Off Case

Topicality
 INCREASE
We Meet
Communicative engagement
Lynch 02 (Marc, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George
Washington University, Why Engage? China and the Logic of Communicative
Engagement, European Journal of International Relations, 8(2), p. 204-205)//TN
Communicative engagement takes seriously the awareness of both actors, who
enter into a dialogue oriented towards achieving consensus through the give and
take of reasoned argument.14 Rather than a sender (the US) using engagement to
manipulate a target (China) in pursuit of predefined interests, communicative
engagement initiates a dialogue to produce international arrangements amenable
to the interests of both parties. Within a communicative logic of action, actors
should make a sincere effort at empathy, to understand the interests and concerns
of the other in order to arrive at a formula which can satisfy both. Ideally,
participants in a dialogue temporarily set their self-interest aside, formulating
generalizable arguments oriented towards a consensus position acceptable to all
affected parties. Where strategic engagement aims to induce the other to accept a
predefined set of institutions, communicative engagement aims to arrive at a
mutually acceptable solution which does not rest upon coercion or manipulation.
Giving all affected actors a voice in shaping institutions, rather than socializing new
actors into existing institutions or punishing deviant behavior, characterizes the
underlying logic of communicative engagement. The strategic mode of action
produces compromise between divergent preferences on the basis of the
distribution of power and commitment. The communicative mode of action
produces a consensus based on mutual intersubjective validity and empathetic
understanding of interests. The logic of communicative engagement is not to
provide sufficient carrots to influence the targeted state, nor to strike a bargain on
the distribution of goods and prestige which reflects the distribution of power. Nor is
it precisely the same as persuasion through rhetorical action, in which one actor
attempts to change the policies of the other through arguments or appeals to
shared norms (Cortell and Davis, 2000: 767). Instead, communicative action aims
to produce shared social rules which all parties view as legitimate, within which they
can compete for the distributional goods without calling into question the existence
of the game itself (Bohman, 1996).

THEIR T CRITICIZES OUR AFF BECAUSE WE DO NTO INCREASE IS

DOENST PSEICIFY THAT AFFIRMATIVES MUST BE ESTABLISHING
NEW ACTION. WE MEET THEIR DEFINITON OF INCREASE.
LETTER ANALOGY AND TEXTING

Counter Interp
Increase is calculated by net action
Words and Phrases 8 vol 20B p 265
 La.App.2 Cir. 1972 Within insurance companys superintendents employment contract,
increase meant net increase in premiums generated by agent calculated by
subtracting lapses or premiums lost on polices previously issued from gross premiums
added by new policies sold and one time meant payment made as salary or bonus to agent on
dollar for dollar or one for one basis measured by net increase. Lanier v. Trans-World Life
Ins. Co., 258 So.2d 103.Insurance 1652(1)

Prefer Our Definition

OPENS UP AFFIRMATIVES SUCH AS CLIMATE COOP WHICH IS V
EXPECTED
NOT A VOTER
 ENGAGEMENT
Substantially relates to quality, not quantity
Design & Artists Copyright Society 3 (http://www.dacs.org.uk/index.php?
c=86&m=5&s=5.)
Copyright is infringed when an individual carries out one of the copyright owner's
exclusive rights (see FAQ 5 above) without the permission of the copyright owner in
relation to the whole or a substantial part of the artistic work. The test to determine
what is substantial is a qualitative test and not a quantitative one. This means that
there may be an infringement even if a small but distinctive portion of the original
artwork was copied.

More ev
Lands 99 (Robert, 12-1, Finer Stephens Innocent Solicitors, http://www.theaoi.com/Mambo/index.php?
option=content&task=view&id=226&Itemid=26)

If you copy the whole of another persons work, you will probably infringe their
copyright. You will probably infringe their copyright if you copy a substantial part of
anothers work. What is substantial is determined by the quality of the portion used,
not just the quantity. In other words, if you copy the most important part of a work,
it will be substantial even if its only a small percentage of the whole.
 K
COLONIALISM NOT PROBLEM, REAL PROBLEM UNKNOWN
BECAUSE OF CENTURIES OF VIOLENCE.
Williams 11
Walter Williams is an author for FEE.org, Poverty is Easy to
explain, (FEE), 6-26-14
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/poverty-is-easy-to-explain

Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the

question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and
greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen
as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and
incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem in coming to grips with it.
There is very little either complicated or interesting about poverty. Poverty has been
mans condition throughout his history. The causes of poverty are quite simple
and straightforward. Generally, individual people or entire nations are
poor for one or more of the following reasons: (1) they cannot produce
many things highly valued by others; (2) they can produce things valued
by others but they are prevented from doing so; or (3) they volunteer to
be poor. The true mystery is why there is any affluence at all. That is, how did a
tiny proportion of mans population (mostly in the West) for only a tiny part
of mans history (mainly in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries)
manage to escape the fate of their fellow men? Sometimes, in reference to
the United States, people point to its rich endowment of natural resources. This
explanation is unsatisfactory. Were abundant natural resources the cause of
affluence, Africa and South America would stand out as the richest continents,
instead of being home to some of the worlds most miserably poor people. By
contrast, that explanation would suggest that resource-poor countries like Japan,
Hong Kong, and Great Britain should be poor instead of ranking among the worlds
richest places. Another unsatisfactory explanation of poverty is colonialism.
This argument suggests that third-world poverty is a legacy of having
been colonized, exploited, and robbed of its riches by the mother country.
But it turns out that countries like the United States, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand were colonies; yet they are among the worlds richest
countries. Hong Kong was a colony of Great Britain until 1997, when China
regained sovereignty, but it managed to become the second richest
political jurisdiction in the Far East. On the other hand, Ethiopia, Liberia,
Tibet, and Nepal were never colonies, or were so for only a few years, and
they rank among the worlds poorest and most backward countries. Despite
the many justified criticisms of colonialism and, I might add, multinationals, both served as a means of transferring
Western technology and institutions, bringing backward peoples into greater contact with a more-developed
Western world. A tragic fact is that many African countries have suffered significant decline since independence. In
many of those countries the average citizen can boast that he ate more regularly and enjoyed greater human-rights
protections under colonial rule. The colonial powers never perpetrated the unspeakable human rights abuses,
including genocide, that we have seen in post-independence Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Central African
Empire, Somalia, and elsewhere. Any economist who suggests he has a complete answer to the causes of affluence
should be viewed with suspicion. We do not know fully what makes some societies richer than others. However, we
can make guesses based on correlations. Start out by ranking countries according to their economic systems.
Conceptually we could arrange them from more capitalistic (having a larger free-market sector) to more
communistic (with extensive State intervention and planning). Then consult Amnesty Internationals ranking of
countries according to human-rights abuses. Then get World Bank income statistics and rank countries from highest
to lowest per capita income.

Interpretation: The role of the ballot should be to weigh the costs and benefits of a topical plan
against a competitive alternative.
Prefer: Its middle ground, they get their alternative but cant moot 8 minutes of 1ac speech time.
Any other interpretation is unfair because it sets the affirmative one speech behindtheir
framework could shift the focus of the debate to a critique of any word, phrase, sentence of the 1ac

The alt alone fails devolves into endless reflection and navel-gazingonly practical political
solutions can solve the epistemology critique

Gordon 4 (Lewis, Professor of Philosophy at University of Connecticut, Fanon and Development: A

Philosophical Look, http://www.codesria.org/IMG/pdf/4-3.pdf)
Democracy and Development: Irene Gendzier
Although Sylvia Wynter qualified her conclusions by reminding us that we should work through
epistemological categories and not merely economic ones, her dis- cussion so focuses on the question of
conceptual conditions that it is difficult to determine how those economic considerations configure in the
analysis. Irene Gendzier, author of one of the early studies of Fanons life and thought, took on this task,
in addition to elaborating its political dimensions as well, in her 1995 history of the field of development
studies, Development against Democracy: Manipulating Political Change in the Third World. Gendzier
first points out that development studies emerged in elite, First World universities as an attempt to offer
their vision of modernisation over the Marxist ones of the U.S.S.R., Communist China, and Cuba. Their
model was resolute: A capitalist economy and elite (oligarchical) democracy. We see here the normative
telos writ large: The United States. Although Gendzier does not present this as a theodicean argument,
those elements are unmistakable. The initial phase of development studies granted the United States the
status of utopia, which means that both its contradictions and those that emerge from its application
abroad must be functions of the limitations of the people who manifest them. In effect, Gendziers study
is an empirical validation of much of Wynters and Fanons arguments. The record of those development
policies is universally bad, although there seems to be no example that could meet any test of falsification
that would convince, say, mem- bers of the Council for Foreign Relations, many of whom are from the
neoliberal and conservative wings of the North American academic elite. Gendzier uses an apt term to
describe the work such policies have done: maldevelopment. Here is her assessment of their record: For
many, terms like Development and Modernization have lost their meaning. They have become code
words. They refer to policies pursued by governments and international agencies that enrich ruling elites
and technocrats, while the masses are told to await the benefits of the trickle down effect. For many,
Development and Modernization are terms that refer to a politics of reform designed to preserve the status
quo while promising to alter it. And for many social scientists, those who have rationalized the interests of
governments committed to such policies are accom- plices in deception (Gendzier 1995:2). North
American and European development studies set the foundations for U.S. policies that supported
antidemocratic regimes for the sake of preserving the eco- nomic hegemony of American business elites,
and the supposed dilemma emerged, in many countries under the yoke of First World developmental
dictates, of whether to reduce social inequalities, which often led to economic decline on the one hand, or
increase economic prosperity, which often led to social inequalities on the other. The problem, of course,
is that this is a false dilemma since no nation attempts either pole in a vacuum. How other countries
respond to a nations social and eco- nomic policy will impact its outcome. It is not, in other words, as
though any nation truly functions as a self-supporting island anymore. A good example is the small
Caribbean island of Antigua. To normalise relations with the United States, that island was forced to
create immigration laws that would stimulate the formation of an underclass, which U.S. advisors claimed
would create a cheap labour base to stimulate economic investment and an increase in production and
prosperity. There is now such a class in Antigua, but there has, in fact, been a decline in prosperity. The
reason is obvious: There was not an infrastructure of capital in need of such a labour force in the first
place. The island of Antigua has a good education base, which makes the type of labour suitable for its
economy to be one of a trained profes- sional class linked in with the tourist economy and other high-
leveled service-ori- ented professions such as banking and trade, all of which, save tourism, the United
States does not associate within a predominantly black country. The creation of an underclass without an
education or social-welfare system to provide training and economic relief, conjoined with an absence of
investments from abroad, has cre- ated a politically and economically noxious situation, and the quality of
life in Anti- gua now faces decline.8 This story is no doubt a familiar one in nations with very modest
prosperity as in Africa. There has been a set of critical responses to development theory, the most
influential of which has been those by theorists of dependency.9 The obvious situa- tion of
epistemological dependence emerges from the United States as the standard of development, both
economic and cultural. The economic consequence is a func- tion of the international institutions that
form usury relationships with countries that are structurally in a condition of serfdom, where they depend
on loans that it is no longer possible to believe they can even pay back. Fanon would add, however, that
we should bear in mind that in the case of many African countries who re- ceived such loans, the situation
might have been different had those funds been spent on infrastructural resources instead of as a source of
wealth for neocolonial elites. That European and American banks hold accounts for leaders who have, in
effect, robbed their countries and have left their citizens in near perpetual debt to the World Bank reveals
the gravity of Fanons warnings of forty years past. An additional Fanonian warning has also been
updated by sociologist Paget Henry, who warns us that the epistemological struggle also includes fighting
to save the sciences from extreme commodification and instrumentalisation (Henry 20022003:51). To
these criticisms, Gendzier poses the following consideration. The critics of development have pointed out
what is wrong with development studies, particularly its project of modernisation, but their shortcoming
is that many of them have not presented alternative conceptions of how to respond to the problems that
plague most of Africa and much of the Third World. Think, for example, of Wynters call for a new
epistemic order. Calling for it is not identical with creating it. This is one of the ironic aspects of the
epistemological project. Although it is a necessary reflec- tion, it is an impractical call for a practical
response.

The alternatives totalizing stance recreates the privilege they critique: focus on
coloniality obscures socio-economic differences that undergird everyday forms of
violence.
Browitt 2004 (Jeff, Head of International Studies Program, Cultural Studies Group at University of
Technology-Sydney, http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/zimmerman/lacasa/Estudios%20Culturales
%20Articles/Jeff%20Browitt.pdf)
I would like to complete this unavoidably selective and admittedly reductive view of Latin American
cultural studies by briefly mentioning Walter Mignolos valuable work on colonial difference, but also
his entrapment in a specious politics of location. In The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) and more
recently Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking
(2000), Mignolo, at one stage also a member of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, is keen to
problematise what he regards as the self- validating narrative of European modernity, which obscures the
fact that its unfolding was based on coloniality: the plundering of New World wealth and the
concomitant European act of self- definition as civilization through positing the colonial other as
savage. To counter this historical tendency, Mignolo posits colonial difference and border thinking
in which the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking place and where colonial difference is the
space [...] in which global designs have to be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored (Mignolo,
Local Histories ix).
In an earlier article in which he responds to Peter Hulmes criticism of his privileging an epistemology of
location, Mignolo elaborates on what he regards as the dilemma of historical thinking, even in such a
perceptive subaltern historian as Dipesh Chakrabarty: The basis of [the] Chakrabarty dilemma is that
writing subaltern histories means to remain in an epistemically subaltern position in the domain of
cultures of scholarship. This is because one of the invisible places in which the coloniality of power
operates is the domain of epistemology (Mignolo, I Am 241). In other words, the institutional location
of much history writing already
compromises what can be said by the very methodological and philosophical assumptions of
professional historiography. As an example of such blindness, Mignolo stresses the exclusion of the
voice of the indigene in Gordon Brotherstons discussion of Amerindian knowledge of a system of
writing. For Mignolo:
Amerindians themselves have nothing to say, as they have not been invited to participate in a debate in
which they themselves are objects of consideration. That is the epistemic colonial difference from whence
emerged Amerindians in the sixteenth century, Chicano/as as in the US today, and white, mestizo, and
immigrant Creole intellectuals like Kusch, Dussel, and myself. Voices from the margins are voices from
and dealing with the colonial epistemic difference. (241)
In Local Histories/Global Designs, he elaborates on this colonial difference from the point of view of a
sensual, lived experience related to territory: the sensibilities of geohistorical locations have to do with a
sense of territoriality [...] and includes language, food, smells, landscape, climate, and all the basic signs
that link the body to one or several places (Mignolo, Local Histories 191). It is hard to argue with this
sort of claim, but how each person experiences those sensibilities will also be crucially related to socio-
economic position. Mignolo unfortunately collapses the distance between Amerindians and white,
mestizo, and immigrant Creole intellectuals like Kusch, Dussel and himself, seemingly oblivious to the
obvious objection that there is also a world of class, status and ethnic differences between the lettered
intellectual able to participate in, indeed make a living out of engaging in Euro-Latin American cultural
debates. Here the politics of location is reduced to an abstract macro-geo-cultural category Latin
America now reconstituted, not as the now largely discredited US area studies, but as the site of
colonial difference, in which the privileged interlocutors (once more) are the lettered Creole
intelligentsia. There is more than a ring of truth therefore to Peter Hulmes remark that birth certificates
matter more here than intellectual credentials (Hulme 225). Mignolo rebels against what he regards as
the subordination of Latin American intellectuals vis-a-vis metropolitan centers of learning, but though
such one-way traffic of knowledge does exist, it may matter much less for those whose own difference is
lived in and against the postcolonial, peripheral nation women, subordinate social classes, ethnic
minorities, indigenous peoples than for the postcolonial national intelligentsia itself.

Perm do both: To move beyond individual struggles and embrace the fight against colonialism as
whole is to create a world of political possibility.
Tapia 2K11 [Ruby C. Tapia, doctoral candidate in the department of ethnic studies at the University of
California, San Diego and is currently completing a dissertation on the racialized construction of
maternity in popular visual culture, What's Love Got to Do with It?: Consciousness, Politics and
Knowledge Production in Chela, Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed, Methodology of the
Oppressed by Chela Sandoval, American Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 733-743]

CHELA SANDOVAL'S METHODOLOGY OF THE OPPRESSED IS, TO USE BALDWIN'S analogy,

the outsider who has entered the gates of some of the most apparently incongruous methodological and
theoretical positions, defamiliarizing their tenets in order to illuminate their dialogic origins, their
possibilities for co-articulation, and the potential for their "occu- pants" to discard the robes muffling
radical cultural critique, suffocat- Ruby C. Tapia is a doctoral candidate in the department of ethnic
studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is currently completing a dissertation on the
racialized construction of maternity in popular visual culture. American Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 4
(December 2001) 2001 American Studies Association 733 This content downloaded from
206.76.84.110 on Sun, 28 Jul 2013 14:39:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions734
AMERICAN QUARTERLY ing social transformation. In this brilliantly innovative work, Sandoval
demands that (all) intellectuals interested in democratizing power trust their nakedness enough to
venture into new political, theoretical territories, to explode (inter)disciplinary and identificatory
boundaries, to listen to and participate in conversations heretofore largely inaudible across borders of
subjectivity. If this characterization of Sandoval's work seems abstract, if its imagery discomforts, then
it has been effectively inspired by the word and spirit of a most rigorous, practical and practice-able
political science: Sandoval's science of love. Molded with material from such apparently "different"
knowledges as those put forth by Frederic Jameson, Gloria Anzaldia, and Roland Barthes,
Methodology of the Oppressed feels through and across material and theoretical histories of first world
powers and third world struggles, carving a path toward what Sandoval outlines in part four as "a
hermeneutics of love in the postmodern world." Stirred in part by Roland Barthes' meditations on love
in Incidents, The Pleasure of the Text, and A Lover's Discourse, Sandoval re-members these texts'
connections to the decolonial theory of Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and Emma Perez, among others,
as well as their applicability to contemporary predicaments of culture, subjectivity, and politics. She
weaves together the theoretical narratives presented by each of the thinkers that she engages to construct
not another narrative but a manner of story-telling and theory-making that attempts to take seriously
and move always beyond the repertoire of intellectual and political possibility articulated in
individual bodies of critical theory, whether they be post-structuralist, post-modern, post-colonial or
strict identity-based bodies. Even as Sandoval calls attention to the weak- nesses and would-be
despairing moments inherent in the theoretical formulations that she engages, her analyses are
immanently productive because they challenge the racialized "apartheid of theoretical domains"
(chapter 3), (per)forming new terms, new possibilities, new alliances in intellectual being and
importantly, social movement. Without a doubt, the love in Sandoval's Methodology has everything to
do with social movement. It is love as social movement that is, ultimately, her object of study. It is love
as social movement that inspires the dialogue she transcribes and furthers between intellectuals (such
as Frederic Jameson and Gloria Anzaldtia) whose interests and formulations are widely perceived to be
divergent, at best, and incom- patible at worst. What Sandoval's location at the nexus of ethnic studies,
women's studies, cultural studies, and American studies compels her to demon- strate is that
intellectual-activists in these fields have never not spoken of one another, even though their alliances
with or divergence from certain ideological positions mean that, as individuals, they (may) have never
been perceived to be speaking to or with one another. They have never not been implicated in or
effected by one another's theorizations, just as they have never not, any of them, performed their
knowledges from embodied locations or with bodily effects. Thus, Sandoval's Methodology
importantly incorporates Cherrie Moraga's notion of theory in the flesh, "reclaim[ing] that theory from
the halls of the academy where it has been intercepted and domesticated" (7), and re- membering its
origins in the intellectual and political insurrections of oppressed peoples. Beyond pointing out that "the
new modes of critical theory and philosophy, the new modes of reading and analysis that have
emerged during the U.S. post-World War II period are fundamentally linked to the voices of
subordinated peoples" (8). Sandoval draws out these links, holding together-through moments of tension
and har- mony-the decolonizing possibilities of critical theory as practiced by both dominant
"Western" and traditionally liminal intellectuals.

Inherent equality of all beings requires utilitiarianism

Cummiskey 1996 [David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bates College and
Ph.D. from UM, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 145-146]
In the next section, I will defend this interpretation of the duty of beneficence. For the sake of argument,
however, let us first simply assume that beneficence does not require significant self-sacrifice and see
what follows. Although Kant is unclear on this point, we will assume that significant self-sacrifices are
supererogatory.11 Thus, if I must harm one in order to save many, the individual whom I will harm by my
action is not morally required to affirm the action. On the other hand, I have a duty to do all that I can for
those in need. As a consequence I am faced with a dilemma: If I act, I harm a person in a way that a
rational being need not consent to; if I fail to act, then I do not do my duty to those in need and thereby
fail to promote an objective end. Faced with such a choice, which horn of the dilemma is more consistent
with the formula of the end-in-itself? We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as
the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract "social entity." It is not a question of some persons having to
bear the cost for some elusive "overall social good." Instead, the question is whether some persons must
bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that "to use a
person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person,
that his is the only life he has."12 But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save
through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to
sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will
bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent
motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the
basis of all particular duties is the principle that "rational nature exists as an end in itself" (GMM 429).
Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational
beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting
the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion,
the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1,
however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non-value-
based rationale. But we have seen that Kant's normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable
end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even
when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the
value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from
maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them
arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have "dignity, that
is, an unconditional and incomparable worth" that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons
also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others
(chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force
another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational
beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.

Ends justify the meansturns their ethics claims

Isaac 02. (Jeffrey C., James H. Rudy professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the
Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Bloomington, Ends, Means and politics,
Dissent, Spring)
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught,
an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be
morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to
see that the purity of ones intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring
violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right
thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond
the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice,
moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is
why, from the standpoint of politics as opposed to religionpacifism is always a potentially immoral
stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with
any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the
alignment with good may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of good that generates evil. This
is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that ones goals be sincere or
idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge
these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment.
It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political
effectiveness.
Case
 Containment
If containment and securitization against the supposed china
threat succeedes, a clash of nations will be very likely
Song 15 ( Securitization of the "China Threat" Discourse: A Poststructuralist
Account, Weiqing song Ph.D. in Political Science, University of Siena, Italy
(2008))mlm
Here, the so-called China threat is represented as a political myth, in whose
construction the method of differentiation plays a dominant role. Securitizers
working in the political myth mode make an effort to stimulate intuitive and
psychological responses from their audience to heighten the latter's consciousness
of the "China threat." Disseminated as authoritative knowledge of news reports, a
comprehensive set of threats are securitized through the recounting of political
myths derived from the notorious "yellow peril" narrative in Western history. Power
in this mode of securitization appears in its most intellectual form in the "clash of
civilizations" thesis, according to which future conflicts in the globalizing world will
probably take place along cultural and civilizational lines, as these are constituted
by fundamental factors such as history, language, ethnicity, tradition, and religion.
This thesis involves the securitized argument that "cultural identities are central" to
a world with a "shifting balance of civilisations," in which "cultural affinities and
differences shape the alliances and antagonisms.If this act of securittization
succeeds, a clash of civilizations will in fact be more likely.

The china threat is inflated as an excuse to militarize and

democratize South East Asian Nations
Pan 4 (Chengxin Pan, Discourses of China In International Relations, a study in
western theory as IR practice, august 2004) mlm
At stake here are the vested interests of U.S. national security agencies and their
industrial contractors, for a 'China threat' scenario would almost guarantee a surge
of U.S. spending on weapons and increased enthusiasm for the national missile
shield. In this context, therefore, it is necessary to focus again on how the creation
of the Chinese Other in the 'China threat' argument plays an important role in
shaping the power relations between the West (the United States in particular) and
China, and how the containment policy cannot be put into practice without a prior
sanction of the discursive imagery of China as a 'real' strategic threat. In a short yet
decisive article entitled "Why We Must Contain China," American columnist Charles
Krauthammer takes "a rising and threatening China" as his starting point of
analysis. In consequence, he argues that "any rational policy toward" it must "have
exactly these two components": "containing China" and "undermining its ruthless
dictatorship." Indeed, by seeing China as a bully and the mother of all other
enemies (since "it is sending missile and nuclear technology to such places as
Pakistan and Iran"), he urges that this containment policy "must begin early in its
career," and be complemented by a policy aimed at "undermining its aggressively
dictatorial regime." To further esh out his containment strategy, Krauthammer
offers such practical options as strengthening regional alliances (with Vietnam,
India, Russia, as well as Japan) to box in China; standing by Chinese dissidents;
denying Beijing the right to host the Olympics; and keeping China fiom joining the
World Trade Organisation on the terms it desiresuo Similar policy advice was also
offered by an article published in The terms it desires no Similar policy advice was
also offered by an article published in The Economist, which anchors its argument in
an image of China as "the real source of the current tension" in Asia. The only
important difference between the two articles is that the latter is more frank about
the underlying aim of the containmentstrategy, which countries should stop
averting their eyes from reality and instead make a more active efibrt to keep an
American military presence in the region. It is unlikely that China would have
challenged the Philippines over the rocky islet it claims in the South China Sea if the
American navy had still had its Philippine base. Commenting on these efforts to
create and strengthen alliances to contain China, former National Security Adviser
Samuel Berger wrote: "continued rapprochement with India and effervescent U.S.-
Japan relations, both fully justified, now are pursued with more than a whiff of
Chinese encirclement.""3 Certainly, the strategy derived from the 'China threat'
argument is not a monolithic whole of confrontational containment. More often than
not, there exists a subtle, business-style policy of 'crisis management.' For example,
central to the concerns of Gerald Segal and David S. G. Goodman in their edited
volume China Rising.' Nationalism and Interdependence is how to "constitute a
policy framework for managing a rising China.""" Bernstein and Munro also shy
away from the word 'containment' and prefer to call their China policy
'management,' that is, "how can the conflict with China be rnanaged?"n'
Nonetheless, what remains unchanged here is a continued advocacy of controlling
China. A perusal of Bernstein and Munro's texts reveals that what they mean by
'management' is almost identical to Krauthammer's explicit containment stance."6
By framing U.S.-China relations as an issue of crisis management, they leave little
doubt of who is the 'manager,' who is to be 'managed,' and where power and
authority should is to prolong U.S. military dominance in that region. It insists that
"South-East Asian countries should stop averting their eyes from reality and instead
make a more active push to keep an American military presence in the region.
Indeed for Betts and Christensen, coercion and war are part and parcel of their
china management policy: Containment policy is as much about satisfying the
western goal of absolute security as it is about deterring China. Thus, as Gerald
Segal makes clear, there is really no substitute for coercive containment, since no
alternative to it can meet the need to seek an absolute security guarantee from
China. No one, as he argues, can "count on China's short-term economic need
ensuring a peaceful partner in the 21st century. Hence the question arises of the
limit of the interdependence strategy to restrain China [emphasis added]."u3 In
order to "ensure China's cooperation on matters of regional and international
security [emphasis added]," Segal insists that aggressive containment must be the
order of the day: While seeing the need for containment,12 Huntington signifies
that there still exist other options to ease the threat, such as the democratisation of
China. And to this end, Huntington virtually comes up with a strategy of
Christianising Chinese leaders. He believes that China's heritage, an obstacle to
democracy, can be overcome by Christianity, as in the case of Korea and Taiwan,
where "the political leaders most active in pushing for democracy were
Christians."m For all its contemporary 'political science' guise, this is reminiscent of
a 19th-century missionary conviction that in order for China to be democratised, it
must be Christianised first. Of course, not all these strategies will be automatically
translated into actual policy and practice. But more often than not they do make
their way into bilateral relations. For example, alarmed by the 1999 Cox Report of
China's nuclear espionage, the powerful U.S. Senator (now retired) Jesse Helms was
determined to press Washington to do something about it. Among his key
recommendations were to "shore up our own defenses, and those of our allies...
bring Taiwan under a regional missile- defense umbrella," and "build a national
missile defense," including scrapping the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty. 2 As we now
know, almost all these measures have become part of American foreign policy. In
this context, I argue that it is imperative to ask the question of "What are the
implications of this kind of policy on China?" In a recent article critical of the
containment policy, Joshua Cooper Ramo has specifically pointed out some of its
dire implications for China. As he notes: The ensuing questions are of course "Will
China readily accept such an outcome?" and if not, "What are the implications for its
relations with the countries which seek to contain it?" These are the questions that I
will try to answer in the remaining parts of this chapter, which will centre
specifically on two recent incidents in the course of the new U.S. pursuit of
containing the 'China threat': firstly the Taiwan Missile Crisis of 1995-1996 and then
the Spy Plane incident of 2001.

Studies of the China threat are written with the intention to

contain research always follow the lines of a self fulfilling
prophecy which perpetuates xenophobic policy a
Song 15 ( Securitization of the "China Threat" Discourse: A Poststructuralist
Account, Weiqing song Ph.D. in Political Science, University of Siena, Italy
(2008))mlm
Why is China, then, perceived to pose such a huge threat to much of the world? This
question highlights another kind of speech act involved in identity buildin g. It is
interesting for analysts to consider the identity or identities that a particular piece
of language is being used to enact (i.e., to persuade an audience to recognize an
identity or identities as opera tive). What identity or identities does a particular use
of language attri bute to others, and how does this help the speaker or writer to
enact his or her own identity?68 It matters little whether the content communicated
is factual. The real purpose is to convince an audience of its urgency and
consequently persuade them to take action. The mode of securitization here is
based on political myth. One cannot falsify political myths because they are not a
matter of "scientific hypothesis" but rather the "expression of a determination to
act."69 This mode uses rhetoric, visual spectacle and other kinds of art, rituals, and
social practices, among other forms of communication . It relies to a large extent on
ascriptive factors such as ethnicity, race, culture, and civilization . In contrast to the
scientific and analogical modes, the mythical mode of securitization pursues a logic
that is psychologically intuitive rather than logically deductive or inductive. In
extreme cases, it can be bluntly discriminatory. In the mode of political myth, the
China threat issue is structurally incorporated by a group of securitizers into the
"basic discourses" of culture and civilization. The issue does not appear to be a
question of security because it is assigned to a broader context wherein a country
as different as China is expanding its reach throughout the world. However, the real
purpose of the mythical mode of securitization is again to construct the China threat
as such, and ultimately to call for action against it. Securitizers working in this mode
thus promulgate political myths about the issue. A myth is rendered specifically
"political" not by its content but by the relationship between a given narrative and
the political conditions of a given group.70 In the documentary titled The Chinese
Are Coming, the securitizers use a differentiating logic to construct China as a
country, nation, and culture/civilization that is quite alien to the West . When
Chinese sailors in the harbor of Luanda offer to share their lunch with the narrator,
for example, he merely observes that their style of cooking is unfamiliar. A more
dramatic scene occurs at Kafue, a large wildlife national park in Zambia. Some
chopsticks and a hanko ("seal" in Japanese), both made of ivory, are presented to
the audience. Although there is no evidence of the market(s) to which these items
are exported, the blame for the killing of elephants in Africa is attributed to China.
The conclusion is then drawn that "there are aspects of Chinese culture that
represent a threat to the very wildlife the tourists come to see." Similarly, another
study provides evidence that most Western attempts to portray Chinese firms as
cruel, unconcerned with human rights, and the "worst employers" in Africa are
highly inaccurate, with methodological mistakes and elemen tary empirical
errors.71 It is clear that the essence of a political myth does not lie in its
truthfulness, but rather in how it is articulated to compel attention and action . The
above are only a few examples of a series of acts of exclusion and marginalization
perpetrated by Western agents seeking to construct China as culturally alien.7
 Militarized Masculinity
Realist conceptions of international relations and security rely
on a masculine perspective that necessitates militarism and
structural violence
Thickner 93 (J Ann Thickner, Gender in International relations: feminist
perspectives on achieving global security, December 1993, The Journal of
American History 108(2)) feminist international relations theorist, professor at USC) mlm
In looking for explanations for the causes of war , realists, as well as scholars in other
approaches to international relations, have distinguished among three levels of analysis: the
individual, the state, and the international system. While realists claim that their theories are
"objective" and of universal validity, the assumptions they use when analyzing states and
explaining their behavior in the international system are heavily dependent on
characteristics that we, in the West, have come to associate with masculinity . The
way in which realists describe the individual, the state, and the international system
are profoundly gendered; each is constructed in terms of the idealized or hegemonic
masculinity described in chapter 1. In the name of universality, realists have constructed a world
view based on the experiences of certain men: it is therefore a world view that offers us only a
partial view of reality. Having examined the connection between realism and
masculinity, I shall examine some feminist perspectives on national security. Using
feminist theories, which draw on the experiences of women, I shall ask how it would
affect the way in which we think about national security if we were to develop an
alternative set of assumptions about the individual, the state, and the international
system not based exclusively on the behavior of men . Realist assumptions about
states as unitary actors render unproblematic the boundaries between anarchy and order
and legitimate and illegitimate violence. If we were to include the experiences of
women, how would it affect the way in which we understand the meaning of violence ?
While women have been less directly involved in international violence as soldiers, their lives have been
affected by domestic violence in households, another unprotected space, and
by the consequences of war and the policy priorities of militarized societies. Certain
feminists have suggested that, because of what they see as a connection between
sexism and militarism, violence at all levels of society is interrelated, a claim that
calls into question the realist assumption of the anarchy/order distinction. Most
important, these feminists claim that all types of violence are embedded in the gender
hierarchies of dominance and subordination that I described in chapter 1. Hence they would argue
that until these and other hierarchies associated with class and race are dismantled and until women have control
over their own security a truly comprehensive system of security cannot be devised.

Globalization renders womens bodies disposablelegitimizes

rape, kidnapping, and murder
Mountz and Hyndman 6, associate professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and
Professor and Director, Centre for Refugee Studies at York University respectively 06 (Alison and Jennifer, Feminist
Approaches to the Global Intimate, Womens Studies Quarterly 41:1/2, Spring/Summer 2006, JSTOR)

The use of a transnational feminist approach problematizes binary conceptions of

politics and scale as either global or local, central or peripheral, focusing instead on the
circulation of power, identity, and subjectivity across space vis-a-vis transnational populations
(Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Silvey 2004). "We need to articulate the relationship of gender to
scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms,
authentic forms of tradition, local structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on multiple
levels" (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 17). The murder of women working in maquiladoras along
Mexico's northern border with the United States illustrates how the global and the
intimate are inseparable.Intimate violent acts committed on women's bodies in the
form of rape, abduction, and homicide went unrecognized by local, state, and federal
authorities for many years. Feminist advocates organizing on the ground in Ciudad Juarez argued that the
confluence of the women's identities and intimate geographies contributed to the
silence around their disappearance. The woman who leaves home to work is
considered to have made herself vulnerable . Many of the women disappeared on the way to or
from work at the factory, their bodies often abandoned in vacant urban spaces. Melissa Wright (2004) argues that
their disappearance confirms the idea of the global worker with exploitable and
disposable, devalued body as commodity. The increasing occurrence of disappearances of women
in multiple nation-states and the calls for feminist advocates to "jump scale" by appealing to national and
international bodies to recognize femicide as genocide also suggests the urgency of the work of transnational femi-
nisms to name, map, connect, and mobilize against oppressions occur- ring across international borders. The
strategies of activists organizing to call attention to such violent silences
demonstrate that the mobiliza- tion of scale has proved an effective political
strategy. This transnational feminism articulates the global as intimate, the intimate as global.

Interrogating epistemology is key to successful IR theory

Reus-Smit 12 Professor of International Relations at the European University
Institute, Florence (Christian, International Relations, Irrelevant? Dont Blame
Theory, Millennium - Journal of International Studies June 2012 vol. 40 no. 3 525-
540)
the notion that IRs lack of practical relevance stems from
However widespread it might be,
excessive theorising rests more on vigorous assertion than weighty evidence. As noted
above, we lack good data on the fields practical relevance , and the difficulties establishing
appropriate measures are all too apparent in the fraught attempts by several governments to quantify the impact of
we lack any credible evidence
the humanities and social sciences more generally. Beyond this, though,
that any fluctuations in the fields relevance are due to more or less high theory. We hear
that policymakers complain of not being able to understand or apply much that appears in our leading journals, but
it is unclear why we should be any more concerned about this than physicists or economists, who take theory, even
high theory, to be the bedrock of advancement in knowledge. Moreover, there is now a wealth of
research, inside and outside IR, that shows that policy communities are not open
epistemic or cognitive realms, simply awaiting well-communicated, non-jargonistic knowledge they
are bureaucracies, deeply susceptible to groupthink , that filter information through their own
intersubjective frames. 10 Beyond this, however, there are good reasons to believe that precisely the
reverse of the theory versus relevance thesis might be true ; that theoretical inquiry
may be a necessary prerequisite for the generation of practically relevant
knowledge. I will focus here on the value of metatheory, as this attracts most contemporary criticism and would
appear the most difficult of theoretical forms to defend. Metatheories take other theories as their subject. Indeed,
their precepts establish the conditions of possibility for second-order theories. In general, metatheories divide into
three broad categories: epistemology, ontology and meta-ethics. The first concerns the nature, validity and
acquisition of knowledge; the second, the nature of being (what can be said to exist, how things might be
categorised and how they stand in relation to one another); and the third, the nature of right and wrong, what
constitutes moral argument, and how moral arguments might be sustained. Second-order theories are constructed
Epistemological
within, and on the basis of, assumptions formulated at the metatheoretical level.
assumptions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge and how it is legitimately acquired delimit the
questions we ask and the kinds of information we can enlist in answering them . 11
Can social scientists ask normative questions? Is literature a valid source of social-scientific
knowledge? Ontological assumptions about the nature and distinctiveness of the social universe affect
not only what we see but also how we order what we see ; how we relate the material to the
ideational, agents to structures, interests to beliefs, and so on. If we assume, for example, that
individuals are rational actors, engaged in the efficient pursuit of primarily material
interests, then phenomena such as faith-motivated politics will remain at the far periphery of
our vision. 12 Lastly, meta-ethical assumptions about the nature of the good, and about what constitutes a valid
moral argument, frame how we reason about concrete ethical problems. Both deontology and consequentialism are
meta-ethical positions, operationalised, for example, in the differing arguments of Charles Beitz and Peter Singer on
global distributive justice. 13 Most scholars would acknowledge the background, structuring role that
metatheory plays, but argue that we can take our metatheoretical assumptions off the
shelf, get on with the serious business of research and leave explicit metatheoretical reflection and
debate to the philosophers. If practical relevance is one of our concerns, however, there are
several reasons why this is misguided. Firstly, whether IR is practically relevant depends , in
large measure, on the kinds of questions that animate our research . I am not referring here to
the commonly held notion that we should be addressing questions that practitioners want answered. Indeed, our
work will at times be most relevant when we pursue questions that policymakers
and others would prefer left buried. My point is a different one, which I return to in greater detail below.
It is sufficient to note here that being practically relevant involves asking questions of
practice; not just retrospective questions about past practices their nature, sources and
consequences but prospective questions about what human agents should do. As I have argued elsewhere,
being practically relevant means asking questions of how we , ourselves, or some other
actors (states, policymakers, citizens, NGOs, IOs, etc.) should act. 14 Yet our ability, nay willingness, to
ask such questions is determined by the metatheoretical assumptions that structure
our research and arguments. This is partly an issue of ontology what we see affects how we
understand the conditions of action , rendering some practices possible or impossible, mandatory or
beyond the pale. If, for example, we think that political change is driven by material forces,
then we are unlikely to see communicative practices of argument and persuasion as
potentially successful sources of change. More than this, though, it is also an issue of epistemology.
If we assume that the proper domain of IR as a social science is the acquisition of
empirically verifiable knowledge, then we will struggle to comprehend , let alone answer,
normative questions of how we should act . We will either reduce ought questions to is questions,
or place them off the agenda altogether. 15 Our metatheoretical assumptions thus determine
the macro-orientation of IR towards questions of practice, directly affecting the
fields practical relevance. Secondly, metatheoretical revolutions license new second-order
theoretical and analytical possibilities while foreclosing others, directly affecting those
forms of scholarship widely considered most practically relevant . The rise of analytical
eclecticism illustrates this. As noted above, Katzenstein and Sils call for a pragmatic approach to the study of world
politics, one that addresses real-world problematics by combining insights from diverse research traditions,
Epistemological
resonates with the mood of much of the field, especially within the American mainstream.
and ontological debates are widely considered irresolvable dead ends , grand theorising is
unfashionable, and gladiatorial contests between rival paradigms appear, increasingly, as unimaginative rituals.
Boredom and fatigue are partly responsible for this new mood, but something deeper is at work. Twenty-five years
the neo-neo debate that preoccupied
ago, Sil and Katzensteins call would have fallen on deaf ears;
the American mainstream occurred within a metatheoretical consensus , one that
combined a neo-positivist epistemology with a rationalist ontology. This singular metatheoretical
framework defined the rules of the game ; analytical eclecticism was unimaginable. The Third Debate
of the 1980s and early 1990s destabilised all of this; not because American IR scholars converted in their droves to
critical theory or poststructuralism (far from it), but because metatheoretical absolutism became less and less
tenable. The anti-foundationalist critique of the idea that there is any single measure of truth did not produce a
wave of relativism, but it did generate a widespread sense that battles on the terrain of epistemology were
unwinnable. Similarly, the Third Debate emphasis on identity politics and cultural particularity, which later found
expression in constructivism, did not vanquish rationalism. It did, however, establish a more pluralistic, if
nevertheless heated, debate about ontology, a terrain on which many scholars felt more comfortable than that of
the metatheoretical struggles of the Third Debate
epistemology. One can plausibly argue, therefore, that
created a space for even made possible the rise of analytical eclecticism and its
aversion to metatheoretical absolutes, a principal benefit of which is said to be greater practical
relevance. Lastly, most of us would agree that for our research to be practically relevant,
it has to be good it has to be the product of sound inquiry, and our conclusions have to be plausible. The
pluralists among us would also agree that different research questions require different methods of inquiry and
across this diversity there are several practices widely
strategies of argument. Yet
recognised as essential to good research . Among these are clarity of purpose, logical coherence,
engagement with alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons (empirical evidence, corroborating
arguments textual interpretations, etc.). Less often noted, however, is the importance of
metatheoretical reflexivity. If our epistemological assumptions affect the questions
we ask, then being conscious of these assumptions is necessary to ensure that we
are not fencing off questions of importance , and that if we are, we can justify our choices. Likewise,
if our ontological assumptions affect how we see the social universe , determining what is
in or outside our field of vision, then reflecting on these assumptions can prevent us being
blind to [ignorant of] things that matter. A similar argument applies to our meta-ethical assumptions.
Indeed, if deontology and consequentialism are both meta-ethical positions, as I suggested earlier, then
reflecting on our choice of one or other position is part and parcel of weighing rival
ethical arguments (on issues as diverse as global poverty and human rights). Finally, our
epistemological, ontological and meta-ethical assumptions are not metatheoretical silos;
assumptions we make in one have a tendency to shape those we make in anothe r.
The oft-heard refrain that if we cant measure it, it doesnt matter is an unfortunate example of epistemology
supervening on ontology, something that metatheoretical reflexivity can help guard against. In sum, like clarity,
consideration of alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons,
coherence,
metatheoretical reflexivity is part of keeping us honest, making it practically
relevant despite its abstraction
 Solvency
The process of communicative engagement generates mutual
understanding. Committing to mutuality breaks down
intractable disagreements
Crawford 11 (Neta C Crawford is a professor of Political Science at Boston University who focuses on international
relations theory and discourse ethics. She has won the American Political Science Association Jervis and Schroeder Award for her
writings on international politics. She has been published in numerous scholarly journals and books, in addition to having served as
the chair of the International Studies Association, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Arguing Global
Governance: Agency, Lifeworld and Shared Reasoning, Persuasion in Politics, https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=XpYtCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=lifeworld+china+engagement&ots=LR1cowCm8M&sig=KhoF2I--U-
DwbkBRiAVb94oxx5I#v=onepage&q=china&f=false, edited by Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst, pg. 34, EmmieeM)

The bottom line, for Gearhart, seems to be that interlocutors drop their antagonistic stance.
Mutual communication of the sort described by Gearhart seems to be extremely rare in what we normally
consider the political setting. Yet mutual communication may occur in some instances, for example
among heads of state or diplomats, or in cases of conflict resolution and
reconciliation. And mutual communication may occur within groups of people during
the initial stages of trying to understand a new phenomenon such as global
climate change or a hole in the ozone layer; they share information, opinions,
emotions, and goals in an effort to understand a situation or each othe r. The
creation of an environment of mutual communicatio n that is without the pressure of
one side trying to persuade another seems particularly well suited to settings where
both sides in a dispute have come to an impasse . In this context, mutual communication seems
to be the furthest from what is possible interlocutors may only be talking in-between
exchanging blows. And much of that talk may be simply in the form of insults and
threats tossed back and forth. Mutual communication in such a setting demands
both more and less of interlocutors. Instead of continuing to knock heads in
unproductive efforts to change the others mind, the participants would stop
seeking to get to a final point in resolution, but simply try to understand each other.
Interlocutors may still, in a mutual communication setting, make arguments to support their
views, but they are not trying to get the other to agree: persuasion is not the goal
though genuine persuasion may occur in the other can understand your position and vice versa.