Current RotB

The Role of the Ballot is to endorse the best policy position

use of legal solutions as a heuristic recodes hegemonic
conceptions of agency and articulates power as a contingently
created system that can be infiltrated and changed refusing
the law fails to capture any of the dialogic benefits of my
methodology.
Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti, Associate Professor of PoliSci, Virginia Tech. Governmentality,
Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World. Alternatives: Global, Local,
Political, Vol. 38, p. 288-304. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 the stated Version of
Record is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30 th, 2013. ///JCH-PF
By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on

power and subjects relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for
resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to rejection, revolution, or dispossession to regain a
pristine freedom from all constraints or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent

struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental

rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions
oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and
nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power

interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is
appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing

complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful

differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of power, romanticizations

of the rebel or the the local. More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of
subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political

agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of
political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand
continuous attention to what happens instead of fixations on what ought
to be.83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine freedom to
be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require

intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices . To

conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same
as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.84

Policy education is key to advocacy that outweighs on

portable skills. The educational skills generated from role
playing is key to solving impacts in the real world policy
views problems from diverse perspectives, so we can better
tackle problems of oppression and create tangible solutions.
Nixon 2K (Themba-Nixon, Makani. Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping
communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health equity and justice], Changing the Rules: What
Public Policy Means for Organizing Colorlines 3.2, 2000)

By getting into the

Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands.

policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can
become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a
group should leave a decision maker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course , this work requires a certain amount

of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language,
and the all-too-common resistance by decision makers . Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-
whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their
policy work is just one tool in our organizing
power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course,

is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain
arsenal, but it

amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, stories that are

designed to affect the public conversation [and]. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting

problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to
making it so.
 Current U/V
Empty and aimless critique alone fails policy framework is
better even if fiats not real radical forms of resistance
have no true effect and collapse back into what they critique.
Bryant 12 Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a
professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in
Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant
later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, Critique of the Academic
Left, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/

Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. Its good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet
very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks,
assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here Im reminded by the underpants
gnomes depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ?

Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left.Our plan
seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and
complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be

done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In

order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to
be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even
though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can
understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhDs in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We
seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters
worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that dont have a wide distribution, and give our
talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many
activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a
tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesnt make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of
all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions
we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they dont embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and
unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus was a
critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in

general?). This type of revolutionary is the greatest friend of the reactionary and
capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to
undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isnt where our most serious shortcomings

Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never

lie.

make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields
need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these
things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We
live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their
consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of
transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will
you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had
proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have
theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and
not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously
about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned
economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems
(theres a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the
ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the
ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. Were not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical
paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound.
How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide
food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature,

the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are
alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary

contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you arent
proposing real plans? But we havent even gotten to that point. Instead were like underpants gnomes, saying revolution is the answer! without
addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go
about building those alternatives. Masturbation. Underpants gnome deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-

congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isnt important or necessary it is but because we know
the critiques, we know the problems. Were intoxicated with critique because its easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a

position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is
composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even
the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing
alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.
Ontology/epistemology not first causes violent inaction while
we wait, turns the impacts.
Jarvis 2K (D.S.L., Lecturer n Government - U of Sydney, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE CHALLENGE
OF POSTMODERNISM, p. 128-9)

Certainly, it is right and proper that we ponder the depths of our theoretical imaginations, engage in
epistemological and ontological debate, and analyze the sociology of our knowledge. But to
suppose that this is the only task of international theory, let alone the most important
one, smacks of intellectual elitism and displays a certain contempt for those who search for guidance in their
daily struggles as actors in international politics. What does Ashley's project his deconstructive efforts, or valiant tight against positivism say to

the truly marginalized, oppressed and destitute? How does it help solve the plight of the poor, the displaced refugees, the

casualties of war, or the emigres of death squads? Does it in any way speak to those whose actions and thoughts comprise the policy and practice
of international relations? On all these questions one must answer no. This is not to say, of course, that all theory should be judged by its technical

to suppose that problem-solving technical theory

rarionality and problem-solving capacity as Ashley forcefully argues. But

is not necessaryor is in some, way badis a contemptuous position that abrogates any hope of
solving some of the nightmarish realities that millions confront daily. Holsti argues, we need ask of these theorists and
these theories tne ultimate question, So what? to what purpose do they deconstruct problematize, destabilize, undermine, ridicule, and belittle
modernist and rationalist approaches? Does this get us any further, make the world any better, or enhance the human condition? In what sense can this
"debate toward [a] bottomless pit of epistemology and metaphysics" be judged pertinent relevant helpful, or cogent to anyone other than those foolish
enough to be scholastically excited by abstract and recondite debate.

Making demands on the state does not mean I defend that the
state is good in all instances or that Im reaffirming its
legitimacy even if the state is bad, using it to ban slavery
was probably good.
Newman 10 Saul Newman, Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, ULondon. Theory & Event, Volume 13,
Issue 2, 2010

There are two aspects that I would like to address here. Firstly, the notion of demand: making certain demands on the states- say for higher wages, equal
rights for excluded groups, to not go to war, or an end to draconian policing-is one of the basic strategies of social movements and radical

groups. Making such demands does not necessarily mean working within the state
or reaffirming its legitimacy. On the contrary, demands are made from a position outside the olitical order, and
they often exceed the question of the implementation of this or that specific measure. They implicitly call into question the

legitimacy and even the sovereignty of the state by highlighting fundamental inconsistencies
between, for instance, a formal constitutional order which guarantees certain rights and equalities, and state practices which in reality violate and deny
them.
 1AR
Solutions to critical issues require acting within the hegemony
first.
Kapoor 08 Ilan Kapoor, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, The
Postcolonial Studies of Development. p.138-139, 2008. ///JCH-PF

There are perhaps several other social movement campaigns that could be cited as examples of a hybridizing strategy .5 But
what emerges as important from the Chipko and NBA campaigns is the way in which they treat laws and policies, institutional practices, and ideological
apparatuses as deconstructible. That is, they refuse to take dominant authority at face value, and proceed to reveal its contingencies. Sometimes, they
expose what the hegemon is trying to disavow or hide (exclusion of affected communities in project design and implementation, faulty information
gathering and dissemination). Sometimes, they problematize dominant or naturalized truths (development = unlimited economic growth = capitalism,
big is better, technology can save the environment). In either case, by contesting, publicizing, and politicizing accepted or hidden truths, they hybridize
power, challenging its smugness and triumphalism, revealing its impurities. They show power to be, literally and figuratively, a bastard. While speaking

involves showing up and taking

truth to power, a hybridizing strategy also exploits the instabilities of power. In part, this

advantage of the equivocations of power conflicting laws, contradictory

policies, unfulfilled promises. A lot has to do here with publicly shaming the hegemon,
forcing it to remedy injustices and live up to stated commitments in a more
accountable and transparent manner. And, in part, this involves nurturing or manipulating the splits and strains within

institutions. Such maneuvering can take the form of cultivating allies, forging alliances, or throwing doubt on
prevailing orthodoxy. Note, lastly, the way in which a hybridizing strategy works with the dominant discourse. This reflects the
negotiative aspect of Bhabhas performativity. The strategy may outwit the hegemon , but it does so from

the interstices of the hegemony. The master may be paralyzed, but his paralysis is induced using his own
poison/medicine. It is for this reason that cultivating allies in the adversarial camp is

possible: when you speak their language and appeal to their own ethical horizons, you are building a
modicum of common ground. It is for this reason also that the master cannot easily dismiss or

crush you. Observing his rules and playing his game makes it difficult for him not to take
you seriously or grant you a certain legitimacy. The use of non-violent tactics may be crucial in this regard: state repression is easily
justified against violent adversaries, but it is vulnerable to public criticism when used against non-violence. Thus, the fact that Chipko and the NBA
deployed civil disobedience pioneered, it must be pointed out, by the father of the nation (i.e. Gandhi) made it difficult for the state to quash them
or deflect their claims

The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning even if

politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically
valuable it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and
teaches advocacy skills.
Barma et al 16 Naazneen Barma, PhD in PoliSci, UC Berkeley, Assistant Prof of National Security Affairs at the Naval
Postgraduate School. Brent Durbin, PhD in PoliSci, UC Berkeley, Prof of Government, Smith College. Eric Lorber, JD, UPenn, and PhD
in PoliSci, Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher. Rachel Whitlark, PhD in PoliSci, GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on
Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard.
Imagine a World in Which: Using Scenarios in Political Science. International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, May
2016. http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf ///JCH-PF

Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a

What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science?

technique for examining the robustness of strategy . It can immerse decision makers in future
states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect

themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the
art of considering what if questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the
purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations

of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice
of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and
describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of

juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet
plausible futures, often referred to as alternative worlds. Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections
based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be
equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making
processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world ,
offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on
explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausibleyet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future
worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution
in the United States, Chinas slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized
secular trends thatcombined with OPECs decision not to take concerted action as prices began to declinecame together in an unexpected way. While
scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in
corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965,
with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company
operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for
anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming
that the future will look much like the present (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-
induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots,
scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight,
which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary
governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Councils series of Global
Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of
alternative worlds approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and
intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign
policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of
the latter is the German Marshall Funds EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis
(German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of
different realmssocial, technological, environmental, economic, and politicalcombine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet
the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps.
This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005).
The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual
combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical
process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political
Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists
generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the
future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist
organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive.

Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change the rise of a
new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate

can be useful for

actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics

illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be
missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific
and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global
politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of exogeneityso prevalent in social science scholarshipapplies to models of reality, not to reality

itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet
pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus
offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice,
achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to
provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance. The first step

in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global
affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a
resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into
possible future worlds was to simplify, then exaggerate them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details. Thus, the contours of the future
world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that
some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or
our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario
discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases. An explicit methodological approach
underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around themthat of case-centered, structured, focused comparison,
intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that
it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally
retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and
are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events
might expand or shift the funnel of choices available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 6869), while forward-

scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and

looking

sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by

fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in
international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario
process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes
a set of explicit driving forces which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario
analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and
thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key
observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and
Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads
directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to
policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically
developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby
students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are
thus typically developed by looking for puzzles in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics
that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from
what has been important in the recent pastleading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in
the 2000sin the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research
ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance
in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed
at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and
policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant
enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the

participants learn strategies for avoiding failures

worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass,

of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars

and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs.
 U/V
Radical positions that refuse the state cede the political that
causes extinction and turns K impacts.
Boggs 97 Carl Boggs, National University, Los Angeles. The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in
late twentieth-century America. Theory and Society, Volume 26, Number 6, December 1997.
ideological
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many

currents scrutinized here localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology intersect with and reinforce each other. While
these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different

outlooks and trajectories, they allshare one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to
combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is
accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in
large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American

society will go unsolved perhaps even unrecognized only to fester more ominously in the future. And such problems ( ecological

crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside
the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often
inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence.
In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn
away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public

ideals and visions. 74 In the meantime, the fate of theworld hangs in thebalance . The unyielding truth is that, even as the
ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide
the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of
a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over peoples lives. Far from it:

thespace abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be
filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites an already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The
fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been
so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized
retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise or it might help further rationalize the
existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests
that had vanished from civil society. 75

Institutions are kinda necessary for real lasting change.

Myers 13 Ella Myers, Assistant Professor of PoliSci and Gender Studies, University of Utah. Worldly Ethics:
Democratic Politics and Care for the World. p. 44-45, 2013. ///JCH-PF

Unfortunately, Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self-artistry as an essential preliminary to, and
even the necessary condition of change , at the macropolitical level.104 That is, although Connolly claims that micropolitics and
political movements work in tandem, each producing effects on the other,105 he sometimes privileges action by the self on itself as a starting point

not only avoids the question of the genesis of

and necessary prelude to macropolitical change. This approach

such reflexive action and its possible harmful effects but also indicates that collective efforts to alter
social conditions actually await proper techniques of the self. For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the
United States, Connolly contends that today the micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has become a condition for a macropolitics that
reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and punishment.106 Here and elsewhere in Connollys writing the sequencing renders these

It is a mistake to grant chronological

activities primary and secondary rather than mutually inspiring and reinforcing.107

primacy to ethical self-intervention, however. How, after all, is such intervention, credited
with producing salient effects at the macropolitical level, going to get off the
ground, so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement (rather than withdrawal, for example) if it is not
tethered, from the beginning, to public claims that direct attention to a specific problem,
defined as publicly significant and changeable? How and why would an individual take up
reflexive work on the desire to punish if she were not already attuned, at least partially, to

problems afflicting current criminal punishment practices? And that attunement is fostered,

crucially, by the macropolitical efforts of democratic actors who define a public matter of concern and elicit the attention of other

citizens. For reflexive self-care to be democratically significant, it must be inspired by and continually connected to

larger political mobilizations. Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he celebrates are not themselves the
starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relation with cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective

tendency
arrangements. Yet the selfs relation with itself is also treated as a privileged site, the very source of democratic spirit and action. This

to prioritize the selfs reflexive relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic
ethics that ultimately emerges out of Foucaults and, to a lesser degree, Connollys work. This ethics not only elides
differences between caring for oneself and caring for conditions but also
celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault says, ontologically prior. An ethics centered
on the selfs engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an ethics fit for
democracy.

*Particularism is good root-cause claims ignore specific uses.

Even if the state is bad generally, look to the specifics
banning slavery was using the big bad state to do some good,
so is the aff.
Pappas 16 Gregory Pappas, Texas A&M. The Pragmatists Approach to Injustice. The Pluralist, Volume 11,
Number 1, Spring 2016///JCH-PF

The pragmatists approach should be distinguished from non-ideal theories whose

starting point seems to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and
persist through time, where the task of political philosophy is to detect and
diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of
injustice. For example, critical theory today has inherited an approach to social
philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau,
Marx, Weber, Freud, Marcuse, and others. According to Roberto Frega, this tradition
takes society to be intrinsically sick with a malaise that requires adopting a critical
historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present
social situations. In other words, this approach assumes that a philosophical critique
of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the assumption of a
broader and full blown critique of society in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism,
of modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself. The idea of social pathology
becomes intelligible only against the background of a philosophy of history or of an
anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are
but the inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (Between
Pragmatism and Critical Theory 63) However, this particular approach to injustice
is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African
American political philosophies that have used and transformed the critical
intellectual tools of critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the
Americas. For instance, Charles W. Mills claims that the starting point and
alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose
and rectify a history of an illnessthe legacy of white supremacy in our actual
society. The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical
perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative
about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have
progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as
well as Third World scholars, as reaction to the hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms
that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of
view, have stressed how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem
congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often
described as power structures located in global hierarchies and a world-system
and not situations. Pragmatism only questions that we live in History or a World-
System (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history
(lowercase): in a present situation continuous with others where the past weighs
heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does
not deny the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween
injustices through time, but there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present
situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social
pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic
injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique, context-bound
injustice. To capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, we must study
history but also seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present
injustice. If injustice is an illness, then the pragmatists approach takes as its main
focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that is, the particular
situation-bound injustice and not a global social pathology or some single
transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not
always dependent on adopting a broader critical standpoint of society in its entirety,
but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are
useful only for understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories white
supremacy and colonialism can be great tools that can be of planetary
significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of peoples
lives and injustices than the categories of class and gender, but in spite of their
reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are nothing more than tools to make
reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst
of a particular and unique re- lationship in a situation. No doubt many, but not all,
problems of injustice are a consequence of being a member of a group in history,
but even in these cases, we cannot a priori assume that injustices are
homogeneously equal for all members of that group. Why is this important? The
possible pluralism and therefore complexity of a problem of injustice does not
always stop at the level of being a member of a historical group or even a member
of many groups, as insisted on by intersectional analysis. There may be unique cir-
cumstances to particular countries, towns, neighborhoods, institutions, and
ultimately situations that we must be open to in a context-sensitive inquiry. If an
empirical inquiry is committed to capturing and ameliorating all of the harms in
situations of injustice in their raw pretheoretical complexity, then this requires that
we try to begin with and return to the concrete, particular, and unique experiences
of injustice. Pragmatism agrees with Sally Haslangers concern about Charles
Millss view. She writes: The goal is not just a theory that is historical (v. ahistori-
cal), but is sensitive to historical particularity, i.e., that resists grand causal
narratives purporting to give an account of how domination has come about and is
perpetuated everywhere and at all times (1). For the forces that cause and sustain
domination vary tremendously context by context, and there isnt necessarily a
single causal explanation; a theoretical framework that is useful as a basis for
political intervention must be highly sensitive to the details of the particular social
context (1).13 Although each situation is unique, there are commonalities among
the cases that permit inquiry about common causes. We can formulate tentative
general principles from investigation of similar individual cases, and then . . . check
the generalizations by applying them to still further cases (Dewey, Lectures in
China 53). But Dewey insists that the focus should be on the indi- vidual case, and
was critical of how so many sociopolitical theories are prone to starting and
remaining at the level of sweeping generalizations. He states that they fail to
focus on the concrete problems which arise in experience, allowing such problems
to be buried under their sweeping generalizations (Lectures in China 53). The
lesson pragmatism provides for nonideal theory today is that it must be careful to
not reify any injustice as some single historical force for which particular injustice
problems are its manifestation or evidence for its exis- tence. Pragmatism welcomes
the wisdom and resources of nonideal theories that are historically grounded on
actual injustices, but it issues a warning about how they should be understood and
implemented. It is, for example, sympathetic to the critical resources found in
critical race theory, but with an important qualification. It understands Derrick Bells
valuable criticism as context-specific to patterns in the practice of American law.
Through his inquiry into particular cases and civil rights policies at a particular time
and place, Bell learned and proposed certain general principles such as the one of
interest convergence, that is, whites will promote racial advantages for blacks
only when they also promote white self-interest.14 But, for pragma- tism, these
principles are nothing more than historically grounded tools to use in present
problematic situations that call for our analysis, such as deliberation in establishing
public policies or making sense of some concrete injustice. The principles are
falsifiable and open to revision as we face situation-specific injustices. In testing
their adequacy, we need to consider their function in making us see aspects of
injustices we would not otherwise appreciate.

State engagement is necessary critiques of liberalism are

used to support anti-Trumpist actions.
Claudio 16 Lisandro Claudio, assistant professor of development studies and southeast Asian studies,
Ateneo de Manila University. "Intellectuals have ushered the world into a dangerous age of political nihilism."
Quartz, July 1, 2016. http://qz.com/721914/intellectuals-have-ushered-the-world-into-a-dangerous-age-of-political-
nihilism/ ///LASA-ES

On the surface, it would seem that intellectuals have nothing to do with

the rise of global illiberalism. The movements powering Brexit, Donald Trump and Third-World strongmen
like Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte all gleefully reject books, history and higher

education in favor of railing against common enemies like outsiders and globalization. And youll find few Trump supporters among the largely
left-wing American professoriate. Yet intellectuals are accountable for the rise of these

movementsalbeit indirectly. Professors have offered stringent criticisms of

neoliberal society. But they have failed to offer the public viable alternatives. In this way,
they have promoted a political nihilism that has set the stage for new movements that reject liberal democratic
principles of tolerance and institutional reform. Intellectuals have a long history of critiquing liberalism, which relies on a philosophy of individual rights
and (relatively) free markets. Beginning in the 19th century, according to historian Francois Furet, left-wing thinkers began to arrive at a consensus that
modern liberal democracy was threatening society with dissolution because it atomized individuals, made them indifferent to public interest, weakened

For most of the 20th century, anti-liberal intellectuals

authority, and encouraged class hatred.

were able to come up with alternatives. Jean-Paul Sartre famously defended the
Soviet Union even when it became clear that Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer. French,
American, Indian, and Filipino university radicals were hopelessly enamored of Mao
Zedongs Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. The collapse of Communism changed all this.

Some leftist intellectuals began to find hope in small revolutionary guerrillas in the
Third World, like Mexicos Subcomandante Marcos. Others fell back on pure critique . Academics are now mostly gadflies
 Those who do forward alternatives propose ones so
who rarely offer strategies for political change.

vague or divorced from reality that they might as well be proposing nothing. (The Duke University
professor of romance studies Michael Hardt, for example, thinks the evils of modern globalization are so pernicious that only worldwide love is the answer.)

Such thinking promotes political hopelessness. It rejects gradual change

as cosmetic, while patronizing those who think otherwise. This nihilism easily
spreads from the classroom and academic journals to op-ed pages to
Zuccotti Park, and eventually to the public at large. For academic nihilists , the shorthand for
the worlds evils is neoliberalism. The term is used to refer to a free market ideology that forced globalization on people by reducing the power of
governments. The more the term is used, however, the more it becomes a vague designation for all global drudgery. Democratic politics in the age of
neoliberalism, according to Harvard anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, is something of a pyramid scheme: the more it is indulged, the more it is
required. They argue that our belief that we can use laws and constitutional processes to defend our rights is a form of fetishism that is ultimately
chimerical. For the University of Chicago literary theorist Lauren Berlant, the democratic pursuit of happiness amid neoliberalism is nothing but cruel

we are
optimism. The materialist things that people desire are actually an obstacle to your flourishing, she writes. According to this logic,

trapped by our own ideologies. It is this logic that allows left-wing thinkers to
implicitly side with British nativists in their condemnation of the EU. The radical website Counterpunch, for example, describes
the EU as a neoliberal prison. It also views liberals seeking to reform the EU as coopted by the right wing and its goalsfrom the subversion of

Trump
progressive economic ideals to neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative doctrine. Across the Atlantic,

supporters are singing a similar tune. Speaking to a black, gay, college-

educated Trump supporter, Samantha Bee was told: Weve had these
disasters in neoconservatism and neoliberalism and I think that he [Trump]
is an alternative to both those paths. The academic nihilists and the Trumpists
are in agreement about a key issue: The system is fundamentally broken, and
liberals who believe in working patiently toward change are weak . For the
Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, indifference is the the hallmark of political liberalism. Since liberals balance different interests
and rights, Santos writes, they have no permanent friends or foes. He proposes that the world needs to revive the friend/foe dichotomy. And in a profane
way, it has: modern political movements pit Americans against Muslims, Britain against Europe, a dictatorial government against criminals. Unfortunately,
academic anti-liberalism is not confined to the West. The Cornell political scientist Benedict Anderson once described liberal democracy in the Philippines
as a Cacique Democracy, dominated by feudal landlords and capitalist families. In this system, meaningful reform is difficult, since the countrys political
system is like a well-run casino, where tables are rigged in favor of oligarch bosses. Having a nihilist streak myself, I once echoed Anderson when I
chastised Filipino nationalists for projecting hope onto spaces within an elite democracy. Like Anderson, I offered no alternative. The alternative arrived
recently in the guise of the Duterte, the new president of the Philippines. Like Anderson and me, Duterte complained about the impossibility of real change
in a democracy dominated by elites and oligarchs. But unlike us, he proposed a way out: a strong political leader who was willing to kill to save the country

we will need
from criminals and corrupt politicians. The spread of global illiberalism is unlikely to end soon. As this crisis unfolds,

intellectuals who use their intellects for more than simple negation professors
like the late New York University historian Tony Judt, who argued that European-style social democracy could save global democracy. Failing that, we need
academics who acknowledge that liberal democracy, though slow and imperfect, enables a bare minimum of tolerance in a world beset by xenophobia and

although academics have the luxury of imagining a completely

hatred. For

different world, the rest of us have to figure out what to do with the one
we have.

*Deconstructive logic is constitutive of metaphysics. All

concepts, identities, and judgements are constructed in
opposition to their negative. There can be no conception of
good without bad, friendship without betrayal, promises
without promise breaking. Ontological violence is foundational
to any ethical or political framework.
Hgglund 04 Martin Hgglund, The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas. 2004.
Derrida targets precisely this logic of opposition. As he argues in Of Grammatology,
metaphysics has always regarded violence as derivative of a primary peace. The
possibility of violence can thus be accounted for only in terms of a Fall, that is, in
terms of a fatal corruption of a pure origin. By deconstructing this figure of thought,
Derrida seeks to elucidate why violence does is not merely an empirical accident
that befalls something that precedes it. Rather, violence stems from an essential
impropriety that does not allow anything to be sheltered from death and forgetting.
Consequently, Derrida takes issue with what he calls the ethico-theoretical
decision of metaphysics, which postulates the simple to be before the complex, the
pure before the impure, the sincere before the deceitful, and so on. All divergences
from the positively valued term are thus explained away as symptoms of
alienation, and the desirable is conceived as the return to what supposedly has
been lost or corrupted. In contrast, Derrida argues that what makes it possible for
anything to be at the same time makes it impossible for anything to be in itself. The
integrity of any positive term is necessarily compromised and threatened by its
other. Such constitutive alterity answers to an essential corruptibility, which
undercuts all ethico-theoretical decisions of how things ought to be in an ideal
world.11 A key term here is what Derrida calls undecidability. With this term he
designates the necessary opening toward the coming of the future. The coming of
the future is strictly speaking undecidable, since it is a relentless displacement
that unsettles any defi nitive assurance or given meaning. One can never know
what will have happened. Promises may always be turned into threats, friendships
into enmities, fidelities into betrayals, and so on. There is no opposition between
undecidability and the making of decisions. On the contrary, Derrida emphasizes
that one always acts in relation to what cannot be predicted, that one always is
forced to make decisions even though the consequences of these decisions cannot
be finally established. Any kind of decision (ethical, political, juridical, and so forth)
is more or less violent, but it is nevertheless necessary to make decisions. Once
again, I want to stress that violent differentiation by no means should be understood
as a Fall, where violence supervenes upon a harmony that precedes it. On the
contrary, discrimination has to be regarded as a is constitutive condition. Without
divisional markswhich is to say: without segregating bordersthere would be
nothing at all.

Absolute peace and absolute violence are one and the same
Hgglund 04 Martin Hgglund, The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas. 2004.
A possible objection here is that we must striv[ing]e toward an ideal origin or end, an arkhe or telos that would prevail beyond the
possibility of violence. Even if every community is haunted by victims of discrimination and forgetting, we should try to reach a state
of being that does not exclude anyone, namely, a consummated presence that includes everyone. However, it is precisely with such
an ontological [the] thesis that Derridas hauntological thinking takes issue. At several places in Specters of Marx he maintains
that a completely present lifewhich would not be out of joint, not haunted by any ghostswould be nothing but a complete
death. Derridas point is not simply that a peaceful state of existence is impossible to realize, as if it were a desirable,
albeit unattainable end. Rather, he challenges the very idea that absolute peace is [not] desirable. In a state
of being where all violent change is precluded, nothing can ever happen.
Absolute peace is thus inseparable from absolute violence, as Derrida argued already in
Violence and Metaphysics. Anything that would finally put an end to violence (whether the end is
a religious salvation, a universal justice, a harmonious intersubjectivity or some other ideal) would end the possibility of
life in general. The idea of absolute peace is the idea of eliminating the
undecidable future that is the con- dition for anything to happen. Thus, the idea of absolute peace is the idea of
absolute violence. (49)
 Civic Engagement
Civic engagement is internal link to averting existential threats
its try or die for engaging the state.
Small 06 Jonathan Small, former Americorps VISTA for the Human Services Coalition. Moving Forward. The
Journal for Civic Commitment, Spring, 2006.
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/other/engagement/Journal/Issue7/Small.jsp

What will be the challenges of the new millennium? And how should we equip young people to face these challenges? While we cannot be sure of the
exact nature of the challenges, we can say unequivocally that humankind will face them together. If the end of the twentieth century marked the triumph
of the capitalists, individualism, and personal responsibility, the new century will present challenges that require collective action, unity, and enlightened

Confronting global warming, depleted natural resources, global super viruses, global
self-interest.

crime syndicates, and multinational corporations with no conscience and no accountability will require cooperation,
openness, honesty, compromise, and most of all solidarity ideals not exactly cultivated in the twentieth century. We can no longer suffer to see life

Our very
through the tiny lens of our own existence. Never in the history of the world has our collective fate been so intricately interwoven.

existence depends upon our ability to adapt to this new paradigm , to envision a
more cohesive society. With humankinds next great challenge comes also great opportunity. Ironically, modern individualism backed us into a corner. We

have two choices, work together in solidarity or perish together in alienation. Unlike any other crisis
before, the noose is truly around the neck of the whole world at once. Global super viruses will ravage rich and poor

alike, developed and developing nations, white and black, woman, man, and child. Global warming and damage to the environment will
affect climate change and destroy ecosystems across the globe. Air pollution will force gas masks

on our faces, our depleted atmosphere will make a predator of the sun, and
chemicals will invade and corrupt our water supplies. Every single day we are presented the opportunity to
change our current course, to survive modernity in a manner befitting our better nature. Through zealous cooperation and radical solidarity we can alter
the course of human events. Regarding the practical matter of equipping young people to face the challenges of a global, interconnected world, we need
to teach cooperation, community, solidarity, balance and tolerance in schools. We need to take a holistic approach to education. Standardized test scores
alone will not begin to prepare young people for the world they will inherit. The three staples of traditional education (reading, writing, and arithmetic)
need to be supplemented by three cornerstones of a modern education, exposure, exposure, and more exposure. How can we teach solidarity? How can
we teach community in the age of rugged individualism? How can we counterbalance crass commercialism and materialism? How can we impart the true

meaning of power? These are the educational challenges we face in the new century. It will require a radical

transformation of education
our conception of . Well need to trust a bit more, control a bit less, and put our faith in the
potential of youth to make sense of their world. In addition to a declaration of the gauntlet set before educators in the twenty-first century, this paper is a
proposal and a case study of sorts toward a new paradigm of social justice and civic engagement education. Unfortunately, the current pedagogical
climate of public K-12 education does not lend itself well to an exploratory study and trial of holistic education. Consequently, this proposal and case study
targets a higher education model. Specifically, we will look at some possibilities for a large community college in an urban setting with a diverse student
body. Our guides through this process are specifically identified by the journal Equity and Excellence in Education. The dynamic interplay between ideas of
social justice, civic engagement, and service learning in education will be the lantern in the dark cave of uncertainty. As such, a simple and straightforward
explanation of the three terms is helpful to direct this inquiry. Before we look at a proposal and case study and the possible consequences contained
therein, this paper will draw out a clear understanding of how we should characterize these ubiquitous terms and how their relationship to each other
affects our study. Social Justice, Civic Engagement, Service Learning and Other Commie Crap Social justice is often ascribed long, complicated, and
convoluted definitions. In fact, one could fill a good-sized library with treatises on this subject alone. Here we do not wish to belabor the issue or argue
over fine points. For our purposes, it will suffice to have a general characterization of the term, focusing instead on the dynamics of its interaction with
civic engagement and service learning. Social justice refers quite simply to a community vision and a community conscience that values inclusion,
fairness, tolerance, and equality. The idea of social justice in America has been around since the Revolution and is intimately linked to the idea of a social
contract. The Declaration of Independence is the best example of the prominence of social contract theory in the US. It states quite emphatically that the
government has a contract with its citizens, from which we get the famous lines about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Social contract theory and
specifically the Declaration of Independence are concrete expressions of the spirit of social justice. Similar clamor has been made over the appropriate
definitions of civic engagement and service learning, respectively. Once again, lets not get bogged down on subtleties. Civic engagement is a measure or
degree of the interest and/or involvement an individual and a community demonstrate around community issues. There is a longstanding dispute over
how to properly quantify civic engagement. Some will say that todays youth are less involved politically and hence demonstrate a lower degree of civic
engagement. Others cite high volunteer rates among the youth and claim it demonstrates a high exhibition of civic engagement. And there are about a

hundred other theories put forward on the subject of civic engagement and todays youth. But one thing is for sure; todays youth no
longer see government and politics as an effective tool
or valuable for affecting positive change in the world.
Instead of criticizing this judgment, perhaps we should come to sympathize and even admire it. Author Kurt Vonnegut said, There is a tragic flaw in our
precious Constitution, and I dont know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. Maybe the youths rejection of American
politics isnt a shortcoming but rather a rational and appropriate response to their experience. Consequently, the term civic engagement takes on new
meaning for us today. In order to foster fundamental change on the systemic level, which we have already said is necessary for our survival in the twenty-

our challenge becomes convincing

first century, we need to fundamentally change our systems. Therefore, part of

the youth that these systems, and by systems we mean government and commerce, have the potential
for positive change. Civic engagement consequently takes on a more specific and political meaning in this context. Service learning is
a methodology and a tool for teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement , and deepening practical
understanding of a subject. Since it is a relatively new field, at least in the structured sense, service learning is only beginning to define itself. Through
service learning students learn by experiencing things firsthand and by exposing themselves to new points of view. Instead of merely reading about
government, for instance, a student might experience it by working in a legislative office. Rather than just studying global warming out of a textbook, a
student might volunteer time at an environmental group. If service learning develops and evolves into a discipline with the honest goal of making better
citizens, teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and most importantly, exposing students to different and alternative experiences, it could
be a major feature of a modern education. Service learning is the natural counterbalance to our current overemphasis on standardized testing.

Social justice, civic engagement, and service learning are caught in a symbiotic cycle. The more we have of one of them; the
more we have of all of them. However, until we get momentum behind them, we are stalled .
Service learning may be our best chance to jumpstart our democracy. In the rest of this paper, we will look at the beginning stages of a project that seeks
to do just that.

Young people specifically can organize political education is

key.
Giroux 16 Henry A. Giroux, chaired Professor for Scholarship the Public Interest, McMaster University.
"Authoritarianism in America: A Call for Resistance." Abolition Journal, November 13, 2016.
https://abolitionjournal.org/authoritarianism-in-america-a-call-for-resistance-henry-a-giroux/ ///JCH-PF

neoliberalism has spurned has not been matched

We have also learned that the economic crisis and the misery

by an ideological crisis, a crisis of ideas, education, and values. In part, that is because the left and progressives
have not taken education seriously enough as central to the meaning of politics.
Without an informed public, there is no resistance in the name of democracy and
justice. Of course, power is never entirely on the side of domination, and in this
coming era of acute repression, we will have to redefine politics, reclaim
the struggle to educate, change individual and collective consciousness, engage in meaningful
dialogue with people left out of the political landscape, and build broad based social movements.
There are hints of this happening among youth of color and we need to be attentive to these struggles. This is a time for those who believe in democracy

It will not be easy but it can happen and there are

to both talk back and fight back.

historical precedents for this. The main vehicle of change and political
agency has to be young people. They are the beacon of the future and we have to
learn from them, support them, contribute where possible, and join in their struggles. The lights are going out in America and in many European countries
and the time to wake up from this nightmare is today. Forget depression, look ahead, get energized, read, build alternative public spheres, and learn how

to hold power accountable. There are no guarantees in politics, but there is no politics that

matters without educated hope

hope, that is, . What is happening in the United States can happen in any country, including
Canada. Americas move into authoritarianism is a warning for all of us, regardless of where we live.

Trump victory proves the case is a disad to every K failure to

prioritize civic engagement causes rightwing takeover.
Rorty 98 Richard Rorty, Prof of Philosophy, Stanford. Achieving Our Country. p. 87-94, 1998.
If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all
the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supernational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed
analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Partynamely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the
important decisions. The analogue of Orwells Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionalsLinds overclass, the people
like you and me. The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will
be in the interest of the international super-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the
political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that
national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and
the Right, to specialize in cultural issues.7 The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhereto keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and
the bottom 95 percent of the worlds population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be
distracted from their own despair by media-created psuedo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.
Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated
and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each
democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response
suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.8 The first response comes
naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to
the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements. Union members in the United States have watched
factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of international free trade as prosperity
for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in developing countries, and a very much worse standard of living for American
workers. It would be no wonder if they saw the American leftist intelligentsia as on the same side of the managers and stockholdersas sharing the same
class interests. For we intellectuals, who are mostly academics, are ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of
globalization. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the developing world than in the fate of our fellow citizens. Many
writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist

movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the
American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled
workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around
the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workersthemselves desperately afraid of being downsizedare not going to let themselves be

taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will
decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to
vote forsomeone will assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salemen, and postmodernist
professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis novel It Cant Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a
strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler
chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans,
and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words nigger and kike will once again be heard

All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make
in the workplace.

unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel
about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness.
For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made with the German
industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a

People will wonder

disaster for the country and the world. why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they
will ask,was the American Left ? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of
globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossesed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth

the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission

century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called

that that Left is unable to engage in national politics . It is not the sort of the Left which can be asked to deal with
the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening
relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost

of talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first is that the Left should put a
moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize what remains of
our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman might be achieved. In support of my first
suggestion, let me cite a passage from Deweys Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now
going on under the rubric of individualism versus communitarianism. Dewey thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously suffer from
a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon
this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the
traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be
exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a
rightist maneuver, one which supplies the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order.9 For such ascents are now more common on
the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the
established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of todays academic
leftists says that some topic has been inadequately theorized, you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language,
or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of
differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacans impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion,
they say, is accomplished by problematizing familiar concepts. Recent attempts to subvert social institutitons by problematizing concepts have
produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worts. The authors

to clamber back
of these purportedly subversive books honestly believe that the are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible

down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits
of a law, a treaty, a candidate or a political strategy. Even though what these authors theorize is often something very concrete
and near at handa curent TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandalthey offer the most absract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile

attempts to philosophize ones way into political relevance are a symptom

of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the
problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical

hallucinations. These result in an intellec- tual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street,
Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the name of what Edmund- son calls
Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook." 10
 Pragmatism
Only policy demands solve exclusive focus on social demands
gets coopted and destroyed by the right wing. Uniqueness
overwhelms the link radical movements exists in the SQuo
and theyre losing its try or die for the perm.
Chomsky 16 Aviva Chomsky, Prof of History and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State
University, Massachusetts. Student Protest, the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Rise of the Corporate
University. Truthout.org, May 22, 2016.

During the past academic year, an upsurge of student activism, a movement of millennials, has swept
campuses across the country and attracted the attention of the media. From coast to coast, from the Ivy League to state universities
to small liberal arts colleges, a wave of student activism has focused on stopping climate change, promoting a living wage, fighting mass incarceration
practices, supporting immigrant rights, and of course campaigning for Bernie Sanders. Both the media and the schools that have been the targets of some
of these protests have seized upon certain aspects of the upsurge for criticism or praise, while ignoring others. Commentators, pundits, and reporters have
frequently trivialized and mocked the passion of the students and the ways in which it has been directed, even as universities have tried to appropriate it
by promoting what some have called "neoliberal multiculturalism." Think of this as a way, in particular, of taming the power of the present demands for
racial justice and absorbing them into an increasingly market-oriented system of higher education. In some of their most dramatic actions, students of
color, inspired in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, have challenged the racial climate at their schools. In the process, they have launched a wave
of campus activism, including sit-ins, hunger strikes, demonstrations, and petitions, as well as emotional, in-your-face demands of various sorts. One
national coalition of student organizations, the Black Liberation Collective, has called for the percentage of black students and faculty on campus to
approximate that of blacks in the society. It has also called for free tuition for black and Native American students, and demanded that schools divest from

private prison corporations. Other student demands for racial justice

have included promoting a living wage for college
employees, reducing administrative salaries, lowering tuitions and fees, increasing financial aid, and reforming the practices of campus police. These

are not, however, the issues that have generally attracted the attention either of media commentators or the
colleges themselves. Instead, the spotlight has been on student demands for cultural

changes at their institutions that focus on deep-seated assumptions about whiteness, sexuality, and ability. At some universities, students have
personalized these demands, insisting on the removal of specific faculty members and administrators. Emphasizing a politics of what they call
"recognition," they have also demanded that significant on-campus figures issue public apologies or acknowledge that "black lives matter." Some want
universities to implement in-class "trigger warnings" when difficult material is being presented and to create "safe spaces" for marginalized students as a

By seizing upon and responding to these (and only these)

sanctuary from the daily struggle with the mainstream culture.

student demands, university administrators around the country are attempting to domesticate and
appropriate this new wave of activism. In the meantime, right-wing commentators have depicted students as coddled, entitled, and
enemies of free speech. The libertarian right has launched a broad media critique of the current wave of student activism. Commentators have been quick
to dismiss student protesters as over-sensitive and entitled purveyors of "academic victimology." They lament the "coddling of the American mind." The
Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf has termed students "misguided" in their protests against racist language, ideas, and assumptions, their targeting of
"microaggression" (that is, unconscious offensive comments) and insensitivity, and their sometimes highly personal attacks against those they accuse.
One of the most vocal critics of the new campus politics, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, argues that such rampant "liberalism" and
"political correctness" violate academic freedom and freedom of speech. (In this, they are in accord with the liberal American Civil Liberties Union. Free
speech advocates Daphne Patai and the ACLU's Harvey Silvergate, for example, bemoan a new diversity requirement at the University of Massachusetts
for its "politicization of education.") In a response that, under the circumstances, might at first seem surprising, college administrators have been
remarkably open to some of these student demands -- often the very ones derided by the right. In this way, the commentators and the

administrators have tended to shine a bright light on what is both personal and symbolic
in the new politics of the student protesters, while ignoring or downplaying their more structural and economically challenging
desires and demands. The Neoliberal University University administrators have been particularly amenable to student demands that fit with current trends in higher education. Today's neoliberal university is increasingly facing market pressures like loss of state
funding, privatization, rising tuition, and student debt, while promoting a business model that emphasizes the managerial control of faculty through constant "assessment," emphasis on "accountability," and rewards for "efficiency." Meanwhile, in a society in which labor unions are constantly being weakened,
the higher education labor force is similarly being -- in the term of the moment -- "flexibilized" through the weakening of tenure, that once ironclad guarantee of professorial lifetime employment, and the increased use of temporary adjunct faculty. In this context, universities are scrambling to accommodate
student activism for racial justice by incorporating the more individualized and personal side of it into increasingly depoliticized cultural studies programs and business-friendly, market-oriented academic ways of thinking. Not surprisingly, how today's students frame their demands often reflects the
environment in which they are being raised and educated. Postmodern theory, an approach which still reigns in so many liberal arts programs, encourages textual analysis that reveals hidden assumptions encoded in words; psychology has popularized the importance of individual trauma; and the neoliberal
ideology that has come to permeate so many schools emphasizes individual behavior as the most important agent for social change. Add together these three strands of thought, now deeply embedded in a college education, and injustice becomes a matter of the wrongs individuals inflict on others at a
deeply personal level. Deemphasized are the policies and structures that are built into how society (and the university) works. For this reason, while schools have downplayed or ignored student demands for changes in admissions, tuition, union rights, pay scales, and management prerogatives, they have
jumped into the heated debate the student movement has launched over "microaggressions" -- pervasive, stereotypical remarks that assume whiteness as a norm and exoticize people of color, while taking for granted the white nature of institutions of higher learning. As part of the present wave of protest,
students of color have, for instance, highlighted their daily experiences of casual and everyday racism -- statements or questions like "where are you from?" (when the answer is: the same place you're from) or "as a [fill in the blank], how do you feel about..." Student protests against such comments,
especially when they are made by professors or school administrators, and the mindsets that go with them are precisely what the right is apt to dismiss as political correctness run wild and university administrations are embracing as the essence of the present on-campus movement. At Yale, the Intercultural
Affairs Committee advised students to avoid racially offensive Halloween costumes. When a faculty member and resident house adviser circulated an email critiquing the paternalism of such an administrative mandate, student protests erupted calling for her removal. While Yale declined to remove her from
her post as a house adviser, she stepped down from her teaching position. At Emory, students protested the "pain" they experienced at seeing "Trump 2016" graffiti on campus, and the university president assured them that he "heard [their] message... about values regarding diversity and respect that clash
with Emory's own." Administrators are scrambling to implement new diversity initiatives and on-campus training programs -- and hiring expensive private consulting firms to help them do so. At the University of Missouri, the president and chancellor both resigned in the face of student protests including a
hunger strike and a football team game boycott in the wake of racial incidents on campus including public racist slurs and symbols. So did the dean of students at Claremont McKenna College (CMC), when protest erupted over her reference to students (implicitly of color) who "don't fit our CMC mold." Historian
and activist Robin Kelley suggests that today's protests, even as they "push for measures that would make campuses more hospitable to students of color: greater diversity, inclusion, safety, and affordability," operate under a contradictory logic that is seldom articulated. To what extent, he wonders, does the
student goal of "leaning in" and creating more spaces for people of color at the top of an unequal and unjust social order clash with the urge of the same protesters to challenge that unjust social order? Kelley argues that the language of "trauma" and mental health that has come to dominate campuses also
works to individualize and depoliticize the very idea of racial oppression. The words "trauma, PTSD, micro-aggression, and triggers," he points out, "have virtually replaced oppression, repression, and subjugation." He explains that, "while trauma can be an entrance into activism, it is not in itself a destination
and may even trick activists into adopting the language of the neoliberal institutions they are at pains to reject." This is why, he adds, for university administrators, diversity and cultural competency initiatives have become go-to solutions that "shift race from the public sphere into the psyche" and strip the
present round of demonstrations of some of their power. Cultural Politics and Inequality In recent years, cultural, or identity, politics has certainly challenged the ways that Marxist and other old and new left organizations of the past managed to ignore, or even help reproduce, racial and gender inequalities. It
has questioned the value of class-only or class-first analysis on subjects as wide-ranging as the Cuban Revolution -- did it successfully address racial inequality as it redistributed resources to the poor, or did it repress black identity by privileging class analysis? -- and the Bernie Sanders campaign -- will his
social programs aimed at reducing economic inequality alleviate racial inequality by helping the poor, or will his class-based project leave the issue of racial inequality in the lurch? In other words, the question of whether a political project aimed at attacking the structures of economic inequality can also
advance racial and gender equality is crucial to today's campus politics. Put another way, the question is: How political is the personal? Political scientist Adolph Reed argues that if class is left out, race politics on campus becomes "the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism." As he puts it, race-first politics of
the sort being pushed today by university administrators promotes a "moral economy... in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT
people." The student movement that has swept across the nation has challenged colleges and universities on the basics of their way of (quite literally) doing business. The question for these institutions now is: Can student demands largely be tamed and embedded inside an administration-sanctioned agenda
that in no way undermines how schools now operate in the world? Feminist theorist Nancy Fraser has shown how feminist ideas of a previous generation were successfully "recuperated by neoliberalism" -- that is, how they were repurposed as rationales for greater inequality. "Feminist ideas that once formed
part of a radical worldview," she argues, are now "increasingly expressed in individualist terms." Feminist demands for workplace access and equal pay have, for example, been used to undermine worker gains for a "family wage," while a feminist emphasis on gender equality has similarly been used on
campus to divert attention from growing class inequality. Student demands for racial justice risk being absorbed into a comparable framework. University administrators have found many ways to use student demands for racial justice to strengthen their business model and so the micro-management of
faculty. In one case seized upon by free-speech libertarians, the Brandeis administration placed an assistant provost in a classroom to monitor a professor after students accused him of using the word "wetback" in a Latin American politics class. More commonly, universities employ a plethora of consulting
firms and create new administrative positions to manage "diversity" and "inclusion." Workshops and training sessions proliferate, as do "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings." Such a vision of "diversity" is then promoted as a means to prepare students to compete in the "global marketplace." There are even
deeper ways in which a diversity agenda aligns with neoliberal politics. Literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels argues, for example, that diversity can give a veneer of social justice to ideas about market competition and meritocracy that in reality promote inequality. "The rule in neoliberal economies is that the
difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks -- but that no culture should be treated invidiously," he explains. "It's basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social
justice is not that the rich don't make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women." Or as Forbes Magazine put it, "Businesses need to vastly increase their ability to sense new
opportunities, develop creative solutions, and move on them with much greater speed. The only way to accomplish these changes is through a revamped workplace culture that embraces diversity so that sensing, creativity, and speed are all vastly improved." Clearly, university administrators prefer student

The more that

demands that can be coopted or absorbed into their current business model. Allowing the prevailing culture to define the parameters of their protest has left the burgeoning Millennial Movement in a precarious position.

students -- with the support of college and university administrations -- accept the individualized cultural path to
social change while forgoing the possibility of anything greater than cosmetic changes to prevailing
hierarchies, on campus and beyond, the more they face ridicule from those on the right who present them as
fragile, coddled, privileged whiners. Still, this young, vibrant movement has momentum and will continue to evolve. In this time of great social and
political flux, it's possible that its many constituencies -- fighting for racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice -- will use their growing clout to
build on recent victories, no matter how limited. Keep an eye on college campuses. The battle for the soul of American higher education being fought
there today is going to matter for the wider world tomorrow. Whether that future will be defined by a culture of trigger warnings and safe spaces or by
democratized education and radical efforts to fight inequality may be won or lost in the shadow of the Ivory Tower. The Millennial Movement matters. Our
future is in their hands.

Pragmatism centered on weak-ontological claims is the best

process for political contestation you can affirm that without
the telos of liberalism or humanism. Reject totalizing
ontological claims because they destroy prospects contingent
progress.
Nyman 16 Jonna Nyman, Pragmatism, Practice and the Value of Security. Ethical Security Studies: A new
research agenda, Routledge, pg. 139-141, 2016. ///JCH-PF

A pragmatic, practice-centred approach can help us return to the original forces of critical security studies: the politics of security and life experiences of
it. Existing approaches remain split over the value of security and the meaning or purpose of critical/Critical research. Many reject the possibility for
security to be ethically good, suggesting that it is too tainted by its association with existing problematic national security practices and ontologies.
Alongside this a concern with power has led poststructuralist authors to focus on deconstruction over reconstruction, in return for which they are critiqued
for lacking emancipatory impetus (Hnyek and Chandler 2013). However, pragmatism can help us recognise core concerns and help us move forward
through three contributions. First, it avoids foundational 'truth; second it presents a different way to think about ethics though a 'weak foundationalism'
allowing for contingent ethical claims; and third, it allows us to move forward with a practical research agenda. The rest of this chapter will expand on

A pragmatic approach rejects the idea of foundational 'truth' , and

these contributions.

Rather than being anti-foundationalist, Cochran

involves a recognition that nothing is ever definitively settled.

suggests, a pragmatic approach can be seen as 'weak foundationalist', and leads to contingent ethical claims which are

context-dependent, temporary and provisional' (Cochran 1999: 16). Based on this, Cochran has used pragmatism to
build bridges in normative theorising within IR. She argues that for pragmatists, establishing 'truth' is not the same as for a positivist: it involves settling a
controversial or complex issue for the time being, until something comes along to dislodge the comfort and reassurance that has thereby been achieved,
forcing inquiry to begin again' (Cochran 2002: 527, 1999). So, while progress is always provisional, 'it is not empty' (Cochran 2002: 528). Such a 'weak
foundationalist' approach helps us to move beyond debates over whether or not security is 'positive* or 'negative', as nothing is ever definitively settled.
Though she doesn't use the terminology of pragmatism, Mustapha makes a similar argument in proposing a 'modified poststructuralist approach to

'any ontological claims that

security based on weak foundationalism. As with an 'unsettled' pragmatic approach, this means that

must always be open to interrogation' (Mustapha 2013: 74-5). This allows us to

are made

engage with the (contingent) "realities" of actual "security" problems' (Mustapha 2013: 77), and makes
reconstruction possible even for most poststructuralists. Here, '(contingent) foundational claims
are not static and are open to interrogation, but are necessary for politics and ethics. Security is a practice/means as
well as an end (Mustapha 2013: 82). The weak foundationalism which underpins pragmatism emphasises the contingent nature of claims, and shows that
security doesn't have to always be negative - but likewise, any 'ethical' or 'positive' notion of security should not be considered to be fixed or permanent.

Instead, reflexivity is imperative, with continuous evaluation and re-evaluation of our

claims. It also helps us to move past arguments by poststructuralist and Copenhagen School authors who suggest that the way in which security has
traditionally been attached to problematic national security politics means it is 'tainted by association. Instead, the meaning and value of security is not
fixed and can change, and will never be settled. It also helps to avoid some of the controversial baggage of emancipatory approaches (Barkawi and Laffey

2006: 350). It also helps us tomove beyond debates over deconstruction /reconstruction and the meaning and
purpose of critique - most importantly because it is inherently pluralist, and therefore argues that there is no one 'truth and so no correct approach to
critique or ethics. Poststructuralist discomfort with going beyond critique and related concerns with power become less significant once we recognise this.
Anti-foundauonalists don't believe that there are secure foundations on which we can base ethics: a pragmatic approach helps us to recognise the lack of
secure foundations and still move forward with reconstructive agendas. Ultimately, it allows for suggestions of alternatives based on experiences, while
recognising that these alternatives will never be final. Consequently, although we can never reach emancipation' or 'security', we can instead focus on
becoming more secure, given what we know about different conditions and contexts at any given time. This moves us onto the second contribution a
pragmatist approach can make: it provides us with a different way to think about ethics. As noted, Cochran makes a link between a pragmatic weak

foundationalism and contingent ethical claims. Once we reject 'truth', it becomes clear that ethical claims, or the
good, can never be settled but must rather be continually re-thought and unproved upon. Thus, while we
can draw ethical conclusions, these conclusions are 'no more than temporary resting places for

ethical critique' (Cochran 1999: 17). Drawing on Brassett's work on pragmatism, we can suggest 'possibilities , while

remaining sensitive to their limitations' (Brassett 2009a: 226). Once we drop the obsession with 'truth' and finding
'truth' in scholarly enquiry, the task becomes one of engaging in the trial and error process of suggesting possibilities' (Brassett 2009a: 226).