.12 Nor, as
Callinicos (2003: 24) reminds us, should we turn a blind eye to the fact that there are contemporary
examples of support for non-democratic regimes, as shown in the case of the Bush administrations
backing for the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, despite its numerous violations of human rights, and for
Musharrafs regime in Pakistan, which receives US support yet is scarcely to be considered a fully fledged

The imperative to democratise, just as the injunction to globalise,

creates, as Dallmayr (2005) suggests, an asymmetry between those
announcing the imperative and those subjected to it, between those
who democratise and those who are democratised. Such an asymmetry
has a long history. Jeffersonian notions of both an empire of liberty and an
empire for liberty represented an initial framing of the conflicting juxtaposition
democracy.

of emerging

American imperial powerexpressed for instance in the phrase that the USA has a

hemisphere to itselfwith

a benevolent belief in Americas mission to

spread democracy and liberty to the rest of the world. This juxtaposition, which is also closely
tied to the founding importance of the self-determination of peoples, is characterised by an
inherent tension between strong anti-colonial sentiment and the
projection of power over peoples of the Third World. Discourses of
democracy are deployed in ways that are intended to transcend such
dissonances and to justify the imperial relation, even though such a relation is
frequently denied (for a critical review, see Cox, 2005). What is also significant in this context is the idea
that democracy US-style is being called for, being invited by peoples yearning for freedom, so that more

imperial power is being invited to spread its wings (see Maier, 2005).
Rather than democracy being imposed, it is suggested that the USA is
responding to calls from other societies to be democratised, so that through
a kind of cellular multiplication a US model can be gradually introduced; the
owners will be the peoples of other cultures who will find ways of adapting the US
template to their own circumstances. As it is expressed in the National
Security Strategy for 2006, it is the policy of the United States to seek and
support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture (White
House, 2006: 1). What is on offer here is a kind of viral democracy, whereby the
politics of guidance is merged into a politics of benign adaptation.13 Nevertheless,
at the same time, a specific form of democratic rule is being projected and
alternative models that include a critique of US power and attempts to introduce
connections with popular sovereignty and new forms of socialism are
singled out for opprobrium. This is reflected in the commentary on Hugo Chavezin
Venezuela, a demagogue awash in oil money is undermining democracy and seeking
to destabilize the region (White House, 2006: 15). This is despite the fact that the
Venezuelan leader has won more elections in the past seven years than any other Latin
generally

American leader.

Hegemony
U.S. military interventions in foreign countries are
steeped in imperialist ulterior motivesensures backlash
and violence
Grossman 02 (Dr. Zoltan, faculty member in Geography and Native American &
World Indigenous Peoples Studies at The Evergreen State College, February 05,
2002 New US Military Bases: Side Effects Or Causes Of
War? http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/grossmanbases.html)
Whether we look at the U.S. wars of the past decade in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the
Balkans, or Afghanistan, or at the possible new wars in Yemen, the Philippines,
or Colombia/Venezuela, or even at Bushs new "axis of evil" of Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea, the same common themes arise. The U.S. military
interventions cannot all be tied to the insatiable U.S. thirst for oil (or rather
for oil profits), even though many of the recent wars do have their roots in oil
politics. They can nearly all be tied to the U.S. desire to build or rebuild
military bases. The new U.S. military bases, and increasing control over oil
supplies, can in turn be tied to the historical shift taking place since the
1980s: the rise of European and East Asian blocs that have the potential to
replace the United States and Soviet Union as the worlds economic
superpowers.
Much as the Roman Empire tried to use its military power to buttress its weakening
economic and political hold over its colonies, the United States is aggressively
inserting itself into new regions of the world to prevent its competitors
from doing the same. The goal is not to end "terror" or encourage
"democracy," and Bush will not accomplish either of these claimed goals. The
short-term goal is to station U.S. military forces in regions where local
nationalists had evicted them. The long-term goal is to increase U.S.
corporate control over the oil needed by Europe and East Asia, whether the
oil is in around the Caspian or the Caribbean seas. The ultimate goal is to
establish new American spheres of influence, and eliminate any obstacles-religious militants, secular nationalists, enemy governments, or even
allies--who stand in the way.
U.S. citizens may welcome the interventions to defend the "homeland" from
attack, or even to build new bases or oil pipelines to preserve U.S.
economic power. But as the dangers of this strategy become more
apparent, Americans may begin to realize that they are being led down a
risky path that will turn even more of the world against them, and lead
inevitably to future September 11s.

http://www.colorado.edu/IBS/PEC/gadconf/papers/flint.html

Promotion of US hegemony leads to domination

Flint 02 Colin, Graduate Student, Department of Geography, Penn State U,
Extra-territoriality, reterritorialization and hegemonic power: The hegemonic
dilemma and its implications for globalization.
http://www.colorado.edu/IBS/PEC/gadconf/papers/flint.html

In this word-systems analysis interpretation of the current economic

processes, the one I adopt in this paper, the role of hegemonic powers is vital
in explaining what is diffused, and why, from where, and when. In other
words, it offers a geohistorical contextualization of contemporary
globalization (Taylor, 1999). The world-systems understanding of hegemony
has become more complete over time. It began with an initial concentration
upon economic prowess (Wallerstein, 1984), through a connection with the
establishment of geopolitical world-orders (Taylor, 1996; Taylor and Flint,
2000), to the important inclusion of the role of social and cultural
practices defined and disseminated by the hegemonic power (Taylor,
1999). Hegemony is founded upon the clustering of dominant
production processes and technological innovation within the
borders of one state (with intra-state uneven development) that
allow for dominance in commerce that, ultimately provides for global
financial domination. Economic hegemony allows for, and is
facilitated by, political domination of the world that is reflected in the
establishment of periods of geopolitical stability, otherwise known as
hegemonic geopolitical world orders. But the power and dominance of the
hegemonic power is not just a product of economic strength or political
might. The power base is based upon a subtler tactic the definition
of a modern way of life that is, on the whole, desired and emulated
by social groups within the hegemonic power and across the globe.

Pleas by the U.S. military to help other countries is a

mask to expand American spheres of influence which
makes reductions of military presence a sham
Grossman 02 (Dr. Zoltan, faculty member in Geography and Native
American & World Indigenous Peoples Studies at The Evergreen State
College, February 05, 2002, New US Military Bases: Side Effects Or Causes
Of War? http://www.historyisaweapon.com/ defcon1/grossmanbases.html
Since the end of the Cold War a decade ago, the U.S. has gone to war in Iraq,
Somalia, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The interventions have been
promoted as "humanitarian" deployments to stop aggression, to topple
dictatorships, or to halt terrorism. After each U.S. intervention, the
attention of supporters and critics alike has turned to speculate on which
countries would be next. But largely ignored has been what the U.S.
interventions left behind.
As the Cold War ended, the U.S. was confronted with competition from two emerging
economic blocs in Europe and East Asia. Though it was considered the worlds last
military superpower, the United States was facing a decline of its economic strength
relative to the European Union, and the East Asian economic bloc of Japan, China and
the Asian "Four Tigers." The U.S. faced the prospect of being economically left out in
much of the Eurasian land mass. The major U.S. interventions since 1990
should be viewed not only reactions to "ethnic cleansing" or Islamist
militancy, but to this new geopolitical picture. Since 1990, each large-scale
U.S. intervention has left behind a string of new U.S. military bases in a

region where the U.S. had never before had a foothold. The U.S. military is
inserting itself into strategic areas of the world, and anchoring U.S.
geopolitical influence in these areas, at a very critical time in history . With
the rise of the "euro bloc" and "yen bloc," U.S. economic power is perhaps on
the wane. But in military affairs, the U.S. is still the unquestioned
superpower. It has been projecting that military dominance into new
strategic regions as a future counterweight to its economic competitors, to
create a military-backed "dollar bloc" as a wedge geographically situated between its
major competitors. As each intervention was being planned, planners focused
on building new U.S. military installations, or securing basing rights at
foreign facilities, in order to support the coming war. But after the war
ended, the U.S. forces did not withdraw, but stayed behind, often creating
suspicion and resentment among local populations, much as the Soviet forces
faced after liberating Eastern Europe in World War II. The new U.S. military bases
were not merely built to aid the interventions, but the interventions also
conveniently afforded an opportunity to station the bases. Indeed, the
establishment of new bases may in the long run be more critical to U.S. war
planners than the wars themselves, as well as to enemies of the U.S. The
massacre of September 11 was not directly tied to the Gulf War; Osama bin
Laden had backed the Saudi fundamentalist dictatorship against the Iraqi secular
dictatorship in the war. The attacks mainly had their roots in the U.S. decision to
leave behind bases in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The permanent
stationing of new U.S. forces in and around the Balkans and Afghanistan
could easily generate a similar terrorist "blowback" years from now. This is
not to say that all U.S. wars of the past decade have been the result of some
coordinated conspiracy to make Americans the overlords of the belt between Bosnia
and Pakistan.But it is to recast the interventions as opportunistic responses to events, which
have enabled Washington to gain a foothold in the "middle ground" between Europe to the
west, Russia to the north, and China to the east, and turn this region increasingly into an
American "sphere of influence." The series of interventions have also virtually secured U.S.
corporate control over the oil supplies for both Europe and East Asia. It's not a conspiracy; it's
just business as usual.

Terrorism
The War on Terror is a guise for imperial eurosupremacismensures continual violence
Itwaru 09 (Arnold, psychotherapist, educator, and editorial consultant on
the project named Researching Caribbean Teaching and Learning at
the University of the West Indies, Jamaica Master Race, Murder and Gory
Globalization in The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism, Imperialism,
Colonialism, Racism, Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 25-79)
The murderous mode of reasoning is situated in and informs the
glorification of mass murder institutionalized in the West as "war." It has
been instrumental in history of the White supremacist European
colonizational practice of murdering people whose land they were
occupying and exploiting wherever they imposed themselves in the
world. The gruesome pyres of hundreds of millions of racialized bodies upon which
the empyres of Western supremacy proudly and imperiously stand, grimly attest to
this. The current "War on Terrorism" which has so far killed and

maimed more than a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan alone in this
century of Western aggression, is the blatant demonstration of the
murderous means through which the White supremacist Americanled West is expanding its conquest project of global domination.
This is the fundamental objective of globalization, despite the
nice ties in which it continues to be dressed and promoted. These
self-professed Christian states have joined forces in what amounts to their unstated but
nevertheless holy war against an imputed terrorism which so far has been aimed at Islamic
peoples and cultures for the strategic implementation of additional Western control and economic gain.

New technologies and techniques of terror, torture and killing have been
implemented in the murderous mode of scientific reasoning and used to
continue the same heinous historical killing of racialized peoples. This has
been a central feature in the history of Western imperial culture. It has
procured the blood money upon which much of its pompous wealth is
based, and has informed much of the social and political psyche in these
racist orders. There is strong support for these atrocities from the
majority of patriotic Western citizens who ironically believe they are

bright, informed, free and peace-loving good people. These constitute

the moral cultural force which legitimates the force of their
armies of death in the military industrial complex of ever
expanding Western capitalist exploitation. Proud of their
toughness which they uphold as a cruel virtue, they are
unmoved by the slaughter of defenseless men, women, children,
the elderly and the ill in the current invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan,
for example, or anywhere else for that matter in the racialized world
outside of the White supremacist West. In the murderous mode of
reasoning these racialized Others are not considered human. They are
reduced into the dangerous threatening Enemy-Other who must be killed.
The murder of the caricatured terrorist is believed to ensure the safety of
all Western citizens. Hence it has become a matter of patriotic duty for

such citizens to believe they are defending their country when they
support the preemptive attacks of the invading American led White West
who have been directing their assaults against the peoples and cultures
thousands of miles and continents away from the domesticities of the
imperial Western fortress homeland. The culture informed by this mode of
reasoning is where the murderous patriot-subject is produced and highly
exalted. In the supra-militarized, settler-occupier, armed, aggressive and
dangerous, United States of America and its fawning settler-occupier northern
neighbor and reliable ally, the Dominion of Canada, waning troops are tearfully loved
and admired by sections of the patriotic populace as they are deployed to attack
the racialized evil Enemy-Other. This emotional display is in effect the militarization
of affection and patriotism in the culture of murderous aggression. These troops are
the state trained military killers who are patriotically loved as "our troops" as they
go out in "harm's way" - to do what they are trained to do - to kill, to maim, to
destroy people. These are not the "nice guys" and "nice gals" we are repeatedly told
they are. "Nice guys" and "nice gals" do not undergo military training to go out and
kill people. And we should seriously rethink the repeated claims being made that
when these "nice guys" and "nice gals" slaughter innocent and helpless people in
distant regions across the world that they are ensuring safety "at home," given that
there is no verifiably credible danger "at home" in the first place. The murderous
mode of reasoning celebrates military killers and deifies them as heroes. This
mode of reasoning has historically framed the imposition of the racial
mastery of euro-supremacism in its colonial conquests which for hundreds
of years have debased, enslaved, exploited and murdered, willfully and
knowingly killed large numbers of people, to assert its domineering
control.

Economic Growth
Globalization is a form of imperialism
Vilas 02 (Carlos, Professor of Sociology and Political science, UNAM,
Globalization as Imperialism, Latin American Perspectives, November,
http://hmb.utoronto.ca/Old%20Site /HMB303H/weekly_supp/week-0809/Vilas_GlobalizationImperialism.pdf, 70-71)
Considered from a historical perspective,

economic imperialism.

globalization is the present stage of

In accordance with the definition formulated by Hilferding and Lenin at

the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialism is a set of basic characteristics: th e

development of monopoly capital, the emergence of finance capital

through the fusion of industrial capital and the banks, the export of
investments from the center to the periphery, and inter-imperialist
competition for the control of foreign markets. In the present circumstances,
these features are exacerbated. Recent technological innovations with regard to
the flow of information and immense international liquidity have
favored the increased growth of finance capital and huge
transnational monopoly corporations. The magnitude and rate of international
investment flows have also multiplied, and the implosion of the Soviet bloc has opened new spaces for
investment in underdeveloped areas. Capitalist control of the world is greater today than it has ever

been, leading to the intensification of the stratification of

international power in which the United States appears to have
unquestionable hegemony.

Economic principles and diplomacy build upon the image

of American soft power. This is used to expand US
imperial goals
Kennedy and Lucas 05 (Liam, Prof at Univ of Birmingham, and Scott,
Prof at Univ of Birmingham, American Quarterly, Enduring Freedom: Public
Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy, 57(2)) MAT
Fulbright educational and cultural exchanges, and pointed toward the
development of new activities. (We use the term state-private
network to refer to the extensive, unprecedented collaboration
between official U.S. agencies and private groups and
individuals in the development and implementation of political,
economic, and cultural programs in support of U.S. foreign policy
from the early cold war period to today.)13 Legislative backing was
obtained in 1948 with the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act,
popularly known as the Smith-Mundt Act, for the preparation, and
dissemination abroad, of information about the U.S., its people, and its
policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, and other
information media, and through information centers and instructors abroad . .
. to provide a better understanding of the U.S. in other countries and to
increase mutual understanding.14 With these mandates, public diplomacy

could carry forth the rhetorical command of the Truman Doctrine to

support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by
armed minorities or by outside pressures. In an expansion
supporting, but also constructed as distinct from, the extension of
U.S. political and economic influence, U.S. projects by early 1951
covered ninety-three countries, broadcasting in forty-five languages
and disseminating millions of booklets, leaflets, magazines, and
posters. Touring exhibitions, already established by the late 1940s, received
more coherent if often contested support and were common throughout the
1950s.15 In 1953 the organization of public diplomacy moved beyond
the State Department with the formation of the autonomous United
States Information Agency (USIA) to tell Americas story to the
world.16 The modern history of U.S. public diplomacy is often
focused on the USIA, telling the story of its contributions to the
winning of the cold war and of its decline as the agency was
downsized in the 1990s. This story tends to separate public
diplomacy from the system of political warfare that emerged in the
late 1940s, limiting understanding of the intersections between
overt and covert practices. The overt measures of sponsored media
production and cultural exhibitions, though central to the formation
of cold war public diplomacy, need, however, to be understood as
part of a broader restructuring of the national security state and of a
strategic framework designed to promote an America that would
win a total campaign for hearts and minds. The authority granted to
the State Department by NSC 4, forged in the immediacy of a crisis in which
the NSC feared communists might legitimately take power in France and Italy
through elections, was complementary and potentially secondary to another
mandate, NSC 4-A, which directed the newly formed Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) to initiate and conduct, within the limit of available funds,
covert psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet and Sovietinspired activities.17 With the threat of French and Italian communism
always at the forefront in the wider American objective of securing Western
Europe through the Marshall Plan, NSC 4-A, like its more mundane
counterpart, was the cornerstone of a regional and indeed global strategy. A
special clause in the Marshall Plan, when it was passed in April 1948, set
aside 5 percent of counterpart funds for undefined operations under NSC 4A. This translated into hundreds of millions of dollars for propaganda and
covert action.18 Thus public diplomacy, beyond providing the
informational overlay for containment, was already part of a
broader operational conception for a more ambitious objective. In
May 1948, George Kennan, the head of the State Departments Policy
Planning Staff, drafted a proposal for The Inauguration of Organized Political
Warfare against the Soviet Union. The national security state would
support liberation committees and underground activities behind
the Iron Curtain as well as indigenous anti-Communist elements in
threatened countries of the Free World.19 Victory over the Soviets,
achieved with the liberation of captive peoples, which went

beyond containment, would come not only through the reality of

American economic and diplomatic superiority but also through the
projection of that superiority as inherent to the American system
and way of life. The sanction of NSC 4-A and the testing grounds of France
and Italy were only the first stages of this campaign. The NSC endorsed
Kennans plan in November 1948, and within months the Policy Planning
Staff, CIA, and Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a new agency created to
carry out covert operations, converted the proposal for a public American
organization which will sponsor selected political refugee committees into
the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE). The NCFEs guidelines came
from the State Department and 75 percent of its funding from the CIA; its
chief executive officers were psychological warfare veterans from the army
and the CIAs forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Its bestknown operation, Radio Free Europe, was on air in 1951, but even before that,
the NCFE was already promoting the idea of liberation from communism
through pamphlets, magazines, books, and a Free European University in
Strasbourg, France.20

State
State action requires a build up of empire through the
militarization of daily life. This propels racist, sexist, and
directly violent policies on the population.
Mohanty 06 (Chandra Talpade, Department of Womens Studies, Syracuse
University, Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 720, February 2006,
US Empire and the Project of Womens Studies: Stories of citizenship,
complicity and dissent,
http://www.uccs.edu/~pkeilbac/courses/intlpol/readings/US%20Empire.pdf)
In an earlier essay charting the colonial legacies and imperial practices of the
late twentieth century US State, Jacqui Alexander and I (1997) argued that
the US State facilitates the transnational movement of capital within
its own borders as well as internationally. We referred to the US
State as an advanced capitalist state with an explicit imperial
project, engaged in practices of re-colonization, prompting the
reconfiguration of economic, political, and militarized relationships
globally. We argued that postcolonial and advanced capitalist states
had specific features in common. They own the means of organized
violence, which is often deployed in the service of national security.
Thus, for instance, the USA Patriot Act is mirrored by similar post-9/11 laws in
Japan and India. Second, the militarization of postcolonial and
advanced capitalist states essentially means the re-masculinization
of the state apparatus, and of daily life. Third, nation-states invent and
solidify practices of racialization and sexualization of their peoples,
disciplining and mobilizing the bodies of women, especially poor and third
world women, as a way of consolidating patriarchal and colonizing processes.
Thus the transformation of private to public patriarchies in multinational
factories, and the rise of the international maid trade, the sex tourism
industry, global militarized prostitution, and so on. Finally, nation-states
deploy heterosexual citizenship through legal and other means.
Witness the US dont ask, dont tell/gays in the military debate in the Clinton
years, and decade-long national struggles over the Defense of Marriage Act
of 1993, as well as similar debates about sexuality and criminalization in the
Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago.3 The deployment of race, gender,
sexuality, and class in the internal and external disciplining of
particular groups evident in the Bush/Cheney war state necessitates
looking at these analytic and experiential categories simultaneously,
and, since 9/11, the acceleration of the project of US empire necessitates
developing a feminist antiimperialist frame. US feminists have always
engaged the US nation-state, but it was always the democratic nation-state
that merited such attentionnot the imperialist US State. Feminist
engagement in the latter context requires making the project of empire
visible in the gendered and sexualized state practices of the US, looking
simultaneously at the restructuring of US foreign and domestic policy. It also

requires an explicit analysis of the complicities and potentially imperialist

complicities of US feminism. And it requires examining feminisms own
alternative citizenship projects in relation to racialized stories of the nation, of
home and belonging, insiders and outsiders. Both US foreign policy and
domestic policy at this time are corporate and military driven. Both
have led to the militarization of daily life around the world and in the
USspecifically for immigrants, refugees, and people of colorand
militarization inevitably means mobilizing practices of
masculinization and heterosexualization.4 Both can be understood
through a critique of the racialized and gendered logic of a
civilizational narrative mobilized to create and recreate insiders and
outsiders in the project of empire building. Thus, for instance, as
Miriam Cooke (2002) argues, saving brown women in Afghanistan
justifies US imperial aggression (the rescue mission of civilizing powers),
just as the increased militarization of domestic law enforcement, the
border patrol, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
(now renamed the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration) can be justified
in the name of a War on Drugs, a War on Poverty, and now a War on
Terrorism.

American Exceptionalism is manifested through the

constant use of law to fix problems and be the heroic
savior of the world, only leading to worse violence and
atrocities
Spanos 11
(William, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at
Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York; he is a founder and editor of
the critical journal boundary 2, The Exceptionalist State and the State of
Exception Herman Melvilles Billy Budd, Sailor,p.142-144)
In the revolutionary process of the eight years of the Bush
administrations tenure in office, the horrendously negative
consequences, both abroad and at home, of this hubristic
American global initiative became increasingly manifest. Abroad,
to invoke only the most obvious of these, the United Statess arrogant
unilateral will to impose American-style democracies (regime
change) on Afghanistan and Iraq has culminated in its
suspension of international law and the precipitation of
seemingly unending civil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that
have borne witness not only to the killing and maiming of
untold numbers of innocent civilians but also, as in the case of
the Vietnam War, to the uprooting of untold numbers of
noncombatants and their transformation into populations of

homeless refugees. Further, instead of diminishing the threat of

terrorism, this hubristic messianic American initiative to
recreate the world in its image has exacerbated its potential,
not least, by way of its violation of international law (the abrogation
of habeas corpus, torture, and the obscenely inhumane practice euphemistically called extraordinary

the war on terror launched by the Bush

administration in the name of homeland security has borne
witness to the production of a pervasive climate of fear; the
increasing conduct of government by secrecy and the
falsification of historical reality; the invasion of privacy by the
executive branch; racial profiling; the branding of the
undocumented as potential terrorists; the precipitation of the
informer mentality; and, not least, the manipulation of the
presidency by Claggart-like functionaries whose purposes are other than
enhancing the public good. That all these lawless foreign and
domestic initiatives of the executive branch of the United
Statesand their imperial and anti-democratic consequences
have not been a matter of accident, but of a systematic effort
by the presidency and the Justice Department has been made
frighteningly manifest by the recent publication by the Barack
Obama administration of the secret (illegal) plans drawn up
and forcibly legalized by the Presidents Office of Legal
Council (John C. Yoo, Jay Bybee, Robert J. Delahunty et al.), and, in response to the urgings of Carl
rendition by its perpetrators). At home,

Rove, principal advisor to the president; Dick Cheney, vice-president of the United States; and Donald
Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, among others, adopted by the Bush administration in the aftermath of

Based on the dubious assumption of the reality of a state

of national emergency, it was a legal initiative, that gave
the president the absolute authority (plenary executive powers) to
deploy the military within the United States for the purpose of
policing its citizenry (in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Posse Comitatus Act of
1878); to censor the media (i.e., annul the First Amendment); to represent any
American citizen as an enemy combatant and to hold him or
her in custody indefinitely and without recourse to the law;
and to flout any international treaty, which is to say, to arrest,
torture (use enhanced methods of interrogating detainees), and to render citizens
of other countries to third-party jurisdictions. In declaring a
war on terror in the wake of 9/11, that is to say, the Bush
presidency tacitly abrogated democratic law (the Constitution)
in favor of establishing martial lawthe sovereign lawless law
of the state of exceptionall, ostensibly, in the name of protecting the well-being of the
abstractionor, to appropriate Giorgio Agambens more precise terms, the secularized
sacredthe United States, a motive variously called self-defense, national security,
domestic security, and homeland security. And insofar as the force that
9/11.

threatened the United States was an amorphous and nameless

enemyan enemy without an identifiable uniform and not
associated with a stateit could be said that the Bush
administrations unilateral declaration of war on terror in
the aftermath of 9/11 was also a tacit announcement that
rendered the state of exception permanent. It has been
primarily this momentous domestic/global initiative on the
part of the U.S. executive branchepitomized by the obscenely
banal phenomenon now called alternatively Abu Ghraib or
Guantnamothat has reawakened the dormant memory of
the Nazi concentration camps and the all too belated but
welcomed interest of contemporary intellectuals in the
question of the state of exception as it pertains to modern
democracies. I am referring, above all, to the important work inaugurated by Giorgio Agamben in
Homo Sacer by way of his retrieval of Michel Foucaults, Hannah Arendts, Walter Benjamins, Theodor
Adornos and, from a different perspective, the German National Socialist political theorist Carl Schmitts
writing on this most urgent question of our precarious contemporary occasion, specifically, to his claim

Western democracies, epitomized by the United States, are

grounded in an ontology in which the state of exceptionand
the campis latent. It is not my purpose in this brief concluding chapter on Melvilles
that

Billy Budd to undertake a fullscale rehearsal of Agambens (and others) richly resonant and highly
complex philological and historical analysis of the state of exception or to spell out his chilling
representation of the polyvalent cultural and sociopolitical effects of its normalization in modernity. It will

according to Agamben, the biopolitical

(onto)logic informing the democratic nation-states achieves
its fulfillmentits limit situationin the permanent
universalization of the concentration camp and its
thanatopolitics (killing humans with immunity), however extreme such a
characterization of the modern polity may seem: Along with
the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement
and gradual expansion beyond the limits of the decision on
bare life, in the state of exception, in which sovereignty
consisted. If there is a line in every modern state marking the
point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on
death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line
no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two
clearly distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually
moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in
which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate
symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest. .
. . From this perspective, the [concentration] campas the pure,
absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is
founded solely on the state of exception)will appear as the
hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity.
suffice, for my purpose, to say that,

The power of the state of exception resides in the inability

to define where it begins or ends- voluntary movements
and legal statutes both become coopted into its
proliferation
Agamben 05 (Giorgio, Extremely influential critical philosopher, teaches
at European Graduate Schools, has multiple publications, The State of
Exception, pgs. 2-3)
One of the elements that make the state of exception so difficult to
define is certainly its close relationship to civil war, insurrection, and
resistance. Because civil war is the opposite of normal conditions, it lies in a zone of
undecidability with respect to the state of exception , which is state powers
immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts. Thus, over the course of the
twentieth century, we have been able to witness a paradoxical
phenomenon that has been effectively defined as a legal civil war
(Schnur 1983). Let us take the case of the Nazi State. No sooner did Hitler take power
(or, as we should perhaps more accurately say, no sooner was power given to him) than, on February
28, he pro- claimed the Decree for the Protection of the People and
the State, which suspended the articles of the Weimar Constitution
concerning personal liberties. The decree was never repealed, so that
from a juridical stand- point the entire Third Reich can be considered a state of
exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism
can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of
exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination
not only of political adver- saries but of entire categories of citizens
who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since
then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though
perhaps not declared in the technical sense ) has become one of the essential
practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic
ones. Faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been
called a global civil war, the state of exception tends increasingly
to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary
politics. This transformation of a provisional and exceptional
measure into a technique of government threatens radically to alter
in fact, has al- ready palpably alteredthe structure and meaning of the
traditional distinction between constitutional forms . Indeed, from this
perspective, the state of exception appears as a threshold of
indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism.

Impacts

Racism
Imperialism is grounded in racism and strips countries of
their culture
Thiongo 86.[Ngugi wa, Distinguished Professor of. Comparative
Literature and English University of California, Irvine Decolonising the Mind:
The Politics of Language in African Literature.London:Heinemann Kenya, New
Hampshire http://www.swaraj.org/ngugi.htm]
For these patriotic defenders of the fighting cultures of African people,
imperialism is not a slogan. It is real; it is palpable in content and form and in
its methods and effects. Imperialism is the rule of consolidated finance
capital and since 1884 this monopolistic parasitic capital has
affected and continues to affect the lives even of the peasants in the
remotest corners of our countries. If you are in doubt, just count
how many African countries have now been mortgaged to IMF the
new International Ministry of Finance as Julius Nyerere once called it. Who
pays for the mortgage? Every single producer of real wealth (use-value) in
the country so mortgaged, which means every single worker and peasant.
Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and
psychological consequences for the people of the world today. It could
even lead to holocaust. The freedom for western finance capital and for
the vast transnational monopolies under its umbrella to continue
stealing from the countries and people of Latin America, Africa, Asia
and Polynesia is today protected by conventional and nuclear
weapons. Imperialism, led by the USA, presents the struggling
peoples of the earth and all those calling for peace, democracy .and
socialism with the ultimatum: accept theft or death. The oppressed
and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from
theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed
by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb.
The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a peoples belief in
their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their
heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately
in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of
non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves
from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which
is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples
languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which
is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their
own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral
rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as
remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair,
despondency and a collective death-wish. Amidst this wasteland
which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure and
demands that the dependant sing hymns of praise with the constant refrain:

Theft is holy. Indeed, this refrain sums up the new creed of the neo-colonial
bourgeoisie in many independent African states. The classes fighting
against imperialism even in its neo-colonial stage and form, have to
confront this threat with the higher and more creative culture of
resolute struggle. These classes have to wield even more firmly the
weapons of the struggle contained in their cultures. They have to
speak the united language of struggle contained in each of their
languages. They must discover their various tongues to sing the song: A
people united can never be defeated.

Colonialism dehumanizes individuals of all races

Hardt and Negri 2k [Michael and Antonio, Political Philosopher and
Literary Theorist at Duke University, Political Philosopher, Empire, page
129]
The work of numerous authors, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and

Franz Fanon, who have

recognized that colonial representations and colonial sovereignty are dialectical in form has proven useful
in several respects. First of all, the dialectical construction demonstrates that there is nothing essential

The White and the Black, the European and

the Oriental, the colonizer and the colonized are all
representations that function only in relation to each other and
(despite appearances) have no real necessary basis in nature,
biology, or rationality. Colonialism is an abstract machine that
produces alterity and identity. And yet in the colonial situation
these differences and identities are made to function as if they
were absolute, essential, and natural. The first result of the
dialectical reading is thus the denaturalization of racial and
cultural difference. This does not mean that once recognized as artificial constructions, colonial
about the identities in struggle.

identities evaporate into thin air; they are real illusions and continue to function as if they were essential.
This recognition is not a politics in itself, but merely the sign that an anti colonial politics is possible. In the

the dialectical interpretation makes clear that

colonialism and colonialist representations are grounded in a
violent struggle that must be continually renewed. The European Self
second place,

needs violence and needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself continually.
The generalized state of war that continuously subtends colonial representations is not accidental or even
unwantedviolence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself. Third, posing colonialism as a
negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation. For a
thinker like Fanon, the reference to Hegel suggests that the Master can only achieve a hollow form of
recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward toward
full consciousness. The dialectic ought to imply movement, but this dialectic of European sovereign
identity has fallen back into stasis. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that
through negativity will move history forward.

Ethics
Imperialism destroys ethics by valuing security risks over
collateral damage
McNally 06 (David, Professor of political science at York University ,The
new imperialists Ideologies of Empire Ch 5 Pg 92) JL
Yet, even on Ignatieff s narrow definition, in which human rights are about
stopping unmerited cruelty and suffering, the crucial question is how we are
to do so. What if some means to this ostensible end say, a military invasion
can reasonably be expected to produce tens of thousands of civilian
casualties and an almost certain breakdown in social order? Ignatieff s
doctrine of human rights provides absolutely no ethico-philosophical criteria
in that regard. Instead, he offers a pragmatic judgement and a highly
dubious one that only U.S. military power can be expected to
advance human rights in the zones where barbarians rule. But
note: this is an utterly ad hoc addition to his theory. In no respect can it be
said to flow from any of his reflections on human rights per se. Moreover,
others proceeding from the same principle of limiting cruelty and
suffering have arrived at entirely opposite conclusions with respect
to imperial war. Ignatieff s myriad proclamations for human rights
thus lack any demonstrable tie to his support of empire and imperial
war. This is convenient, of course, since the chasm between moralizing
rhetoric and imperial advocacy allows Ignatieff to pump out empty
platitudes as if these contained real ethical guidance. Concrete
moral choices, involving historical study and calibrations of real
human risk, never enter the equation. So, Ignatieff can drone on
about the world being a better place without Saddam, never so much
as acknowledging the cost of this result: some 25,000 Iraqis killed as a
result of armed conflict since the start of the U.S. invasion, and probably
more than 100,000 dead as a result of all the consequences of the U.S.
war.24 Nowhere does he offer any kind of calculus for determining if
these tens of thousands of deaths are ethically justified. Instead,
banalities about being rid of Saddam are offered up without even
countenancing the scale of human suffering that Ignatieff s preferred course
of action war and occupation has entailed. But then, Ignatieff shows little
regard for ordinary people in the zones of military conflict. His concern is for
the security of the West and of the U.S.A. in particular. Ruminating about
Americas new vulnerability in the world, for instance, he writes, When
American naval planners looked south from the Suez Canal, they had only
bad options. All the potential refuelling stops Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti,
Eritrea and Yemen are dangerous places for American warships. As the
attack on the U.S.S. Cole made clear, none of the governments in these
strategically vital refuelling stops can actually guarantee the safety of their
imperial visitors.25

Environment
U.S. Imperialism has environmental and lethal
consequences
LLCO 11 [Leading Light Company, Imperialism kills and keeps on killing in
Vietnam, Iraq, etc LLCO Publisher, July 6th, 2013 http://llco.org/imperialismkills-and-keeps-on-killing-in-vietnam-iraq-etc/]

According to a recent, 2009 study by the Vietnam Veterans of

America Foundation and Vietnams Ministry of Defense, land
mines and unexploded ordnance dot the landscape of Vietnam
even though the war ended nearly 35 years ago. More than
one third of the land in six central Vietnamese provinces
continues to be a serious hazard. According to Vietnams Ministry
of Defense, 6.6 million hectares (6.3 million acres) are still
contaminated. Land mines have resulted in 42,000 deaths since
the wars end in 1975. Quang Tri and Quang Binh are two
provinces that have suffered many deaths. 7,000 deaths in the
former, 6,000 in the latter. Death resulting from such
explosions are part of the ongoing legacy of imperialism in
Vietnam. In addition, the Vietnamese people still suffer from
the consequences of the massive amounts of chemical agents
dumped into their environment by the US. Millions of gallons of
Agent Orange were sprayed across the Vietnamese
countryside. Agent Orange contained a strain of dioxin known as
TCCD which is one of the strongest poisons known to humanity.
In 2003, the soil was sampled in Vietnam and found to contain 180
million times the safe dioxin levels as prescribed by the US
Environmental Protection Agency. There are roughly 150,000
children whose birth defects can be traced to their parents
contamination to Agent Orange. According to the Vietnam Victims
of Agent Orange Association, three million Vietnamese were
exposed to the chemical during the war. As a result, serious
health problems affect one million of the victims. The US pays up
to 1,500 a month for Americans who have problems resulting from
dioxin exposure during the war. The US refuses to pay anything to
the vast numbers of the Vietnamese victims the underlying
assumption by the US is that a Vietnamese life is worth less
than that of an American. According to the former president of
the Vietnamese Red Cross, US tactics were a massive
violation of human rights of the civilian population, and a
weapon of mass destruction. Contaminating the environment
of a whole country with explosives and poisons such that,

decades later, people are still suffering in the thousands as a

result is tantamount to genocide. Such actions end up
affecting the entire population, including future generations.
Even though imperialism was defeated for a time in, the US
continues to kill, cripple, and maim. Imperialism kills and
keeps on killing.

Environmental consequences lead to extinction

Hoah 06 [Hannah, Published Author, Global Warming Already Causes
Extinction, National Geographics News, July 5th, 2013
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061128-globalwarming.html]
Parmesan and most other scientists hadn't expected to see species
extinctions from global warming until 2020. But populations of frogs,
butterflies, ocean corals, and polar birds have already gone extinct
because of climate change, Parmesan said. Scientists were right
about which species would suffer firstplants and animals that live
only in narrow temperature ranges and those living in cold climates
such as Earth's Poles or mountaintops. "The species dependent on
sea icepolar bear, ring seal, emperor penguin, Adlie penguinand
the cloud forest frogs are showing massive extinctions," Parmesan
said. Her review compiles 866 scientific studies on the effects of climate
change on terrestrial, marine, and freshwater species. The study appears in
the December issue of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and
Systematics. Global Phenomenon Bill Fraser is a wildlife ecologist with the
Polar Oceans Research Group in Sheridan, Montana. "There is no longer a
question of whether one species or ecosystem is experiencing climate
change. [Parmesan's] paper makes it evident that it is almost global," he said.
"The scale now is so vast that you cannot continue to ignore climate
change," added Fraser, who began studying penguins in the Antarctic more
than 30 years ago. "It is going to have some severe consequences." Many
species, for example, have shifted their ranges in response to rising
temperatures.

US imperialism creates the most environmental

destruction.
Buell 01 (Frederick, professor of English at Queens College Globalization
without Environmental Crisis: The Divorce of Two Discourses in U.S. Culture,
Symploke, Pg 64
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.foley.gonzaga.edu:2048/journals/symploke/v009/9.
1buell.html) JL

The global biodiversity crisis is another multi-source crisis, created

by a wide variety of local actors acting as a part of an extended global
system; but the damage these actors do is to local systems, not to the
biosphere as a whole. It becomes global in its accumulation not just of
individual actions (primarily habitat destruction), but localized effects. Many
other new global problems resemble the biodiversity crisis in being globalized
through the bootstrapping of local actions and instances of local damage into
a global nightmare. Many of John Bellamy Foster's [End Page 62] long list of
"urgent problems" are global today, thanks to the spread of industrial
systems and practices and the worldwide accumulation of small impacts this
creates. These include: loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear
contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests,
wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the
despoliation of lakes, streams and rivers, the drawing down and
contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries,
the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic
wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to
hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable
resources. (Foster 11-2) But environmental crisis has taken on an even
more contemporary global feel as it has begun to share in the
contemporary topos of the trans(-): the evocation of the transnational,
transcultural, and (a necessary part of this, though less commonly added) the
transgenic. One sign is that environmental crisis has become hyperaware of
global interactions occurring painfully and even riskily in real time. These
days, lungs in the U.S. contract as fearfully at information about the
deforestation of the Amazon as they do at disputes over national clean air
standards. In 1932, Aldo Leopold complained that "when I go birding in my
Ford, I am devastating an oil field and re-electing an imperialist to get me
rubber"; he meant this, Lawrence Buell notes, as "a reductio ad absurdam of
purist thinking" (2001, 302). Contemporary globalization, in the meantime,
has institutionalized such discourse as a part of our normality, not something
ridiculous. 7 It is now a staple of social justice rhetoric and global activism, as
when Noam Chomsky points out that American children use baseball bats
hand-dipped in toxic chemicals by Haitian women and corporations are
scrutinized for their overseas labor practices. It is equally a staple of
environmental crisis thought, expressed in several ways. For example,
environmental imperialism by a resource-hogging, pollutiongenerating North is now a commonplace perception ("a baby born in
the United States creates thirteen times as much environmental
damage over the course of its lifetime as a baby born in Brazil, and
thirty-five times as much as an Indian baby") (Hertsgaard 196); the huge
environmental footprints of consumer items purchased by innocent
consumers extend well across the world, as environmentalists chart
these effects; and linkages between apparently innocent first world choices
are exposed as having drastic effects-at-a-distance [End Page 63] (as when
Theordore Roszak unhappily discovers that "the material from which my
eyeglass frames are made comes from an endangered species, the hawksbill

turtle" and is told that whenever he turns on a light bulb powered by nuclear
energy, he is "adding to the number of anecephalic babies in the world"
(Roszak 36).

War
Imperialism leads to warWWI proves
TAHC 12 [The Authentic History Center, The Origins of WWI Primary
Source for American Pop Culture, July 6th, 2013,
http://www.authentichistory.com/1914-1920/1-overview/1-origins/index.html]

One of the main causes of the First World War was

imperialism: an unequal relationship, often in the form of an
empire, forced on other countries and peoples, resulting in
domination and subordination of economics, culture, and
territory. Historians disagree on whether the primary impetus for
imperialism was cultural or economic, but whatever the reason,
Europeans in the late 19th century increasingly chose to
safeguard their access to markets, raw materials, and returns
on their investments by seizing outright political and military
control of the undeveloped world. Between the 1850s and 1911,
all of Africa was colonized
except for Liberia and Ethiopia. The
British, who had imposed direct rule on India in 1858, occupied Egypt
in 1882, probably a strategic necessity to protect their Indian interests.
The French, who had begun missionary work in Indochina in the 17th
century, finished their conquests of the region in 1887, and in 1893
they added to it neighboring Laos and a small sliver of China.

U.S. Imperialism creates world-wide tensions and fails by

every measure
Ottaway and Lacina 2003 [Marina, Senior Scholar at the Woodrow
Wilson Center and a long- time analyst of political transformations in Africa,
the Balkans, and the Middle East, and Bethany, junior fellow, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, International Interventions and
Imperialism, SAIS Review, Summer-Fall http://muse.jhu.edu/ login?
auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/sais_review/v023/23.2ottaway.html]

First, the United States is seeking to shift final authority for

authorizing internal interventions away from the UN and toward
itself, relegating the UN to a position of secondary importance, to be
called upon when convenient as a marginal contributor to essentially
American undertakings. Second, by arguing that the United
States has the right to intervene not only to eliminate
threats to itself and international peace, but also to put in
place new regimes, the doctrine of preemptive intervention
poses a new threat to the principle of state sovereignty. Not
surprisingly, the debate on imperialism has intensified
unilateral American interventionism constitutes a far greater

threat to the foundations of the international system than

even the most aggressive multilateral missions of the 1990s.
In [End Page 86] Namibia, Haiti, and Sierra Leone multilateral
interventions supported regime change, but these cases have been
justified as the return of legally recognized powers in place of an
illegal de facto regime. The unilateralist American project
appears to go much further. It justifies regime change not
simply as a means of restoring a legitimate government, but
as a means of removing threats to U.S. security interests as
defined by the U.S. administration. Though all states have the right
to defend their security interests, U.S. unilateral interventions,
based on preemption of vaguely defined threats and
undertaken without an international process of
legitimization, would provoke widespread international
resentment against the United States, as the war in Iraq
already has. U.S. unilateralism may also furnish a license for
unilateral interventions by other states, and thus become a
source of instability. In addition to the threat unilateral
interventions pose to the international system and U.S. moral
credibility, the experience of multilateral post-conflict reconstruction
during the 1990s should be a major check on such a project. That
experience demonstrates that interventions, even those with
imperial characteristics and significant resources, often result in very
little change to internal power dynamics. Even the tremendous
military power and financial resources of the United States
cannot necessarily keep its attempts to rebuild states and
support stable, benign, and democratic regimes from being
thwarted by local political realities. Rapidly transforming
rogue and failed states will prove a daunting task, and
unilateral intervention, shackled by international resentment
and charges of imperialism, is especially unlikely to prove an
effective tool.

The only thing an imperialist country does is bring

violence
Feldman 08 [Keith, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, Berkeley,
Black Powers Palestine and the End(s) of Civil Rights, New
Centennial Review, Fall
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v008/8.2.feldman.
html]
The concept imperial formation, recently distilled by Ann
Laura Stoler, captures the mobile terrain on which these

battles for an anti-racist historical legibility have been

waged. Imperial formation suggests the shifting degrees of
rights, scale, rule, and violence through which the state
projects sovereignty both within and outside internationally
agreed upon borders. They are macropolities whose
technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions
and their uneven and changing proliferation. They thrive on
turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and everimproved coercive measures to protect the common good against
those deemed threats to it. Finally, imperial formations give rise
both to new zones of exclusion and new sites ofand social
groups withprivileged exemption (2006, 128). This theory of
the shifting cartography of empire as one built on
differential forms of exclusion and exemption that operate
through racist social structures begins to help us see how SNCC
and, increasingly, many others involved in the black freedom
movement began to see in Palestine facts . . . that pertain to our
struggle here. A critique of the widespread discourse of U.S.
support for Palestines occupation could challenge the staid
exceptionalist arguments that the United States and Israel were
somehow unique in achieving their philosophical commitments and
political practices of freedom and democracy. Indeed, U.S.
exceptionalist discourse, as Stoler and David Bond cogently
noteand the black freedom movements post-1967 engagement
with Palestine gives depth, complexity, and specificity tohas
historically constructed places exempt from scrutiny and
peoples partially excluded from rights (2006, 95), what
Etienne Balibar calls a fluctuating combination of continued
exteriorization and internal exclusion

U.S. intervention caused millions of excess deaths in The

Korean War
Lucas 07 [James A., retired social worker in Dayton, Ohio who is active in
anti- war and anti-imperialist endeavors, Deaths In Other Nations Since WW
II Due To Us Interventions CCNews, July 6th, 2013
http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm]

The Korean War started in 1950 when, according to the Truman

administration, North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25th.
However, since then another explanation has emerged which
maintains that the attack by North Korea came during a time of many
border incursions by both sides. South Korea initiated most of the

border clashes with North Korea beginning in 1948. The North Korea
government claimed that by 1949 the South Korean army committed
2,617 armed incursions. It was a myth that the Soviet Union ordered
North Korea to attack South Korea. (1,2) The U.S. started its attack
before a U.N. resolution was passed supporting our nations
intervention, and our military forces added to the mayhem in
the war by introducing the use of napalm. (1)During the war
the bulk of the deaths were South Koreans, North Koreans and
Chinese. Four sources give deaths counts ranging from 1.8 to
4.5 million. (3,4,5,6) Another source gives a total of 4 million but does
not identify to which nation they belonged. (7) John H. Kim, a U.S. Army
veteran and the Chair of the Korea Committee of Veterans for Peace,
stated in an article that during the Korean War the U.S. Army, Air
Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about
three million civilians both South and North Koreans at many
locations throughout KoreaIt is reported that the U.S. dropped
some 650,000 tons of bombs, including 43,000 tons of napalm
bombs, during the Korean War. It is presumed that this total
does not include Chinese casualties.

US imperialism threatens to spur major world conflict

Kuang et al 5 (Xinnian, teaches modern Chinese literature at Tsinghua
University, Preemptive War and a World Out of Control, Positions,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v013/13.1kuang.html) JL
The existing world order was constructed under the leadership of the United
States following World War II. The United Nations, the representative of this
order, is certainly not an entirely democratic organization. Since its inception,
the United Nations has been controlled by two superpowers, the United
States and the Soviet Union. These two superpowers used the United Nations
as a stage on which to vie for power. But it is important to note that [End
Page 159] neither the United States nor the Soviet Union doubted the
significance or efficacy of the United Nationsand the United States, in
particular, used the United Nations to export its values to the rest of the
world. Both their confrontations and their mutual hold on power gave the
second half of the twentieth century a long peace. However, after the
collapse of the U.S.S.R., the surviving hegemon, the United States,
no longer had the patience to use the United Nations to put forward
its own values, but rather pursued what might be referred to as
peace under imperial domination (diguo tongzhi xia de heping).
America's invasion of Iraq has damaged the authority of the United
Nations and the principle of the inviolability of national sovereignty. Before
the war broke out, Bush repeatedly sent out warnings in which he stated that

if the Security Council refused to pass a resolution authorizing the use of

force, the United Nations would become irrelevant. Some hawks in the
administration and conservative newspapers even threatened that the United
States could withdraw from the United Nations, bringing it to an ignominious
end. The strategy of preemption as espoused by American
neoconservatism, along with new interpretations of sovereignty, will bring
about a revolution in the twenty-first century, and the war in Iraq will
serve as a model. The United States will use its neo-imperialist
imagination in an attempt to recreate the so-called rogue states and
restore world order. The strategy of preemption is a sign of
America's abandonment of both traditional Western international
regulatory systems and the principle of rule by law as established under the
U.N. charter. Instead, America is bringing about the return to an era
where naked power takes preeminence. At a press conference held June
27, 2003, after talks with the French minister of foreign affairs, Dominique de
Villepin, Nelson Mandela commented on this shift: "Since the establishment of
the U.N., there have been no world wars; therefore, anybody, and particularly
the leaders of the superpowers, who takes unilateral action outside the frame
of the U.N. must receive the condemnation of all who love peace." On a visit
to Ireland on June 20, 2003, he went on to say, "Any organization, any
country, any movement that now decides to sideline the United
Nations, that country and its leader are a danger to the world. We
cannot allow the world to again degenerate into a place where the
will of the powerful dominates over all other considerations."4 [End
Page 160] The strategy of preemption is not simply a military
strategy, but is, in fact, a kind of barbaric politics, a serious attack
against civilized humanity. It is ultimately tied to the question of whether
the world is seeking civilization and order, or whether it is entering into a
period of violence and chaos. The United States' adoption of this
strategy provoked the intense opposition of Europe and, indeed, the
entire world because many believe that a strategy of preemption would
take the world in the latter direction. As a result of the Iraq War, a deep rift
was opened up between America and its western European allies, to which
the media now frequently affix the label "Old Europe." Modern history,
beginning in 1492, has been a Eurocentric history of colonialism, imperialism,
and expansion. However, the United States has replaced Europe as
imperialist colonizer. The imagination of American neoconservative
politics has inspired the United States to become a tyrannical and
self-appointed hegemon, willfully changing global boundaries, and a
particularly intense force for the destruction of world order. Europe,
on the other hand, has become a force for rationality and civilization. The
dispute that arose between Europe and America during the Iraq War was both
a conflict of potential profit and a sign of civilizational disparity.

Imperialist ideals cause us to rush ignorantly into

unnecessary violence and wars
Harris, 08 (Jerry, US Imperialism after Iraq, Race & Class, 50(1), p. 41) JH
In light of this assessment, counter-insurgency wars, in Iraq or elsewhere,
would clearly lead to attacks on the local population insofar as it constitutes a
support network for insurgents. This review of changing tactics in Iraq is
important because it sets the stage for future wars. Overwhelming force
and counter-insurgency doctrine are strategies for occupation. But
all imperialist occupations face the same political problem. They are
opposed by local people who yearn for self-determination. This
fundamental truth is something no Washington think tank or
Pentagon general can admit, not even to themselves. They always
believe in the rightness of their cause, be it the white mans
burden or the war against terror. Such hubris blinds
military/industrial intellectuals time and time again. Their
understanding of conditions is framed by the bias and dogmas
formed in the imperial centre, leaving them ignorant of the
complexities of Third World societies. National chauvinism that
originates in power and wealth never accepts that less powerful,
less wealthy and less technologically endowed societies can run
their affairs better than the imperialist centre; consequently, defeat
seems unimaginable. Just listen to the eloquent arrogance of
neoconservative Richard Perle shortly before the war: Those who
think Iraq should not be next may want to think about Syria or Iran
or Sudan or Yemen or Somalia or North Korea or Lebanon or the
Palestinian Authority if we do it right with respect to one or two
we could deliver a short message, a two-word message, Youre
next.

The continuance of violence causes extinction

Holmes 89 (Robert L., Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University of
Rochester, On war and morality, Princeton University Press, p. 1)
The threat to the survival of humankind posed by nuclear weapons
has been a frightening and essential focus of public debate for the
last four decades and must continue to be so if we are to avoid
destroying ourselves and the natural world around us. One
unfortunate result of preoccupation with the nuclear threat,
however, has been a new kind of "respectability" accorded to
conventional war. In this radical and cogent argument for pacifism, Robert
Holmes asserts that all war--not just nuclear war--has become
morally impermissible in the modern world. Addressing a wide audience
of informed and concerned readers, he raises dramatic questions about the
concepts of "political realism" and nuclear deterrence, makes a number of

persuasive suggestions for nonviolent alternatives to war, and presents a rich

panorama of thinking about war from St. Augustine to Reinhold Niebuhr and
Herman Kahn.
Holmes's positions are compellingly presented and will provoke
discussion both among convinced pacifists and among those whom
he calls "militarists." "Militarists," we realize after reading this book,
include the majority of us who live a friendly and peaceful personal
life while supporting a system which, if Holmes is correct,
guarantees war and risks eventual human extinction.

Imperialism leads to world war

Boyle 12 [Francis, Professor of international Law, University of Illinois, Unlimited Imperialism and
the Threat of World War III. U.S. Militarism at the Start of the 21st Century, Global Research, Online,
7/6/13, http://www.globalresearch.ca/unlimited-imperialism-and-the-threat-of-world-war-iii-u-s-militarismat-the-start-of-the-21st-century/5316852]

This current bout of U.S. imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau

denominated unlimited imperialism in his seminal work Politics Among
Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53): The outstanding historic examples of
unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the
Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries,
Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward
expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own
successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the
confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as
there remains anywhere a possible object of dominationa politically
organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the
conquerors lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of
moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest,
characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the
undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind It is the Unlimited
Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler
who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The
factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First
World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin
Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.

War Spanos
The promise of peace through the ending of war conceals
the Western truth discourse that turns those "wasteful"
Other subjects into a productive mass to be harnessed by
the supervisory gaze of the dominate culture.
Spanos 2K(William V. [professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Binghamton University] America's Shadow: Anatomy of Empire). p. 51

The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously: 1. the interpellation of

'individuals' as subjects; 2. their subjection to the Subject; 3. the mutual recognition of
subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's
recognition of himself; 4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on
condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be

caught in this quadruple system of

interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of
universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects
"work," they "work by themselves" in the vast majority of
cases, with the exception of the "bad subjects" who on
occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments
of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of
(good) subjects work all right "all by themselves," i.e. by
ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological
State Apparatuses).93 The fulfillment of this promissory
accommodational project is called variously "beauty,"
"perfection," or, most tellingly, "peace" (pax). In this
reconstellated context the differential entity becomes, indeed,
productive, but what it produces is a product of exchange
value that benefits the economy and increases the authority of
the dominant structure projected by the "supervisory gaze" or,
alternatively, the invisible imperial "Subject" or "center
elsewhere." This political economy, in the sociopolitical
domain, is what Foucault calls "the repressive hypothesis."
Derived in part from its recognition of the ancien regime's economically and politically
all right: Amen "So be it." Result:

wasteful economy of power, this is the seductive ruse of the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie
that strategically represents knowledge (of the Other) as external to and the essential agent of
deliverance from the constraints of power. It is the ruse that conceals the complicity between
(Western) truth and power: We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in
negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it

In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it

produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The
individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him
belong to this production.94
"conceals."

The calculative thought of the aff is a mindset of

imperialism that locks their scholarship into a purely
violent mindset, effacing the singularity of the Vietnam
War which is the only oppositional discourse that is
possible
Spanos 08 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature, Binghamton
University/Baller, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of
Vietnam, p. 19-21)

What should be remarkable to anyone attuned to the dissonance of the actual history of
this century is not only the failure of oppositional discourses for example,
deconstruction, Marxism, the new historicism, feminism, cultural critique, and even postcolonialist criticism
to

perceive the rigorously logical counterrelationship between the

Vietnam War and the triumphalist representation of the post-Cold
War as the end of history and the advent of the New World Order or its later
accommodational variants. These oppositional discourses, which include New Americanist studies, had their provenance in and continue to
identify themselves with the post-Enlightenment countermemory. It should also be remarkable, therefore, that they have been blinded by their
vestigially disciplinary problematics to the rigorously logical complicity of the American cultural memorys massive and obsessively sustained
effort in the thirty-year aftermath to obliterate the radically differential actual history of the Vietnam War (and to discredit the posthumanist

with the triumphalist post-Cold War discourses more

subtle obliteration of this radically disruptive event by
accommodating it to the logical economy of the (Hegelian) dialectics
of the larger pattern of History. Given the glaring visibility of Fukuyamas invisibilizing of the Vietnam
discourses it precipitated)24

Wara process further abetted by Richard Haasss, and, as I will show later, Samuel P. Huntingtons and the numerous Straussian
neoconservatives realisitic representation of the post-9/11 worldit is surprising, in other words, that these oppositional discourses should
have been blind to his arrogant (or incredibly naive) re-visionary/recuperative strategy, to the fact that this end-of-history discourse of what,

a rationale
that reverts to the very epistemethe ground of legitimacythat
the singular event of the Vietnam War and the theory it
precipitated had decisively delegitimized by revealing the truth
discourse of liberal capitalist democracy to be a social construction
that of the Anglo-Protestant core culture, as Huntington will put it after 9/11 infused by a
totalizing will to power that is characterized by its suppression or
accommodation, the colonization, as it were, of the entire relay of
Others composing the continuum of being to its polyvalent Identity.
since then, has come to be called the American Century relies on a now anachronistic ontological justification. I mean

To put that which these oppositional discourses overlook succinctly, Fukuyamas representation of the end
of the Cold War or, to emphasize that

it is the hegemonization of this end-of-

history discourse

with which I am concerned, the mediatization of his representation, is informed

by a metaphysical ontology that willfully subdues actual history, its differential dynamics, to its secularized

the calculative/ instrumentalist thinking it privileges

as the agency of truth is essentially imperial. It is not so much
liberal capitalisms practical colonization of the planet as such that
this end-of-history discourse is celebrating. After all, Fukuyama, Haass, and the
transcendental Logos. In short,

culture they and their neoconservative colleagues represent acknowledge the possibility of future setbacks

It is, rather, its planetary

colonization of thinking in its technological/instrumentalist mode,
though the two are not mutually exclusive, indeed, are indissolubly related. The fundamental
and disappointments in this geopolitical American project.

ideological purpose of this discourse is to delegitimize every other

form of thinking than that dialectical/instrumental reasoning that,
according to the Kojvian/Hegelian perspective informing it, Historys Aufhebung has precipitated as the

This total victory of a

historically perfected calculative metaphysics means, of course,
the decisive preclusion as a viable option of the kind of
ontological/political thinking precipitated as an imperative by the
recognition of the Vietnam War as a radical contradiction in the
discursive practices of liberal capitalist democracy, the kind of
differential thinking, that is, that haunts the legitimacy of the
latters benign global narrative. The massive post-Cold War representation of ever manifestation of
planetary absolutethe Pax Metaphysica, as it were.

such thinking first as politically correct, a new McCarthyism of the Left, by the victors has contributed significantly to the demise of the
little authority it originally achieved, indeed, as I will show, to their demonization after 9/11 as complicitous with, if not acts of, terrorism as
such. It thus bears emphatic witness to the success of the dominant cultures recuperative project of delegitimizingwhich is to say, of
colonizinga thinking that would think the spectral difference that cannot finally be contained by the imperial (onto)logic of liberal democracy.
More tellingly, the success of this imperial project is also witnessed by the seeming indifference of most alternative discoursesthose that
have emerged in the wake of the demise of theory to oppose the New World Orderto Fukuyamas and the contemporary policy elites
representation of the post-Cold War occasion and by their seeming blindness to this representations synecdochical cultural status.25 That is,

these emancipatory discourses, as Fukuyama predicts, seem to

have no recourse to any other way of thought than that imperial
logic informing and prescribed by the triumphant liberal democracy.
This disabling condition of oppositional thought, I want to underscore, is one
significant reason why the retrieval of the actual historythe singularity
of the Vietnam War is an urgent imperative, especially in the wake of
9/11 and the American governments unleashing of its war on
terrorism.

The affs attempt to establish plan solvency as a prerequisite and necessary condition of peace and stability is
imperialistic and relies on intolerable forms of violence to
sustain American security.
Spanos 00, William, Professor of English & Comparative Literature at New York
State University of Binghamton, 2000 (Americas Shadow, pg.191-192// Petey G)

the
euphoric annunciation of the end of history and the advent of
the New World Order by the deputies of the dominant
American culture at the end of the Cold War is symptomatic of
the achievement of the global hegemony of "America"
understood not simply as a political order, but as a way of
thinking. I have claimed that this triumphant "American" way of thinking is not exceptionalist, as it
What I have argued in this book about the relationship between philosophy and imperialism is that

has always been claimed by Americans, especially since de Tocqueville's announcement of the advent of

an imperial thinking,
whose provenance resides in Roman antiquity, that sees the
being into which it inquires as a totalized spatial image, a
"field" or "region" or "domain" to be comprehended, mastered,
democracy in America, but European, which means metaphysical:

and exploited.

But this way of putting this imperial metanarrative, though necessary in the
context of the amnesiac imperatives of thinking the Enlightenment as an epochal emancipatory moment in
world history, is too general. It does not account for the historically specific transformation of this
European mode of knowledge production accomplished in the wake of America's emergence as a global
power: the fulfillment of the Enlightenment's "developmental model" in the effacement of the visible
imperial logos informing traditional metaphysics by way of the apotheosis of the "objectivity" of empirical
science and the advent of the classificatory table. Under the aegis of a triumphant America, the narrative

metaphysics has come to its end in the form of a

universal instrumentalism, a Man-centered thinking for which
everything in time and space is seen as a "problem" that the
larger comparative "picture" renders susceptible to a final and
determinate solution. In Heidegger's proleptic terms, European
metaphysical thinking in the technological age dominated by
America has become "Americanized," a "representational"/"calculative" thinking or "planning" that has
transformed the uncalculability of being at large into a
planetary "world picture": "We get the picture" concerning something does not mean only
economy of European

that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us in all
that belongs to it and all that stands together in it as a system. "To get the picture" throbs with being
acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it. Where the world becomes picture,
what is, in its entirely, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he
therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive
sense to set in place before himself. Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a
picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in
such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents
and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in
its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.1
Reconstellated into the context of this Heideggerian diagnosis of modernity, the American end-of-history
discourse undergoes a resonant estrangement.

as "good news"

What is euphorically represented

the global fulfillment ("end") of the emancipatory promise of History comes

the colonization of the errant mind of

humanity at large by a banal and banalizing thinking that has
reduced everything, including human beings, to "standing [or
disposable] reserve."2 This "end of philosophy" in the form of
a "triumphant" instrumentalist thinking that has reduced being
to disposable commodity is everywhere manifest in the postCold War era. And, I suggest, its most telling symptom is the
globalization of (American) English as the lingua franca of the "free market,"
which has as one of its most devastating consequences the
"Americanization" not simply of the Western nation-states but
of entire Third World cultures.
to be seen as the Pax Metaphysica:

The 1ac supposedly identifies a real problem that

threatens global stability and peace and thus demands a
response. This benign discourse treats the globe as a
territory to be dominated and exploited for americas
expanding hegemony.
Spanos 00, William, Professor of English & Comparative Literature at New York
State University of Binghamton, 2000 (Americas Shadow, p. xvi-xviii)

This euphoric representation of the end of the Cold War by the

intellectual deputies of the dominant culture has been
modified under the pressure of world events since the apparently decisive
defeat of the Iraqi army in the Gulf War: the genocidal ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia; the political
instability and violence in much of central and southern Africa; the bloody struggle between the secular
state and religious fundamentalists in Algeria; the continuing tensions between East and West in the
Middle East, not least, the reaffirmation of Iraqi sovereignty against the United States's threat of

Indeed,
references to the end of history and the New World Order have
all but disappeared from mediatic and theoretical
representations of the contemporary occasion. But I interpret
this modification not as a tacit admission of the illegitimacy of
the end-of-history discourse, but rather as an accommodation
of these contradictory events to its universalist scenario, an
accommodation that, in fact, renders this end-of-history
discourse more powerful insofar as the apparent
acknowledgment of their historical specificity obscures its real
metaphysical basis. This accommodational strategy of
representation, for example, is epitomized by Richard Haass, a former official in the Bush
intervention; and the emergent threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

administration and now director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, in his book The

Eschewing Fukuyama's
Hegelian eschatological structure in favor of theorizing the
actual practices of the United States in the international
sphere Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, and so forth Haass frames the post-Cold
War conjuncture in the totalizing image of a "deregulated
world" (in contrast to the world "regulated" by the Cold War scenario) and the role of the
United States in the trope of a sheriff leading posses (the appropriate
members of the United Nations) to quell threats to global stability and
peace posed by this international deregulation. Despite
Haass's acknowledgment that conflict is inevitable (which, in
fact, echoes Fukuyama), the triumphant idea of liberal
capitalist democracy remains intact in his discourse. That is,
his commitment to the "laissez-faire" polity (deregulation) to the fictional
concept of the sovereign subject continues to be grounded in the
metaphysics that informed America's global errand in the
"wilderness" of Southeast Asia. Indeed, Haass gives this representational framework
Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (1997).4

far more historical power than Fukuyama's disciplinary discourse of political science is able to muster. For,

unlike the Fukuyamans,

Haass informs his representation of the United

States's historically determined and determining
exceptionalist mission in the post-Cold War era with the
teleological metaphorics that have been from the beginning
fundamental to the constitution and power of the American
globally oriented national identity. The metaphor of the
sheriff/posse derives from the history of the American West
and constitutes a variation of the pacification processes of
westward expansion. As such it brings with it the entire
baggage of the teleological metanarrative of the American
frontier from the Puritans' "errand in the ['New World']
wilderness" to the myth of Manifest Destiny. As the "New Americanist"
countermemory has persuasively shown, this is the myth that has saturated the
cultural discourse of America, both high and low, since its
origins: whether in the form of the American jeremiad, which, from the Puritans through Daniel
Webster to Ronald Reagan, has always functioned to maintain the national
consensus vis-a-vis its providentially ordained mission to
domesticate (and dominate) what is beyond the frontier5 or in
the form of the Hollywood western, which has functioned to
naturalize what one New Americanist has called the American
"victory culture."6 Reconstellated into this context, Haass's
more "realistic" analysis of the post-Cold War occasion comes
to be seen not simply as continuous with Fukuyama's, but as a
more effective imperial global strategy. The utter immunity to criticism of the
Clinton administration's "humanitarian" war against Serbia in the spring of 1999 which perfectly enacted
the Haassian scenario bears witness to this. In the following chapters of this book I will, by and large,

But I wish to
make it clear at the beginning that, in doing so, I am referring
not to a particular theory, but to a fundamental American
tradition whose theorization extends from de Tocqueville
through Frederick Jackson Turner to Fukuyama and Haass.
refer to Fukuyama's version of the post-Cold War American end-of-history discourse.

Indigenous Rights

Imperialism deteriorates the culture of indigenous people

Galeota 04 [Julia, prize-winning high school essayist, The Humanist,
Article Cultural Imperialism: An American Tradition,
http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/ articles/essay3mayjune04.pdf]
In his 1976 work Communication and Cultural Domination, Herbert
Chiller defines cultural imperialism as: the sum of the
processes by which a society is brought into the modern world
system, and how its dominating stratum is attracted,
pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social
institutions to correspond to, or even to promote, the values
and structures of the dominant center of the system. Thus,
cultural imperialism involves much more than simple consumer
goods; it involves the dissemination of ostensibly American
principles, such as freedom and democracy. Though this
process might sound appealing on the surface, it masks a
frightening truth: many cultures around the world are
gradually disappearing due to the overwhelming influence of
corporate and cultural America. The motivations behind
American cultural imperialism parallel the justifications for
U.S. imperialism throughout history: the desire for access to
foreign markets and the belief in the superiority of American
culture. Though the United States does boast the worlds
largest, most powerful economy, no business is completely
satisfied with controlling only the American market; American
corporations want to control the other 95 percent of the
worlds consumers as well. However, one must question whether
this projected society is truly beneficial for all involved. Is it worth
sacrificing countless indigenous cultures for the unlikely promise
of a world without conflict? Around the world, the answer is an
overwhelming No! Disregarding the fact that a world of
homogenized culture would not necessarily guarantee a world
without conflict, the complex fabric of diverse cultures around
the world is a fundamental and indispensable basis of
humanity. Throughout the course of human existence, millions
have died to preserve their indigenous culture. It is a
fundamental right of humanity to be allowed to preserve the
mental, physical, intellectual, and creative aspects of ones
society. A single global culture would be nothing more than a
shallow, artificial culture of materialism reliant on technology.
Thankfully, it would be nearly impossible to create one bland culture in
a world of over six billion people. And nor should we want to. Contrary
to Rothkopf s (and George W. Bushs) belief that, Good and evil,

better and worse coexist in this world, there are no such absolutes in
this world. The United States should not be able to relentlessly force
other nations to accept its definition of what is good and just or
even modern. Fortunately, many victims of American cultural
imperialism arent blind to the subversion of their cultures.

Terrorism
Imperialism encourages fundamentalism which leads to
terrorist organizations.
Gagnon 12[Jean, Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Greater China
Studies, Journal of South Asian Development, The Taliban Did Not Create the
Taliban, Imperialism Did, vol. 7 no. 1]
Sir Karl Poppers (2002) method of historicism has been neglected in the analysis of the radicalization of
Afghanistans society in the form of the Taliban. Poppers historicism is the idea that the past may allow the
forecasting of the future by understanding the state of the present in one specific line of historical inquiry.

by analyzing periods of imperialismthose eras of

social injustice, violence and oppressionit is seen that such
imperialism led to radical fundamentalism, as many had no
choice but to lash out. The push to strenuous religious identity,
heavily laden with violent tactics, was the natural response of
peoples trying to maintain their identities and collective destiny
from imperial domination. Furthermore, as evidence continues to
show, most often those individuals that are first to radicalize are
the poorest of the poor, the dispossessed, or those who have
experienced violent injustices. Using Poppers method, it is possible to
explain how imperialism breeds radicalism (using Afghanistan as
an example) and as such provide some general recommendations to swing the pendulum in
It is argued herein that

reverse so as to minimize radical behavior. This article has implications for international relations, foreign
policies and aid.

Nuclear technology is easily accessible to terrorist

groups, enabling them to inflict maximum damage.
O'Neill 97
[Kevn, Editor at the Institute for Science and International Security, The
Nuclear Terrorist Threat
http://www.isisonline.org/publications/terrorism/threat.pdf]
The proliferation of nuclear weapons or radiological dispersal devices to
terrorist groups is perhaps one of the most frightening threats to U.S.
security. Nuclear materials, technologies and know-how are more widely
available today than ever before. Small quantities of both fissile materials
and highly radioactive materials, sufficient to manufacture a radiological
dispersal device, are actively traded on the black market. A nuclear
detonation by a terrorist group would likely result in an unprecedented
number of casualties. In contrast, a radiological dispersal attack would
probably be less violent, but could significantly contaminate an urban center,
causing economic and social disruption. Both types of attacks would have
significant psychological impacts on the entire population.

Terrorism is the result of technological domination of the

world it is an attempt to break free from the standing
reserve.
Mitchell 05

[Andrew J., Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford

University, "Heidegger and Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume
35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]

Terror takes
a situation that looks hopelessly doomed and finds the
essential within it, but terror contains its own demise, too. We flee from it. We
respond to it with a hardening of our own ways; we reaffirm
the identity of being instead of opening ourselves to others. The
American response to terror has been one of Americanism, there can be no doubt about that. Terror
ends in this, and there is no commemoration, just a forgetting. The
Nothing stable, this juncture in being itself must be followed and traced. It trembles.

commemorative aspect of terror allows us to remember the fallen and understand how they can still be

Terrorism will take place in the

withdrawal of beyng, in the unworld of machination. The
modem configuration of war is surpassed by the technological
plan of homogenized circulation, and the distinction between
war and peace falls away in their mutual commitment to
furthering the cycle of production and consumption. The abandonment
with us today in our American way of being.

of being that forms this unworld by draining the world of its being does not occur without a trace, however,
and terror in its trembling corresponds to that trace. Terrorism necessarily results from such a devastation-

Terrorism is
metaphysical because it touches everything, every particular
being, all of which may be attacked and annihilated. The
circulation of the standing-reserve sets an equivalence of
value among things with a resulting worldlessness where
existence is another name for exchangeability. The exchanged and
or, "becoming-desert," Vendiistung-of the world; terrorism is always born in the desert.

replaceable things are already replaced and exchanged, not serially, but essentially. They are not fully

Terrorism names this absence, or rather is the effect of this absence, which is to
say it is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with an absence that could be the
effect of any loss of presence. The absence in question is not an absence of presence, but an
absence in and through presence. It would be ridiculous to think that such a change
in being would lack a corresponding change in beings. This change in' the nature of
being shows itself in the fact that all beings today are
terrorized. They all stand under a very real threat of
destruction via -terrorist acts. There would be no terrorist
threat were it not for these terrorists, yet there would be no
possibility of a threat were it not for being. Certainly terrorism is not the only
present when here.

"effect" of this absence in presence; Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in precisely this
regard.

Terrorism's claim, however, is distinct from that of atomic

war. Like the atomic bomb, terrorism operates at the level of threat. Insofar as it calls
into question all beings, terrorism is itself a metaphysical
determination of being. Terrorism makes everything a possible
object of terrorist attack, and this is the very terror of it.
Everything is a possible target, and this now means that all
beings exist as possible targets, as possibly destroyed. But this
should not be taken to mean that there are discrete beings, fully present, now threatened with
destruction. The ineradicable threat of destruction transforms the nature ofthe being itself. The being can
no longer exist as indifferent to its destruction; this destruction does not reside outside of the being.
Instead, destruction inhabits the being and does so, not as something superadded to the being, but as the

Terror brings about

an alteration in the very mode of being of reality, the real is
now the terrorized. Reality is already terrorized; the change has already
essence of the being itself. Beings are henceforth as though destroyed.

taken place, -and this regardless of whether an attack comes or not. Beings exist as endangered, as
terrorized, and this means as no longer purely self-present. It means that, in terms of pure presence,

beings exist asalready destroyed. Destruction is not

something that comes at a later date, nor is it something that
may or may not already have taken place. Destruction exists
now as threat. The effectiveness of terror lies in the threat, not
the attack.

Alternative

2NC/ 1NR Alt Solves

Engage in scholarly analysis of imperialism as it relates to
micro and macro level politics. This allows us to see the
origins of imperialism within the political and education
realm and separate ourselves from them
Shome 06
[Raka, Media, Communication, and Feminist Cultural Studies scholar who
writes on postcolonial cultures and transnational feminism.Postcolonial
Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An Other View, Communication
Theory, March 17 2006, Wiley interscience]
The importance of a postcolonial position to any scholarly practice is
that it urges us to analyze our academic discourses and connect
them to the larger political practices of our nations. This means that in examining our
academic discourses, the postcolonial question to ask is: To what extent do
our scholarly practices-whether they be the kind of issues we explore in our research, the
themes around which we organize our teaching syllabi, or the way that we structure our conferences and
decide who speaks (and does not speak), about what, in the name of intellectual practices -

legitimize the hegemony of Western power structures? In posing this

question, the postcolonial perspective does not suggest that as scholars writing in the West all that we do

the argument is that

we need to examine our academic discourses against a larger
backdrop of Western hegemony, neocolonial, and racial politics. We
need to engage in contrapuntal lines of a global analysis where we
see texts and worldly institutions . . . working together (Said, 1993, p.
is legitimize the imperial political practices of Western nations. Rather,

318). In the pursuit of our scholarly goals, we often do not stop to think or ask questions about why, for
example, research agenda A seems more important to us than research agenda B? What is the ideology
that operates in us that makes research agenda A seem more significant than research agenda B? How are
we always already interpellated into examining A but not B? What does that interpellation say about our
role in reproducing and participating in the hegemonic global domination of the rest by the West? What
does it mean, for instance, when I am told that there is a market for research agenda A but none for
research agenda B? Or that if I did pursue research agenda By I would have to do it in a way that would

Who decides what

is marketable? What does the decision have to do with the political
practices of our nations? How does this market serve the capitalistic
and racist hegemony of Western nations? And what is my position, as
an intellectual, in reproducing this hegemony? The point in asking such questions
make it marketable? And what way would that be? Whose way would that be?

is to recognize the latent ideological structures that inform our scholarship and practices. As Van Dijk
(1993) puts it, often under the surface of sometimes sophisticated scholarly analysis and description of
other races, peoples, or groups . . . we find a powerful ideological layer of self-interest, in-group favoritism,

In fact, even when we do sometimes try to break

out of the Eurocentric canons informing contemporary academic
scholarship by including alternate cultural and racial perspectives in
our syllabi, we often do not realize that instead of really breaking
free of the canon, all that we do is stretch it, add things to it. But the
canon remains the same and unchallenged. Our subject positions in relation to the
canon remain the same and challenged. Instead of examining how the canon itself
is rooted in a larger discourse of colonialism and Western hegemony,
and ethnocentrism (p. 160).

we frequently use the canon to appropriate other voice^.^ The question

than arises, so what is to be done? Perhaps the first step here is to do what Spivak (1990)
suggests: to unlearn our privilege (p. 9). And the first step toward that unlearning requires self-reflexivity;

it requires seeing ourselves not sequestered in an academic

institution but connecting things that we think or not think, say or
not say, teach or not teach, to the larger political and ideological
practices of our nations in their interactions with the rest of the
world. The solution, however, is not merely to do more rhetorical studies on nonwhite people (e.g.,
Campbells, 1986, study on African American women speakers), for that only becomes a matter of
extending, instead of displacing or challenging, the canon by adding others. Rather, the solution is to
critically examine and challenge the very value system on which the rhetorical canon and our scholarship
is based. For instance, rhetoric as a discipline has been traditionally built on public address. But historically
public address has been a realm where imperial voices were primarily heard and imperial policies were
articulated. The colonized did not always have access to a public realm, or if they did, their speeches were
not always recorded in mainstream documents, since the means of production rested with the imperial
subject. All this perhaps means that we have built a lot of our understanding of rhetoric, and the canon of
rhetoric, by focusing on (and often celebrating) imperial voices. This calls for a reexamination of our
paradigms. The move here is parallel to that made by feminists in their challenges of the masculinist

scholars are to reexamine the discipline in relation to issues such

need to perhaps do what Spivak (see explanation)
suggests, unlearn a lot of the rhetorical tradition and evaluate
critically what kinds of knowledge have been (and continue to be)
privileged, legitimated [and] displaced in our texts and theories and what
biases of the discipline. If rhetorical

as imperialism, neocolonialism, and race, then they

configuration of socio-political [and racial] interests this privileging, displacing, and legitimizing has

this means
engaging in some serious soul searching to uncover why
scholarship in our discipline has been and continues to be so white
served (and continues to serve) (Conquergood, 1991, p. 193). For one thing,

(Rakow, 1989, p. 2l2). It is through such postcolonial self-reflexivity of our discipline, as well as our
individual scholarship, that we will be able to continue the task of pushing the traditional paradigms of
rhetoric further in order to create spaces for racially and culturally marginalized voices and perspectives on
rhetoric to emerge - voices and perspectives that would comprise sensitive postcolonial responses to the
neocolonial and racist circumstances of our present time. Second, the postcolonial critique of Western
discursive imperialism that constructs racial others and that legitimizes the contemporary global power
structures has important implications for rhetorical criticism, in that it beckons us to recognize
postcolonialism as a timely and important critical and political perspective. As Williams and Chrisman (1
994) emphasizes with great urgency in their introduction to Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, it
is alarming how many of the attitudes, the strategies, and even how much of the room for manoeuvre of
the colonial period [still] remain in place (p. 3) in contemporary social, cultural, and I would add,
academic practices. Given this, it is unfortunate that in our literature we hardly find articles, especially in
our mainstream journals, that examine neocolonial representations of racial others or that analyze, for
instance, the discursive processes through which the (white) West gets constantly legitimized in political,
cultural, and social discourses.

The alternative solves by opening up a space for

discussion without the influence of imperialism
Coupland 10
[Nikolas , Research Director of the Centre for Language and Communication

Research at Cardiff UniversityChapter 3. The Global Politics of Language:

Markets, Maintenance, Marginalization, or Murder?, The Handbook of
Language and Globalization, October 7 2010, Wiley interscience]

The present - day strength of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the
Americas, in Africa, in Asia, in Australasia and in the Pacific is a direct consequence of
European expansion throughout the world since 1492 and of successive waves of
colonization. The languages have accompanied political and
economic influence, being invariably backed up by military might . The
promotion and hierarchization of languages often dovetailed with missionary activity: Christianity thus
accompanied several European languages world - wide, just as Arabic has been an integral part of the
spread of Islam, and Russian of Soviet communism. While Europeans were experiencing industrialization
and the consolidation of national (that is, dominant) languages, they were deeply involved in overseas
expansion, which contributed to economic boom in Europe. Many of the features of what is now known as
globalization were presciently described by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 (1961) .
This text stressed global economic markets, class interests, and ideological legitimation of an oppressive
world order. The project of global dominance has been articulated since before the USA achieved its
independence; for instance George Washington saw the United States as a rising empire (Roberts
2008 : 68). US national identity was forged through massive violence, the dispossession and extermination
of indigenous peoples, the myth of unoccupied territory, the surplus value extorted from slave labor, and
an active process of national imagination used to form a common identity, one deeply permeated by

The project of establishing English as the language of

power, globally and locally, is central to this empire. The manifest destiny
religion (Hixson 2008 ).

that colonial Americans arrogated to themselves has been explicitly linked, since the early nineteenth
century, to English being established globally: English is destined to be in the next and succeeding
centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age
(John Adams to Congress, 1780, cited in Bailey 1992 : 103). The whole world should adopt the American
system. The American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system. (President Harry
Truman, 1947, cited in Pieterse 2004 : 131). The role of scholars in facilitating US empire is explored in Neil
Smith s American Empire. Roosevelt s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003) , which traces
the shift through territorial, colonial dominance (the invasion of the Philippines in 1898) to the attempt to
dominate globally through a strategic recalibration of geography with economics, a new orchestration of
world geography in the pursuit of economic accumulation (2003: xvii xviii). Academia services the
global needs of the political project, perpetuating a system in which [ ] global power is
disproportionately wielded by a ruling class that remains tied to the national interests of the United States
(ibid., p. xix). In US colonies and in the British Empire, English was privileged and other languages
marginalized. Today s global ruling classes tend to be proficient in English. In the twenty - first century,
empire has increasingly figured in the political discourse of advocates and critics. Englers How to Rule
the World. The Coming Battle over the Global Economy (2008) distinguishes clearly between the
corporate globalization of the final decades of the twentieth century and its successor, imperial
globalization based on military dominance. Alternatives to Economic Globalization ( 2002 : 19) lists the
following eight key features of economic/corporate globalization (neo - liberalism): 1 promotion of
hypergrowth and unrestricted exploitation of environmental resources to fuel that growth; 2 privatization
and commodifi cation of public services and of remaining aspects of the global and community commons;
3 global cultural (and, we would add, linguistic) and economic homogenization and the intense promotion
of consumerism; 4 integration and conversion of national economies, including some that were largely self
- reliant, to environmentally and socially harmful export - oriented production; 5 corporate deregulation
and unrestricted movement of capital across borders; 6 dramatically increased corporate concentration; 7
dismantling of public health, social and environmental programs already in place; 8 replacement of the
traditional powers of democratic nation states and local communities by global corporate bureaucracies.
Alternatives to Economic Globalization fails to mention language among the features listed under cultural
homogenization, despite referring to a global monoculture and to the unrestricted flow of production and
marketing, needed by large multinational corporations. It seems that not even the best globalization
experts are aware of the tendencies toward linguistic homogenization and of the threats to linguistic
diversity mentioned above. Much of the literature on English as a global or international language
has tended to be celebratory and failed to situate English within the wider language ecology or to explore
the causal factors behind its expansion (on these subjects, see Phillipson 1992 and 2008a and Pennycook
1998 ). Influential work by Crystal, Fishman, and Graddol is critically analyzed in Phillipson 2000 , and
books on the world language system by De Swaan and Brutt - Griffler are critically analyzed in Phillipson
2004 . One of the controversial questions today is to what extent corporate globalization is leading toward
greater homogenization or greater diversification (for instance through localization), as some researchers
claim. For instance Mufwene ( 2008 : 227) claims that McDonaldization does not lead to uniformity because
the McDonald menu is partly adapted to the local diet. Even if McDonald s in India may serve
vegetarian burgers in Hindi, this reduction to superficial adaptation disregards completely the structural
and process - related aspects of homogenization (see n. 3 for examples; also, for a discussion of

McDonaldization, see Hamelink 1994 ; Ritzer 1996 ; and Defi nition Box 6.3 in Skutnabb - Kangas 2000 ). 3

Linguistic globalization needs to be discussed in a politico - economic

framework which relates the hierarchization of languages to global
and local power relations. A typical example of special pleading for English can be found in a
book by a political scientist who argues for the formation of an EU super - state and cites the familiar
trope of English as lingua franca, along with young people s consumerism and global business integration
(Morgan 2005 : 57). He seems unaware that there are many lingua francas in Europe; or that the
common transnational youth culture is essentially American and that the convergence of business
practices derives from the US corporate world and from the conceptual universe it embodies. It is false to
project English as though it is neutral, English as a mere tool that serves all equally well, in whatever
society they live. The phrase English as a lingua franca generally decontextualizes users and seems to
imply symmetrical, equitable communication, which is often not the case. It conceals the actual functions
that the language performs, English as a lingua academica , lingua bellica , lingua culturalis , lingua
economica , and so on (Phillipson 2008b ). It also ignores the Anglo - American semantics and grammar
embedded in the language (Wierzbicka 2006 ; M hlh usler 2003 ). It fails to explore the hegemonic
practices of the currently dominant capitalist language or to theorize English linguistic neo - imperialism.

Imperialism needs careful definition if it is to be used analytically . This

principle guided the definition of linguistic imperialism as a variant of linguicism (Skutnabb - Kangas 1988 :
13) operating through structures and ideologies and entailing unequal treatment for groups identified by

capitalist imperialism is a
contradictory fusion of the politics of state and empire
(imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of the actors
whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its
human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military
ends) and the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time (imperialism as a
language (Phillipson 1992 ). For Harvey ( 2005 : 26),

diffuse political economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes
primacy). (Emphasis added) The first of these components of the contradictory fusion is the top - down
process of what a state, a combination of states, or an institution such as a corporation or a university
does to achieve its goals which includes the way it manages linguistic capital. The second is the way

economic power flows across and through continuous space, toward

or away from territorial entities (such as states or regional power
blocs) through the daily practices of production, trade, commerce,
capital flows, money transfers, labour migration, technology
transfer, currency speculation, flows of information, cultural
impulses, and the like (ibid.). Most of these processes are crucially
dependent on language, and constituted by language. English can be
seen as the capitalist neo - imperial language that serves the
interests of the corporate world and of the governments it influences
(Phillipson 2008a , 2009 ). This dovetails with the language being activated through molecular processes of
linguistic capital accumulation in space and time , in a dialectic process at the intersection of economics,

linguistic neo - imperialism is concerned, the

political mode of argumentation refers to decision - making,
language policy, and planning, whereas the economic mode of
argumentation refers to the working through of such decisions at
all levels, to the implementation of language planning decisions, to
the actual use of English in myriad contexts. When English increasingly occupies
politics, and discourses. So far as

territory that hitherto was the preserve of national languages in Europe or Asia, what is occurring is
linguistic capital accumulation , over a period of time and in particular territories, in favor of English. When
Singaporean parents gradually shift from an Asian language to the use of English in the home, this
represents linguistic capital accumulation. If users of German or Swedish as languages of scholarship shift
to using English, similar forces and processes are at work. When considering agency in each of these
examples, the individuals concerned opt for the neo - imperial language because they perceive that this
linguistic capital will serve their personal interests best, in the false belief that this requires the sacrifice of
their own language. When language shift is subtractive, and if this affects a group and not merely
individuals, there are serious implications for other languages. If domains such as business, the home, or

scholarship are lost, what has occurred is in fact linguistic capital dispossession . Analysis of the
interlocking of language policies with the two constituents of Harvey s contradictory fusion can
highlight both the corporate agendas, which serve political, economic, and military purposes, and the
multiple flows that make use of English for a range of purposes. New discourses and technologies are
adopted and creatively adapted, but in a rigged, so - called free global and local market. The active
promotion of other major international languages such as Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish also
aims to strengthen the market forces and the cultures associated with each language; but at present the
linguistic capital invested in these languages does not seriously threaten the current pre - eminence of
English. A Chinese global empire may be on the way. International language promotion itself needs to be
seen in economic terms, dovetailing as it does with media products and many commercial activities.
TESOL (the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) teaching materials, examinations, know
- how, teachers, and so on is a major commercial enterprise for the British and for the Americans and a
vital dimension of English linguistic neo - imperialism. The English language teaching sector directly
earns nearly 1.3 billion for the UK in invisible exports and our other education related exports earn up to
10 billion more (Lord Neil Kinnock, Chair of the British Council, in the Foreword to Graddol 2006 a
work that charts many variables in the global linguistic mosaic, challenges British monolingual
complacency, and aims, as Kinnock stresses, to strengthen the UK s providers of English language
teaching and broader education business sectors ). The major publishing houses are now global. For
instance Pearson Education s international business has been growing rapidly in recent years, and we
now have a presence in over 110 countries ( http://www.pearson.com/index.cfm?pageid=18 ). The
website of Educational Testing Services of Princeton, NJ, which is responsible for the TOEFL (Test of English
as a Foreign Language) for language profi ciency, declares as their mission: Our products and services
measure knowledge and skills, promote learning and educational performance, and support education and

The
entrenchment of English in many countries world - wide and for many cross national purposes leads Halliday (2006) to make a distinction between
indigenized and standardized Englishes, which he categorizes as international and
professional development for all people worldwide ( www.ets.org , About ETS).

global : English has become a world language in both senses of the term, international and global:
international, as a medium of literary and other forms of cultural life in (mainly) countries of the former
British Empire; global, as the co - genitor of the new technological age, the age of information. [ ] they
obviously overlap. [ ] International English has expanded by becoming world Englishes, evolving so as to
adapt to the meanings of other cultures. Global English has expanded has become
global by taking over, or being taken over by, the new information technology, which means everything

all the other forms of

political and commercial propaganda. Halliday s international is an unfortunate
from email and the internet to mass media advertising, news reporting, and

label, since he is in effect referring to local forms and uses of English, comprehensible within a country, for
instance. His terms also elide the anchoring of global English in the English - dominant countries, where

This
terminology is a minefield which obscures power relations and
hegemonic practices, nationally and internationally.
this is the primary national language and one that also opens international doors.

Debate Key
True representations of history are key to show the kind
of integration of cultural differences that open
communities in the real world.
Besse 04
(Susan K., Professor in the City College division of the CUNY agency, 2004,
Hispanic American Historical Review 84.3 (2004) 411-422, Placing Latin
America in Modern World History Textbooks,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hispanic_american_historical_review/
summary/v084/84.3besse.html, Accessed 7/5/13)
Studying the physical and cultural borderlands where Europeans,
Native Americans, Africans, and Asians met opens important
discussions about the varying and continually changing ways
humans have defined the supernatural, physical space and nature, time,
value and exchange, health and illness, community and identity, gender,
and the other. It points to the schisms between abstract, formal
scientific knowledge and local forms of knowledge; furthermore, by
questioning the possibilities of subaltern forms of knowledge, it
challenges the notion of a universal reason. As nonwhite and nonChristian immigrants to the United States and Europe are changing (or
upsetting, in the view of many) the demographic and cultural landscape of
the West, the history of Latin America can provide illuminating
examples of how heterogeneous cultural communities came into
being through interaction across boundaries of race, religion,
language, and cultural differences. If we seek to tame the violence that
has characterized most of such encounters up until now, we would do well
to introduce our students to some of the literature on cultural
encounters and ethno-racial hybridity. Perhaps greater
understanding of the complexities of such encounters can help
reduce the cultural myopia that breeds fear.

Talking about the dominant forms of education in an

academic debate space is key to developing a new form of
rhetoric that is free from this narrative of domination and
oppression
Baca 10
(Damian, University of Arizona assistant professor of English and Mexican
American studies, Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE, Edited by
Damian Baca and Victor Villanueva, p.12)
Finally, in the spirit of "in xochitl in cuicatl," the Nahuatl phrase for poetics,
Rafael Jesus Gonzalez closes this book collection with "Las Cobijas/The
Blankets." a bilingual narrative that illustrates a wise humility that is at once

matrilineal and material, born of a cuencente-nary of difficult survival.

Collectively, these chapters make the case that rhetorics of the Americas
significantly challenge the vanguard narrative of Occidentalism. Beyond
European modernity, a plurality of rhetorical strategies and points of
origin are possible. Yet neocolonial powers continue to de-authorize
the Americas within a largely unquestioned intellectual dichotomy in
higher education: that of "high" and "low" theory. For example, "high"
theories that inform "Classical Rhetoric" and "Modern Rhetorical
Theorv" hold an institutional and historical ethos that is denied to
those of the Americas. Likewise, in rhetoric curricula at every level,
the Americas hold little academic importance when placed next to
modes of Athenian and Roman argumentation. Rhetoric and
Composition's macro-narrative "from Ancient Greece to Modern America"
continues to imagine the origins of rational thought and
communication in the minds of Western thinkers. This foundational
myth signifies a colonial supremacy that is incompatible with the
very possibility of achieving cultural pluralities. At the same time, a
mere inclu-sion of the scholarship in this book would only add to the
content of an Occidentalist narrative and not reform the
construction of the narrative itself. Even the very concepts of
"alternative rhetorics" and "rhetorics of difference" are already
embedded in the Anglo- and Euro-centered idea of modernity.
Therefore, moves toward decolonizing the field's horizons, toward
moving beyond its cultural and epistemological flaws, require
rhetorical mediations that operate out of Western reason, mediations
that originate from te-ixtli, from the voices, testimonies, communicative
strategies, and perspectives of the colonized. These strategic moves
not only affirm our own ideologies, cultural meanings, and historical
narratives; but they also assert that the colonial foundations of the
West and its presumptions of universal hegemony must be
rethought and retold. These are the activities that may bring us
toward "new" rhetorics and rhetorical inquiries across the Americas,
the Caribbean, and beyond.

Vote Neg
Voting negative reveals the gaps and omissions of the
knowledge produced by the aff, this is the first step to a
true understanding of the world and eliminating
imperialism
Tikly 04
[Leon , Professor in Education at the Graduate School of Education at the
University of Bristol, UK, Education and the New Imperialism, Comparative
Education, May http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134648]
The question remains, however, as to whether there can be an alternative to the 'regime of truth' that
operates around the education and development problematic and whether alternative visions of the
future, of education and even of 'development' itself are possible? After all, as Mudimbe (1988) reminds
us in relation to Africa, even in the most Afrocentric of perspectives on change, the western
epistemological order remains as both context and referent. Indeed, it will not have escaped the
attention of the reader that the present article, like so much 'postcolonial' scholarship, is also written
largely within a western frame of reference, whatever its intentions or commitments! For critics of the

is it possible to conceive of a critical social

theory and epistemology on which an alternative to western
hegemony can be built, and what ought the role of education to be
in this endeavour assuming it were possible? To some extent, this is not a new
new imperialism this poses a dilemma-

problem within the social sciences. It is a problem of how to go beyond the existing order of knowledge
whilst being obliged simultaneously to work within its frameworks. For some critics this has meant
abandoning the whole 'development' problematic entirely. Against this kind of nihilism, however, another
view is that such an abandonment is itself a betrayal of the poor and marginalized. As Tucker (1999)
points out, 'If we were to follow this logic, we would also need to abandon concepts such as socialism,
cooperation and democracy because they have also been abused and manipulated for purposes of
domination and exploitation' (p. 15). In relation to formal education in particular, it is often the poorest
and most marginalized communities that have struggled hardest, both during the period of European
colonialism and subsequently, to create educational opportunities for their children because formal
schooling is still perceived by those with the most to lose as a way out of poverty and destitution. At a
theoretical level I find Santos' (1999) work to be particularly useful in beginning to reconstruct a role for
education. He sets out what he describes as a postmodem critical theory (but for our purposes might
equally be described as a new anti-imperial critical theory). Santos starts by pointing out that

Foucault's great merit was 'to show the opacities and silences
produced by modem science, thus giving credibility to alternative
"regimes of truth", for other ways of knowing that have been
marginalised, suppressed and discredited by modern science' (1999, p.
33). Part of this process or silencing has been to obscure the nature and origins of western science itself.
To begin with, modern science developed in the crucible of Enlightenment thought owes much to the
Islamic world of scholarship. Secondly, modern science from its inception has had both emancipatory and
regulatory dimensions. It was emancipatory to the extent that it sought to bring the threatening chaos of
unmastered natural forces under control in relation to an emerging liberal notion of freedom and equality.
It was regulatory because it excluded from this and indeed sought to dominate and regulate large

Santos'
plea is for a reinvention of 'knowledge as emancipation' based on
the principle of solidarity, and a commitment to praxis. That is to combine a new
knowledge as emancipation with a commitment to meeting localized
needs (here his theory intersects with that of other scholars such as Freire). The principles of
knowledge as emancipation are firstly, that it must move from monoculturalism
towards multiculturalism based on the recognition of the 'Other'
(indigenous and colonized peoples, women, rural dwellers etc.) as producers of knowledge.
sections of humankind including slaves, indigenous peoples, women, children, the poor, etc.
(1999)

This means recognizing the silences, gaps and omissions within and
between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems of knowledge
so as to begin to unearth alternative ways of knowing the world.
However, this also entails a recognition of difference (see also Crossley & Watson,
2003). Rather than posit one 'knowledge as emancipation' it requires recognizing a multitude of voices of
the historically marginalized and to work towards a theory of translation, a hermeneutics that makes it
possible for the needs, aspirations and practices of a given culture to be understood by another. Thirdly,

knowledge as emancipation involves developing greater awareness

and links between the production of knowledge and its likely impact,
that is, in contextualizing knowledge production rather than
separating it off as a technical area of expertise and in creating an
ongoing critical and deconstructive approach towards forms of
knowledge power. Finally, however, and going beyond deconstruction, Santos (1999) urges us to
reconstruct the idea of emancipatory social action and to 'inquire into the specific forms of socialisation,
education, and work that promote rebellious, or on the contrary, conformist, subjectivities' (p. 41).Within
the educational sphere and within the context of this article, Santos' challenges lead us to inquire as to
what conditions are necessary for transforming education as a disciplinary technology into a potentially
liberatory institution based on a view of knowledge not as a means of western control and of regulation
of non-western populations but of emancipation from the new imperialism. A few brief points, however,
are relevant here. Firstly, as Sardar (1999) has pointed out: Resistancet o Eurocentricisma, and hence
development, can only come from non-Western concepts and categories. The non-Western cultures and
civilisations have to reconstruct themselves, almost brick by brick, in accordance with their own world

the non-West has to

rediscover its lost and suppressed

views and according to their own norms and values. This means that
create a whole new body of knowledge,

intellectual heritage, and shape a host of new disciplines. (p. 57)

Block Stuff

Discourse First
Discourse shapes reality specifically in the context of
education about Latin America - even if they win that
their plan isnt imperialist, the way they frame it makes
the link exponentially bigger
Beech 02
[Jason,

Director of the BA in Education at the Universidad de San Andres in

Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he also teaches Comparative Education.
Latin American Education: Perceptions of Linearities and the Construction of
Discursive Space, Educational Transfer, November,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3099544]
educational
systems in Latin America do not derive from voluntary educational borrowing. Similarities are
rather a result of cultural imperialism and neo-colonialism exercised
especially by international agencies that have imposed a 'neo-liberal
agenda' on Latin American countries in order to keep them
economically, politically and culturally dependent . This view is represented by
The perspective which stresses 'domination' argues that the similarities of national

much of the writing by Martinez Boom (2000) and Corragio (1997). Even though the sharing of similar
problems amongst Latin American nations and the processes of cultural imperialism can be noted, this
article suggests a different perspective- based on the analysis of discourse-to understand the similarities in
the Latin American educational reforms. A perspective that puts discourse at the centre of the analysis
explains the similarity in the latest educational reforms in Latin America by the existence of a regional
educational discourse: a discourse that has Latin American education as its object.

The way in

which we view the world, the way in which we think and speak or
write about the world affects the way in which we act upon it. Thus,
the existence of a regional educational discourse creates the
conditions of possibility for certain things to be said and done in
Latin American education, but at the same time this discourse
implies a limit on educational thought and action. In other words, why is it that
of all the things that could be said and done in Latin American education only certain things are said and
done? Overall, then, this essay offers an analysis of the process by which the Latin American discursive
space is constructed in the educational literature. The argument is that there are a number of themes that
dominate contemporary 'Latin American educational discourse' and that this can partly explain the
similarities in the latest educational reforms in the region. This closed discursive space creates the
conditions for the production of certain ideas and practices, but at the same time it becomes a limit for
the production of other ideas and practices.

Epistemology Stuff
The affs approach to globalized knowledge subverts local
knowledge and prevents opposition, their epistemology is
upheld through the destruction of local knowledges
Alcadipani and Rosa 11
[Rafael, Associate Professor of Organizational Studies in the Sao Paulo School
of. Management of Getulio Vargas Foundation and Alexandre Reis Rosa,
Professor of Management, Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES).
Organization Studies, Public and Nonprofit, Discourse Analysis,From global
management to local management: Latin American perspectives as a
counter-dominant management epistemology, Canadian Journal of
Administrative Sciences, January 4, Wiley interscience]
This approach raises arguments both for and against globalization (Kellner, 2002). Those in favour of
globalization see an end to borders as a positive thing, which will create new economic, political, and

critics of globalization consider it a form

of imperialism that takes advantage of the end of borders to impose
market and capital logics throughout the world (Kellner, 2002). These two
possibilities can lead us to ask: What is managements role in the global
picture? As an area of academic knowledge and social practice, management is a globally
cultural opportunities. On the other hand,

widespread phenomenon. It is taught at almost all the worlds universities, and practiced professionally

this
global aspect also implies that management knowledge and
practices generated and developed in Western countries, especially
in the United States (US), can then be seamlessly transferred to
other contexts (i.e., Jack, Calas, Nkomo, & Peltonen, 2008). The assumption is that
knowledge in management can be universally applicable and is, supposedly, neutral.
The resultant view is that management globalization is positive, and
is indeed an opportunity created by globalization. On the other hand, if
analyzed from a critical perspective and from the viewpoint of Latin America a
region that is a recipient of management knowledge and practicesthe process can pose
many problems. This is especially because globalized management tends to
impact management knowledge and experiences developed locally. The logic behind
this impact is linked to a wider context in which epistemologies are based on a
dividing line that creates a hierarchy of knowledge and that
subordinates local thinking (which is considered as particular) to global thinking
(which is considered universal. This unequal knowledge-power relationship, which
undermines the particular knowledge of many colonized peoples, is called
and nonprofessionally in all corporations, governments, NGOs, and so forth. However,

coloniality of power by Quijano (2000), and the manner in which this epistemological difference was
(re)produced is called abyssal thinking by Santos (2007). Both of them define lines that divide

On
one side is the hegemonic, useful, intelligible, and visible knowledge
produced by the North (or First World), and on the other is the inferior,
useless or dangerous, and unintelligible knowledge produced by the
South (or Third World), which is meant to be forgotten . In management terms,
experiences, knowledge, and social players into two groups that inhabit each side of the abyss.

this means that the colonial meeting between Northern and Southern knowledge has created a
naturalized view that useful, intelligible, and visible ways to manage an organization are necessarily
found in the knowledge produced in the North. Here North refers to the countries in the Northern
Hemisphere formed by Europe and the US and South refers to countries in the Southern Hemisphere,
formed by regions that were colonized by Europe but which have not achieved the same level of
development as the North (Santos, 1995).

Independent reason to vote neg rejecting the colonizers

is the only way to create a true epistemology
Alcadipani and Rosa 11
[Rafael, Associate Professor of Organizational Studies in the Sao Paulo School
of. Management of Getulio Vargas Foundation and Alexandre Reis Rosa,
Professor of Management, Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES).
Organization Studies, Public and Nonprofit, Discourse Analysis,From global
management to local management: Latin American perspectives as a
counter-dominant management epistemology, Canadian Journal of
Administrative Sciences, January 4 2011, Wiley interscience]
To consider management from a Southern point of view means to
reclaim the principle that the world is epistemologically diverse and
that this diversity could enrich human capacity to manage and
organize social life. It also means denouncing coloniality and
reclaiming other types of knowledge that have resisted the colonial
encounter and that today are deprived of a horizontal dialogue with
Northern knowledge. It is to defend global perspective for management. In this sense, this
article aims at denaturalizing management by exploring its diversity in the world, particularly regarding
the way in which management is conceived and carried out in Latin American contexts and by exploring
how this can help change current global management. This article will show how management has
spread around the world as a North American phenomenon, becoming characterized as an agent of

Americanization of management led to the

emergence of the global management perspective and, as a result,
took on the aspect of epistemic coloniality, as problems might emerge during
its encounter with local realities. For this reason, based on ideas conceived by Latin American
social scientists and on the experiences of local organizations, this article defends a global
management approach that takes into consideration local realities
and challenges knowledge produced in the North.
Americanization. We argue that this

General Framework Evidence

Understanding the oppression of imperialism is key for
scholarly discussions
Sachs 03
[Aaron , professor of history and American studies at Cornell University and
an award-winning environmental journalist. The Ultimate "Other": PostColonialism and Alexander Von Humboldt's Ecological Relationship with
Nature, History and Theory, December, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590683]
There is no denying the value of the post-colonial critique and its relevance to all studies of travel and the

In a
world so profoundly shaped-damaged, I would argue-by colonialism and
imperialism, it is imperative that scholars focus on celebrating the
colonized, on hearing the voices of "others." We must understand all
the ways in which Western civilization has come to depend directly
on forms of domination. Indeed, it makes perfect sense, as David Spurr has noted in The
environment. Post-colonialism, at its best, means recuperating the objects of the traveler's gaze.

Rhetoric of Empire (1993), that "works once studied primarily as expressions of traditionally Western ideals
are now also read as evidence of the manner in which such ideals have served in the historical process of
colonization."16

Imperialism is held up through discourse, voting aff only

normalizes it more
Pease 02
[Donald, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities,
Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, and founding director
of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. Imperial
Discourse, Diplomatic History, December 17, Wiley interscience]
As grounds for associating questions of foreign policy with travelers itineraries and museum exhibits, Endy
and Conn both depended on an understanding of the role that discourse played in fashioning imperialism

As a discourse, imperialism correlated a broad

range of cultural spheres to solicit the publics consent to
imperialism as a U.S. foreign policy but also to the domestic arrangements that policy valorized. It
as an American way of life.

reorganized such disparate practices as museum displays and traveling abroad within a much more
inclusive network of linguistic and extra-linguistic practices that naturalized imperial norms. Conn
highlighted this discourses hegemonizing effects when he remarked that American imperialism was not
exclusively, or even most importantly, an episode in American foreign relations, presidential policy, or
military history. The

process of Empire took place on a multiplicity of

terrains, domestic and foreign, public and private . I have mentioned the
hegemonizing aspect of the discourse of imperialism because of the parts played by Wilsons commercial

the discourse of
imperialism forged a hegemony out of linkages between such
unrelated cultural terrains as travel and ethnographic exhibits, I propose an addendum to
museum and imperial travel in producing it. In discussing the means whereby

Conns and Endys fine essays. In what follows, I hope to track one of the relays whereby imperialism
became an American way of life through an analysis of three interdependent aspects in evidence in Conns
and Endys discussions. The analysis shall begin with an account of how Wilsons museum displaced the
distinction between (Europes) territorial and (U.S.) commercial expansionism from a contested point
within the field of debate into a normative presupposition that regulated its terms. Discussion will then

the discourse of imperialism

constructed linkages between travel abroad and ethnic and racial
hierarchies in the domestic sphere. The question of the relationship between Conns
move to a topic that Endy left out of his essay, namely, how

and Endys knowledges and the hegemonizing discursive formation they analyze will shape the contours
of this entire discussion.

The education created by the affirmative team is uniquely

bad because it is used to engrain colonialism within
society
Kumaravadivelu 99
[B. Kumaravadivelu, professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at San Jos
State University. Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis, TESOL Quarterly,
Autumn , http://www.jstor.org/stable/3587674]
Postcolonial theorists offer a refreshingly challenging perspective on education in general and on English

education was "a massive canon in

the artillery of empire," effecting, in Gramsci's (1971) phrase, "a domination by consent" (p.
28). They also tell us that language is a fundamental site of struggle for postcolonial discourse because the colonial process itself begins in
language. The control over language by the imperial centre-whether achieved by displacing native
language education in particular. They tell us that

languages, by installing itself as a "standard" against other variants which are constituted as
"impurities,"or by planting the language of empire in a new place-remains the most potent instrument of
cultural control. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1995, p. 283) Perhaps no language is as much implicated in
colonialism as English is. Several postcolonial commentators have pointed out that the same ideological
climate informed both the growth of English and the growth of Empire. In her pioneering study Masks of
Conquest, Viswanathan (1989) argues that in colonial India, the English literary text functioned as a
mask that camouflaged the conquering activities of the colonizing authority. She wonders at the historical
"irony that English literature appeared as a subject in the curriculum of the colonies long before it was
institutionalized in the home country" (p. 3) of England. Noting that "the superiority of English rested on a
racialized and gendered equation between language and nation" (p. 20), Krishnaswamy's (1998)
Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire shows how colonialists relied "heavily upon a vocabulary of
effeminacy to describe and codify Eastern languages and literatures while defining European languages
and literatures, especially English, as hard, energetic, rational, and masculine" (p. 20). Connecting this
line of thinking specifically to English language teaching (ELT), Pennycook (1998), in English
and the Discourses of Colonialism, offers an in-depth analysis of what he calls "the continuity of cultural
constructs of colonialism" (p. 19) and demonstrates how ELT is deeply

interwoven with the

discourses of colonialism. ELT, he argues, is a product of colonialism notjust because it is colonialism that produced the initial conditions for the global spread of English but

because it was colonialism that produced many of the ways of

thinking and behaving that are still part of Western cultures.
European/Western culture not only produced colonialism but was also produced by it; ELT not only
rode on the back of colonialism to the distant corners of the Empire
but was also in turn produced by that voyage. (p. 19)

The education that the aff claims their framework

sponsors is just a tool used by imperialists to hold power
and control over their subjects
Tikly 04
[Leon , Professor in Education at the Graduate School of Education at the
University of Bristol, UK, Education and the New Imperialism, Comparative
Education, May 2004, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134648]
Modern forms of education with their roots in western cultures and civilizations have
been deeply implicated in and provide a common thread between European
imperialism and colonialism and the new imperialism. Firstly, formal educational
institutions have provided a key disciplinary institution within the
context of classical and settler colonialism. It provided in many contexts a basis for the
exercise of the pastoral power of the colonial missionaries who often controlled formal schooling.
Through reinforcing and legitimizing the trusteeship status of the colonial master through a particular
interpretation of the bible, it helped to forge the colonized as colonial subjects rather than as equal
citizens. This imperative of schooling, however, often clashed with a more 'modernist', economic
imperative, namely to prepare through the inculcation of basic skills, dispositions and attitudes,
indigenous workers intended largely to staff the colonial administrations. For the small minority who
progressed beyond basic education, colonial schooling was also 'disciplinary' in another sense because it
inculcated these indigenous elites into a western way of thinking based on western forms of knowledge,
part of a process that scholars such as Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (1981) and more recently, Nandy (1997) have
described as a 'colonisation of the mind'. The effects of colonial schooling were, however, contradictory.
To begin with the experience differed slightly with respect to differing colonizing powers and contexts.
Secondly, however, the effects of schooling on those who were subject to it was to produce a bifurcation,
a split in the loyalties and identities of the colonized that Fanon (1970) captures so vividly in his metaphor
of Black skins white masks. Thirdly, the spread of the western episteme based on Eurocentric
conceptions of human nature and of social reality, led in some cases to the development of oppositional
discourses although these were inevitably couched within a western discursive framework, most usually
either liberalism or Marxism. Following independence, formal education continued to operate as a

education remained in
missionary hands, although as schooling increasingly became
subject to government control in many countries, it was used by
emerging elites as a tool for transforming colonial subjects into new
kinds of postcolonial identities linked to alternative forms of
sovereignty. In some instances, the receivers of formal education remained
as subjects of a new illiberal sovereignty under dictatorial and
oppressive regimes or under one party rule. In other cases, they were constituted
more as citizens of an emerging liberal form of state. Postcolonial education was not just
disciplinary technology in both senses of the term. To begin with,

disciplinary in the sense that it sought to forge postcolonial subjectivities in relation to new political

was also disciplinary in that it extended the

modernist, economic imperative of schooling through the gradual
expansion of formal education at all levels in the post-independence
period. This belief in the modernist view of the role of formal schooling was a necessary precondition
imperatives and identities. It

for the subsequent spread of global governmentality.

This form of education turns the workforce of a nation

into human capital to be spent by the imperialist nation
and it entrenches imperialism into everyday life
Tikly 04

[Leon , Professor in Education at the Graduate School of Education at the

University of Bristol, UK, Education and the New Imperialism, Comparative
Education, May 2004, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134648]
Education has historically had a key role to play in relation to the
development project for all of the multilateral agencies. Education
was, however, constructed in different ways in relation to the overall object of
development, namely, economic growth and poverty reduction. From
the perspective of the United Nations and the non-aligned movement, for example, education was often
constructed as a basic human right and the extension of education was a means for extending a notion
of global citizenship (although as Santos (1999) reminds us, this form of global citizenship and of human
rights implied in these discourses often remained a peculiarly western one). Of more relevance here was

education was constructed, following the ground-breaking theoretical

work of Theodore Schultz in the discourses of the World Bank in primarily economic terms
as a question of raising 'human capital'. Human capital theory has
remained a central tenet of World Bank thinking on education and has proved
the extent to which

to be a flexible and resilient discursive resource (Fagerlind & Saha, 1989; Ilon, 1996; Rose, 2002; Little,

human capital
was primarily conceived of in terms of its contribution to raising
GNP. In this discursive context, the World Bank and the other agencies supported a range of projects
2003). As Ilon (1996) has argued, in the post-war period and until the late 1970s,

to expand the skills base of low-income countries to provide the necessary human capital to kick-start the

human capital was conceived largely as a

'technical' question of inculcating the necessary skills required for
economic competitiveness and growth. As such, human capital theory contributed to
industrialization process. In this context,

the de-politicization of development discourse mentioned above through removing reference to the role of

In human capital discourses, the

notion of skills was itself conceived in terms of discrete
competencies acquired by individuals, with little attention paid to
the social nature of many skills (such as team work, communication, etc.) and to the
education in relation to reproducing social inequality.

cultural context of skills acquisition. By way of contrast, more recent work, within a skills formation
framework has emphasized these dimensions as a key to understanding different skills paths adopted by
different countries and regions (Brown 1998; Tikly et al., 2003). In these formulations, social, cultural and
political factors and differences in context are seen to play a key role in determining the skills formation
strategy adopted. Human capital theory also has a distinctive cultural bias. In the 1960s and 1970s, for
example, the development of human capital through education was seen as a key means to promote
'modernization' (Fagerlind & Saha, 1989). This was achieved through the further institutionalization of a
form of western education in the post-independence era. The nature of this bias has, however, changed in

Given the obvious failure of the

human capital/modernization coupling to promote growth and to
reduce poverty, attention shifted during the 1980s to the role of human
capital in determining levels of resource allocation to different
levels of education. Here, George Psacharopoulos' (1983) work on individual and social rates of
relation to the uses of human capital theory itself.

return to different levels of education was significant. In relation to rates of return analysis, primary
education is seen as a principal means to eradicate poverty because of its relatively high social rates of
return to gross domestic product (GDP) and growth. In this way, human capital theory became linked to
structural adjustment lending and the increased use of development targets by multilateral agencies.

This new role for education, however, only serves to reinforce the
new imperialism through further limiting the capacity of low-income
countries to determine their own educational agendas. Dependency and the
resulting incapacity generated are reinforced through the disciplinary mechanisms of poverty-conditional
lending, poverty reduction strategies and international target setting, as highlighted above. Firstly, as
has been argued elsewhere and is gradually being recognized by some of the multi-lateral development
agencies themselves, the over-emphasis on primary education at the expense of other levels of education

removes the indigenous capacity for research and innovation which is centrally important if countries are
to link education to indigenously determined future development priorities (Crossley, 2001; Tikly, 2003b;
Tikly et al., 2003). Secondly, as Rose (2003) points out, education and training are treated as a black box
in relation to the underlying processes that take place. In this context, and given the continued hegemony

education will continue to

serve as a basis for a Eurocentric kind of education for most of the
world's children.
of western text books, materials and resources, it is likely that

A2 Perm (Do Both)

The permutation promotes an imbalanced relationship in
where there is always a giver and a recipientthis
creates cycles of dependence and debt which prevent
autonomy and justice
Arrigo and Williams 2k
(Bruce A., Christopher R., professor of law @ the University of North Carolina and
associate professor of criminology @ the University of West Georgia, Possibility of
Democratic Justice and the Gift of the Majority : On Derrida, Deconstruction, and
the Search for Equality, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice)
Derrida's explication of the gift provides an insightful metaphor with which to
analyze the current state of sociopolitical affairs regarding traditionally
subjugated populations. The advances made by the state regarding
minority citizen groups, particularly within the context of employment (economic) and education (social), are gifts.13 Legislative enactments designed
to foster the growth of equality and thereby democratic justice (i.e., standards of
what is "right and fair") produce hegemonic effects constitutive only of nar cissistic power.14 These effects are eclipsed by counterfeit, although impactful,
offerings. The omnipotence of majority sensibilities in Western cultures, particularly
in the United States, has produced an exploitative and nongiving existence for
under- and nonrepresented citizen groups. Despite the many rights-based
movements during the past several decades that have ostensibly conferred to
minorities such abstract gifts as liberty, equality, and freedom, there
remains an enduring wall dividing the masses from those on whom such
awards are bestowed. This fortified separation is most prominent in the (silent)
reverberations of state and federal legislative reforms.15 Relying on Derrida's
(1991,1992,1997) critique, we can regard such statutory reform initiatives as
gifts; that is, they are something given to non-majority citizens by those in
power; they are tokens and emblems of empowerment in the process of
equality and in the name of democratic justice. The majority is presenting
something to marginalized groups, something that the giver holds in its
entirety: power.16 The giver or presenter of such power will never, out of
capitalistic conceit and greed, completely surrender that which it owns. It
is preposterous to believe that the narcissistic majority would give up so
much as to threaten what they own; that is, to surrender their hospice and
community while authentically welcoming in the other as stranger. This form of
open-ended generosity has yet to occur in Western democratic societ ies
and, perhaps, it never will. Thus, it is logical to assume that, although
unconscious in some respects, the efforts of the majority are parsimonious
and intended to secure (or accessorize) their own power.17 The following two
means by which a gift enables self-empowerment were already alluded to by
Derrida (1997): (a) the giver (i.e., the sender or majority) either bestows to

show off his or her power or (b) gives to mobilize a cycle of reciprocation
in which the receiver (i.e., the minority) will be indebted. It is for these
reasons that the majority gives. This explanation is not the same as authentically
supporting the cause of equality in furtherance of a cultural politics of difference
and recognition.

Alt is mutually exclusive- neoliberalism has created the

demand for a new form of social struggle that the state
cannot engage in
Stahler-Sholk 07
[Richard, professor of political science at Eastern Michigan University,
Resisting Neoliberal Homogenization: The Zapatista Autonomy Movement,
Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 2, (Mar.), pp. 48-63]
Subcomandante
Marcos tells the camera that the rebels rose up against the Mexican
government in 1994 only to discover that the Mexican government
didn't exist; instead, they found themselves fighting against the
structures of global capital.1 Social movements do not literally resist neoliberalism; they

In the documentary ?Zapatista! there is a scene in which the ski-masked

resist a specific landlord's hired guns trying to drive them off the land they need for subsistence or a
specific agency that privatizes their water supply and triples the rates. In Mexico they resist a golf course

concrete
manifestations of a global logic that disempowers people who lack
capital and ignores their right to establish their own priorities . A
growing number of movements in Latin America are engaging in
innovative organizing against the injustices of the neoliberal paradigm
(Gills, 2000), departing from the revolutionary focus on seizing state
power (Foran, 2003). Privatization, fiscal austerity, and economic liberalization have resulted in the
in Tepoztl?n, an air

port in San Salvador Ateneo, a Costeo in Cuernavaca?all local and

contraction and redeployment of the state, shifting the locus of political struggles away from direct
contestation for state power and opening new spaces to contestation (by new movements and old) over
whether they will be controlled from above or below. The Mexican state acts increasingly as a broker for
global capital as it attempts to re-regulate the conditions for accumulation on a global scale.
Neoliberalism involves not simply a headlong retreat of the state but rather a renegotiation of state-

The attempted recomposition of capitalist hegemony

included targeted social compensation programs such as the National Solidarity
society relations.

Program?PRONASOL. These somewhat contradictory efforts to create a reformulated clientelism for the
neoliberal era (Hellman, 1994) one more selective and flexible than the old corporatist structures had
allowed did not entirely succeed in shielding the dominant-party form of the Mexican authoritarian state

shift from state-orchestrated to market

mechanisms of distribution overlapped with new forms of socialmovement-based struggles, ranging from the debtors' movement El Barzon to
from political change. The

independent unions and

neighborhood associations (Williams, 2001; Otero, 2004). As the turn to the

increasingly
independent social sectors formulated their demands not in terms of clien
telistic expectations but in terms of citizenship rights (Fox, 1997). This discourse
of rights is characteristic of the newly constituted social subjects confronting
neoliberalism throughout Latin America by simultaneously claiming
indigenous and other collective rights that markets deny and the citizenship rights that
market left state authorities in control of fewer resources for co-optation,

the neoliberal state pretends to offer equally to all (Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley, 2003). The
Zapatistas organize in newly contested spaces paradoxically created by neoliberal globalization itself

(Stahler-Sholk, 2001), joining independent peasant and liberation-theology organizing that predated the

The forces of globalization that affect class

relations are experienced (and resisted) through a variety of locally relevant
identities, including ethnicity and gender (Nash, 2001; Yashar, 2005). In Chiapas,
neoliberal era (Harvey, 1998)

elaborate structures of labor control were constructed in the centuries after colonization by grafting
them onto co-opted "traditional" religious/civic hierarchies in indigenous communities. Changes in the

Mexico were experienced locally as

community power struggles that went to the core of what it meant
to be part of the indigenous community (Collier, 1994; Rus, 1995). The state
regularly mediated private capitalist development initiatives (e.g.,
logging operations in the Lacandon Jungle in the second half of the twentieth century) by
reinventing indigenous identities and lines of authority in ways
that facilitated the particular strategy of capital accumulation (De Vos, 2002).
Resistance to neoliberalism, then, has taken the form of a
movement for autonomy, with the protagonists struggling for the
right to define themselves culturally, socially, and politically .
global political economy of post-1982 (oil/debt shock)

A2: Imperialism Inevitable

We have an ethical obligation to widen the field of
discussion to include how the imperialist motives form the
world order we live in
Said 03
(Edward, Columbia University, Professor of English and Comparative
Literature, Columbia University, August 5, Orientalism 25 Years Later:
Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-builders,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/05/orientalism/, Accessed 7/5/13)
My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the
fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and
analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping
fury that so imprison us. I have called what I try to do "humanism," a word
I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by
sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting
to dissolve Blakes mind-forgd manacles so as to be able to use ones mind
historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding.
Moreover humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other
interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking
therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist. This it is to
say that every domain is linked to every other one, and that nothing
that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any
outside influence. We need to speak about issues of injustice and
suffering within a context that is amply situated in history, culture,
and socio-economic reality. Our role is to widen the field of
discussion . I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years
advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination,
but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the
Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide.
The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should
be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further
suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and
modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore it would seem to be
a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide
alternative models to the simplifying and confining ones based on
mutual hostility that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for
so long.

Imperialism K Answers

No Link
They confuse the distinction between hegemony and
imperialism. By reducing troops we are maintaining the
hegemonic peace by umpiring, not empiring.
Yilmaz 10
[Sait, Professor and Chief of Strategic Research Center (BUSRC), Beykent
University, State, Power, and Hegemony, December,
http://www.ijbssnet.com/journals/ Vol._1_No._3_December_2010/20.pdf
According to Cox, theories like Realism and Neo-realism were coined to preserve the status quo serving the
interests of rich dominant Western countries and their elite (Cox, 1981: 16-155). Those theories aimed to
make the international order seem natural and unchangeable. Hegemony enabled the dominant state to
spread its moral, political, and cultural values around the society and sub-communities. This was done
through civilian society institutions. Civilian society consists of the net of institutions and practices that are

Hegemony is to produce social and political

systems that are to be applied on the nations targeted. There are many
ideas about the relationship between hegemony and imperialism. Imperialism is defined as
enlarging the dominance of one nation over the other by way of
open political and economical instruments (Heywood, 2007: 392). To explain
the basic difference between the imperialism and hegemony Keohane
says that as hegemony manipulates the relations with no superior body,
imperial powers set their superiority with a senior political body
(Keahone, 1991: 435-439). However imperialists have an approach for expansion
by conquering new territory. Another scholar, Duncan Snidal separates hegemony into
partly autonomous from the state.

three; hegemony implied by conviction, kind but forceful hegemony, and colonialist hegemony based on
force (Snidal, 1986: 579-614). Discrimination between hegemony and dominance is another study subject
argued by many scholars including Machiavelli, Gramsci, and Nye. According to those three intellectuals, a
major power should not just rely on dominance, force, and hard power. Machiavelli advocates respect as a
source of obedience to a major power (Wright, 2004). Gramsci says that a major power itself evokes

a superior power
becomes a hegemonic power by persuading others to cooperate .
willingness and cooperation instinctively (Cox, 1993: 49-66). Nye believes that

Persuasion would be ensured by the utilization of soft power that makes other countries believe in common

according to hegemonic stability theory, major

powers achieve their position unilaterally with the deployment of
hard power but retaining consent and conviction (Keahone, 1984: 11). In
interests (Nye, 2002). However,

another definition, hegemony is the position of having the capability and power to change the rules and
norms of international systems based on ones own motivation and desire (Volgy, 2005: 1-2). If you dont
have enough power to affect global events in line with your own road map, that would be a dangerous
illusion. Susan Strange envisages that hegemony requires two kinds of strength; relational and structural
based (Strange, 1989: 165). Relation based power is the strength to persuade and force the other actors
one by one or in groups. Structural power is the essential capacity to realize the desired rules, norms, and

A hegemon creates or maintains critical

regimes to cooperate in the future, and reduces uncertainty while
other states are in pursuit of their own interests.
operations in the international system.

Permutation do both
Permutation do both an approach will facilitates policy
action is key to re-conceptualize power. The alt alone
ensures cooption, vote aff to use the masters tools to take
down the shed
Park and Wilkins 05
(Jane, lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the
United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Karin, Professor of
Media Studies, Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair, Global
Studies Bridging Disciplines Program at the University of Texas at Austin, ,
Global Media Journal, Re-orienting the Orientalist Gaze,
https://www.academia.edu/609540/_Re-orienting_the_Orientalist_Gaze_
accessed 8/2/15)
By implication, the north/south and west/east divisions conventionally
understood as the way to organize national settings within a global system
are now less relevant. A dominant geometry of development (Shah &
Wilkins, 2004), divides countries along political (communism in east vs.
democracy in west), economic (industrialized north vs. agricultural south),
cultural (modern vs. traditional), and hierarchical (first =west; second
=east, and third=south) lines. However, the validity of these regional
distinctions should be questioned. This model has been critiqued for its
ethnocentric and arrogant vision, collapsing diverse communities
with a wide range of cultural histories into monolithic groups. More
often than not, the interests of domestic elites in poorer countries are
identical to the interests of the elite in the wealthier countries. These
categorizations, such as West/East, are problematic, given rapidly shifting
political-economic contexts involving changing patterns of political and
economic dominance among national actors, the strengthening of regional
institutions and identities, the globalization of economic and communication
systems, and the privatization of industries (Hagopian, 2000; Schuurman,
2000). New global categorizations may need to focus on access to
resources, whether economic, political, social or cultural, within and
across geopolitical territories. Inequity in terms of access to resources
then becomes the overarching concern (Schuurman, 2000). Although we
need to foreground tangible issues related to basic human needs, the broader
concern with access to resources addresses the intangible as well, touching
on social, cultural, political and spiritual resources (Steeves, 2002). Access to
resources builds from ones position within a socio-political network. This
vision offers a more nuanced framework of power, in which networks
offer the possibility for some to reach certain goals, such as
employment, education, media production, policy making, and more.
Power is not only activated within state and corporate institutions,
but also within social groups, though these networks tightly

intersect. While issues of territory are still relevant, particularly when clearly
many groups, such as Palestinians, are struggling for a sovereignty rooted in
place, and nation-states are still critical actors in the global sphere
(Morris & Waisbord, 2001), we need to rethink relationships of power as
partly connected with spatial arrangements (Escobar, 2000; Escobar et
al., 2002), and not just in terms of place. And when we do consider
place, we may need to attend to the critical role of regional actors
and not just the US.

Theory Alone Fails

Permutation do both action is a prerequisite to change.
Exclusively criticizing a problem obscures the effects of
imperialism
Lander 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of
Venezuela and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views
from the South, Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin
American Social Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html,
Accessed 7/5/13) The main currents in postmodernism have not been able to
escape from the limits of a grand Western, Eurocentric narrative. The
recognition of the colonial experience is essentially absent. 4
According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1994,66),Some of the most
radical criticisms coming out of the West today is the result of an
interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West
as Subject....Although the history of 524 Nepantla Europe as subject is
narrativized by the law, political economy and ideology of the West, this
concealed Subject pretends it has no geo-political determinations.
Exploring Foucaults and Gilles Deleuzes contributions, she concludes that
their findings are drastically limited by ignoring the epistemic violence of
imperialism, as well as the international division of labor. Spivak argues that
once the version of a self-contained Western world is assumed, its
production by the imperialist project is ignored (86). Through these
visions, the crisis of European historyassumed as universalbecomes the
crisis of all history. The crisis of the metanarratives of the philosophy of
history, of the certainty of its laws, becomes the crisis of the future as such.
The crisis of the subjects of that history turns into the dissolution of all
subjects. The disenchantment of a Marxist generation that
experienced in its own flesh the political and theoretical collapse of
Marxism and socialism and lived through the existential trauma of the
recognition of the gulag evolves into universal skepticism and the end
of collective projects and politics. This justifies a cool attitude of
noninvolvement, where all ethical indignation in the face of injustice
is absent. In reaction to structuralism, economism, and determinism,
the discursive processes and the construction of meanings are
unilaterally emphasized. Economic relations and all notions of exploitation
disappear from the cognitive map. The crisis of the political and
epistemological totalizing models leads to a withdrawal toward the
partial and local, rendering the role of centralized political, military,
and economic powers opaque. The Gulf War thus becomes no more than
a grand show, a televised superproduction. For these perspectives, the
crisis is not of modernity as such, but of one of its constitutive
dimensions: historical reason (Quijano 1990). Its other dimension,

instrumental reason (scientific and technological development, limitless

progress, and the universal logic of the market),finds neither criticism nor
resistance. History continues to exist only in a limited sense: the
underdeveloped countries still have some way to go before reaching
the finish line where the winners of the great universal competition
toward progress await them. It seems a matter of little importance that
the majority of the worlds inhabitants may never reach that goal, due to the
fact that the consumer patterns and the levels of material well-being of the
central countries are possible only as a consequence of an absolutely
lopsided use of the resources and the planets carrying capacity.

Theory alone cant solve an understanding of the role of

IR in creating change is key to effective criticism
Matin 12
(Kamran, committee member of Centre for Advanced International Theory,
European Journal of International Relations 2013 19: 353 Redeeming the
universal: Postcolonialism and the inner life of Eurocentrism,
http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/19/2/353 pg. 355, date accessed 7/7/13)
My core argument is that there is a fundamental tension between
theory and method in postcolonialism that prevents the translation
of its critique of Eurocentrism into an alternative non-ethnocentric
social theory. For on the one hand, postcolonialism declares macrotheoretical agnosticism toward the social in general, which is manifest
in its categorical rejection of, or deep skepticism toward, the concept of the
universal identified with Eurocentric anticipation and violent pursuit of global
socio-cultural homogeneity. On the other hand, postcolonialism
comprehends colonial socialities in terms of their interactive constitution
through a method whose strategic site of operation is specifically the
intersocietal or the international. But the idea of the international
logically requires a general conception of the social in general
whose historical referent bursts the empirical bounds of any notion
of the social in the singular, whether society, culture, or civilization. This
is for the simple reason that the idea of the international
encompasses, or rather ought to encompass, the interconnected
multiplicity of the social as an ontological property. This mutually
constitutive relation between the social and the international escapes any
theory that is strategically anchored in only one of these two dimensions of
social reality. The apparent theoretical incommensurability of classical IR and
social and political theories is a testimony to this claim (Waltz, 1979; Wight,
1966). A unified theoretical comprehension of the social and the
international must, I therefore contend, be central to any attempt at
supplanting Eurocentrism. This requires an explicit theoretical
incorporation of the universal. But a conception of the universal that
is fundamentally rethought away from being an immanent self-

transcendence of the particular, and re-comprehended as a radical

amenability to, and constitutiveness of, alterity (Cheah, 2008; cf.
Chernilo, 2006). IR with its paradigmatic focus on the condition and
consequences of political multiplicity is arguably a, if not the most, fertile
intellectual ground for pursuing such a theoretical project. That this
intellectual potential has not been realized has a great deal to do
with the supra-social and non-historical conception of the
international by main stream IR theory; a problem that recent historical
sociological scholarship in IR has thrown in to sharp relief (e.g. Lawson,
2006; Rosenberg, 1994; Teschke, 2003). But a historical sociological IR
in and of itself cannot succeed in exorcizing IRs Eurocentric spirit.
The historicization of international relations has to be dialectically
complemented with the internationalization of the social, that is,
the theoretical articulation of the constitutive impact of the interactive
coexistence of multiple societies on internal processes of social change
(Matin, 2007). The idea of uneven and combined development
(Trotsky, 1985), I argue, contains the organic integration of these two
intellectual moves involving an interactive and heterogeneous
notion of the universal. It is therefore imbued with a radical
potential for generating a positive non-ethnocentric international
social theory.

Perm - Methodology
Permutation do both. Engaging in one methodology falls
short. Institutional debate about these issues creates the
possibility for difference
Lander 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of
Venezuela and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views
from South, Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin
American Social Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html,
Accessed 7/5/13)
These debates create possibilities for new intellectual strategies to
address the challenges posed by the crisis of modernity for Latin
American critical theory. In view of the fact that we are at a point in our
work where we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial
context of our studies (Said 1993,6),it is absolutely necessary to question
whether postmodern theories offer an adequate perspective from which to
transgress the colonial limits of modern social thought. Some of the main
issues of postcolonial perspectives have been formulated and taken anew at
different times in the history of Latin American social thought of the latenineteenth and twentieth centuries (Mart 1987; Maritegui 1979; Fals-Borda
1970; 526 Nepantla Fernndez Retamar 1976). There have been
extraordinary developments associated with the revitalization of the
struggles of indigenous peoples in recent decades.5 Nonetheless,
these issues paradoxically have been of relatively marginal concern
in the academic world, outside anthropology and some areas of the
humanities. Western social sciences, which must be applied creatively to the
study of the realities of Latin America, are still assumed to be the best of
universal thought. Due to both institutional and communicational
difficulties, as well as to the prevailing universalist orientations
(intellectual colonialism? subordinate cosmopolitanism?),6 today the Latin
American academy has only limited communication with the vigorous
intellectual production to be found in Southeast Asia, some regions of Africa,
and in the work of academics of these regions working in Europe or the
United States. The most effective bridges between these intellectual
traditions are being offered today by Latin Americans who work in North
American universities (Escobar 1995; Mignolo 1996a,1996b; Coronil 1996,
1997).

Their protest against imperialism empirically fails and

creates the illusion that they create change only the
perm solve by actually removing the military presence
that is colonizing groups now
Clammer 07
[Chelsey, an award-winning essayist who has been published in The Rumpus,
Essay Daily, The Water-Stone Review and Black Warrior Review among many
others, How nonviolence protects the state,
http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2007/07/how-nonviolence-protectsstate.html]
Do anti-war protests really stop the United States from invading
another country? Do pro-choice marches affect legislation on abortion?
Did sit-ins during the Civil Rights movement help to end racism? These
are the questions that Peter Gelderloos asks in his new book How
Nonviolence Protects the State. With a wealth of experience in anti-prison
work, prisoner support organizations,and the anti-war and antiglobalization movements, Gelderloos brings his seasoned perspective to
these important issues. Drawing on large historical events, such as
the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, Gelderloos
shows how pacifists and nonviolent protests have not achieved
the same results that active resistance has. At a time when
everyone in the world, except for the US government, is realizing that US
troops need to leave Iraq now, Gelderloos book argues how ineffective the
current peace movement has been at stopping the war and creating any
sort of political change. Before the war broke out over four years ago,

[s]ome groups, like United for Peace and Justice, suggested the protests
might avert the war. Of course, they were totally wrong, and the protests
totally ineffective. The invasion occurred as planned, despite the millions of people
nominally, peacefully, and powerlessly opposed to it. So how do we
switch our peace movement from marching in the streets to actually
resisting our government and creating change? It is this question that
Gelderloos has a difficult time answering. How Nonviolence Protects the
State is not meant to change any minds. Instead, it reads as a
reassurance for those who already know the ineffectiveness of peace
movements. Gelderloos language is aggressive at times, as he conflates
peace activists with good sheep. But perhaps this is his point . Maybe if
we started to realize that marches and nonviolent protests were ultimately
tools of society to make people feel as if they are creating change, then we
would actually find a way to resist our government and create the change
we want on our own terms. Covering a diverse range of topics, from how

nonviolence is racist to how nonviolence is patriarchal, How Nonviolence

Protects the State is an important book to read for anyone who
recognizes the ineffectiveness of peace activism today. And while the text
doesnt provide many answers, it does inspire the reader to reconsider
her notions of activism and change.

Too Dualistic
Perm solves Their absolutist rejection of imperialism is
too dualistic
Angus 04
(Ian, Professor of humanities at Simon Fraser University, Empire, Borders,
Place: A Critique of Hardt and Negris Concept of Empire.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event /v007/7.3angus.html)
how can one find a limit to the
expansive tendency of empire? The inscription of a border and a politics
of place both pertain to the construction of a limit to expansion and thus
to hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges (xii). While
deterritorialization cannot be exactly reversed, it is not true that this
implies that emancipation must lie in further deterritorialization and that
all reterritorializations are perverse, or fundamentalist. They are
artificiala matter of human artificeto be sure. However, it can be argued that the most profound
and effective anti-neoliberal globalization politics in recent years has
been inspired precisely by inventive reterritorializations, localizations
that retrieve that which has been pushed aside by empire and preserved
by borders. It is a politics of limit to empire so that a plurality of
differences can occurdifferences from empire, not the putative
consumer differences that are equalized by exchanges . Leonard Cohen has pointed
The two critical points that I have made converge on a central issue:

to the problem of empire in this fashion. Things are going to slide in all directions. Wont be nothing. Nothing you can
measure anymore.24 How exactly to define limits, draw borders, to open a space where measure can be taken, will
take a great deal of political debate and action in deciding. There is a lot more to be said and done about this, but I

Their
concept of abstraction is too dualistic, their concept of border too onesided, their concept of history too uni-linear, their concept of place too
shallow, to have much long-term resonance in the anti-neoliberal
globalization alliance. I would put my bets on the construction of borders that allow Others to flourish, a
doubt whether the perspective put forward in Empire will be of much use in this important matter.

politics of place and a defence of communities against exchange value. This is a very different politics whose
difference is perhaps now obscured by the common opposition to empire. But it is different enough that one may
expect it to become generally visible before too long.

Hegemonic cultures do not subvert others; they create a

dynamic dialectic that advances culture for both nations.
Demont-Heinrich 11
[Christof, journalism professor at the University of Denver, Cultural
Imperialism Versus Globalization of Culture: Riding the Structure-Agency
Dialectic in Global Communication and Media Studies, Sociology Compass,
Wiley interscience]
Multiple scholars (Hall 1990; Kraidy 2002; Straubhaar 2007; Tomlinson 1999, etc.) have picked up
the trope of hybridity and hybridization and sought to develop it and refine it, and, in some cases, to claim
it as the analytical and theoretical locus around which international media and communication research

propose the examination of

globalization and culture through the lens of hybridization via his notion of
cultures in contact. According to Hall, new and different cultures hybrids
ought to congeal. Hall (1990) was among the first to

emerge from social and cultural overlapping. This overlapping has

historically taken place in what Hall describes as contact zones.
These are places where cultures intersect, with one typically an
imperialist culture, the other(s) a subordinate one. The dominant,
imperialist culture does not, according to Hall, steamroll the
subordinate culture. Instead, a subordinate culture draws from its
own roots and mixes its culture with elements of the hegemonic
culture. Considerable attention has recently been paid to considering hybridization in terms of power
inequities. Attention has also been given to the challenge of marrying macro- and micro-level analysis.
This, in an attempt to mold an approach which captures the strengths of both cultural imperialist and
globalization of culture perspectives while leaving the weaknesses of each behind. In this section, I
examine and analyze two comparatively recent articles in which some of the scholars at the leading edge
of theorizing globalization, culture, and media seek to forge new, interesting and productive
methodological and theoretical ground. The articles I select are certainly not the only ones I could have
chosen. However, they are thought-provoking and highly relevant to the focus of this article. Rogers (2006)
searches for a middle ground vis-a`-vis the cultural imperialism and globalization of culture continuum and,
more broadly, with respect to a structure and agency continuum in the article, From Cultural Exchange to
Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation. In it, he advances an
intriguing proposal to consider globalization, culture and media through the lens of transculturation.
According to Rogers, Neither pure determinism (vulgar Marxism) nor pure agency (neoliberalism) is
capable of accounting for the dynamics of cultural appropriation in the conditions of cultural dominance
(2006, 482). Here, Rogers locates cultural appropriation in the conditions of cultural dominance while also
acknowledging inequities in global cultural flows, most notably the tremendous televisual and film outflow
as opposed to inflow with respect to the United States. This sets Rogers analysis apart from those which
stop at the dynamics of cultural appropriation and fail to get to the question of cultural dominance or
unequal flows. Rogers also tips his theoretical hat to globalization of culture active audience theorists,
underscoring the importance of the idea of polysemic media texts which, he writes, challenge(d) simplistic
models of ideological domination (483). Rogers ultimately proposes a typology of cultural appropriation
based on four categories: Exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation. He devotes the final
third of his article to transculturation and to making an argument for its comparative superiority as a
theoretical and analytical instrument by which to engage the intersections among globalization, media,
and culture. Transculturation, he writes, refers not only to a more complex blending of cultures than the
previous categories but also to a set of conditions under which such acts occur: globalization,
neocolonialism, and the increasing dominance of transnational capitalism vis-a`-vis nation states (2006,
491). Rogers makes his primary appeal to the trans. However, it is worth asking: Does the reality of a

no single national actor, or group of

social actors, has more control over the emergent trans-based system than
another? It seems to me that the condition of transculturlarity is likely to
be different sometimes dramatically so for different people and
peoples around the world, all of them positioned differently sometimes
growing tendency toward the trans mean that

radically so vis-a`-vis this social phenomenon. As a critical scholar, I am especially interested here in the
question of power differentials in terms of the condition of transculturalarity how can we most usefully
and effectively understand, theorize, and address such differentials in a transcultural world while keeping
the question of inequality squarely in view? Conclusion: melding the macro and micro, the global and local,
and production and consumption Kraidy and Murphys call for a comparative, empirically grounded
translocalism and Rogers appeal to a transcultural approach represent the leading edge of global

the field is a highly

seeks to tap the strengths of cultural imperialism and
globalization of culture perspectives while also aiming to avoid some
of their weaknesses. This melding of the two approaches
undoubtedly has resulted in, and will continue to result in, the
development of a more sophisticated and nuanced theoretical base
from which to better understand the complex interplay among
globalization, culture, and media. Ultimately, it seems to me that the most
effective middle ground approach would situate local, creative
communication theory. In general, the direction in which they seek to push
productive one as it

appropriation of cultural objects against the backdrop of those

larger regional and global macro-forces which play a significant role
in the question of which cultural objects are widely available in
which particular cultural contexts, and which ones are not. This
approach which would keep an eye both on productive and consumptive players and actors
would also seek to acknowledge the many complexities and
paradoxes that characterize the intersections among globalization,
culture, and media, including, for example, the ways in which the local, national, regional, and
global constitute one another (Kraidy and Murphy 2008). Ideally, such an approach would
also pay attention to the ways in which resistance to local or regional
cultural hegemony can paradoxically fuel national or international
cultural hegemony. More concretely, it would, for example, acknowledge the ways in which, in
Quebec, an individual business owners decision to post a store sign in English only rather than in English
and French in an attempt to resist and challenge the regional imposition of French in Quebec might also be
understood as contributing to the hegemony of English on a national, North American, and global scale. If
paying attention to cross-cutting tendencies and paradox, for example, to the ways in which the global
growth of MTV or McDonalds is heavily dependent upon localization strategies that, at a broad level of
analysis, are comparatively homogenous, is crucial and it is it is equally important to engage processes
of globalization at multiple levels of analysis. In other words, while it is crucial to pay attention to the
reality of widespread localization of cultural products, in other words, to undeniable cultural difference, it is
equally important to pay close attention to similarities and comparative homogenization. This means
examining the ways in which the macro-sociological processes and forces of globalization are realized in,
and shaped by, the micro-practices of everyday life. What, for example, does it mean in terms of larger
macro-sociological forces such as the global spread of fast food culture and global popular music when a
Nigerian immigrant to Brazil sits down and helps herself to a Big Mac to the strains of a Celine Dion song in
English in Sao Paulo? Alternatively, how do we make sense of, and meaningfully situate against the
backdrop of the increasing global prevalence of English, a decision by Slovenian pop music group such as
Siddharta to re-record its top songs in English? We might read the first example as an instance of
increasing cultural hybridization, or, rather differently, as indicative of the increasing homogeneity of
modern life. Alternatively, it could be read as indicative of both of these tendencies. And we might read the
second example primarily as an instance of a musical group tapping English to realize greater global
agency, or, rather differently, primarily as a micro-act that when added together with thousands of
similar micro-acts contributes to the very thing that necessitates that Siddharta sing in English in the first

the challenge for global communication

studies lies in constructing an analytical approach that doesnt lean too
far toward a macro or micro-level perspective, but which effectively
and critically takes both into account at the same time. This is not an
place, meaning the global hegemony of English. Ultimately,

easy, nor necessarily unproblematic, task. Indeed, the difficulty of perhaps the impossibility of putting
aside ones assumptions about the nature of the relationship between the human social whole and the
individual is surely one of the primary reasons for the often heated debates that have swirled around, and
which will continue to swirl around, how best to approach theorizing and studying the relation between the
global and local and culture and media. As contentious as these debates have been and as passionate as
they continue to be, it seems clear that, as Fornas (2008), Jansson (2009), and others have noted, global
communication and media studies has generally moved beyond the polarization that once characterized
the field. Thus, there appears to be general agreement that one cannot adequately grasp the nexus
between globalization and culture by looking exclusively at the realm of cultural production or by zeroing
in only on local, individual acts of creative cultural appropriation. This doesnt mean that disagreement and
debate have disappeared from global communication and media studies, or that the disagreement that
remains does not revolve around some of the same issues that it has in the past, most notably, the
question of where the balance of power primarily resides in the global local equation. However, it does
mean global communication and media studies is moving toward building approaches to engaging and
understanding the global local-culture media dynamic in more sophisticated and productive fashion than
it has in the past. In short, it shows that the field is not stagnant and that it is not being held back by
entrenched thinking. Indeed, it is, as Rogers (2006) and Kraidy and Murphys (2008) recent work shows,
very definitely moving forward. In the end, this is exactly what ought to be happening with theory, whether
its focused on the interplay between globalization, media and culture, or, more broadly, on the general
nature of human social being in the world.

Impact turns
Imperialism is necessary to solve poverty, democracy,
human rights, warwe are not the type of empire the neg
claims
Barnett 11
(Thomas P.M. Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research
Department, U.S. Naval War College,The New Rules: Leadership
Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads, March 7
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/the-new-rulesleadership-fatigue-puts-u-sand- globalization-at-crossroads,)
It is worth first examining the larger picture: We live in a time of
arguably the greatest structural change in the global order yet
endured, with this historical moment's most amazing feature being
its relative and absolute lack of mass violence. That is something to

consider when Americans contemplate military intervention in Libya,

because if we do take the step to prevent larger-scale killing by
engaging in some killing of our own, we will not be adding to some
fantastically imagined global death count stemming from the ongoing
"megalomania" and "evil" of American "empire." We'll be engaging in
the same sort of system-administering activity that has marked our
stunningly successful stewardship of global order since World War II.
Let me be more blunt: As the guardian of globalization, the U.S.
military has been the greatest force for peace the world has ever
known. Had America been removed from the global dynamics that
governed the 20th century, the mass murder never would have
ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable there would now be no
identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered
the killing equation. But the world did not keep sliding down that path
of perpetual war. Instead, America stepped up and changed
everything by ushering in our now-perpetual great-power peace. We
introduced the international liberal trade order known as
globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its spread. What
resulted was the collapse of empires, an explosion of democracy, the
persistent spread of human rights, the liberation of women, the
doubling of life expectancy, a roughly 10-fold increase in adjusted
global GDP and a profound and persistent reduction in battle deaths
from state-based conflicts. That is what American "hubris" actually

delivered.

US imperialism is benevolentnot the same type of

imperialism your authors are talking about
Boot 06
(Max, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "Power for Good", The
Weekly Standard. 10 April. Vol. 11, Issue 28, Factiva)
Ever since the end of the Cold War, experts of various stripes have been
grappling with the nature of American power. Clearly, with the demise of
its only major rival, the United States became really, really powerful. So
powerful that the old term superpower doesnt seem to cut it anymore.
A French foreign minister suggested that hyperpower was more
appropriate, but that hasnt caught on. Other analysts have called the
United States a hegemon, a global policeman, even an empire. Ive been
known to use the latter label myself, even though the United States is
no longer a territorial empire of the Roman type (as it was in the
days of Manifest Destiny). Michael Mandelbaum, professor of
American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies, doesnt think much of those who want to cloak the
old Republic in imperial ermine. American influence in the world is
certainly considerable, he writes, but the United States does not
control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other
societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that
turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule. He prefers to label the
United States the worlds government, though its hard to see why
thats much of an improvement. As Mandelbaum himself admits, There
aremany governments in the world and the global role of the United
States, expansive though it is, does not look much like any of them. His
case for labeling the United States a global government, rather than a
global empire, rests on a rickety foundation. Traditionally, he notes,
the imperial power has been seen as a predator, drawing
economic profit and political gain from its control of the imperial
possession, while the members of the society it controls suffer.
The United States, he correctly notes, does not exploit any states
in this way. Instead, it provides the whole world with valuable
public goodsprincipally protection from predatorsthat are
welcomed by most of the worlds states. But that hardly makes it
that different from the British Empire, which also performed all sorts of
public services, such as stamping out the slave trade and piracy.
Mandelbaum may see the United States as a particularly benign great
power, and he is not wrong to do so; but most empires of the past also
saw themselves as advancing a mission civilisatrice. His assurance that
the United States means ithonestly!is not likely to mollify Americas
critics. Nor is his choice of terminology particularly reassuring. I cant see
some mandarin at the Quai dOrsay (the French foreign ministry) slapping
himself on the forehead and exclaiming, So they are not an empire after
all. Theyre only the worlds government. What a relief. Vive les Etats-

Unis! The value of The Case for Goliath does not lie in its central conceit
the United States as the worlds governmentbut in the arguments
Mandelbaum advances for why American power serves the interests of
other countries. The case he makes is not particularly novel (William
Odom and Robert Dujarric made similar points in their 2004 book,
Americas Inadvertent Empire), but it bears repeating at a time when the
publishing industry is churning out reams of paranoid tomes with titles
like Rogue Nation, The Sorrows of Empire, and The New American
Militarism. Mandelbaum begins by listing five security benefits the United
States offers the world. First, the continuing deployment of American
troops in Europe is a reassurance that no sudden shifts in
Europes security arrangements would occur. Second, the United
States has reduced the demand for nuclear weapons, and the
number of nuclear-armed countries, to levels considerably below
what they otherwise have reached, both by attempting to stop
rogue states from acquiring nukes and by providing nuclear
protection to countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
that would otherwise go nuclear. Third, the United States has
fought terrorists across the world and waged preventive war in
Iraq to remove the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Fourth, the
United States has undertaken humanitarian interventions in such places
as Bosnia and Kosovo, which Mandelbaum likens to the practice,
increasingly common in Western countries, of removing children from the
custody of parents who are abusing them. Fifth, the United States has
attempted to create the apparatus of a working, effective,
decent government in such dysfunctional places as Haiti and
Afghanistan. Mandelbaum also points to five economic benefits
of American power. First, the United States provides the security
essential for international commerce by, for instance, policing
Atlantic and Pacific shipping lanes. Second, the United States
safeguards the extraction and export of Middle Eastern oil, the
lifeblood of the global economy. Third, in the monetary realm,
the United States has made the dollar the worlds reserve
currency and supplied loans to governments in the throes of
currency crises. Fourth, the United States has pushed for the
expansion of international trade by midwifing the World Trade
Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other
instruments of liberalization. And fifth, by providing a ready market for
goods exported by such countries as China and Japan, the United States
became the indispensable supplier of demand to the world. Naturally,
the United States gets scant thanks for all these services provided gratis.
But Mandelbaum points out that, for all their griping, other countries
have not pooled their resources to confront the enormous
power of the United States because, unlike the supremely
powerful countries of the past, the United States [does] not
threaten them. Instead, the United States actually helps other

nations achieve shared goals such as democracy, peace, and

prosperity.

A2 Root Cause
Their root cause claims are false-there is no single cause
of events, rather many different causes
Wallerstein 97
(Immanuel, American sociologist, historical social scientist, and worldsystems analyst. His bimonthly commentaries on world affairs are syndicated,
1997, "Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science," New
Left Review 226: 93-108,
http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iweuroc.htm, Accessed: 7/6/13)
But even if we agree on the definition and the timing, and therefore
so to speak on the reality of the phenomenon, we have actually
explained very little. For we must then explain why it is that Europeans,
and not others, launched the specified phenomenon, and why they did so at a
certain moment of history. In seeking such explanations, the instinct of
most scholars has been to push us back in history to presumed
antecedents. If Europeans in the eighteenth or sixteenth century did x, it is
said to be probably because their ancestors (or attributed ancestors,
for the ancestry may be less biological than cultural, or assertedly
cultural) did, or were, y in the eleventh century, or in the fifth
century B.C. or even further back. We can all think of the multiple
explanations that, once having established or at least asserted some
phenomenon that has occurred in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries,
proceed to push us back to various earlier points in European
ancestry for the truly determinant variable. There is a premise here that
is not really hidden, but was for a long time undebated. The premise is that
whatever is the novelty for which Europe is held responsible in the sixteenth
to nineteenth centuries, this novelty is a good thing, one of which Europe
should be proud, one of which the rest of the world should be envious, or at
least appreciative. This novelty is perceived as an achievement, and
numerous book titles bear testimony to this kind of evaluation.There seems
to me little question that the actual historiography of world social
science has expressed such a perception of reality to a very large
degree. This perception of course can be challenged on various grounds, and
this has been increasingly the case in recent decades. One can challenge the
accuracy of the picture of what happened, within Europe and in the world as
a whole in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. One can certainly challenge
the plausibility of the presumed cultural antecedents of what happened in
this period. One can implant the story of the sixteenth to nineteenth
centuries in a longer duration, from several centuries longer to tens of
thousands of years. If one does that, one is usually arguing that the European
"achievements" of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries thereby seem
less remarkable, or more like a cyclical variant, or less like achievements that
can be credited primarily to Europe. Finally one can accept that the novelties

were real, but argue that they were less a positive than a negative
accomplishment.

Saying imperialism is the root cause for all oppression

masks more violent forms of oppression
Halliday 99
[Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics,
Middle East Report, The Middle East at the Millennial Turn
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer213/213_hallliday.html]
Recent developments in the Middle East and the onset of new global trends
and uncertainties pose a challenge not only to those who live in the region
but also to those who engage it from outside. Here, too, previouslyestablished patterns of thought and commitment are now open to question.
The context of the l960s, in which journals such as MERIP Reports (the
precursor of this publication) and the Journal of the North American
Committee on Latin America (NACLA) were founded, was one of solidarity
with the struggles of Third World peoples and opposition to external,
imperialist intervention. That agenda remains valid: Gross inequalities of
wealth, power and access to rightsa.k.a. imperialismpersist. This agenda
has been enhanced by political and ethical developments in subsequent
decades. Those who struggle include not only the national groups
(Palestinians and Kurds) oppressed by chauvinist regimes and the workers
and peasants (remember them?) whose labor sustains these states, but now
also includes analyses of gender oppression, press and academic suppression
and the denial of ecological security. The agenda has also elaborated a more
explicit stress on individual rights in tandem with the defense of collective
rights. History itself and the changing intellectual context of the West have,
however, challenged this emancipatory agenda in some key respects. On the
one hand, oppression, denial of rights and military intervention are not the
prerogative of external states alone: An anti-imperialism that cannot
recognizeand denounceindigenous forms of dictatorship and
aggression, or that seeks, with varying degrees of exaggeration, to
blame all oppression and injustice on imperialism, is deficient. The
Iranian Revolution, Bathist Iraq, confessional militias in Lebanon, armed
guerrilla groups in a range of countries, not to mention the Taliban in
Afghanistan, often represent a much greater immediate threat to human
rights and the principles in whose name solidarity was originally formulated
than does Western imperialism. Islamist movements from below meet
repressive states from above in their conduct. What many people in the
region want is not less external involvement but a greater commitment by
the outside world, official and non-governmental, to protecting and realizing
rights that are universally proclaimed but seldom respected. At the same
time, in a congruence between relativist renunciation from the region and
critiques of "foundationalist" and Enlightenment thinking in the West, doubt

has been cast on the very ethical foundation of solidarity: a belief in universal
human rights and the possibility of a solidarity based on such rights. Critical
engagement with the region is now often caught between a denunciation of
the West's failure actively to pursue the democratic and human rights
principles it proclaims and a rejection of the validity of these principles as
well as the possibility of any external encouragement of them. This brings
the argument back to the critique of Western policy, and of the relation of
that critique to the policy process itself. On human rights and
democratization, official Washington and its European friends continue to
speak in euphemism and evasion. But the issue here is not to see all US
involvement as inherently negative, let alone to denounce all international
standards of rights as imperialist or ethnocentric, but rather, to hold the US
and its European allies accountable to the universal principles they proclaim
elsewhere. An anti-imperialism of disengagement serves only to
reinforce the hold of authoritarian regimes and oppressive social
practices within the Middle East.

Alt fails
Studying imperialism fails to produce effective epistemic
change. Scholars contest every claim about it.
Howe 08
Stephen, Professor in the History and Cultures of Colonialism at the
Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, Imperial and Colonial
History, http://www.history.ac.uk/
makinghistory/resources/articles/imperial_post_colonial_history.html
The very core terminology of the subject(s) is deeply contested.
Keith Hancock, seen by many as the greatest of all historians of the
British empire, famously proclaimed that imperialism is no word for
scholars.(2) A distinguished historian of early modern Ireland, Steven Ellis,
suggests that whether the British-Irish relationship was a colonial one is
merely a matter of opinion, since colonialism as a concept was developed by
its modern opponents and constitutes a value-judgement which cannot be
challenged on its own grounds.(3)
If I agreed fully, I wouldnt have the chutzpah to engage in this field at all. But
a kind of permanent vigilance and self-questioning about the very nature,
even the validity, of the titular subject seems to me utterly necessary. What
if anything is generically colonial about all the various situations labeled
thus? What if anything do empires have in common across history? What is at
stake in arguing over whether a particular mode of rule, cultural
phenomenon, ideological formation or indeed bit of landscape is colonial or
imperial, or whether particular modes of behaviour constitute imperialism,
colonialism, anticolonialism, resistance or collaboration? Behind these
arguments lie others, which revolve around radically divergent evaluations of
the strength or weakness of imperial and colonial states, their relationships
with cultural formations and identity-claims, and most sweepingly the
historical significance or otherwise of systems of alien rule.
Much colonial and postcolonial theory has exhibited a tendency to
see colonial power as an all-embracing, transhistorical force,
controlling and transforming every aspect of colonised societies. The
writings and attitudes of those involved with empire are seen as constituting
a system, a network, a discourse in the sense made famous by Michel
Foucault. (Though the notion of colonialism as a system goes at least as far
back as Sartre, and I would argue for Georges Balandier as the crucial
precursor for much which today is mistakenly hailed as new in the field.) It
inextricably combines the production of knowledge with the exercise of
power. It deals in stereotypes and polar antitheses. It has both justificatory
and repressive functions. And, perhaps above all, it is a singular it: colonial
discourse and by extension the categories in which it deals (the coloniser, the

colonised, the subject people, etc.) can meaningfully be discussed in unitary

terms.
Some current writing in this vein thus treats colonialism as
homogeneous and all-powerful, and also often uses the term to
denote patterns of domination, or even merely of transregional
contact, which preceded, succeeded or indeed were substantially
disengaged from periods of actual conquest, possession and rule.
Calling all these sorts of things colonial or imperial at worst
systematically denies or underrates historical variety, complexity
and heterogeneity.
How, for instance, by what criteria of judgement, can we decide what
features of British culture are imperial? It has proved extraordinarily difficult
to formulate such criteria and set limits, despite the mass of recent historical
work in the field, and despite the seemingly elaborately organised,
sometimes officially sponsored nature of the putatively relevant British
cultural production. Assessment of the historical place of empire in British life
is still marked by stark polarity between silent assumptions about its utter
marginality and vociferous ones about its centrality or ubiquity.
In some quarters there is a danger of overcompensating for previous neglect
of the interpenetration of domestic and imperial, failing to recognise that in
many spheres of British life and thought, there really were powerful kinds of
insulation between them. To a somewhat lesser but rapidly increasing extent,
similar questions are being posed and sometimes similarly polarised
positions taken by historians and historical geographers of France,
Germany, Belgium and other European former imperial powers and indeed
those of Russia and America.
The kind of vigilance I am preaching though no doubt often fail to practice
requires of course a considerable degree of explicit conceptual or indeed
theoretical self-consciousness. Yet the role of such things in imperial history
and colonial studies has also been notably contentious. In the study of
empire, there have been comparatively few big ideas and, by
comparison with many other spheres both of historical and of social
scientific research, relatively little theory-building. One need only
think of how much debate still revolves around the century-old theories of J.
A. Hobson, or the 50-year-old ones of Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher.
The most widely influential new wave of the past few decades, Saidian
cultural analysis, has been spurned or scorned by at least as many students
of empires as have embraced it. Very few historians have been at all
attracted by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris eloquent and suggestive but
also impressionistic or even internally inconsistent arguments, or think that
these offer fruitful leads for historical research.
Yet this relative dearth of theoretical elaboration coexists with a remarkable
effervescence of controversy and especially, perhaps, since the 1980s
with influences coming from numerous academic disciplines, milieux and

indeed theoretical traditions. If theory-building within imperial history

as such has been sparse, the impact of various kinds of theory
drawn from elsewhere on it has been ever more substantial and
contentious.
A further and closely linked problem lies in the relative lack, still, of
interaction between political, economic and strategic studies of global power,
on the one hand, and work by literary and cultural studies scholars interested
in the cultures and discourses of imperialism, on the other. These spheres of
research have operated largely in an atmosphere of mutual indifference or
even antagonism and although here too a growing body of recent work
seeks to close the gaps, they remain very wide. The post-1980s wave of
cultural histories of colonialism and nationalism developed in large part out of
literary studies, and has continued to bear the marks of its origin. It has also
diverged sharply from much earlier work on related issues in its fundamental
take on the nature of imperial power.
One could over-simply, say that one camp sees the crucial relationships for
analysing colonial and indeed postcolonial histories as being those between
knowledge and power, whereas the other views them as being those between
interest and power. The focus on a knowledge-power nexus involves not
merely a stress on the centrality, power and purposefulness of colonial
discourses (or ideologies: those two concepts are, disconcertingly often, used
as synonyms) but on colonialisms capacity in a strong sense to create that
which it claimed to find in colonised societies. Arguments doubting this, ones
seeing colonial knowledge either as essentially neutral information or as
being created by colonised as well as colonising subjects, ones denying that
Orientalism in Saids sense was a coherent system of thought, ones stressing
the weakness of colonial power and the degree of agency retained by the
colonised, all amount (in Nicholas Dirkss terms) to an abject disavowal of
colonial power and prejudice or, yet more starkly, to blam[ing] the victim
again.(4)
Colonialism, as classically conceived, is very specifically a political
phenomenon, a matter of the state. In my view any coherent analysis or even
definition of it must bear this constantly in mind, retaining the recognition
that its core is a juridical relation between a state and a territory; one in
which the colonising state took complete power over the government of the
territory which it had annexed. This clearly distinguishes colonial polities from
those which have internal self-government, such as British Dominions, and
from formally sovereign states subject to various forms and degrees of
influence or control from outside (though the latter, by the definitions I have
adopted, may well be instances of imperialism).
Much contemporary theory silently abandons this focus, and inexplicitly
(indeed, most often unknowingly) substitutes at best a notion of a colonialism
of civil society, at worst a purely discursive conception of colonial power. The
former focuses on interest groups, religious bodies, educational institutions

and so on, while almost invariably failing to specify the relationship of their
projects to colonial state power. Insofar as it is at all theoretically explicit,
other than about its relations to earlier literary theory, it takes much of its
inspiration from the later Foucault, with his rejection of attention to the state
as privileged source or instance of power.
Much poststructuralist theory, of course, goes further, spurning not only the
state but society as an object of analysis. Here colonial discourse analysis
connects with the linguistic turn in social and historical studies more
generally in its rejection of social explanation and very often of totalising
explanation tout court. Or rather, its ostensible rejection; for in fact very
sweeping kinds of general claim, often unsupported by any evidence and
indeed premised on glib denial of the necessity for any coherent criteria as to
what might constitute evidence for the propositions advanced, are
characteristic of the genre. At the extreme, as for Timothy Mitchell, it seems
that colonialism is modernity and vice versa: Colonising refers not simply to
the establishing of a European presence but also to the spread of a political
order that inscribes in the social world a new conception of space, new forms
of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the
real.(5)
Another sphere of contention is that over appropriate levels and
units of analysis. The British new imperial history has included a sharp
critique of nation-centred historical models, with sometimes a suggestion that
notions of imperial cultures as global networks should be put in their place.
British history could form the centre of a worldwide web of interconnecting
stories; but in tracing those connections, the centre itself would be
decentred. Some others including some who would in this over-polarised
debate be characterised as old historians, like A. G. Hopkins also urge that
important trends in the contemporary world both give the history of empire a
renewed relevance, and enable new perspectives on it. If the great
historiographical shift of the 20th centurys second half was from imperial to
national history, there are strong grounds for this now to be reversed. Yet the
resistances against such a move will be substantial: not only among those
committed, whether on scholarly or political grounds, to narratives of a
national past in Britain, Ireland and other European states, but from their
counterparts in many former colonies too.
The key questions here often revolve around how far or in what ways if,
indeed, at all notions of themselves as being imperial enter into, or even
become in some strong sense constitutive of, collective identities among both
colonisers and colonised, their relationship to ideas about race and ethnicity
and of course, though I am shamefacedly conscious of adding this in utterly
tokenistic style, ideas about gender. If relationships to ideas of Britishness
among a wide range of people in different parts of the empire, for instance,
were complex, contested and rapidly changing (as clearly they were), and if
they often included feeling British in some sense and among other things,
then evidently it follows that the colonialness of colonial rule was also a

complex and variable thing. Maybe we need to talk, unfamiliarly and

following the important recent arguments of Ann Laura Stoler, in terms of
degrees of colonality. This is so also in a different sense where (unlike the
British or indeed any modern European-imperial case) the ruling elites of
empires were themselves ethnically diverse, as with the later Roman empire
or the Ottoman one.
The whole idea of colonial collaboration is also intensely contested.
A key argument in much modern scholarship on European empire perhaps
especially that rather loosely identified by critics as a conservative
Cambridge School of imperial historiography is that colonialism depended
crucially on it. Collaborative bargains were not only inherent in the imperial
relationship, but the nature of these bargains determined the character, and
the longevity, of colonial rule. Again, ideas and ideology had little to do with
it.
Conversely, the social bases of anticolonial nationalism lay in a web of
particularistic relationships which linked locality, province and nation.
Nationalist politics in India was crucially formed by local patron-client
networks, by the ways in which resources were fought over or bargained for,
and thus by the very structures of the Raj, as the biggest controller of such
resources. All this implies great scepticism about the claims of Congress
either to represent a unified national will or to be driven by high principles of
national liberation. We are thus left with the question (and I am indebted to
John Lonsdale for the formulation): Was the colonial state typically so weak in
powers of coercion, so dependent on the politics of collaboration, that social
conflict took place within the forms of colonial rule rather than, or more than,
against it?
There is, then, an inescapably parallel contest over the historical legitimacy
or integrity of anticolonial nationalism. The view thus sketched is, in critics
eyes, in itself colonialist, according the colonised no will of their own, no
meaningful role other than collaboration, no politics other than that
structured by the imperial system itself. In a somewhat different, more
overtly present-minded and indeed more strident vein, some current writers
the best known, perhaps most extreme case in the Anglophone world would
be Niall Ferguson see those who resist imperial power, past and present, as
typically doing so in the name of deeply unattractive, inward- or backwardlooking ideologies, and the postcolonial states they created a disaster for
most poor countries. The continuation or renewal of some form of
imperial governance might be better than independence for many.
That last claim in its turn rests, of course, on the viability, both as
historical reconstruction and as present programme, of a model of
liberal empire such as that which Ferguson sketches. Such a model
inevitably provokes not only analytical but political and emotional
resistance, perhaps well encapsulated in the great Indian historian Ranajit
Guhas remarkable admission that even sixty years after the end of the Raj:

Whenever I read or hear the phrase colonial India, it hurts me. It hurts like an
injury that has healed and yet has retained somehow a trace of the original
pain linked to many different things memories, values, sentiments.(6)
My last theme is perhaps still more emotive and contentious. This is the role
of violence, repression and atrocity in empire, and in its representations and
memories. In Britain right now, some politicians urge that it is time to stop
apologising for the imperial past and instead celebrate its positive
achievements and the abiding virtues of Britishness: several recent
statements by Gordon Brown are striking cases in point. Countering this,
critics press for renewed attention to past British colonial atrocities, drawing
above all just now on important books about 1950s Kenya which reveal
patterns of abuse and massacre far wider than previously acknowledged.
Repeatedly and inescapably, the historical arguments are linked with images
of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Arguments over the relationship
between alien rule and violence including stark claims that colonialism is
inherently bound up with extreme, pervasive, structural and even genocidal
violence, whose most famous early proponents were the French-Antillean
thinkers Frantz Fanon and Aim Csaire have today a vigorous new lease of
life. Some historians suggest that most episodes of genocide and mass
murder in world history have been associated with empire-building: and in a
particularly thought-provoking and disturbing twist, Michael Mann has
recently argued that democratic colonisers are the most likely to be
genocidal.(7)

The ideology of imperialism is to deeply entrenched in

society that the State has been corrupted and prevents
any alternative
Van Elteren 03
(Mel, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Tilburg University, US Cultural
Imperialism Today, SAIS Review,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v023/23.2elteren.html)
advertising constitutes a pervasive public "art form," however, it has become the
dominant mode in which thoughts and experiences are expressed. This
trend is most evident in U.S. society. While alternative values and
ideologies do exist in this culture, it is harder to find representations for
them. Advertising distorts and flattens people's ability to interpret
complex experiences, and it reflects the culture only partially, and in ways that
are biased toward a capitalist idealization of American culture. 47 At this level,
To the extent that

goods are framed and displayed to entice the customer, and shopping has become an event in which individuals

The ongoing interpenetration and

crossover between consumption and the aesthetic sphere (traditionally separated
off as an artistic counter-world to the everyday aspect of the former) has led to a [End Page 182] greater
"aestheticization of reality": appearance and image have become of
prime importance. Not only have commodities become more stylized but style itself has turned into a
purchase and consume the meanings attached to goods.

valuable commodity. The refashioning and reworking of commoditieswhich are themselves carefully selected
according to one's individual tastesachieve a stylistic effect that expresses the individuality of their owner. 48

This provides the framework for a more nuanced and sometimes

contradictory second order of meaning. The dynamics of cultural change

therefore entail both processes of "traveling culture," in which the received culture (in this case globalizing
capitalist culture) is appropriated and assigned new meaning locally, and at the same time a "first order"
meaning that dominates and delimits the space for second order
meaningsthus retaining something of the traditional meaning of
cultural imperialism. The latter is, ultimately, a negative phenomenon from
the perspective of self-determination by local people under the influence
of the imperial culture. Traditional critiques of cultural globalization have missed the point. The core of
the problem lies not in the homogenization of cultures as such, or in the creation of a "false consciousness" among

the problem lies in the

global spread of the institutions of capitalist modernity tied in with the
culturally impoverished social imagery discussed above, which crowd out the
cultural space for alternatives (as suggested by critical analysts like Benjamin Barber and Leslie
Sklair). The negative effects of cultural imperialismthe disempowerment
of people subjected to the dominant forms of globalizationmust be
located on this plane. It is necessary, of course, to explore in more detail how the very broad
consumers and the adoption of a version of the dominant ideology thesis. Rather,

institutional forces of capitalist modernity actually operate in specific settings of cultural contact. The practices of
transnational corporations are crucial to any understanding of the concrete activities and local effects of globalization.

A state-centered approach blurs the main issue here, which is not whether nationals
or foreigners own the carriers of globalization, but whether their interests are driven by
capitalist globalization.

Imperialism doesnt allow for the space of alternatives to

exist
Ali 06
(Tariq, novelist, historian, and commentator on the current situation in the
Middle East, The new imperialists Ideologies of Empire, ed. Colin Mooers,
https://ourrebellion .files.wordpress.com/ 2010/09/booknew_imperialists1.pdf, Ch 3, Pg 51)
Then came the total collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of a peculiar form of gangster

Did the triumph of capitalism and the defeat of an

enemy ideology mean we were in a world without conflict or enemies?
capitalism in the world.

Both Fukuyama and Huntington produced important books as a response to the new situation.
Fukuyama, obsessed with Hegel, saw liberal democracy/capitalism as the only embodiment of the
world-spirit that now marked the end of history, a phrase that became the title of his book.3 The
long war was over and the restless world-spirit could now relax and buy a condo in Miami. Fukuyama

The
philosophy, politics, and economics of the Other each and every variety of
socialism/Marxism had disappeared under the ocean, a submerged continent
of ideas that could never rise again. The victory of capital was
irreversible. It was a universal triumph. Huntington was unconvinced, and
warned against complacency. From his Harvard base, he challenged Fukuyama with a set of
insisted that there were no longer any available alternatives to the American way of life.

theses first published in Foreign Affairs (The Clash of Civilizations? a phrase originally coined by
Bernard Lewis, another favourite of the current administration). Subsequently these papers became a
book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The question mark had now

Huntington agreed that no ideological alternatives to

capitalism existed, but this did not mean the end of history. Other
antagonisms remained. The great divisions among humankind and the
dominating source of conflict will be cultural. . . . The clash of
civilizations will dominate global politics.4 In particular, Huntington emphasized the
disappeared.

continued importance of religion in the modern world, and it was this that propelled the book onto the
bestseller lists after 9/11. What did he mean by the word civilization? Early in the last
century, Oswald Spengler, the German grandson of a miner, had abandoned his vocation as a teacher,
turned to philosophy and to history, and produced a master-text. In The Decline of the West, Spengler
counterposed culture (a word philologically tied to nature, the countryside, and peasant life) with
civilization, which is urban and would become the site of industrial anarchy, dooming both capitalist

For Spengler, civilization reeked of

death and destruction and imperialism. Democracy was the dictatorship
of money and money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. 5 The
and worker to a life of slavery to the machine-master.

advent of Caesarism would drown it in blood and become the final episode in the history of
theWest.Had the Third Reich not been defeated in Europe, principally by the Red Army (the spinal cord
of the Wehrmacht was broken in Stalingrad and Kursk, and the majority of the unfortunate German
soldiers who perished are buried on the Russian steppes, not on the beaches of Normandy or in the
Ardennes), Spenglers prediction might have come close to realization. He was among the first and
fiercest critics of Eurocentrism, and his vivid worldview, postmodern in its intensity though not its
language, can be sighted in this lyrical passage: I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear
history, the drama of a number of mighty cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil
of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its
material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and
feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet
discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks
and stonepines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves. Each Culture has its own new possibilities of selfexpression, which arise, ripen, decay and never return.6 In contrast to this, he argued, lay the
destructive cycle of civilization:Civilizations

are the most external and artificial

states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a
conclusion, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built
petrifying world city following motherearth . . . they are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity

Imperialism is civilization unadulterated. In this

phenomenal form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. . . .
Expansionism is a doom, something daemonic and intense, which grips
forces into service and uses up the late humanity of the world-city
stage.7
reached again and again. . . .

Framework
Our framework is socially productive forcing students to
assert policy solutions has tremendous research and
education benefits and encourages them to become
advocates for change rather than mere spectators
Joyner 99
[Christopher C., Professor of International Law in the Government
Department at Georgetown University, Spring, 5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377,
Accessed on July 5, 2013]
Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social
sciences. Debates, like other role-playing simulations, help students

understand different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a

perspective as their own. But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not
require that a student participate directly in order to realize the benefit of the
game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing

the consequences of different choices in a traditional role-playing

game, debates present the alternatives and consequences in a
formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental audience. Having the
class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out
opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and enabling
audience members to pose challenges to each debating team. These debates ask
undergraduate students to examine the international legal implications of various
United States foreign policy actions. Their chief tasks are to assess the aims of the
policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national interests,
ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States
policy in question squares with relevant principles of international law. Debate
questions are formulated as resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United
States should deny most-favored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;"
or "Resolved: The United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection
of Iraq's possible nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or
"Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of
force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein." In

addressing both sides of these legal propositions, the student

debaters must consult the vast literature of international law, especially
the nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international law journals now
being published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich
body of legal analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign
policy, as well as other more esoteric international legal subjects. Although most
of these journals are accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to
the political science community specializing in international relations, much less to
the average undergraduate. By assessing the role of international law in United
States foreign policy- making, students realize that United States actions do not
always measure up to international legal expectations; that at times, international
legal strictures get compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and
that concepts and principles of international law, like domestic law, can be
interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States policy in various

international circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students

the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning

techniques, in that it makes them become actively engaged with
their subjects, and not be mere passive consumers. Rather than
spectators, students become legal advocates, observing, reacting
to, and structuring political and legal perceptions to fit the merits
of their case. The debate exercises carry several specific educational
objectives. First, students on each team must work together to
refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal
position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this
way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas
faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of their
team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing international
law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and
international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively
reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces students to
become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States
foreign policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating and
executing these policies. 8 The debate thus becomes an excellent

vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over

principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and
legal defense.

Politicization takes out solvency politics is a game of

interest groups and high profile politicians
Bertucci, Universidad de San Andres, et al 12 (Mariano E.,
professor of political science, Universidad de San Andres, Fabian BorgesHerrero, professor of political science, University of Southern California,
Claudia Fuentes-Julio, professor of political science, University of Denver,
International Studies Perspectives (2012), 119 Toward Best Practices in
ScholarPractitioner Relations: Insights from the Field of Inter-American
Affairs, pg. 9-10 ,
The likelihood that scholarly ideas will influence the policy process
may be inversely proportional to the politicization of the issue at
play. U.S. policies on illegal drug trade, Cuba, and immigration, illustrate
this paradox (Shifter 2011:2). There is widespread consensus in both
academic and policy circles that U.S. policy is failing in these areas,
but policymakers have not been receptive to new ideas from
scholars aimed at addressing these failures. 18
The complex nature of policy-making processes calls for aligningstars in order for expert knowledge actually to influence
policymaking. The outputs of policy-making processes depend on at least
three streams and two factors that are only marginally, if at all, directly

influenced by scholarly knowledge. The three policy streams flow relatively

independently from each other and are as follows: (i) problem
recognition, or the process through which a given condition (e.g.,
lack of peace in the Middle East) is transformed into a national security
problem of a given country; (ii) policy alternatives, or the process
through which alternative courses of action are generated in
academic and nonacademic circles (e.g., bureaucracy vs. scholars
working in think tanks, nongovernmental organizations); and (iii) politics,
or the national mood, interest groups campaigns, and
administrative or legislative turnover that may or not provide a
functional environment for the implementation of available policy
alternatives. Added to these, the two main factors that could bring the
streams together and open the window of opportunity for available policy
alternatives to influence policy are individual efforts made by politicians or
policy entrepreneurs, or crises such as 9/11. That is, policy-making
processes are like garbage cans of decision making in which policy
outcomes are the result of individual actors attaching available
policy solutions to existing problems, whereas scholarly inputs are
only one among five processes and factors that may facilitate or
impede the influence of scholarly knowledge on practice (Krasner
2009:261).