**2016 NDI – Starter Set – China Critique**

1NC
 OFF
Engagement discourse constructs China as an opportunity that can be harnessed by
the United States so long as it imposes its rules on the uncivilized rising power.

The inconsistent representations of China as dangerous without America as a partner

and beneficial if alongside it is essential to sustaining American Exceptionalism
Turner, Hallsworth Research Fellow @ University of Manchester, 14
(Oliver, “American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy” 165-168)
Finally, twenty-first-century Opportunity China additionally remains a relatively prominent and
powerful construction of American design. Sino-US trade relations are now more significant than at any
point in their history, not least because China’s economy is now the second largest in the world9 This is
a crucial clement of modern-day Chinese—American relations. Nonetheless, particular ideas of which
Chinas economy is constituted are still inextricable from its significance to American policy. To reassert,
the economic practices of states are interpretable not merely through the calculated significance of
material gain. hut through examination of the ideas which give those gains meaning.9 In the 1950s
Washington had maintained an embargo on China despite its international trade activities expanding
The military sales embargo of the present day, examined briefly in Chapter 5, further demonstrates that
while potential economic opportunities with China exist, their interpretation as opportunities is
contingent upon discourse and representation.
As Shaun Breslin observes, China is likely to encounter foreign (especially Western) pressure to liberalize
its economy into the foreseeable future.9 Nonetheless, the boundaries of political performance are now
far more accommodating of China’s membership to the imagined family of civilized nations. In 2000. For
example. China was granted Permanent Normal ‘trade Relations (PNTR, the equivalent of permanent
MFN status) with the United States. Like Bush. Clinton revealed that Opportunity China was still an
imaginative geography expected to conform to the ideals of American identity. ‘Economically,’ he
argued, ‘this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street. It requires China to open its markets in
unprecedented new ways’.98 In 2001 China was granted membership to the World Trade Organization
(WTO). Throughout the Cold War the PRC had been marginalized from the most powerful international
institutions, hut this was now a possibility accepted by the regulatory processes nl’ American discourse.
The American press. for example. broadly supported China’s WTO entry: ‘The news of |the| agreement
is worth celebrating’, noted the Wall Street Journal after China had been granted PN’I’R. establishing the
basis for WTO membership.
As ever. then. the endurance of Opportunity China stems from the expectation that it conforms to
American ideals of international trade Its significance to US China policy has always been that it works
to legitimize actions aimed at facilitating this goal This was reaffirmed in 2008 by President Bush, who
asserted that ‘the key to ensuring that all sides benefit is insisting that China adhere to the rules of the
international economic system.’ As noted earlier in this chapter. these rules are consistently broken. The
widespread use of tariffs, trade barriers and other protectionist measures by the United States, the EU
and countless other state actors illustrates the imaginary existence of these rules as building blocks of a
purely fictional “civilized” and orderly system. As the supposed defender of the rules and still the most
powerful international actor, not least in the dissemination of information and knowledge, the United
States can attribute their abuse to others for selected reasons. Once again, China may indeed be guilty
of rule infractions, yet it is one perpetrator among many, and as an imaginative geography of subjective
design can be an opportunity only when others — most notably the United States — deem it to be so.
To recap. Chapter 5 interrogated societal American images of China and its people throughout the
modern age. The purpose of this chapter has been to similarly explore contemporary American
perceptions and interpretations of China. hut with a keener focus upon the presidency of Barack
Obama. It began by outlining China’s presence within the election contest of 2008. Obama’s rhetoric
towards Beijing softened after securing the presidency, in further affirmation of China’s continuing
existence as an imaginative geography whose identity is not simply there to sec, hut is discursively
manufactured and controlled. It then showed that while American politicians may adopt varying
positions on China as a result of their contrasting ideologies, their underlying concern is still for a
country and people which to some extent constitutes a problem to be resolved. It was argued that this
is inextricably tied to modern-day representations of a ‘rising’ China which, rather than merely a
description of a rapidly developing state, carries powerful connotations of a non-Western challenger
to a US-led global status quo.
The chapter then briefly examined some of the imagery of China generated by the 2012 presidential
elections, and in particular that which followed traditional patterns of opposition candidates criticizing
US China policy and portraying the PRC in broadly negative terms. It also showed how China’s
representation as a manipulator of its currency and a principal offender in the realm of ‘cyber warfare’
simultaneously confirms the United Stales as the defender of the rules of the international system
despite it (and many other others) being guilty of identical crimes’. Like so many times in the past,
American discourse and image utilises inconsistency and contradiction to sustain the accepted binary
opposites of a good/civilised United States in comparison with a bad/uncivilised China ‘the chapter
explored how understandings of a ‘rising’ China, tied inexorably to imagery of Threatening China are
working to enable the implementation of Obama’s so-called pivot’ towards the Asia Pacific, as well as
how the discourses of the pivot’ itself sustain and reinforce the ideas on which it is grounded.
Finally, this chapter has demonstrated how the four highly stable and enduring constructions of
Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China continue to the reproduced throughout
American society today. In the modem information age they co—exist perhaps more prominently than
ever. Each has evolved and modified over time but, in many ways. they retain the basic foundations
upon which they were first established. Perhaps most importantly, the chapter has shown that these
constructions are still actively complicit in the creation of realities in which American foreign policy
towards China can he enabled and legitimized. As ever, the most powerful representations of China can
be used to best explain how that policy is made possible. Moreover, they allow an interrogation of
how US China policy itself serves in the production and reproduction of imagery so that China’s
foreignness from the United States can be perpetually reaffirmed.

The impact is extinction – the affirmatives discourse legitimizes plunder and

intervention which causes war and environmental destruction.

Reject the affirmatives representations – noncooperation is critical to create new

forms of knowing
Willson, Humanities PhD New College San Francisco, 13
(S. Brain, JD, American University, “Developing Nonviolent Bioregional Revolutionary Strategies,”
http://www.brianwillson.com/developing-nonviolent-bioregional-revolutionary-strategies/)
II. The United States of America is irredeemable and unreformable, a Pretend Society. The USA as a
nation state, as a recent culture, is irredeemable, unreformable, an anti-democratic, vertical, over-sized
imperial unmanageable monster, sustained by the obedience and cooperation, even if reluctant, of the
vast majority of its non-autonomous population. Virtually all of us are complicit in this imperial plunder
even as many of us are increasingly repulsed by it and speak out against it. Lofty rhetoric has
conditioned us to believe in our national exceptionalism, despite it being dramatically at odds with the
empirically revealed pattern of our plundering cultural behavior totally dependent upon outsourcing the
pain and suffering elsewhere. We cling to living a life based on the social myth of US America being
committed to justice for all, even as we increasingly know this has always served as a cover for the social
secret that the US is committed to prosperity for a minority thru expansion at ANY cost. Our Eurocentric
origins have been built on an extraordinary and forceful but rationalized dispossession of hundreds of
Indigenous nations (a genocide) assuring acquisition of free land, murdering millions with total
impunity. This still unaddressed crime against humanity assured that our eyes themselves are the wool.
Our addiction to the comfort and convenience brought to us by centuries of forceful theft of land, labor,
and resources is very difficult to break, as with any addiction. However, our survival, and healing,
requires a commitment to recovery of our humanity, ceasing our obedience to the national state. This is
the (r)evolution begging us. Original wool is in our eyes: Eurocentric values were established with the
invasion by Columbus: Cruelty never before seen, nor heard of, nor read of – Bartolome de las Casas
describing the behavior of the Spaniards inflicted on the Indigenous of the West Indies in the 1500s. In
fact the Indigenous had no vocabulary words to describe the behavior inflicted on them (A Short
Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552). Eurocentric racism (hatred driven by fear) and arrogant
religious ethnocentrism (self-righteous superiority) have never been honestly addressed or overcome.
Thus, our foundational values and behaviors, if not radically transformed from arrogance to caring,
will prove fatal to our modern species. Wool has remained uncleansed from our eyes: I personally
discovered the continued vigorous U.S. application of the “Columbus Enterprise” in Viet Nam,
discovering that Viet Nam was no aberration after learning of more than 500 previous US military
interventions beginning in the late 1790s. Our business is killing, and business is good was a slogan
painted on the front of a 9th Infantry Division helicopter in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta in 1969. We, not
the Indigenous, were and remain the savages. The US has been built on three genocides: violent and
arrogant dispossession of hundreds of Indigenous nations in North America (Genocide #1), and in Africa
(Genocide #2), stealing land and labor, respectively, with total impunity, murdering and maiming
millions, amounting to genocide. It is morally unsustainable, now ecologically, politically, economically,
and socially unsustainable as well. Further, in the 20th Century, the Republic of the US intervened
several hundred times in well over a hundred nations stealing resources and labor, while imposing US-
friendly markets, killing millions, impoverishing perhaps billions (Genocide #3). Since 1798, the US
military forces have militarily intervened over 560 times in dozens of nations, nearly 400 of which have
occurred since World War II. And since WWII, the US has bombed 28 countries, while covertly
intervening thousands of times in the majority of nations on the earth. It is not helpful to continue
believing in the social myth that the USA is a society committed to justice for all , in fact a convenient
mask (since our origins) of our social secret being a society committed to prosperity for a few through
expansion at ANY cost. (See William Appleman Williams). Always possessing oligarchic tendencies, it is
now an outright corrupt corporatocracy owned lock stock and barrel by big money made obscenely rich
from war making with our consent, even if reluctant. The Cold War and its nuclear and conventional
arms race with the exaggerated “red menace”, was an insidious cover for a war preserving the Haves
from the Have-Nots, in effect, ironically preserving a western, consumptive way of life that itself is killing
us. Pretty amazing! Our way of life has produced so much carbon in the water, soil, and atmosphere,
that it may in the end be equivalent to having caused nuclear winter. The war OF wholesale terror on
retail terror has replaced the “red menace” as the rhetorical justification for the continued imperial
plunder of the earth and the riches it brings to the military-industrial-intelligence-congressional-
executive-information complex. Our cooperation with and addiction to the American Way Of Life
provides the political energy that guarantees continuation of U.S. polices of imperial plunder. III. The
American Way Of Life (AWOL), and the Western Way of Life in general, is the most dangerous force
that exists on the earth. Our insatiable consumption patterns on a finite earth, enabled by but a one-
century blip in burning energy efficient liquid fossil fuels, have made virtually all of us addicted to our
way of life as we have been conditioned to be in denial about the egregious consequences outsourced
outside our view or feeling fields. Of course, this trend began 2 centuries earlier with the advent of the
industrial revolution. With 4.6% of the world’s population, we consume anywhere from 25% to nearly
half the world’s resources. This kind of theft can only occur by force or its threat, justifying it with noble
sounding rhetoric, over and over and over. Our insatiable individual and collective human demands for
energy inputs originating from outside our bioregions, furnish the political-economic profit motives for
the energy extractors, which in turn own the political process obsessed with preserving “national
(in)security”, e.g., maintaining a very class-based life of affluence and comfort for a minority of the
world’s people. This, in turn, requires a huge military to assure control of resources for our use,
protecting corporate plunder, and to eliminate perceived threats from competing political agendas. The
U.S. War department’s policy of “full spectrum dominance” is intended to control the world’s seas,
airspaces, land bases, outer spaces, our “inner” mental spaces, and cyberspaces. Resources everywhere
are constantly needed to supply our delusional modern life demands on a finite planet as the system
seeks to dumb us down ever more. Thus, we are terribly complicit in the current severe dilemmas
coming to a head due to (1) climate instability largely caused by mindless human activities; (2) from our
dependence upon national currencies; and (3) dependence upon rapidly depleting finite resources. We
have become addicts in a classical sense. Recovery requires a deep psychological, spiritual, and physical
commitment to break our addiction to materialism, as we embark on a radical healing journey,
individually and collectively, where less and local becomes a mantra, as does sharing and caring, I call it
the Neolithic or Indigenous model. Sharing and caring replace individualism and competition. Therefore,
A Radical Prescription Understanding these facts requires a radical paradigmatic shift in our thinking
and behavior, equivalent to an evolutionary shift in our epistemology where our knowledge/thinking
framework shifts: arrogant separateness from and domination over nature (ending a post-Ice Age
10,000 year cycle of thought structure among moderns) morphs to integration with nature, i.e., an eco-
consciousness felt deeply in the viscera, more powerful than a cognitive idea. Thus, we re-discover
ancient, archetypal Indigenous thought patterns. It requires creative disobedience to and strategic
noncooperation with the prevailing political economy, while re-constructing locally reliant communities
patterned on instructive models of historic Indigenous and Neolithic villages.
Link
 Liberalism/Orientalism – 2NC
New orientalism is premised on folding China into the international order through
engagement – the affirmative attempts to collapse China’s difference into sameness
because of an inherent distaste for their “non-Western” political tradition - the impact
is discursive imperialism
Vukovich, teaches critical and cultural theory @ Hong Kong University, 12
(Daniel, China and Orientalism Western knowledge production and the P.R.C., pp. xvi-2)
Perhaps a return to the question of orientalism – recall that Said’s book predates the rise of postcolonial studies – and the properly
geo-political will help. I do not think the problematic of Sinological-orientalism is going away anytime
soon. Perhaps there will come a time when the U.S.-West has to know as much about China as the latter
now do about America and Europe – and in an enlarged and rich way, as opposed to the colonial/Cold
War/universalist form of the present knowledge systems (or the ham-handed soft power efforts of the PRC). At that point
we can begin to entertain the question of an end to orientalist knowledge production in the world. Even
then, however, we would still need to think through the historical legacies of orientalist, racist, and

imperial discourse and whether or not this still impacts the global Eastward shift and re-balancing.
These have after all been the dominant ways of thinking the Other and the East for a very long time .
This is precisely the power and tradition of orientalism as a material part of Western and global intellectual political culture. I do not see China as exceptionalist in
As for academic work proper, the dominance of empiricism and
this sense. It is part of global history in these ways too.
positivism over against more theoretically informed, self-reflexive approaches to China is still with us.
There is as ever the refusal to broach “subjective” and speculative questions. The corporatization of the academy is
almost complete. This is all to say that there will have to be a worldly, political solution to orientalism and that type of
representation; a longterm project indeed. Intellectual labor, in other words, is still a part of the world that labor, trade and capital created.
My point is that orientalism (as opposed to “bias”) may not be eternal in the way Althusser talked of ideology, but even
with the rise of China it is still on the table, only more so. Chapter 2 first appeared in Cultural Logic in the 2009 annual issue and
reappears here in lightly revised form. A few parts of my final chapter appear in “China in Theory: The Orientalist Production of Knowledge in the Global Economy”
in Cultural Critique (Fall 2010), although the argument is different here. One’s intellectual debts are innumerable, even beyond the revelations in your footnotes.
But I still want to thank a number of people for their work, for comments on mine, or for other forms of support. Liu Kang has been a valuable interlocutor and
advisor. Zhang Xudong has also been one, in the US and in China. I’ve learned a good deal from both of them and will continue to do so. Andrew Ross’s support of
the manuscript has meant a lot. Likewise for Timothy Brennan, whose work in my view sets the standard for cultural and “postcolonial,” radical critique. Thanks,
Tim, for all your help. Gao Mobo’s work is foundational to my thinking about the P.R.C. and its interpretation, as is Wang Zheng’s and Han Dongping’s. Mobo has
been not only a former dissertation reader but an intellectual bulwark and inspiration. Several people residing within China have helped me think and sustain this
project. The inimitable Han Yuhai and Liu Yuanqi have taught me a great deal – much more than they realize. Others include Shi Xu, Zhao Xun, and Ma Laoshi (via
Nanjiecun). And of course my dear iconoclastic friends in Hong Kong, Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman. A roundtable with Wang Hui in Shanghai was most beneficial,
as have been his defenses of the alternative complexity of the PRC and modern China. Elsewhere, Arif Dirlik, Utsa Patnaik, and Jason McGrath also provided
welcome and clarifying feedback on several different chapters in their own, diverse fields. All of the usual disclaimers apply for all of these interlocutors. From my
old cohort in the China Study Group of days gone by I thank the late Joan Hinton (a most remarkable person indeed), Dale Wen, Matt Hale, Robert Weil, Joel
Andreas, and Dong Xulin. It was first through the CSG, and then through later, more direct encounters with the “New Left” and “Old Left” perspectives emerging
from China, that I first became aware that informed critical approaches to China existed and that William Hinton did. Conference interlocutors at several MLA
conventions, at Nanjing University, Shanghai University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, HKU, and Zhejiang University were all useful. I must sincerely thank Michael
Dutton and an anonymous reader for the Postcolonial Politics series, as well as Nicola Parkin and Craig Fowlie with Routledge. The draft of this book was first
accepted back in June 2009 and I am still glad Michael and the Board took a chance on it. In Hong Kong I received a Research Grants Council award that provided
teaching release in 2009–10. That and an earlier grant from Hong Kong University bought me time for revisions and helped me deliver parts of this book at various
conferences in China and the U.S. Working in Hong Kong can be exceedingly wonderful and exceedingly trying. Getting work done here requires a lot of good faith
and patience in the face of large linguistic, cultural, political, bureaucratic, and other boundaries; it takes a whole village, indeed, and I have depended on a lot of
people from the ground level on up. I’d like to thank the entire HKU village in particular. I have benefitted from teaching students from all walks of life in China,
Hong Kong, and the U.S. I must thank Liu Xi and especially Yu Xuying for help sustaining a mainland-oriented perspective. Henry Kuok and Jaymee Ng have helped
me believe that my teaching here has been mutually beneficial. My greatest, happiest debt in Hong Kong and elsewhere has been to Vicky Lo, whose love, patience,
and generosity have enabled me to rewrite this book and see it through the long march of publication. Without her, nothing, but with her, everything. The next one
is for her and the Button. I dedicate this book to my father, who passed away before it came out. An American working-class hero of great adaptability, spirit and
love, he taught me perhaps the most of all. In “Orientalism Now,” the concluding chapter of Edward Said’s 1978 book, we are left with the migration of orientalism
from European empires and philology to the U.S. imperium and the dominance of social scientific discourse. This project begins where Said left off. It argues that
there is a new, “Sinological” form of orientalism at work in the world, one that takes as its object an “Other” that has since the 1970s occupied an increasingly
central place within the world system and Western intellectual–political culture: the People’s Republic of China. As with Said’s formulation rooted in the Middle East
and South Asia, Sinological-orientalism and its production of a textual “China” helps constitute the identity or “Self” of the West (what Balibar aptly calls the
“WesternChristian-Democratic-Universalist identity”) (“Difference” 30). The U.S.-West is what China is not, but which the latter will become. So, too, the new
orientalism is part of a neo-colonial or imperialist project: not just the production of knowledge about an “area” but the would-be management and administration
whereas orientalism in Said turned upon a posited,
of the area for economic, political, and cultural–symbolic benefit. But
essential difference between Orient and Occident (as in Kipling’s famous verse: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain
 the new form turns upon sameness or more specifically, upon China’s becoming sameness .
shall meet”),

China is seen as in a process of haltingly but inevitably becoming-the-same as “us”: open , liberal ,
modern , free . Put another way, “China” is understood as becoming generally equivalent to the West . What
this reflects, in part, is the by now familiar resurgence of modernization rhetoric under the cover of
“globalization” and the end-of-history thematic famously captured by Francis Fukuyama. But that, in turn, was
triggered by the collapse of the former Soviet Union as well as by the fateful deployment of the market mechanism and the logic of capital within China. After a
noble but brief interruption of the politics and discourse of modernization by Chinese Maoism and by the long decade of the 1960s and early 1970s, the former is
When one recalls the Marxist cultural analysis of
back in charge not only of area studies but of global intellectual–political culture.
capital as such, namely as an historical force of abstraction that makes unlike things alike on the basis of
some third thing called the value-form (their “exchange value” or “general equivalent”), the relationship between this
orientalism and global capitalism appears in sharper relief. Sinological-orientalism is in an important
sense a capital-logic, just as historical capitalism betrays an orientalist one. As Said himself made clear (in at least my
reading of him), orientalism and colonial discourse may precede the rise of capitalism, but in the modern era they are hand in glove. So, too, for the present
moment, whereby Western investment and “constrainment” strategies are often rationalized on the basis of these being beneficial to the Chinese and their
progression towards democracy and human rights (whatever these mean), as well as helping “balance” and protect the rest of Asia from China’s rise. I further
address the relationship between orientalist and capital logics in a final chapter. My argument is a totalizing, “functionalist” one about the integral relationship
between capitalism and orientalism. But then, so is the thing. The historical conditions of possibility for a global Sinological-orientalism are the momentous if not
counter-revolutionary changes within China itself – its Dengist “era of reform and opening up” dating from 1979 – and
the West’s economic, political, and discursive responses to this subsequent rise to global prominence.
This paradoxical relationship is captured in the logic of becomingsameness: China is still not “ normal”
(and has been tragically different), but is engaged in a “universal” process such that it will, and must, become the

same as “us.” Whether it wants to or not. That is the present–future offered to China within this discourse, and – as anyone who watched the 2008
Olympics opening ceremonies knows (“one world, one dream”) – it is also one taken up within China itself.
 Engagement Link – 2NC
Engagement with China presupposes America’s role in the world is to manage the rise
of other powers – this anxiety eschews effective predictions about China’s policy
changes
Zhang, Professor of International Politics @ University of Bristol, 13
(Yongjin, “‘China Anxiety’: Discourse and Intellectual Challenges,” Development and Change 44(6): pp.
1407-1425)
For many centuries, China has been a fixture in the Western imagination. In the words of Jonathan
Spence (1999: xi): ‘The sharpness of the feelings aroused by China in the West, the reiterated attempts
to describe and analyze the country and its people, the apparently unending receptivity of Westerners
to news from China, all testify to the levels of fascination the country has generated’. Imageries of China
as either the ‘Yellow Peril’ or the ‘Red Menace’ have been an integral part of Western obsessions and
anxieties about China (Pan, 2012). The discourse on the rise of China has informed, and been informed
by, these imageries. Few would deny that the Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China is a fast-
moving one. Claims such as ‘the coming conflict with America’ (Bernstein and Munro, 1997) and ‘the
coming collapse of China’ (Chang, 2001), made only a decade or so ago, now seem light years removed
from the present. Ezra Vogel's contemplation of ‘living with China’ in a non-confrontational US–China
relationship (Vogel, 1997) is a far cry from Bergsten's proposed ‘partnership of equals’ or a Group of
Two (G2) in managing global economic affairs a decade later (Bergsten, 2008). Gerald Segal's (1999)
poignant question ‘does China matter?’ has become no more than rhetorical now. Yet the rise of China
continues to be a source of anxiety for a variety of reasons. Those who view the power transition as a
zero-sum game are concerned that China's rise is synonymous with American decline. China has built up
its soft power, Joseph Nye (2005) asserts, ‘at the expense of the United States’. China is also said to have
mounted a ‘charm offensive’ worldwide through its diplomatic, trade and cultural initiatives
(Kurlantzick, 2007). In an endorsement of Kurlantzick's book, Orville Schell claimed that Chinese soft
power ‘has begun to transform the world balance of power in a way that makes it essential for
Americans to recalibrate their presumption of US pre-eminence’.2 While some argue that China is
increasingly becoming a status quo power, others are convinced that China continues to follow Deng's
grand strategy of hiding its capacity and biding its time (Foot, 2006; Friedberg, 2011; Johnston, 2003,
2007; Taylor, 2007). For Brzezinski (2009: 56), China remains ‘a fundamentally cautious and a patiently
revisionist power’, and for Barry Buzan (2010: 18), China is no more than ‘a reformist revisionist’. Aaron
Friedberg (2011) goes much further and claims that China has engaged in a ‘contest for supremacy’ with
the United States in ‘the struggle for mastery of Asia’, whereas Peter Navarro (2008) predicts ‘the
coming China wars’ — not because China possesses weapons of mass destruction, but because of its
invention of the weapons of mass production. At the same time, Robert Zoellick (2005) argues that ‘the
China of today is simply not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s’ and that ‘China does not believe that its
future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system’. This is at odds with
the conviction of offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that China, the rising
power, and the United States, the hegemonic power, are preordained to clash violently. A rising China
will inevitably challenge the hegemonic United States; the question is thus not whether, but when this
will happen (Mearsheimer, 2001, 2006; Walt, 2010). Offensive realists may indeed support their
proposition by pointing out that China has increased its military spending at a double-digit rate annually
in the last two decades and has a military budget second only to that of the United States. China's
successful attempts at testing its anti-satellite and anti-ballistic missiles technology in 2007 and 2009 can
be cited as clear evidence of China's strategic and purposeful challenge to American dominance in space
(Lampton, 2010). China is also said to have developed offensive capability in cyber warfare and has
launched the most egregious cyber-attacks on US commercial and government networks (Lampton,
2010; The Wall Street Journal, 2013). Stephen Walt counsels at the same time that there is no need for
panic about China's phenomenal rise since China ‘has a long way to go before it becomes a true “peer
competitor”’ of the United States (Walt, 2010). The ‘cauldron of anxiety’ in the United States, to borrow
the phrase of Zoellick (2005), is not just about China as a rising power but about the uncertain strategic
intentions of China. In the words of Jeffrey Legro (2007: 515), ‘the “rising China” problem is not just
about power, but purpose’. According to Legro (ibid.: 516), neither realists nor liberals have suitable
policy responses to China's rise, because ‘China's diplomatic future…is likely to be more contingent than
either the power or interdependence positions allow’. Legro argues that the key is to understand and to
seek to shape, if possible, core ideas held by the Chinese leadership and the way they inform China's
strategic foreign policy goals. For democratic peace theorists, such a proposition is obviously
problematic. If China remains authoritarian and its policy-making processes continue to be opaque, its
strategic intentions are likely to be shrouded in secrecy. For them, nothing short of fundamental
democratic change in China would solve the problem, simply because ‘a democratic China is much less
likely to find itself in a conflict with the United States, partly because Americans will be more tolerant of
a rising great power democracy than a rising power autocracy’ (Kagan, 2007: 99). Others are even more
concerned about the implications of a rising authoritarian power for the future of the liberal global
order championed by the United States. The question is not whether China is likely to challenge the
hegemonic power or seek to change the rules of the game, nor whether China and the United States are
destined to come into conflict. Rather the big question is simply, and more poignantly, ‘can the liberal
system survive [the rise of China]?’ (Ikenberry, 2008). In this scenario, another question has been asked:
‘will China's dream turn into America's nightmare?’ (Saunders, 2010). Beyond the pure power paradigm,
the rise of China has instigated no less intensive anxiety. The source is China's growing prosperity.
China is to blame for the slow global economic recovery from the financial crisis. According to Paul
Krugman (2010): ‘Most of the world's large economies are stuck in a liquidity trap — deeply depressed,
but unable to generate a recovery by cutting interest rates because the relevant rates are already near
zero. China, by engineering an unwarranted trade surplus, is in effect imposing an anti-stimulus on these
economies, which they cannot offset’. Krugman proposes what he calls ‘a turn to hardball policy’
towards China (ibid.). Even an increase or decrease in China's purchase of US Treasury bonds causes
serious concerns. In July 2010, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) in Beijing had to go
out of its way to publicly rule out the so-called ‘nuclear’ option of dumping its vast holdings of US
Treasury bonds for political purposes (China Daily, 2010). There are also acute concerns about the ‘dark
side’ of China's relentless pursuit of high-speed economic growth, from environmental degradation to
climate change. Even before it overtook the US as the largest emitter of CO2 in 2007, China was
regarded as the worst polluter. China was accused of having either ‘wrecked’ or ‘hijacked’ the
Copenhagen climate deal (Lynas, 2009; Vidal, 2009). Together with India, China is said to have
‘sabotaged the UN climate summit’ at Copenhagen (Rapp et al., 2010). Furthermore, China's forays into
Africa raise serious concerns about its global ambition beyond securing sufficient energy and resources
for rapid economic development. Its presence in Africa is seen as having significant impact on the
development path of the continent and policy decisions of other powers involved (Alden and Hughes,
2009; Taylor, 2007). As erstwhile pariah state, China is now said to be in ‘pursuit of the pariah’ through
its energy security strategy, which shapes its relationship with Iran, Myanmar and Sudan (Canning,
2007). Last but certainly not least, there are anxieties about continued human rights abuses, political
repression, ethnic conflicts and rampant corruption in China, and about the Chinese Communist Party's
stubborn resistance to democratization. There is nevertheless a real shift to be discerned in the
dominant Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China compared to that of a decade ago. The
difference is that there is now an underlying consensus that this time the rise of China is for real and it is
highly likely to continue, which urgently requires an effective and rigorous response, particularly by the
United States. Yet, Will Hutton (2007) contends, the US simply will not make up its mind whether to
contain or engage China, even though ‘the writing is on the wall’ and the challenges posed by China's
rise are palpable. In other words, the US remains unsure about how to manage China as a rising power.
Its policies seem to have vacillated between constraining, containing, engaging, enmeshing and hedging
against China's rise, as the moment of great strategic uncertainty lingers on. James Steinberg's (2009)
call that ‘China must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growing global role will not
come at the expense of security and well-being of others’, reflects not only the deep-seated mutual
strategic mistrust between China and the US, but it is also indicative of the ongoing frustration on the
part of the US in trying to read China's real strategic intentions (Foot, 2009; Lampton, 2010; Lieberthal
and Wang, 2012). Looming large on the horizon is a profound unease about China as a rising power.
The ‘China anxiety’ noted above has morphed into such questions as ‘does the future belong to China?’
(Zakaria, 2005); ‘what does China think?’ (Leonard, 2008); ‘what will China want?’ (Legro, 2007); ‘what
China wants: bargaining with Beijing’ (Nathan, 2011); ‘will China's rise lead to war?’ (Glaser, 2011); and
‘will China's rise lead to a new normative order?’ (Kinzelbach, 2012). That these questions are being
asked and debated both in academia and foreign policy circles is revealing. They testify to deeper
anxieties which are discernible but rarely talked about explicitly and which ultimately concern China's
pathways to power. That is, given the apparent contradictions in the Chinese political economy, how has
China managed to rise so rapidly? How could we have got China so wrong in the recent past? These
questions take us beyond concerns expressed about an indeterminate transition of power, strategic
uncertainties and the impact of the rise of China on the future world order. It suggests that prior to
being a problem, the rise of China is first and foremost a puzzle. If we adopt a twenty-year perspective,
it is humbling to observe how seriously we have misjudged China. Put differently, China's political
change, economic transformation and strategic policies since 1990 seem to have defied most
anticipations, projections and predictions by economists, political scientists and international relations
specialists, whether from the political right or the political left, be they realist, liberal or
constructivist. China, in other words, keeps surprising us all.
 Engagement Link – 2NC
The premise of the affirmatives link defense is “we represented China positively” and
“we think the United States is what is causing China to react the way it is” – this
ignores the central problem that positive representations of China are a means to fold
the East into the US controlled international order – the affirmative constructs China
rhetorically through predictions of their bad behavior absent a modification in US
policy, which projects an image of a savage China dependent on US temperance to
find its way towards being a positive force in the global community.
Turner, Hallsworth Research Fellow @ University of Manchester, 11
(Oliver, Sino-US relations then and now: Discourse, images, policy, Political Perspectives: 5 (3), pp. 27-
45)
The movement, then, was interpreted through the values of American identity so that discourse
remained tightly controlled and regulated. Confirmation of China as an uncivilised other in relation to
the superior and law-abiding West soon followed as Washington lobbied the world’s leading multilateral
economic organisations for a withdrawal of support. Weapons sales to the PRC were banned and high
level military exchanges were postponed. Another round of sanctions later followed in which lending to
China by international financial institutions and official diplomatic exchanges both ceased. Sanctions
against Beijing were legitimised on the basis that China had once again failed to conform to the superior
standards of Western civilisation. As Suettinger puts it, the West ‘recoiled in horror and disgust,
expelling it from the company of modern civilized nations’ (Suettinger, 2003: 1). In 1992 Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell argued that America remained ‘a remarkable nation. We are, as
Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a nation that “cannot escape history” because we are
“the last best hope of earth”’ (Powell, 1992: 32). As the ‘last best hope’ the United States could still
unproblematically occupy a location from which it claimed exceptionalism, through an identity based
upon the values of democracy and liberty for all. The events in and around Tiananmen Square were
framed accordingly and on 6 June 1989 President George Bush argued that the momentous, tragic
events in China give us reason to redouble our efforts to continue the spread of freedom and democracy
around the globe...to broaden the community of free nations, and to reaffirm the rights of man
(Woolley and Peters, American Presidency Project [online]). Time informed its readers that by the
morning of 4 June ‘the great, peaceful dream for democracy had become a horrible nightmare’ (Time,
12 June, 1989). However, that dream was American, not Chinese. Despite apparent signals from China
that it was now following in the footsteps of the West yet another Chinese ‘revolution’ had failed to
conform to American expectations. The imagined geography of Uncivilised China existed to Americans
as starkly now as it had done a century earlier as it remained a nation and a people which lacked the
imagined standards of the civilised Western world. It had taken just a few weeks for prevailing imagery
of China to shift dramatically from overtly positive to negative but beneath that shift lay enduring and
powerful continuities and commonalities. Harry Thayer, former director of the American Institute in
Taiwan, articulated the situation perfectly: ‘China was oversold in 1978-79, just as we had oversold
Chiang Kai-shek in World War II…the Chinese turned out not to be saints and perfect partners after all.
This is a long standing problem in the relationship’ (Tucker, 2001: 327-328). Warren Cohen is
representative of much of the relevant literature when he describes the United States’ historical
relations with China as ‘schizophrenic’, with ‘a pattern of alternating highs and lows’ (Cohen, 2010: 278
and 280). Indeed, throughout the body of comparable literature American images of China and the
Chinese have been variously misrepresented and underestimated. Certainly, American images of China
have shifted quickly and dramatically in terms of their relative positivity and negativity at given
moments. However, this analysis shows that they have also endured as more powerful underlying
assumptions about China’s identity across extended temporal periods. Specifically, it has argued that
imagery should be acknowledged not only as representations of what the Chinese do, but additionally
constitutive of enduring assumptions about who the Chinese are. To achieve this, a reinterpretation of
imagery emphasised its inextricability from discourse and identity processes. American discourse is that
which has always constructed images of China in particular ways, providing selected realities of that
country and its people. Moreover, because the identities of others are always produced from
understandings about the identity of the self, China has always been historically represented in
relation to the United States. The paper has argued that the idea of Uncivilised China has remained an
especially durable construction, produced in relation to the necessarily more civilised United States. It
has also shown that foreign policy must be understood not as the actions of prediscursive states but the
continual process by which states are made foreign in relation to one another. In such a way, it has
argued that American imagery of China represents an inextricable component of US China policy. That
imagery, in fact, has always been actively complicit at every stage of its formulation, enactment and
justification. During the earliest period of Sino-US relations American discourse worked to construct the
identity of Uncivilised China as backward, heathen and anachronistic and as failing to adhere to Western
standards of civilisation. Imagery of Uncivilised China became accepted and naturalised and endured for
generations, throughout the Chinese revolutionary period in the early years of the twentieth century
and during the 1989 protest movement and the events in Tiananmen Square (among innumerable
others). Imagery at each of these particular moments can be logically analysed in isolation as dramatic
shifts of attitude and opinion were undoubtedly in evidence. However, beneath these shifts lay more
enduring assumptions of identity which remained highly durable and largely unchanged. Expectations of
Uncivilised China have always been that it civilise to Western standards. As such, whether American
imagery of that country has appeared more overtly positive or negative at any given moment is, to a
certain extent, irrelevant. Further, at each of these moments comparatively stable understandings
about Uncivilised China worked to legitimise actions in Washington. They created realities within which
Uncivilised China had to change, and in which certain political possibilities could be introduced at the
expense of others. They allowed Americans to support the British-led opium wars of the mid-
nineteenth century, delay recognition of the new Chinese government in 1912 and implement
sanctions upon Beijing after the Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ of 1989. China’s increasing involvement
in contemporary global affairs means that Washington’s desire for Beijing to participate peacefully and
cooperatively within the US-dominated system of global political and economic governance is more
palpable today than ever. Powerful American images of China and the Chinese and the policies they
will serve to enable and justify must accordingly become a focus of more concerted scholarly
attention. It is imperative, in other words, that these ‘schizophrenic’ relations be acknowledged as at
least partly contingent upon pervasive and durable imagistic foundations. Only in this way can the
contours of the relationship between the United States and China be more satisfactorily understood so
that historical episodes we wish not to be repeated might somehow be avoided in the future.
 Cooperation Link – 2NC
Engagement with China unites global elites to advance the exploitative project of
globalization – the impact is endless war
Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion @ Lancaster University, 14
(Astrid, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars”, IJBS 11(2) p. online)
In this new fractal state of war and hostility, the Chinese state has joined forces with the American
leadership to reinstate the hegemony of the global (of which they have surely dreamt, just like the rest
of us). To the American unilateral war on terror in Afghanistan and George W. Bush’s call “you are either
with us or against us”, the Chinese government responded with a (perhaps reluctant) “we are with
you!” This wish to be part of the global American self has not meant, however, the full contribution to
the war effort that some American representatives may have hoped. China has, since around the time of
9/11 shifted from being extremely reluctant to condone or participate in any form of “peacekeeping”
missions, including under United Nations (UN) flag, to being the UN Security Council member that
contributes most to UN peacekeeping missions. Much of this participation has taken the form of non-
combatant personal. Nonetheless, China has been an actively involved party in ‘Operation Enduring
Freedom’. It has provided police training for Afghanistan’s security forces, as well as mine-clearance.
Though it was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq without UN mandate, China has emerged as one of the
biggest beneficiaries of the occupation, as it is one of the biggest winners of oil contracts in Iraq. In both
Afghanistan and Iraq, China has been accused of ‘free-riding’ on American efforts, but China has
nonetheless been clearly positioned as part of the participating and benefiting ‘we’. The Chinese state
has benefited from participation in the war on terror in more ways than one. The war has increased
Chinese influence in Central Asia. It has legitimized China’s harsh clamp-downs in Xinjiang, where the
state claims its violence is justified by the presence of separatist ‘terrorists’ in the Muslim Uyghur
community. Not least, China’s participation in the war on terror has been used to demonstrate to the
world that China is now a ‘responsible great power’, as measured by the standard of ‘international
society’ (see Yeophantong 2013 for a discussion of this ‘responsibility’ rhetoric). Again, this rhetoric of
‘responsibility’ has been deployed by both American and Chinese leaders to tie China more tightly to the
purported American-led ‘we’. More recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has stressed the
importance of continued Sino-US co-operation over Afghanistan post-2014 troop withdrawal. Wang has
publicly stressed the common goals of China and the US with regards to Afghanistan: ‘We both hope
Afghanistan will continue to maintain stability … We both hope to see the reconstruction of Afghanistan
and we both don’t want to see the resurgence of terrorism’ (cited in Chen Weihua, 2013). China and the
USA have jointly engaged in what is termed advisory and capacity-building for Afghans, for example in
training Afghan diplomats, and their co-operation continues around shared goals in the region. Much
could be said here about China’s participation in the American-led globalization project and war on
terror. My point here is simply to note that whatever we read America as doing through its war on
terror, China is a supporting and benefiting actor in this process. It is clearly positioned as part of this
global idea of self. At the same time, however, China is also portrayed, from within and without, as a
challenger, an alternative, or an ‘other’ to that global, American or Western order. We therefore turn
next to the Chinese scholarly and governmental rhetoric that claims to offer such an alternative or
challenge to the Western way of war that Baudrillard criticized and that we can see China joining in the
war on terror. (ii). Contemporary PRC rhetoric on pre-modern Chinese thought on war In contemporary
China, the official rhetoric on war focuses on pre-emption and the claim that China will never be a
‘hegemonic’ or warmongering power – unlike the US. In this rhetoric, the Chinese war is by nature a
non-war. Official documents emerging in the last decade repeatedly stress that China is by nature
peaceful, which is why nobody needs to worry about its rise. In the 2005 government whitepaper
China’s Peaceful Development Road, for example, we are told that: [i]t is an inevitable choice based on
China’s historical and cultural tradition that China persists unswervingly in taking the road of peaceful
development. The Chinese nation has always been a peace-loving one. Chinese culture is a pacific
culture. The spirit of the Chinese people has always featured their longing for peace and pursuit of
harmony (State Council of the PRC 2005b). The whitepaper (and numerous other official and unofficial
publications) posit an essentialised Chinese culture of peacefulness as prior to any Chinese relations
with the world. This rhetoric of an inherently non-bellicose Chinese way has also echoed in Chinese
academic debates, where Chinese pre-modern philosophy has come back in fashion as a (selectively
sampled) source of inspiration. The claims and logics that have come out of these debates are varied.
One significant grouping of Chinese academics directly follow the government line and claim that
‘choosing “peaceful rise” is on the one hand China’s voluntary action, on the other hand it is an
inevitable choice’ (Liu Jianfei 2006: 38). That peacefulness and harmony is something that ‘Chinese
people’ have always valued is an implication, and often explicitly stated ‘fact’ in these literatures. Zhan
Yunling, for example, claims that ‘from ancient times until today, China has possessed traditional
thought and a culture of seeking harmony’ (Zhang Yunling 2008: 4). This claim to natural harmony is
mutually supportive of the claim that ‘the Chinese nation’ has always been a peaceful nation, to authors
such as Liu Jianfei (2006), or Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli (2006). A related set of commentators further
stress the significance of militarily non-violent means to China getting its (naturally peaceful) way in
international relations. For example, Ding Sheng draws on the Sunzi quote mentioned above: ‘to
subjugate the enemy’s army without doing battle is the highest of excellence’ (Ding Sheng 2008: 197).
This line of argument typically sees what some would call ‘soft power tools’ as a way of getting others to
become more like yourself without any need for outright ‘war’ or other forms of physical violence. In a
discussion of the official government rhetoric of ‘harmonious world’ under former president Hu Jintao,
Shi Zhongwen accordingly stresses that the doctrine opposes going to extremes, and therefore
contradicts what Shi calls ‘the philosophy of struggle’ (Shi Zhongwen 2008: 40, where ‘struggle’ implies
Marxist ideology). Qin Zhiyong similarly argues that China needs to steer away from collisions and
embrace the aim of ‘merging different cultures’ (Qin Zhiyong 2008: 73). At the same time, few Chinese
academics question the direction of the ‘merging of cultures’ discussed above – clearly it is other
cultures that should merge into China’s peaceful one. In a common line of thought that draws on the
historical concept of Tianxia, or ‘All-under-heaven’, it is argued that the Chinese leadership can thus
bring about a harmonious world through ‘voluntary submission [by others] rather than force’ simply
through its superior morality and exemplary behaviour (Yan Xuetong 2008: 159). On this logic, the
leadership will never need to use violence, because everybody will see its magnanimity and will want to
emulate its behaviour (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34. See Callahan 2008: 755 for a discussion). Much of these
debates have come to pivot around this concept of Tianxia, an imaginary of the world that builds on a
holistic notion of space, without radical self-other distinction or bordered difference. To some thinkers,
this imagination is based on a notion of globalisation (for example Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli 2006:
59) or networked space (Ni Shixiong and Qian Xuming 2008: 124) where everything is always already
connected to everything else in a borderless world. In these accounts, Tianxia thinking is ‘completely
different from Western civilisation, since Chinese civilisation insists on its own subjectivity, and
possesses inclusivity’ (Zhou Jianming and Jiao Shixin 2008: 28). Despite this apparent binary, it is claimed
that Tianxiaism involves an identification with all of humankind, where there is no differentiation or
distinction between people (Li Baojun and Li Zhiyong 2008: 82). A thinker whose deployment of the
Tianxia concept has been particularly influential is Zhao Tingyang, who proposes the concept as a
Chinese and better way of imagining world order (Zhao Tingyang 2005; 2006), where ‘better’ means
better than the ‘Western’ inter-state system to which Tianxia is portrayed as the good opposite. In
opposition to this ‘Western system’, he argues that Tianxia can offer ‘a view from nowhere’ or a view
‘from the world’, where ‘[w]orld-ness cannot be reduced to internationality, for it is of the wholeness or
totality rather than the between-ness’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 39). However, as a consequence of a
prioritisation of order over the preservation of alterity, ‘any inconsistency or contradiction in the system
will be a disaster’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). As a corollary of this prioritisation, Zhao comes to insist on
the homogeneity of his all-inclusive space, which aims at the uniformity of society (Zhao Tingyang 2006:
33, emphasis in original) where ‘all political levels … should be essentially homogenous or homological
so as to create a harmonious system’ (2006: 33). The aim of the Tianxia system is thus to achieve one
single homogeneous and uniform space. Clearly, for such homogeneity to be born from a
heterogeneous world, someone must change. Zhao argues that: one of the principles of Chinese political
philosophy is said ‘to turn the enemy into a friend’, and it would lose its meaning if it were not to
remove conflicts and pacify social problems – in a word, to ‘transform’ (化) the bad into the good (Zhao
Tingyang 2006: 34). Moreover, this conversion to a single ‘good’ homogeneity should happen through
‘volontariness’ rather than through expansive colonialism: ‘an empire of All-under-Heaven could only be
an exemplar passively in situ, rather than positively become missionary’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 36,
emphasis in original). However, when we are given clues as to how this idea of the ‘good’ to which
everyone should conform would be determined, Zhao’s idea of self-other relations seems to rely on the
possibility of some Archimedean point from which to judge this good, and/or the complete eradication
of any otherness, so that the one space that exists is completely the space of self (Zhao Tingyang 2006:
33). Thus, Zhao confesses that ‘[t]he unspoken theory is that most people do not really know what is
best for them, but that the elite do, so the elite ought genuinely to decide for the people’ (2006: 32). As
explained by William A. Callahan: By thinking through the world with a view from everywhere, Zhao
argues that we can have a ‘complete and perfect’ understanding of problems and solutions that is ‘all-
inclusive’. With this all-inclusive notion of Tianxia, there is literally ‘no outside’.… Since all places and all
problems are domestic, Zhao says that ‘this model guarantees the a priori completeness of the world’
(Callahan 2007: 7). This ‘complete and perfect’ understanding is hence attainable only to an elite, who
will achieve homogeneity (convert others into self) through example. Eventually, then, there will be no
other, the ‘many’ will have been transformed into ‘the one’ (Zhao Tingyang 2005: 13, see also 2006). It is
through this transformation and submission to the ruling elite that the prevention of war is imagined. If
Baudrillard had engaged with these contemporary Chinese redeployments of pre-modern thought on
war (which, to my knowledge, he never did), I think he would have recognised many of the themes that
interested him in Western approaches to the first Gulf war. Most strikingly, this is a way of talking about
war that writes out war from its story. Like deterrence, it is an imagination of war that approaches it via
prevention and pre-emption. What is more, we recognise an obsession with the self-image of the self to
itself – in this case, a Chinese, undemocratic self rather than a Western, democratic one. In this Chinese
war, like in the Persian Gulf of which Baudrillard wrote, there is no space for an Other that is Other. In
the Tianxia imaginary, Others can only be imagined as something that will eventually assimilate into The
System and become part of the Self, as the Self strives for all-inclusive perfection. There is no meeting
with an Other in any form. Encounter only happens once the Other becomes like the Self, is assimilated
into the One, and hence there is no encounter at all (for an analysis that reads Baudrillard and Tianxia to
this effect in a Chinese non-war context, see Nordin 2012). (iii). Contemporary Chinese war and its
various modes As was the case with the first Gulf War, the war that we are waiting for here in the
Chinese case is thus a non-war. If by war we mean some form of (symbolic) exchange or some clash of
forms, agons, or forces (as we tend to do even in the current ‘cutting edge research’ in ‘critical war
studies’, see Nordin and Öberg 2013) – we cannot expect it to take place. In China, we see not only a
participation in the Western system of (non)war through the war on terror, but also another system that
precisely denies space for imagining an other as Other, which in turn makes the idea of exchange
impossible. In this sense, the Ancient Chinese approach to war through the Tianxia concept – at least as
it is reflected by current Chinese thinkers like Zhao Tingyang and Yan Xuetong – is not a Clausewitzean
war continuing politics by other means, but precisely a continuation of the absence of politics by other
means. It arguably shares this aspect with both the first and the second Gulf Wars. This, however, is
certainly not to say that there are not those who fear a Chinese war or that we have no reason to fear it.
In various guises, the war that is imagined through a Clausewitzean ontology of agonistic and reciprocal
exchange returns and is reified also in China. It is not uncommon for authors discussing the Chinese
traditions of thinking war that I describe above to begin their discussion by explicitly drawing on
Clausewitz and take his war as their point of departure (for example Liu Tiewa 2014). For several
Chinese writers, it is clear that this building of a ‘harmonious world’ is directed against others whose
influence should be ‘smashed’ (Fang Xiaojiao 2008: 68). From this line of thinkers, the call to build a
harmonious world has also been used to argue for increased Chinese military capacity, including its
naval power (Deng Li 2009). Although Chinese policy documents stress that violence or threat of
violence should be avoided, they similarly appear to leave room for means that would traditionally be
understood as both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ in Joseph Nye’s dichotomisation (See for example State Council of
the PRC 2005a). Indeed, many of Chinas neighbours have voiced concern with growing Chinese military
capacity over the last few years, and a Chinese non-war is no less frightening to its neighbours than a
war – be it labelled ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, ‘real’ or ‘virtual’. This Chinese war – past, present and future – is
acted out in various different modes. Violent war is reified through the spectacle of computer games,
art, online memes, cartoons and not least dramas on film and television (Diamant 2011, 433). The
Chinese state claims success in all of its wars, and simultaneously claims that it has never behaved
aggressively beyond its borders (which is also, of course, a convenient way of glossing over all the
violence perpetrated by the Chinese state within those borders, the violence with which they are upheld
and with which they were established in the first place, and the clear contradiction between the state’s
fixation on territorial integrity and its borderless and holistic Tianxia rhetoric). Popular cultural
renditions of war paint a more varied picture, but all contribute to a reification of war.
 Competitiveness – 1NC
Fear of China surpassing the US economy is intrinsically linked to a history of
xenophobic politics that attempt to purge and punish East Asian immigrants – this act
of securitization creates the conditions for a clash of civilizations
Song, associate professor of political science at the University of Macau, 15
(Weiqing, Securitization of the “China Threat” Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account, China Review
15(1) p. muse)
As a political myth, the securitization of the China threat operates within a corresponding epistemic terrain. It
targets the general public, an audience as wide and as large as possible. Again, effective securitization relies on the use of language
appropriate to context and audience. Securitization discourses in this mode are not confined to the linguistic sphere;75 they may include, for
example, signs, images, and rituals. The BBC documentary is typical in its deployment of a wide variety of discourses, such as interviews, nonverbal communication,
In attempting
written text, and signs. The documentary provides a clear visual illustration of the allegation that a growing China is encroaching on the globe.
to arouse an emotional response from the general public, the documentary includes stories told by
ordinary people, accompanied by vivid pictures and signs. The securitizers hope that raising consciousness of and
inspiring an emotional response to the so-called China threat will elicit action to prevent it . The success
of a political myth lies not only in its production, “but rather, and foremost, [in] its reception.”76 Indeed, the
“work” of myth can be characterized as a system of “production—reception—reproduction.”77 In other words,
this process of securitization “coagulates and reproduces significance”;78 it should then be able to address
“the specifically political conditions”79 in which the intended subjects live, and the meanings they share as a community.
This process is fully implemented in The Chinese Are Coming. In terms of substantial modality, agents working in the political-myth mode aim to securitize the sheer
In addition to its military,
comprehensiveness of the threat posed by China, which is represented as covering a wide range of social spheres.
strategic, and political threats, China is imagined to endanger economic, environmental, social, and
cultural development worldwide. Rowlatt concludes at the end of the BBC documentary that “China’s expansion into the world
is transforming not just the global economy but also the balance of world power.” The “price that is
being paid” is made clear, including “the environmental damage this rush for resources is wreaking” and
the undermining of “local businesses almost everywhere.” He concludes that the 21st century will certainly be China’s century, and
that the rise of China will profoundly affect people all over the world. In economic terms, the world economy as a “supranational referent object” is perceived to be
existentially threatened by China, whose own economy undermines the rules, norms and institutions that constitute a [End Page 162] liberal market, based on free
competition and rule compliance.80 In the documentary, for example, the narrator describes “the legions of construction workers from China building vast new
structures across Africa,” who “work 24 running hours, all the time.” China’s economic rise is also represented as affecting the
highly industrialized United States, where “discomfort is turning to despair in America’s industrial
heartlands.” The audience witnesses China’s use of “unfair trade” measures to put the traditional steel industry out of business, generating unemployment in
the communities that have been tied to these factories for generations. Comparably, China’s thirst for natural resources is depicted as
a major threat to the environment. In the environmental sector, there are a wide range of possible referent objects, from concrete outcomes
like the survival of individual species or types of habitat to broader issues such as the maintenance of the global climate s ystem and biosphere.81 In the BBC
these referent objects are well documented: the killing of elephants for ivory products in the
documentary,
national park of Zambia, the incredible hunger for resources that threatens the Amazon, the world’s largest
rainforest, and so on. Faced with a panoramic view of an enormous mine carved out of the previously tree-covered rainforest, audiences are inevitably struck by the
devastation caused by Chinese companies. It does not matter whether this devastation is truly attributable to China. The manner of the presentation is much more
the China threat is also represented as affecting the
important than the veracity of the content. In the mode of political myth,
social sector, where the referent objects under threat are large-scale collective identities.82 These identities may
extend beyond the state to nations, religions, cultures, and civilizations. In The Chinese Are Coming, the identity of China is clearly differentiated from that of the
West: it has unfamiliar food, different ways of doing business, human rights abuses, no respect for local culture, and so on. This is most vividly reflected in the
report of a protest made by a number of U.S. citizens outside a Confucius Institute sponsored by the Chinese government, which teaches Chinese language and
culture to the children of U.S. citizens. The narrator reports that people believe Beijing to be using these classes to smuggle pro-China propaganda into U.S.
classrooms; they are opposed to the Chinese government’s trying to brainwash U.S. youth “by insidious methods of misinformation” in U.S. schools. [End Page 163]
Securitizers
Here, the so-called China threat is represented as a political myth, in whose construction the method of differentiation plays a dominant role.
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.”83 If this
act of securitization succeeds, a clash of civilizations will in fact be more likely.
 A2: Perm Both – 2NC
1.Perm links or its severance out of the 1AC’s representations – that’s a voting issue
because it makes the AFF a moving target which makes clash impossible – neg ground
outweighs because it’s always reactionary

2.Policymaking DA – the perm reduces the alternative’s epistemology to a policy

statement – that allows critical reflection to be co-opted for the service of empire –
prefer the alternative alone
Steinmetz, Sociology Prof @ University of Michigan, 6
(George, “Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Comparative Historical Perspective,”
Sociological Theory 23:4)
Until recently, U.S. imperialism seems to have continually regenerated the mirage of its own insignificance

or dwindling importance. This self-euphemization corresponded to the informal nature and

universalistic self-presentation of American geopolitical engagements. The blindness of most of American society to the
very existence of this empire is mirrored in the near invisibility of the topic in the main sociology journals.70 But surely it is incumbent on sociologists to look
beyond and beneath the official rhetoric and leftist millennial dreams of American decline and to explore the topic in more detail. This silence stands in sharp
one reason for this difference is that these groups are
contrast to the journals in political science and even in history. Of course,
more likely than sociologists to be called on to give lessons to the imperial state .71 But rather than avoiding the topic
altogether, sociologists could explore the possibility of giving lessons about (or against) empire. The refusal to
provide lessons for empire is not just a normative objection to polices that violate foreign sovereignty and dignity but
also an analytic argument rooted in some of the characteristic ontological features of social life. Society is an
‘‘open system,’’ in the sense that social events are typically overdetermined by a multiplicity of causal structures
rather than being produced by a single cause (as in the ideal production of an effect in a scientific
laboratory experiment) or by a constantly recurring cluster of causal factors. The openness of the social
means that we will never attain the positivist grail of the ‘‘constant conjunction of events.’’ Although we may be
able to explain events such as the 19th-century European scramble for colonies retroductively, or extrapolate patterns into the very near future under highly
constrained contextual conditions, we will never be able to predict such events except by sheer luck. As a result, the only kind of affirmative lesson we would ever
The science of
be able to give to empire, even if we were so inclined, would be to prescribe policies whose outcomes would be impossible to foresee.72
public policy, in other words, has the choice of being either thoroughly and willfully political or resolutely
historical and nonpredictive. To avoid having one’s work functionalized by empire, then, one should
create accounts that are ontologically and epistemologically adequate to the processual, conjunctural,
contingent nature of social life, and hence irreducible to simple policy statements .73 That is not to say
that one cannot diagnose conditions that generate inequality or distorted knowledge about the social
world, and call for their absenting; here there is no prediction but rather a retroductive analysis
specifying social determinants.
3. Noncooperation key – wholesale rejection is the only way to prevent hegemonic
ideology from reasserting itself, it’s so powerful that anything but complete withdraw
allows imperial knowledge to reassert itself – that’s Willson.

4.Externalization DA – the perm projects knowledge production outwards to make a

policy to engage with China instead of using knowledge to establish a deeper
understanding of how internal desire constructs imperial relationships with others.
The alternative’s act of self-reflection is key to undermine the conditions that
imperialism impossible, and the perm disrupts the process.
Philipose, Women's Studies Prof @ California State University Long Beach, 8
(Liz, “The Politics of Pain and the End of Empire,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 9:1,60 -81)
Neoliberalism, with its foundations in colonial knowledge, conspires to support empire in numerous
ways. It relies upon and creates a culture of neurochemical selves whose disaffection from politics is
more likely to be treated psychopharmaceutically rather than taken as a crisis of firmly held beliefs. We
code social dismay and the pain of contemporary existence as biological impulses that have no social
import. We become further removed from the possibility of taking our own emotions seriously, and
that creates a tremendous hindrance to our ability to engage others as emotional subjects. Ultimately,
not taking our own emotions seriously means not taking our human spirit seriously, and that translates
into an inability to see others as the embodiment of human spirit. The problem for political movements
is how to politicize and activate a population increasingly removed from a passionate, caring ethic – a
population which cannot move unless personally affected, and which cannot be personally affected by
the suffering and pain of others. Progressive and peaceful social movements often seem to believe that
if people only knew what US foreign policy does to others, or what governments keep from us, or in
what conditions most of our commodities are produced, then we would eventually stop creating
harmful practices and systems. Of course, it is crucial to be informed about political events. However,
the knowledge we seem to be missing is that of the self, of our own selves as we have come to be
constituted through neoliberal and colonial knowledges. The neoliberal, colonial self of the western
world is impaired in its ability to focus on one of the best indicators of whether or not we live a
collectively good life – our emotional responses. In this context, an effective challenge to empire
requires us to recover our relationship to emotional life as political actors. We need to face up to the
historical and contemporary social forces that remove us from our emotions and the emotions of
others, and, simultaneously, to reconstitute a public relationship to emotions in general. These are
necessary steps to imagining more clearly the work of political movements and the kinds of
communities we aim to construct out of the present imperial moment.
Framework
 A2: Framework – 2NC
Framework – weigh the affirmatives epistemological assumptions before its
hypothetical legal effects – prefer it

Policymaking – discourse is inseparable from implementation of the plan – no

representation is objective, it has a history and serves particular interests in its
articulation. The affirmatives dominant framing enables a hierarchical US-China
relationship which flips the case
Turner, Hallsworth Research Fellow @ University of Manchester, 11
(Oliver, Sino-US relations then and now: Discourse, images, policy, Political Perspectives: 5 (3), pp. 27-
45)
Traditionally, foreign policy analysis has reflected the tendency of the dominant realist and liberal
schools to ignore the significance of discourse and imagery to the advancement of policy and to focus
instead upon material forces. In consequence, the role of ideas within the formation and enactment
of policy has been broadly overlooked. Moreover, the foreign policy of states has been understood to
constitute the manifestation of those material forces as the objective behaviour of singular, isolated
units of analysis. In the particular case of China, for example, Thomas J. Christensen argues that
contemporary debates are centred on distributions of material power. ‘Power is what matters’, he
argues, ‘and what matters in power is one’s relative capabilities compared with those of others,
especially other great powers’ (Christensen, 2001: 6). In 1989, however, James Rosenau argued that ‘the
breakdown of the old interstate system is necessitating reformulation of [the ways in which] domestic
and international processes sustain each other’ (Rosenau, 1989: 5). Peter Gourevitch similarly suggested
that the domestic and international realms should be examined holistically, since traditional distinctions
between established levels no longer reflect reality (Gourevitch, 1978). David Campbell provides a useful
reorientation of traditional assumptions of foreign policy so that analysis shifts from a concern for the
relations between states to one for the processes by which states are made foreign in relation to one
another. Societal representations of foreign lands and people, he argues, are more than descriptions of
others ‘out there’. They constitute the discursive construction of states at all levels of society and the
ubiquitous process by which actors are made foreign in relation to the identity of the self. When
understood in these terms, processes of representation become a ‘specific sort of boundary producing
political performance’ (Ashley, 1987, p.51, emphasis in original). The power inherent to domestic or
societal discourse, then, is such that the truths it advances are able to create the necessary reality within
which particular policies are not only enabled but justified as logical and proper courses of action. As
Foucault explains, power is understood to be inextricable from knowledge so that one cannot be
advanced in the absence of the other (Foucault, 1980: 52). The result is a power/knowledge nexus which
precludes the advancement of discourse and the establishment of truth as neutral or dispassionate
endeavours (Foucault, 1979). Discursive representation, then, is unavoidably performative in the sense
that ‘it produces the effects that it names’ (Gregory, 1995: 18). Ellingson agrees, noting that the
historical construction of non-Europeans as ‘lower’ peoples has been at the heart of the establishment
of a global European hegemony (Ellingson, 2001: xiii). International relations therefore represent an
arena of power that is both political and discursive, wherein discourses create certain possibilities and
preclude others (Apple, 2003, p.6). This means that American discourses and imagery about China
have never been produced objectively or in the absence of purpose and intent. Their dissemination
must always be acknowledged as a performance of power, however seemingly innocent or benign.
They are able to create the imagined conditions within which appropriate, and perhaps even ostensibly
unsavoury, action can be enacted while other potential policies are dismissed as inappropriate or
impossible. As Doty confirms, ‘the naturalization of meaning has had consequences ranging from the
appropriation of land, labor and recourses to the subjugation and extermination of entire groups of
people’ (Doty, 1998: 7). The intention of this paper is not to dismiss entirely the utility of the ‘traditional’
approaches to International Relations. Yet, China and the United States share a history of alliance and
war, trust and suspicion, sympathy and hatred and their relations should not be conveniently reduced to
overtly materialistic analyses of policy, merely of what happened. It is necessary to achieve a
complementary understanding of how it was able to happen. To return to the example provided by
Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000: 3), then, the forest could be destroyed, left in tact or even protected
but each policy would always be fundamentally reliant upon which of its potential representations is
considered true by those responsible for its future. In such a way, American discourse and imagery of
China are not merely related to, or somehow affective towards, the enactment of US China policy (as
authors within the imagery literature have variously suggested). They are in fact inextricable from, and
constitutive of, that policy so that they can never accurately be conceived as separate or distinct.
Rather, they must consequently be understood as actively complicit at every stage of its formulation,
enactment and justification.

Praxis– policymaking takes the world as given which foreground unjust social orders
making violence inevitable – rethinking ontological starting points is a pre-requisite to
policy action
Cox, Poli Sci Prof @ York University, 96
(Robert, “Approaches to World Order,” pg. 144-147)
Ontology lies at the beginning of any enquiry. We cannot define a problem in global politics without
presupposing a certain basic structure consisting of the significant kinds of entities involved and the
form of significant relationships among them . We think, for example, about a system whose basic entities are states and of an
hypothesized mechanism called the balance of power through which their relation- ships may be understood to constitute a certain kind of world order. From
such ontological beginnings, complex theories have been built and specific cases — particular inter-state relationships
— can be exam- ined. There is always an ontological starting point . Any such ontological standpoint is open to

question . All of the terms just used have ontological meanings: global politics, structure, system, states, balance of power, world order. I choose "global poli-
tics" deliberately to avoid certain ontological presuppositions inherent in other terms such as "international relations," which seems to equate nation with state and
to define the field as limited to the inter- actions among states; or "world system," which has been given a specific meaning by certain writers, notably by Immanuel
Wallerstein. "Global politics' is looser and broader as a starting point than these other terms, although the reader will soon see that even "politics" constitutes an
Theory follows reality. It also precedes and shapes
ontological limitation for me. My thinking would prefer something like "political economy."

reality . That is to say, there is a real historical world in which things happen; and theory is made through
reflection upon what has happened. The separation of theory from historical happenings is, however, only a
way of thinking, because theory feeds back into the making of history by virtue of the way those who
make history (and I am thinking about human collectivities, not just about prominent individuals) think about what they are doing. Their understanding Of
What the historical context allows them to do, prohibits them from doing, or requires them to do, and the way they formulate their purposes in acting, is the
product of theory. There is a grand theory written by scholars in books; and there is a common-sense theory which average people use to explain to themselves and
The ontologies that people work with derive from their historical experience
to others why they are doing what they
and in turn become embedded in the world they construct. What is subjective in understanding
becomes objective through action. This is the only way, for instance, in which we can understand the state as an objective reality. The state has
no physical existence, like a building or a lamp-post; but it is nevertheless a real entity. It is a real entity because everyone acts as though it were; because we know
that real people with guns and batons will enforce decisions attributed to this nonphysical reality. These embedded structures of thought and practice — the
nonphysi- cal realities of political and social life — may persist over long periods of time, only to become problematic, to be called into question, when people
confront new sets of problems that the old ontologies do not seem able to account for or cope with. In such periods, certainties about ontology give place to
skepticism. As the European old regime passed its peak and entered into decline, Pyrrhonism, a revival of skepticism from the ancient world, became an intellectual
fashion.' Now postmodernism, more attuned to a generation that disdains to seek models from the past, performs the function Of disestablishing (or, in its terms,
deconstructing) the heretofore accepted ontologies. In a recent work,2 Richard Ashley argued that there is no indubi- table Archimedean point, no single firm
foundation, on which to build a science Of global politics.' Every purported firm ground is to be doubted in the eyes of eternity.
We are not, however, working with the eyes Of eternity but with a myopia particular to the late twentieth century. Indeed, our perspectives may be strongly
Our challenge
influenced by a sense of the invalidity of former certainties — those of the Cold War, of a bipolar structure of world power, of US hegemony.
is not to contribute to the construction of a universal and absolute knowledge, but to devise a fresh
perspective useful for framing and working on the problems of the present. There is a lingering absolutism in the very
denial of the possibility of absolute knowledge — a regret, a striving to approximate something like it, to endow our practical wisdom with universality. As intellec-
tuals and theorists, we are disposed to think of our task as that of homo sapiens, though we might be more effective were we to see our task as that of an adjunct
To deconstruct the ontological constructs of the passing present is a first step
to homo fabcr, the maker of history.

towards a more pertinent but still relative knowledge. The task of clearing the ground should not become an obstacle to constructing
new perspective that can be useful even though it in turn will ulti- mately be to critical reevaluation. Homo faber is also homo sapiens. There is a cumulative as well
as a dis- junctive quality to history. Distinct historical phases, with their histori- cally specific ontologies, are not sealed off from one another as mutually
incomprehensible or mutually irrelevant constructs.' Historical phases in our own current of civilization are produced, one following the other, in a process of
contradiction. The contradictions and conflicts that arise within any established structure create the opportunity for its trans- formation into a new structure. This is
the simplest model of historical change. The successive phases of other currents of civilization can be understood by the human mind's capacity for analogy. The
encounters and merging of civilizations can be understood by a combination Of pro- cess and analogy. These capacities of thought make the historical pro- cess
intelligible. Knowledge of history, not just of events but of the regu- larities or general principles that help explain historical change, can, in turn, become a guide for
action. History thus generates theory. This theory is not absolute knowledge, not a final revelation or a complete- ness of rational knowledge about the laws of
history. It is a set of viable working hypotheses. It is a form of knowledge that transcends the specific historical epoch, that makes the epoch intelligible in a larger
perspective — not the perspective of eternity which stands outside his- tory, but the perspective of a long sweep of history. There are special epistemological as
well as ontological issues to be resolved in working within an era of structural change. Positivism offers an epistemological approach congenial to periods of relative
structural stability. The state of the social whole can be taken as given in order to focus upon those particular variables t hat frame the specific and limited object of
enquiry. Positivism allows for detailed empirical investigation of discrete problems. The observing subject can be thought of as separated from, as not directly
involved with, what is investigated. The purpose of enquiry is to bring the aberrant activity that focused attention as an object of study back into a compatible
in positivism there is an implicit identity
relationship with the relatively stable whole. Although this is not always clearly recognized,
between the observer-analyst and the stable social whole. This identity at the level of the whole allows
for the fiction of a separation between subject and object at the level of the specific issue. Positivism is
less well adapted to enquiry into complex and comprehensive change . For this we need an
epistemology that does not dis-guise but rather explicitly affirms the dialectical relationship of subject
and object in historical process. Intentions and purposes are under- stood to be embodied within the objectified or institutionalized struc- tures of
thought and practice characteristic of an epoch. Where positivism separates the observing subject from the observed object of enquiry, this other
historically oriented, interpretative, or hermeneutic epistemology sees subject and object in the
historical world as a reciprocally interrelated whole. Such an epistemology is more adequate as a guide
to action towards structural change , even though it may not attain the degree of precision expected of positivism. This essay is an attempt to
develop such an approach. A shift of ontologies is inherent in the very process of historical structural change. The

entities that are significant are the emerging structures and the processes through which they emerge.
Reflection upon change discredits old ontologies and yields an intimation of a possible new ontology.
Use of the new ontology becomes the heuristic for strategies of action in the emerging world order.

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

Representations precede any of the affirmatives empirical analysis – we cannot

understand the affirmatives policy approach to China without first understanding how
our unconscious desires construct China in Western media, scholarship, and
government documents - before we can study China external to the US, we have to
reflect on how the US has come to know China
Pan, IR Prof @ Deakin University, 12
(Chengxin, “Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise,”
Introduction, pp. ebook)
Critical epistemological reflection on the field of China’s i nternational r elations is anything but trivial . At one level,
some measure of selfreflectivity is not only necessary but also unavoidable. It pervades all literary works, as literature is always implicitly a
All forms of knowledge contain within themselves some conscious or
reflection on literature itself.25
unconscious , direct or indirect, autobiographical accounts of the knowing/writing self at either individual or
certain collective levels. As evidenced in the selfimage of positivist knowledge in general, the very absence of critical self
reflection in China watching already denotes a particular way of speaking about itself, namely, as a
cumulative body of empirical knowledge on China. The problem is that this scientistic self-understanding is
largely uncritical and unconsciously so. If Pierre Macherey is right that what a work does not say is as important as what it does
say,26 then this curious silence and unconscious-ness in the writing of China’s rise needs to be interrupted and made more conscious, a process
which Jürgen Habermas calls reflection.27 Besides, it seems impossible for China watching to watch only China. Aihwa Ong notes that ‘When a
book about China is only about China, it is suspect’.28 We may add that it is also self-delusional. China
as an object of study does
not simply exist in an objectivist or empiricist fashion, like a freefloating, self-contained entity waiting
to be directly contacted, observed and analysed. This is not to say that China is unreal, unknowable or is
only a ghostly illusion constructed entirely out of literary representation. Of course China does exist: the Great Wall, the Communist
Party, and more than one billion people living there are all too real. And yet, to say something is real does not mean that its
existence corresponds with a single, independent and fixed meaning for all to see. None of those
aforementioned ‘real’ things and people beam out their meaning at us directly, let alone offer an unadulterated, panoramic view of ‘China’ as a
whole. China’s existence, while real, is better understood, to use Martin Heidegger’s term, as a type of ‘being-in-theworld’. 29 The ‘in-the-
world-ness’ is intrinsically characteristic of China’s being, which always needs to be understood in conjunction with its world, a world which
necessarily includes China-bound discourse and representation. R. G. Collingwood once said that ‘all history is the history of thought’, meaning
that no historian can speak directly of hard historical facts without reference to various thoughts about those facts.30 Likewise, insofar
as
China cannot exist meaningfully outside of language and discursive construction of it, no study of it is
ever possible, let alone complete, without studying our thoughts about it . For this reason, echoing George Marcus and
Michael Fisher’s call for ethnography to ‘turn on itself’ and ‘to create an equally probing, ethnographic knowledge of its social and cultural
foundations’, 31 this book takes the representation of China (rather than ‘China’ itself) as its main object of study. It calls for a critical
autoethnographic turn in China watching. Certainly, there has been no shortage of study on Western representations of China. Alongside
Western intellectual interest in this country is a longstanding tradition of documenting this interest, as evidenced in an extensive and diverse
body of literature on Western images of China.32 If we also count the works on Western perceptions of Asia, the size of that literature is even
more impressive. 33 But this makes it all the more conspicuous that to date precious little has been said or written about contemporary China
watching in global politics. For instance, a large portion of the existing study is fixated either on past perceptions of China or perceptions of
China’s past. Historical investigation, valuable as it is, cannot substitute for an up-to-date account of contemporary Western knowledge on
China. Meanwhile, most literature tends to limit its purview to ‘non-scholarly’ sources, such as government
documents , official speeches , mass media , public opinion , travel writings, novels, documentaries and films. As a
result, by design or by accident, scholarly literature is often able to escape attention. Furthermore, even as some academic
writings in historiographical, sociological, philosophical, cultural, and linguistic contexts have begun to be critically scrutinised, 34 with few
exceptions Western IR scholarship on China’s rise continues to be overlooked. 35 This is especially curious given that since the US consolidated
its global dominance after World War II (WWII), IR discourses have become a main frame of reference for mainstream Western worldviews. 36
Is this because discipline-based scholarship such as IR is better able to minimise the prejudice of Orientalism? Edward Said once claimed that
‘interesting work is most likely to be produced by scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a “field” like
Orientalism defined either canonically, imperially, or geographically’. 37 However, it would be naïve, as Said himself would probably agree, to
give the disciplines of IR and Political Science such benefit of the doubt. Though apparently defined intellectually rather than
geographically, neither field is politically innocent or neutral. In fact, both remain largely an American/Western social
science, whose implicit or unintended loyalty to the United States (US) is probably not dissimilar to that of
Orientalism to Europe.38 Indeed, precisely because these disciplines have now gained a false reputation of
being value-free or scientifically objective, their contribution to Western construction of other societies
could be all the more significant and lasting, thus deserving closer investigation. Failing that, it would be
difficult for us to grasp the dynamics and complexities of contemporary Western representations of
China in global politics. No doubt, critical scholarship in the fields of IR and postcolonial studies has begun to problematise mainstream IR
knowledge. Several important works in IR and cultural studies have examined at length the social construction of self/Other and the politics of
representation in relation to the South, the East (‘Near East’), and Asia.39 However, none of their focus is primarily on Western representations
of China. Said’s seminal work Orientalism, despite its sweeping subtitle ‘Western Conceptions of the Orient’, is concerned mainly with the
Middle East.40 When sometimes Said is invoked in China analysis, it is often, perhaps justifiably, to probe China’s own ‘Orientalist’ legacy (or in
Xiaomei Chen’s term, Occidentalism).41 Finally, where there exists useful criticism of Western IR discourses on China’s rise, the criticism is
often confined to empirical debate or concerned with factual or narrowly-conceived methodological matters related to specific works, claims,
 participants in such debates agree that there is a real China out there, and that the main
or issues. 42 Most
problem with Western representa-tion lies in its misrepresentation, bias, or tainted perceptions : once
such distortion is rectified, objective knowledge of China will be within reach. For example, having insightfully
noted that ‘Our uncertainties about China are as much a product of uncertainties about ourselves as they are about China’, Brantly Womack
then goes on to suggest that we should strive for an ‘accurate understanding of China’ through looking at the ‘real’ China and ‘its internal
dynamic’. 43 To many, Womack’s approach makes perfect sense: How could it be otherwise? And yet, appeals to ‘reality’ through
more empirical research are ultimately of limited value . As Eric Hayot et al. put it, ‘noting the discrepancy between
reality and representation, as it applies to particular objects of discourse, no longer works as critique… critique has to acknowledge imagination
as something more than a distorter of fact’. 44 Understanding representation as ‘something more’ than an empirical
matter is crucial, though this does not mean that empirical analysis has become irrelevant; it has not and will not. But if our critique
of Western representations stays at an empirical level, it will be ultimately ineffective , if not
misleading itself. For one thing, there is no compelling reason to suggest that our newer empirical data can
serve as a more reliable base on which to build China knowledge . Moreover, as will be made clear in the book, the
overall function of Western representations is self-imagination. For all their claims to scientific
objectivity, they have not been primarily about presenting an empirically accurate picture of China in the
first instance. As such, no amount of ‘accurate’ empirical facts or logical reasoning contrary to Western
assumptions of China is likely to succeed in challenging those assumptions. Consequently, in spite of the vast body
of works that focus on Western images and representations of China, there is a glaring lack of critical analysis of
contemporary Western thought on China’s rise in the field of IR (broadly defined), a gap which this book aims to fill. The
book is not interested in asking whether or to what extent various forms of China knowledge accurately reflect ‘Chinese reality’. Nor will it offer
my own ‘authentic’ or ‘objective’ picture of that reality—so long as it is ‘my own’, it can be neither authentic nor objective. Instead, it will
examine how various representations of ‘Chinese reality’, created under the guises of objective knowledge, are discursively and socially
constructed, and how such constructions function in international relations theory and practice. Different from a conventional study of national
image in foreign policy making, the main concern of the book is with a sociology of knowledge and politics of representation in relation to China
watching. To this end, the book draws attention to two dominant and recurring themes and assumptions on China’s rise: the ‘China threat’ and
‘China opportunity’. These themes may be variously termed as ‘regimes of truth’, ‘metanarratives’, or a certain ‘style of thought’, 45 but here
they are referred to as ‘paradigms’, a term made academically popular by Thomas Kuhn.46 More on the definition of the term will be said in a
moment and in the next chapter. For now, like colonial discourse, a paradigm is ‘a signifying system without an
author’. 47 In this sense, to illustrate my misgivings with the two China paradigms is not to pick on any individual scholars/authors or their
specific works, even though in order to critically engage with those paradigms we have no choice but to rely on examples found in specific
publications. Also, these paradigms are not to be confused with any specific arguments or theoretical frameworks. A paradigm is a type of basic
conceptual lens through which what can and cannot be known about a certain object of study is delineated, and from which certain specific
arguments and theoretical frameworks can flow. Though the paradigms of ‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’ may be found more readily in
the IR field of China watching, they are not the exclusive patents of IR scholars. To better illustrate these two paradigms, it is necessary to select
the relevant literature on an eclectic basis. Coming within the purview of my analysis are, consequently, not just academic writings on China’s
foreign policy and international relations, but also other pieces in the ‘China representation’ puzzle such as media reports, commentaries, and
official discourses. As well as cutting across genre lines, the ‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’ paradigms are not confined within any
the US has played a leading role in setting the agenda for Western
particular geographical boundaries. True,
perceptions of China’s rise and much attention of the book will therefore be paid to the American discourse, but these
paradigms are by no means distinctively American. This is why I use the designation ‘Western’ to cast a wider geopolitical net
(and at the same time to leave out ‘non-Western’ sources to avoid making my enterprise too unwieldy). Of course, by ‘Western’ here I do not
really mean ‘Western’ per se, whatever that term might mean. My source materials, in most cases, are drawn from English literature published
in a few selected Western countries, notably the US, Britain, and Australia. Discourses from other Western countries, such as France and
Germany, will not be examined, for the simple reason that their inclusion is beyond the scope and capacity of this single volume. Furthermore,
even as I focus almost exclusively on English literature, I do not claim to do full justice to the inherently heterogeneous quality of China writings
no matter how hard we try to narrow down our scope of
in those ‘Anglophone’ locales. My understanding is that
investigation, we are bound to encounter still subtler spatial differences, contextual nuances, and
temporal variations, which could well exist in the writings of the same author. Consequently, this study, its subtitle
notwithstanding, does not claim to capture the full complexities or ‘totality’ of Western IR representations of China’s rise, let alone China
watching in general.
 A2: Plan Focus – 2NC
The action of the plan is less important than the discourse used to support it – the
affirmative’s engagement is willing to compromise on everything except for the
principle that America is meant to lead and its power through security is paramount to
the planet’s survival. Neoconservative ideology is constructed through
representations, not policies, which means analysis of the logic constructing the
affirmative’s advantages should take priority over the plan’s predicted outcomes or
benevolent intentions.
Pan and Turner, senior lecturer in IR @ Deakin University and Research Fellow in IPE @ University of
Manchester, 16
(Chengxig and Oliver, “Neoconservatism as discourse: Virtue, power and US foreign policy,” European
Journal of International Relations, pp. 1-26)
When Clinton asserted that ‘[t]he future of politics will be decided in Asia … and the United States will
be right at the center of the action’ (Clinton, 2011), she articulated the ‘truth’ of American entitlement
to power, and the need to act forcefully and even unilaterally in a region many thousands of miles from
the mainland US. So, too, does the rebalance stem from a belief in the necessity of American power, to
export and protect American virtue through the advancement of the ‘beachhead for liberty’. The 2015
US National Security Strategy, for example, asserts unequivocally that: America must lead. Strong and
sustained American leadership is essential to a rules-based international order that promotes global
security and prosperity as well as the dignity and human rights of all peoples. The question is never
whether America should lead, but how we lead. (White House, 2015) The goal of expanding the reach
of the American self, inevitably in tandem with American power, is thus essentially unquestioned by
Obama. This is reflected in his admission that while he was no ideological bedfellow of former ‘neocon’
president Ronald Reagan, he once found himself ‘in the curious position of defending aspects of
Reagan’s worldview’. Obama explains that with the end of the Cold War — which saw the triumph of
American virtue and the confirmation of US hegemony — he ‘had to give the old man his due’ (Obama,
2007: 289). Obama’s implicit endorsement of the worldview that sent US resources to Iraq and
Afghanistan shines a light on the nature of neoconservatism not as a badge, qualification or
characteristic, but as a dynamic societal discourse that is something far more than the ‘3Ps’ approach is
equipped to capture. Obama’s continuation of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are cited as
particular evidence that his approach to foreign policy has diverged little from that of Bush (Lynch,
2014). For example, shortly after taking office, Obama announced the deployment of 30,000 troops to
Afghanistan. The use of military drones also markedly increased. Still, there is more to the story than
policy similarities alone. Like Bush in 2001 and generations of politicians before him, Obama frames the
advancement of US power and primacy as an advancement of a uniquely benevolent American identity:
we must draw on the strength of our values — for the challenges that we face may have changed, but
the things that we believe in must not. … America will … tend to the light of freedom and justice … for
the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the source, the moral source, of America’s
authority. (White House, 2009) As ever, the ‘moral source of America’s authority’ is its virtuosity in the
presence of barbaric Others and the only conceivable way to ‘tend to the light of freedom’ is through
the expansion of American power, albeit in modified, softer forms. The point here is not about
determining the extent to which the Obama administration can be labelled ‘neoconservative’; many
avoid such an explicit label while pointing to the retention of backroom ‘neocon’ personnel and the
‘neocon consensus’ that steers his policy approach (Jackson, 2014; Singh, 2014). Designating Obama a
neoconservative would be ‘absurd’, suggests Underhill. Yet, to win the argument over the ‘neocons’ in
2008, Obama embraced and adapted, rather than rejected, the concepts they used. As a result, he ‘did
not stand outside their “world”’ (Underhill, 2012: 4). This shared ‘world’, presented in the literature as
the Bush–Obama foreign policy consensus, is certainly noteworthy. Yet, it cannot be detached from the
still wider and more encompassing discursively constructed ‘world’ explored throughout this article.
Obama is unavoidably caught up in a history that pervades the present. When Walter Russell Mead
(2011) argues that Obama’s liberal style of politics in the pursuit of identical aims makes him ‘a more
effective neo-conservative’ than Bush, he alludes to the power and seduction of neoconservatism as a
discourse whose parameters may be repackaged, but not completely discarded. Indeed, Obama has
been confident that his deliberate appeals to a righteous and powerful US identity will find a
sympathetic domestic audience beyond Washington: in 2010, 80% of Americans considered the US an
exceptional nation (Jones, 2010); and in 2012, 85% reported the belief that the US is a force for good in
the world (Goodenough, 2012). Ultimately, then, this is less about Obama and his administration than
about the discursive conditions in the US within which the construction of neoconservatism remains
logically possible and, indeed, widely acceptable. This brief comparative analysis of Bush and Obama
reinforces the argument that as a discourse, neoconservatism does not have a single face or formation.
It revises and updates over time so that it becomes liable to transformation and disruption. As such, the
brand of multilateralism espoused by Obama, which has seen the US deepen its involvement in the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the East Asia Summit (Turner, 2014), can be
acceptable in the pursuit of a virtuous and powerful US. Thus, when Max Boot (2004) argues that
‘neocons’ such as himself ‘don’t have a problem with alliances. They are [simply] wary of granting
multilateral institutions (such as the United Nations) a veto over US action’, he expresses the
widespread belief in America’s ‘righteous might’ to export its essential elements. Across US history, this
widespread belief, being the product of the mutually constitutive discourses of American virtue and
power, has conjured up a world populated by uncivilised, inferior and barbaric Others, rationalising and
even necessitating their subjugation in the name of advancing the US self through its superior and self-
righteous capabilities. Foreign Others are no longer explicitly referred to as ‘uncivilised’ or ‘inferior’, but
the neoconservative logic that underpinned such rhetoric and its attendant actions survives today.
Democrats and Republicans have come to share some form of post-9/11 ‘neoconservative agenda’. As
our analysis has shown, this is explained less by recent convergences of policy preferences than by the
persistent construction of a virtuous US with a duty to advance superior power. Thus, the presidential
election of 2016, like that of 2008, is unlikely to fundamentally disrupt this long history. Unless the twin
discourses of virtue and power in the American self-imagination are granted more concerted critical
attention, neoconservatism may remain a powerful and largely unquestioned component of future US
foreign policy thinking and practice. This article began by arguing that neoconservatism has been
traditionally conceptualised through the ‘3Ps’ approach, which, while useful in certain respects, has yet
to produce a satisfactory explanation of how neoconservatism is formed, what it represents or why its
presence is likely to continue. To address these problems, we argued that neoconservatism is most
meaningfully conceived as a discourse. Specifically, we put forward the case that neoconservatism is
constituted primarily by two powerful and pervasive discourses in the US: those of virtue and power.
These discourses were crucial to the establishment of the US itself, and to its later expansion and
emergence into an assertive international actor. Virtue and power, we argued, have often been
inextricable and mutually complementary in the US self-construction, expanding and advancing in the
service of each other. From this theoretical base, our aim was to provide a novel and productive
examination of what neoconservatism is and how it is dynamically constituted, with the implications for
better understanding its change and continuity in American foreign policy. While we tend to agree with
others that neoconservatism remains an active force in contemporary US foreign policy processes, we
did so on new analytical and methodological grounds. In our analysis, neoconservatism and its change
and continuity are not judged simply by its external logic, for instance, by the fact that Obama and his
allies have adopted ‘neoconservative’ principles, that ‘backroom personnel’ from the Bush
administration have remained or that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to linger. Rather,
they are best understood through its internal logic and rules of discursive formations. As so many others
before them, Presidents Bush and Obama adhere to understandings of a virtuous US that must retain
superior material power for the survival and exportation of its universal values. The Bush administration
implemented extreme and costly policies, with broad American support, in the extraordinary aftermath
of 9/11. However, contrary to popular opinion, American neoconservatism is not best envisioned as
bold, boisterous and brash; its power and influence as a discourse comes from its acceptance as
unquestionable common sense (Fairclough, 1992a) and thus its ability to escape critical attention to it
qua discourse. In its ‘Bush Doctrine’ manifestations, neoconservatism may have proven politically toxic,
but as a particular discursive formation that is used to define the US, it is intoxicating and self-gratifying;
it tells Americans who they are in an irresistibly flattering manner. As this discursive formation
‘produce[s] the subject and simultaneously along with him [sic] what he is given to see, understand, do,
fear and hope’ (quoted in Fairclough, 1992b: 31, emphasis in original), neoconservatism as a discourse
is productive of its adherents and constitutive of a set of policies. Thus, the ‘3Ps’ approach to
neoconservatism has certain merit. Yet, understanding neoconservatism cannot begin or end with
specific people, policies or even principles. Its discursive formations are far more fundamental to
explaining its resilience, variations and continued relevance to US foreign policy. To the extent that
discourses of virtue and power are not necessarily unique to US self-imagination, our approach could
help explain why neoconservatism may not be a distinctively American phenomenon (Gove, 2004).
 Discourse Key – 2NC
Discourse mediates reality – the representation of China in the 1AC influences the
outcome and enactment of the plan – the binary opposition of Chinas as their threat
or opportunity is an essential piece of sustaining modern Orientalism
Pan and Turner, senior lecturer in IR @ Deakin University and Research Fellow in IPE @ University of
Manchester, 16
(Chengxig and Oliver, “Neoconservatism as discourse: Virtue, power and US foreign policy,” European
Journal of International Relations, pp. 1-26)
Michel Foucault described discourse as ‘the general domain of all statements’. Discourse can refer to
any statement which entails meaning but equally to a grouping of statements into a recognisable
category, such as that of IR (Foucault, 1972: 80). Importantly, discourse provides subjective
interpretations and realities of the world around us, a point reinforced by Howarth and Stavrakakis.
They argue that a forest in the path of a proposed new road can represent an inconvenient barrier, a
site of scientific interest and/or a symbol of national heritage (Howarth et al, 2000: 3). Imagery, or
representation, then, is the discursive construction of reality as the world itself is unintelligible until
ascribed meaning through discourse. While discourse constructs the reality of an otherwise
indecipherable world, so too does it work to construct the identities of which that reality is
constitutive. As Osborne and Wintle observe, ‘identity is always socially mediated and...wholly or
partially the precipitate of social discourses...’ (Osborne and Wintle, 2006: 16). As discursive
constructions of reality, then, images are also the constructions of societal actors. Thus, while the
economic and military capabilities of states are undoubtedly critical to the determination of
international relations, those states are not given by nature or pre-discursive. Rather, as ‘imaginative
geographies’ states (like forests) are socially constructed with inherently unstable identities (Said,
1995: 49). They exist as ideas as much as territorial physicalities ‘out there’ in the real world. American
discourse of China therefore represents the articulation of ideas about that country in the broadest
possible sense. It can be manifest as any number of disparate and single statements where China is the
object, but equally to collectives of related statements about it. Further, American images, or
representations, of China are discursive constructions of its reality. The identity of any state, however,
cannot be conceived in the absence of understandings about opposing others. This is because meaning
itself is created in discourse (Neumann, 1999: 12 and 13). In Orientalism Edward Said famously argued
that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience’. Importantly, he asserted that the East has been consistently represented as fundamentally
inferior in relation to the necessarily superior West (Said, 1995: 1-2). In Imperial Encounters Roxanne
Lynn Doty similarly investigated the identity processes which have enabled such binary oppositions as
‘“developed/underdeveloped”, “first world/third world”, *and+ core/periphery”’, among others, in
which the West has perpetually occupied the former, superior locations (Doty, 1998: 6). As Michael
Shapiro argues, the process of making others foreign almost invariably ensures their status as less-than-
equal subjects (Shapiro, 1988: 100). The analyses of Said and Doty, to varying extents, both rely upon
the contributions of Foucault. Crucially, Foucault not only argued that discourse is responsible for the
construction of our social realities, but that it is neither free nor unrestricted. Discourse, he observed, is
tightly contained; ‘controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of
procedures’. As such, it is more than a simple set of coherent statements (Foucault, 1975: 215). It is the
product of rules and regulations which promotes particular ideas and suppresses others, keeping them
from circulation. What emerges are ‘regimes of truth’ which function within every society. A regime of
truth represents a general politics of truth and regulates discourse so that one is able to distinguish
between true and false statements (Foucault, 1980: 131). Walter Lippmann put it another way: ‘*I+n the
great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined
for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our
culture’ (Lippman, 1922: 81). A regime of truth, then, simultaneously endorses certain ideas while
rejecting others. The ideas of some people are accepted as true whereas those of others are
marginalised, ignored or rejected. This naturalisation of ideas is critical to the formation of common
sense assumptions which often go unquestioned because they are believed to represent truth and
reality, becoming ‘implicit, backgrounded, taken for granted’ (Fairclough, 2001: 77). The understanding
that social identities are beholden to regimes of truth and processes of naturalisation is advanced by
both Said and Doty. Each traces Western historical constructions of non-Western peoples and places
and, as already described, the stability of particular binary oppositions through which those
constructions have long been articulated. From these assumptions, it is a fundamental assertion of this
paper that American discourse has always been responsible for the construction of images (and hence
the reality) of China and the Chinese within American imaginations. Moreover, China’s identity has
traditionally been constructed as an (often inferior) other in relation to the necessarily superior United
States, according to the restrictions imposed by a powerful regime of truth. This regime of truth has
ensured that certain representations of China have endured at the expense of others, becoming
accepted, common sense understandings which have remained stable over extended periods of time.
These understandings, or identity constructions, have also always been inextricable from the
enactment of US China policy. It is this understanding to which the paper now turns.
 Gateway Issue – 2NC
K is a prior question to the case – representations inform knowledge and they are a
product of Western power - unpacking the ideology that informed the policy is a pre-
requisite to assessing the accuracy of the affirmatives epistemology or the
consequences of the plan
Zhang, Professor of International Politics @ University of Bristol, 13
(Yongjin, “‘China Anxiety’: Discourse and Intellectual Challenges,” Development and Change 44(6): pp.
1407-1425)
The discussion of ‘China anxiety’ above suggests that a rising China has profound implications for the
search of a politically viable global order. It contends that the rise of China remains a puzzle that needs
to be carefully unpacked in the design of a policy response and that the ‘China knowledge’ as
represented in the dominant Anglo-American discourse is deficient and inadequate. Unpacking and
understanding the particular puzzle that China represents implies three humbling intellectual
challenges. The first is to recognize that the dominant Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China is
problematic. Comprised of different representational practices, it is informed by certain political
commitments and cultural assumptions that are blind to some important aspects of the changes that
China has undergone, which have been integral to its rise. The discourse has been purposefully oblivious
of the fact that the fundamental social and economic changes that China has undergone have triggered
anxieties among Chinese people and in Chinese society. It is also to acknowledge not only that ‘the rise
of China will undoubtedly be one of the great dramas of the twenty-first century’ (Ikenberry, 2008: 23),
but also, more importantly, that what the reforms in China are trying to accomplish is unprecedented in
world history. It is to appreciate the complexities and contradictions associated with this human attempt
at history making. Delivering the second annual Barnett-Oksenberg lecture in Shanghai in 2006, Kenneth
Lieberthal (2006) observed that: ‘What China is now attempting — simultaneous, rapid and very large
scale marketization, urbanization, privatization, and globalization — is simply historically unprecedented
in scale or scope. No other country has ever undergone all four of these deeply unsettling transitions
simultaneously, and China is doing so at astonishing speed’. Taking urbanization as an example,
according to a recent report by McKinsey Global Institute (2012: 16), ‘China is urbanizing on 100 times
the scale of Britain in the 18th century and at more than ten times the speed’. However, even
Lieberthal's list understates the scale of transformation China is undergoing. To marketization,
urbanization, privatization and globalization, one might add industrialization, democratization,
bureaucratization, individualization, commodification, monetization and capitalization. China, in other
words, has been trying to accomplish the ‘great transformation’ to modernity on an exceptionally large
scale and in a compressed timespan. Just imagine British industrialization, the French Revolution, the
American democratic experiment, and German nation building all happening at the same time in a
territorially-bound state! Is it really surprising that this human attempt at history making has been
accompanied by social unrest and upheavals, socio-economic dislocations, and political and economic
complexities and contradictions? Second, critical reflections on the dominant Anglo-American discourse
as contingent representational practices should lead to the understanding that unpacking the China
puzzle requires a different kind of knowledge about China. After all, China is always an amalgam of
seeming contradictions. This necessitates serious consideration of the nature and limits of the existing
knowledge on China which such representations construct and produce. It should also be considered
whether such representations, as a particular kind of discursive practice, do not impose certain
regularities on our understanding of China. ‘There is no knowledge — political or otherwise — outside
representation’, Bhabha (1994: 43) once famously declared. Accepting this dictum has two implications
for knowledge construction about the rise of China. The first refers to the responsibility to search for an
alternative and more reflective form of social knowledge about the rise of China. The second refers to
the need to acknowledge that ‘China knowledge is always inextricably linked with the general dynamism
of Western knowledge, desire and power in global politics’ (Pan, 2012: 152).
Impact
 Impact Calculus – 2NC
Structural violence outweighs – it creates all forms of macro-level violence – obscuring
its role guarantees future conflicts - reject their appeals to empirical evidence because
suffering cannot be captured in a dataset – only centering impact calc on affect can
arrive at truth
Springer, Professor of Geography @ University of Otago, 11
(Simon, “Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative
geographies,” Political Geography (30) pp. 90-98)
The confounding effects of violence ensure that it is a phenomena shot through with a certain
perceptual blindness. In his monumental essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin (1986) exposed
our unremitting tendency to obscure violence in its institutionalized forms, and because of this opacity,
our inclination to regard violence exclusively as something we can see through its direct expression. Yet
the structural violence resulting from our political and economic systems ( Farmer, 2004 and Galtung,
1969), and the symbolic violence born of our discourses ( Bourdieu, 2001 and Jiwani, 2006), are
something like the dark matter of physics, ‘[they] may be invisible, but [they have] to be taken into
account if one is to make sense of what might otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective
[or direct] violence’ ( Zizek, 2008: 2). These seemingly invisible geographies of violence – including the
hidden fist of the market itself – have both ‘nonillusory effects’ ( Springer, 2008) and pathogenic affects
in afflicting human bodies that create suffering ( Farmer, 2003), which can be seen if one cares to look
critically enough. Yet, because of their sheer pervasiveness, systematization, and banality we are all
too frequently blinded from seeing that which is perhaps most obvious. This itself marks an
epistemological downward spiral, as ‘the economic’ in particular is evermore abstracted and its ‘real
world’ implications are increasingly erased from collective consciousness ( Hart, 2008). ‘The clearest
available example of such epistemic violence’, Gayatri Spivak (1988: 24–25) contends, ‘is the remotely
orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’, and it is
here that the relationship between Orientalism and neoliberalism is revealed.
Since Orientalism is a discourse that functions precisely due to its ability to conceal an underlying
symbolic violence (Tuastad, 2003), and because the structural violence of poverty and inequality that
stems from the political economies of neoliberalism is cast as illusory (Springer, 2008), my reflections on
neoliberalism, Orientalism, and their resultant imaginative and material violent geographies are, as
presented here, purposefully theoretical. As Derek Gregory (1993: 275) passionately argues, ‘human
geographers have to work with social theory… Empiricism is not an option, if it ever was, because the
“facts” do not (and never will) “speak for themselves”, no matter how closely… we listen’. Although
the ‘facts’ of violence can be assembled, tallied, and categorized, the cultural scope and emotional
weight of violence can never be entirely captured through empirical analysis. After Auschwitz, and now
after 9/11, casting a sideways glance at violence through the poetic abstractions of theory must be
considered as an enabling possibility. This is particularly the case with respect to understanding the
geographies of violence, as our understandings of space and place are also largely poetic (Bachelard,
1964 and Kong, 2001)
Invisible wars come first – only looking backwards at inequality can solve extinction
Szentes, Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest, 8
(Tamás, and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, “Globalisation and prospects of the world
society” http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf)
[]=gender corrected
It’s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries
cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the
world, undermining security even in the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended
with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous
resources badly needed for development, --many “invisible wars” are suffered by the poor and oppressed people,
manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics
and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical terror,
organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth,
ethnic or religious minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that -- the
“war against Nature ”, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale
pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and
“invisible wars” we find striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted development
patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international tensions , thus paving the way for unrest
and “visible” wars . It is a commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting
peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic
and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and
institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace
requires a process of social and national emancipation , a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world
bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It
further requires a pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society,
articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a
really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in
peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or before war, and cannot be
our world,
safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires,
indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of
development” (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for
preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted
environment. However, no
ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap
and intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any
“zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to predominate, in which
the actual question is not about “sustainability
everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore,
of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of [hu]mankind – because
of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange
of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more restricted to the case of
underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries) are also facing development problems, such as
those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about
natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak
about and make “survival studies”. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent
crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural,
The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for
cultural and political aspects.
power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last
catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last
century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or
authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international organisations and new forums for
negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies,
codification of human rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and
system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has
extended and deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final
Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and
catastrophe or a common solution.
technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and
international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated . Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no
longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand,
and the poor, deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be
“negative-sum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies,
the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on
the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order
by demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be
faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other
mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural environment.
 Impact – Ethics First
Prioritize debate over the ethics of the system that the AFF endorses prior to
evaluating the consequences of the plan – there is no way to calculate costs or
benefits without first establishing an ethical baseline to judge what is an acceptable
outcome; their framework trades off with a cosmopolitan political orientation which is
necessary to confronting every impeding security crisis, which means framework both
solves and turns the case
Burke et al, Associate Professor of International and Political Studies at UNSW Australia, 14
(Anthony, Katrina Lee-Koo is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Australian National
University, and Matt McDonald is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Queensland “Ethics and Global Security” pg 1-9)
With its world wars, cold wars, proxy wars, colonial wars, guerrilla wars, civil wars, drug wars, and new
wars, not to mention its genocides, nuclear weapons, economic crises, gender-based violence, refugees, famines and
environmental disasters , the twentieth century was a century of chronic and endemic insecurity. What will
the twenty-fi rst century become? It certainly has not started out well. Its fi rst decade alone saw aircraft smashing into New York’s
World Trade Center, a new global war on terror, the near-death of the nuclear non-prolif eration regime, the Indian Ocean and Japanese

tsunamis, Cyclone Nargis, the war in Iraq, genocide in the Sudan, and three brutal wars in Palestine and Lebanon.
The picture beyond that does not improve when we add global stalemate on climate change, mass
slaughter in the Congo, Islamist terrorism in Pakistan and India, a craze for walls and “border protection”, and
strategic anxiety about Iran, North Korea, the rise of China, and a future of drone, cyber and space war.
All of these examples have been riven with moral anxiety and exemplifi ed particular ethical choices : whether
to use poison gas against enemy forces to protect one’s own; whether to bomb populated areas to shorten a war or degrade an enemy’s industrial capacity;
whether to develop and deploy weapons that can destroy cities in a few seconds and kill millions; whether to use starvation as a weapon of war; whether to support
Islamic extremists in a proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, in the face of warnings about how they were likely to turn on their masters afterwards;
and when that time came, whether to fi ght such extremists by systemic violations of the international laws of war and human rights. The debates over
these issues refl ect many things: their inherent moral complexity, competing ethics and norms, and a global interest in their rightness and long-term
impact. None of these ethical questions and dilemmas are new, but the fi eld of security studies has been slow to address them, and it has not established a
tradition of ethical thought (Burke 2010; for new research see Floyd 2007; Hayden 2005; Robinson 2011; Roe 2012). This book attempts to address that gap, and to
contribute to a dialogue about the possibilities for a genuinely global security orientation and practice in international politics. We survey a range of ethical
ethical commitments
perspectives and arguments relating to diverse problems on the global security agenda, so that we can begin to understand how

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

ethical perspectives (such as realism, liberalism and just war theory), we push on to argue for a specifi cally cosmopolitan ethics . A

cosmopolitan ethics aims to ensure the security of all states and communities through time, by aiming
for the elimination rather than just the management of grave insecurities. We regard such an ethics as
not merely morally desirable , but as strategically necessary , and with this objective, we develop ethical
guidelines for the decisions and policies of all security actors. We list these principles here in Box 1.1 below, and explain them in
the section entitled ‘Key Principles of a Cosmopolitan Security Ethics’. If practices of global security politics raise ethical questions at the conceptual level, they have
also precipitated broader debate and contestation in the “real world” of international security. The Burmese military’s refusal to allow foreign aid to enter the
country after the 2008 cyclone, which killed 140,000, provoked global outrage, calls for foreign intervention, and active regional diplomacy (Evans 2008b; Kouchner
2008). After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 280,000, the United Nations and ASEAN moved to create an early warning system and response
capability in recognition of the failure to have such a system in place beforehand or to even put such threats on the region’s security agenda (Burke and McDonald
2007: 1). Some of the scientists who built the fi rst atomic bombs questioned their use in warfare and opposed the later development of fusion weapons, whi le
scores of former national security policymakers have supported calls for total nuclear disarmament (Bird 2005: 426; Burke 2009; Oppenheimer 1984: 113; Schweber
2000). The 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident at Fukushima led many Japanese (and four European countries) to question the role of nuclear power in their energy
supply, and brought calls for stronger global regulation of the industry (Fackler 2012). The widespread bombing and targeting of civilians in war have provoked
major innovations in International Humanitarian Law (IHL), including the classifi cation of area bombing and rape as war crim es, and new treaties outlawing land
mines and cluster weapons. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established to prosecute major international crimes including war crimes, crimes against
humanity, genocide, and aggression. Aggression has been defi ned in such a way (‘the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or
political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations’) that it would have put the US, Britain and
Australia in the dock had it been in force at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Amendments to the Rome Statute 2010). The moral anxiety and debate in such
cases—just a few of many—suggests something important. Ethics matters . In this book, we contend that the nature of global insecurity
in the last century, and the kinds of security that the world will be able to achieve in this century,
depends significantly on ethics: on the ethics we bring to our analysis, policymaking and decisions; on the ethics that underpins our
understanding of what security is and to whom it is owed; and on the ethics that shapes the realities we accept or deny. Whether people live or die,

whether they suffer or prosper — which people live and prosper and where they are able to do so— are ethical questions. How

these questions are answered in the real world will be the results of particular ethical frameworks , rules and
decisions ; the result of the ways in which ethical dilemmas are posed, and how they are addressed and resolved. Is it right to attack—or target—
cities with nuclear weapons? Is it right to even possess them? Is it right to detain asylum seekers, push their boats out to sea, or return them to the
places from which they fl ed? Is it right to target terrorists and insurgents with remote-controlled robotic aircraft and missiles, even if those killed include civilians
and if their operators aim—and kill—without risk? Is it right to invade a foreign country to stop crimes against humanity, end a famine, build a state, or remove a
regime, and if so, what are the right ways of going about it? Is it right to use torture, or suspend habeas corpus or the rule of law, to protect our security? What
forms of reasoning, what criteria and ends, should govern such decisions? These are some of what most of us recognise as “moral”
questions central to war and security—questions about killing, harm and humanity—and put in this form they are certainly of great importance. In particular, such
questions are addressed in great depth in the “just war” tradition, and you will read more about that school of thought in the pages that follow. However, in this
book we argue that the infl uence and problem of ethics in security goes beyond moral choices in particular cases, and beyond questions of war and violence, to
take in the very system and infrastructure of global security itself. This “system” is a dynamic and contested set of processes that develops out of the frameworks
provided by (and actions of) key structures and actors: international treaties and law, regional and global organisations, governments, militaries, intelligence and aid
agencies, NGOs, corporations, communities, and civil society organisations. The “international” management of security, however, should not be confused with a
we have a largely state-centric international security
genuinely global sensibility, perspective, practice or set of institutions. Currently,
system that attempts very imperfectly to deal with increasingly global processes and dynamics of
insecurity: risks and threats that have transnational and often global sources and symptoms. This system is structured around a
cooperative tension (and sometimes outright confl ict) between national security policies and military alliances, regional security organisations (like ASEAN
or the OSCE) and collective security “regimes” of international law, treaty agreements and international organisations in areas like arms control, disarmament, and
the environment. These regimes refl ect both cosmopolitan commitments to deal with global problems in an
eff ective and equitable way, and an uglier power politics that generates compromises that reflect
particular national and corporate (rather than global) interests . Such regimes are also almost entirely missing or stagnant in
areas like the energy and the world economy. A global approach to security thus recognises that our common problems

are global in scope and that national, regional and collective security responses need to be reformed to
serve genuinely global ends (Burke 2013a). In our view, the kind of global security system we have, how and to
whom it provides security, is the very first ethical question . Does this system serve the interests of states and corporations
alone or the interests of all people and the ecosystems that they depend on? Does it serve the interests of the wealthy and
powerful, or the poor and the marginalised? Does it serve the interests of some at an unacceptable cost to others? These concerns
preoccupied a “high level panel” of former states-people asked by then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to map out a new global security agenda in
2004. In their report, A More Secure World, they said: Diff erences of power, wealth and geography do determine what we perceive as the gravest threats to our
survival and well-being. Differences
of focus lead us to dismiss what others perceive as the gravest of all threats
to their survival . Inequitable responses to threats further fuel division . Many people believe that what passes for
collective security today is simply a system for protecting the rich and powerful. (United Nations 2004: 2) We believe that “ethics” and “morality” are not things that
before we face a
can be brought to insecurity or war from outside, to a space that would otherwise be unethical or amoral. Rather, we believe that even

specific moral decision , ethics constitutes the choices available to us—that particular ethical
commitments , options , limits and imperatives are implicit in the system itself, and in particular theoretical and
policy world views. Every vision, every practice, and every system of security has an ethics—even if we cannot agree that all are equally ethical. As
Richard Shapcott argues, any work of political ethics must draw attention to the possible consequences or

implications of different starting points …it is only once we have assessed or understood these
[consequences] that we can reflect adequately upon our ethics and whether we think the costs of our
positions are worth it, or not, or whether they are justifi able or need modifi cation. (Shapcott 2010: vii-viiii) In sum, even as we accept that to be able
to term a perspective or behaviour “amoral”, “immoral”, or “unethical” is a powerful and sometimes legitimate use of language, it is analytically more
helpful to be able to lay out the assumptions and commitments of a range of ethical frameworks that
bear on the problems and realities of global security, so that their eff ects can be considered and judged.
Even as we assume a responsibility to advance a distinctive global security ethics that is better—that will lead to a more just and stable world—we do so in a global
political context where moral pluralism is a fact. Debate among competing ethical perspectives is necessary and
important. Following Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, we see ethics not merely as right or moral behaviour, but as a vision of the good—the ‘highest
good’, an end towards which ‘every action and decision seems to aim’ (Aristotle 2012: 216). This distinguishes our approach from the “just war” tradition, which is
the closest thing we currently have to an ethics that addresses (some) security questions, like war, terrorism and intervention. The end of the just war tradition
seems unduly modest, being merely to reduce the evils of an institution (war) that it otherwise sees as an enduring social fact (Walzer 2006). Our interest is larger:
to understand and judge war and violence within a more general global picture—and ethics—of security. When ethics is understood in terms of an overarching
vision of the social or political good, moral conduct and decision-making will then be framed so as to contribute to the desired end, and will be shaped by the ways
in which that good is defi ned and understood. What that ultimate end is becomes crucial, because so much fl ows from it. Indeed, defi ning the ultimate good not
only drives ethics, but is an ethical problem in itself, because settling on the overarching end of ethics involves making decisions about what the world is (or ought
to be) like, who matters, what their needs are, who has responsibility, what those responsibilities are, and how to discharge them. It shapes the realities we can see
or attempt to create. We also focus on ethics because of an important practical distinction between “ethics” and “morality”. It is often said that morality relates to
conduct whereas ethics relates to a broader good towards which moral conduct will lead. It also seems that when morality is invoked in international aff airs it is
used negatively, to resolve a problem where it may be necessary to do harm or have truck with evil— to decide when killing may be legitimate or necessary, how
much killing, for how long, and at a cost that does not exceed the good we may be trying to do by way of it. Morality here is about St Thomas Aquinas’s “double eff
Ethics , in contrast, opens up a more positive trajectory: to think of more systemic visions of peace,
ect”.

justice and human fl ourishing that might eliminate the need to resort to violence. At the same time, we
acknowledge that grand ethical or moral visions can be dangerous, if they legitimate unjust practices or blind us to destructive consequences. And we accept the
need for constant refl ection on and interrogation of our ethical commitments and their implications in practice. Even if in this book we accept the (contested) claim
that the highest good—the end—of ethics is “security”, there is a range of diverse and confl icting perspectives on what these ends are. (Our view, as we e xplain
below, is that the best way to understand security as a highest good is in a global or cosmopolitan way.) The most infl uential perspective, as discussed in Chapter 1,
is associated with the theory of realism and the majority of state practices. It holds that national security is the
ultimate end, and the security of individuals , ecosystems or the world in general is invisible or is at
least subordinate. Some classical realists also profess a concern to stabilise a structurally unalterable system of state confl ict, so as to reduce the
incidence and severity of war and seek mutual security. The national security perspective views the security of one’s own
state’s citizens as paramount, and views global security relationships through the prism of how that
state has determined its “national interests”— which could well include the security of citizens and other states, environmental
protection, and human rights, but often does not . In this perspective “international security” is the problem of managing
cooperative, competitive and confl ictual relations among states that act fi rst and foremost according to
their own interests—however those interests are defi ned. The interests and security of others can be disregarded or even sacrifi ced to that end. An
alternative perspective—which has gained traction in the United Nations and among NGOs—is that human security is the ultimate good, and that national security
policies and international security relations need to aim for that goal. While it remains a contested concept, among the most compelling accounts of human security
was set out by the United Nations’ Commission on Human Security, which described it as being based on the creation of ‘political, social, environmental, economic,
military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity’ at an individual and community level. In this view of
human security, systems work holistically and give people both ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ to enable a diverse range of cultures, faiths and
communities to prosper and coexist (Commission on Human Security 2003: 4). A third perspective hovers uneasily between the two, but has also been infl uential
since the end of the Second World War, especially on the founding of the United Nations and on the development of key arms control, disarmament, and regional
and global security regimes. This view, linked to liberal and international society perspectives in international relations thought, is that collective security is the
ultimate end—especially of international law and global cooperation. This perspective holds that states must subordinate their freedoms and interests to
international law, participate constructively in a transnational system of security, and consider the security needs and interests of other states. Later ideas of
common and cooperative security gave even stronger emphasis to a view that security could only be achieved in common with other states through rule-based
cooperative mechanisms and practices (Evans 1993; Independent Commission 1982). This perspective shapes the attitudes of many states towards important global
security regimes such as that formed around the United Nations Charter, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and to a lesser extent,
regional organisations such as the African Union (AU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Organisation for Security Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE). It was also the concern of important UN documents: the 2004 report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, and the Secretary-
General’s 2005 report, In Larger Freedom, released prior to the most signifi cant conference of UN member states since the organisation’s founding, the 2005 World
Summit. However, the collective security system remains largely state-centric (even if concerns with human security and crimes against humanity are increasingly
the collective security
present in UN discussions and Security Council decision-making) and is ethically troubling in three signifi cant ways. First,

system is still centred on states’ rights and interests, and affords spoilers great latitude to damage
efforts at global cooperation and problem-solving ; second, the system is riven with power play and inequality,
especially when we consider the membership of the Security Council and the veto powers held by its permanent members; and third, when collective security turns
to coercion and enforcement it can be extremely destructive of human life and stability, as happened during the comprehensive trade embargo enforced on Iraq
during the 1990s, and is a risk in any form of “humanitarian” intervention. In this book, we will argue for a fourth perspective that draws normative inspiration from
aspects of the human and cooperative security approaches and seeks to harmonise national security practices with legitimate global ends. This perspective argues,
in a “cosmopolitan” way, that global security is the ultimate end that should govern an ethics of security; that the security of all human beings,
communities, ecosystems and states is of equal value . The ethics of a global security system holds that the reduction and
prevention of serious harm is an overarching goal, and that competing claims must wherever possible be harmonised and negotiated through dialogue, rules and
law rather than violence and coercion. Even where violence might remain regrettably necessary or ethically defensible, it will still mark a broader failure of the
system to provide comprehensive security and reduce confl ict, and may put all those other eff orts into peril. More about the core aims and principles of this
cosmopolitan global security ethics is outlined below. We are aware that such a system will be diffi cult to achieve in a world where many governments and actors
are unsympathetic to its premises, but we also argue that were this ethics to become infl uential, the security benefi ts for all states, human beings and the global
environment would be great. It is an ethics aimed at creating security on a universal basis, rather than providing limited succour to some parts of a world that
merely seeks to manage and limit insecurity. A further word is needed here about the problem posed by ethical pluralism— which contradicts the commonsense
view that behaviours and norms can be divided between those that are ethical and those that are not. Ethics is not a choice to do good when
the overwhelming temptation—or the easier option—is to do evil; it is, rather, a competing set of perspectives
about what it is to do good, and about what that good might be. It is challenging to think, for example, that an ethic could
provide moral sanction to the killing of tens of thousands of noncombatants to defend a state in a time of “supreme emergency”, a consequence that many
consider to be evil. Yet this argument, made by the respected American philosopher Michael Walzer (2006: 251–63) in his book Just and Unjust Wars, is just one of
many morally-controversial positions that have been put by “just war” theorists. Even as they have done so much to defend the principle of non-combatant
immunity and provide rational guidelines for the resort to war, some just war writers have endorsed the use of torture in extreme situations and supported
preventive war in violation of the United Nations Charter (Ignatieff 2004: 140; Bellamy 2006c; Burke 2005; Reus-Smit 2005). As much as it may occasionally disturb
ethics is a contested and morally pluralistic space, one that promises as much danger as benefit to
us,

humankind and the planet we depend on . In short, ethics is contained in everything we do and are, and
the very possibility of security (or insecurity) for billions of human beings hinges on it.
 Impact – Self Fulfilling Prophecy – 2NC
Securitization is a self-fulfilling prophecy
Song, associate professor of political science at the University of Macau, 15
(Weiqing, Securitization of the “China Threat” Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account, China Review
15(1) p. muse)
This article identifies the three modes of securitization activity. In all of these modes, securitizing agents
communicate the China threat [End Page 164] issue referentially (that is, using the linguistic act of
identifying something) to their audiences/subjects in the context of shared knowledge in a particular
domain. It can be structurally incorporated into the field of theoretical research, addressed to elites and
focused on the security and strategic sectors. It can also be structurally incorporated into ideological
debates and conflicts, addressed to an attentive or well-informed public and focused on the political
sector. Alternatively, it can be assigned to a broad context of culture and civilization, addressed to the
general public and encompassing a comprehensive range of sectors.
In these processes, the actors are performing acts with communicative force. Although the intended
meanings are not directly signaled, they can be inferred from the contexts of the different modes. The
so-called China threat can be predicted as inevitable, based on deductive reasoning from scientific
theory. Rhetorical power comes from a specialized domain of scholarly expertise. Following an inductive
logic, the same conclusion can be drawn from past experiences and current observations. It can also be
inferred from psychological traits and prejudices. In the latter case, the issue of the China threat is
securitized by eliciting an intuitive emotional response from the audience that bypasses ordinary
justification. In other words, the subject’s perception of the China threat results from immediate a priori
knowledge or experiential belief. The agents thereby heighten their audiences’ sense of the seriousness
and urgency of the issue.
A securitization act succeeds only when it achieves the intended effect. A poststructuralist securitization
analysis of the China threat issue in this article reveals the specific ways in which power and knowledge
constitute each other through different modes. All types of performative communication, regardless of
their domains, attempt to build identities—in this case, that of a “threatening” China—through means
such as linking and differentiating. The real aim of this process of securitization is not to identify the
cause of the “China threat,” but rather to elicit a reaction from an audience. The China threat thesis
may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If so, this may have very real policy implications and political
consequences.
 Reflection First – 2NC
Prioritize critical reflection on the social practices of the West prior to interrogating
the behavior of China – insofar as any knowledge of Chinese behavior can be deduced
Pan, IR Prof @ Deakin University, 12
(Chengxin, “Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise,”
pg. 152-153)
In this context, self-reflection cannot be confined to individual China watchers or even the China
watching community Never a purely personal pursuit or even a disciplinary matter. China knowledge is
always inextricably linked with the general dynamism of Western knowledge, desire and power in global
politics. Its self-reflection should thus extend to the shared collective self of the West, its assumed
identity and associated foreign policy (China policy in particular). If China can be seen as a being—in—
the—world, these issues are part and parcel of the world in which China finds itself and relates to
others. But until now they have largely escaped the attention of China watchers Maybe it is because
these are primarily the business of scholars of Western/American culture, history and foreign relations,
rather than that of China scholars. After all, there is a need for division of labour in social sciences. True.
for various reasons it is unrealistic to expect China scholars to be at the same time experts on those
‘non-China’ issues Nevertheless, since China watchers both rely on and contribute to their collective
Western self-imagination in their understanding of China, it is crucial that they look at their collective
Western self in the mirror. Take the negative image of China’s brutal Soviet-style sports system for
example. Every now and then, such an image will be reliably brought up to reinforce China’s Otherness
more generally. But if the ways American young talents are trained are put under the same spotlight,
the difference between the US and China is no longer as vast as it appears. 14 In doing so, the previous
China image is no longer as defensible as it seems. In brief, the broader point here is that the same
China may take on quite different meanings when we are willing to subject ourselves to similar scrutiny.
We may better appreciate why China looks the way it does when we are more self-conscious of the
various lenses paradigms, and fore-meanings through which we do China watching. Con we cannot fully
comprehend why the Chinese behave in a certain way until we pay attention to what we have done (to
them), past and present. Such self-knowledge on the part of the West is essential to a better grasp of
China. Without the former, China knowledge is incomplete and suspect.
Yet, to many, self-reflection is at best a luxurious distraction. At worst it amounts to navel-gazing and
could turn into ‘a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorce from the ‘real world’ such concern is
hardly justified, however. The imagined Western self is integral to the real world, and critical self-
reflection also helps reconnect China watching to the ‘real world of power relations to which it always
belongs. By making one better aware of this connection, it helps open up space for emancipatory
knowledge As Mannheim notes:
The criterion of such sell-illumination is that not only the object but we ourselves fall squarely within our
field of vision. We become visible to ourselves, not just vaguely as a knowing subject as such but in a
certain role hitherto hidden from us, in a situation hitherto impenetrable to us, and with motivations of
which we have not hitherto been aware. In such a moment the inner connection between our role, our
motivations, and our type and manner of experiencing the world suddenly draws upon us, hence the
paradox underlying these experiences, namely the op opportunity for relative emancipation from social
determination, increases proportionately with insight into this determination.
Still, there may be a lingering fear that excessive reflectivity could undo much of the hard-won China
knowledge. But again to quote Mannheirn, ‘the extension of our knowledge of the world is closely
related to increasing personal self-knowledge and self-control of the knowing personality’. 17 Even
when that does expose our lack of knowledge about China, all is not lost. Such revelation is not a sign of
ignorance, but an essential building block in the edifice of China knowledge. Confucius told us that “to
say that you know when you do know and say that you do not know when you do not know— that is
[the way to acquire] knowledge’. Thus, the knowing subject can emancipate itself from its delusion
about its own being)9 the real meaning of ignorance is that one claims to know when one does not or
cannot know.
 Laundry List – 2NC
Securitization presumes linear causality – this militarizes responses to complex policy
problems which risks extinction
Gupta, Poli Sci PhD @ University of Delhi, 14
(Asha, “Militarizing International Relations,” http://paperroom.ipsa.org/papers/paper_30926.pdf)
We need to go into the depth of militarization and militarism still prevailing in the 21st century. It has to be seen as a ‘manifestation of

global political economy that has breached the limits of wider environmental and natural resource
systems in which it is embedded’. Conventional approach is to view the multiple crises in the form of ‘climate change’,
‘energy depletion’, ‘food scarcity’ and ‘economic instability’ as independently, whereas these happen to be
‘ interconnected’ and ‘interwoven’. No wonder, the conventional I nternational R elations missed this interconnection and focused on the
‘securitization’ of these crises ‘as amplifiers of traditional security threats, requiring counter-productive militarized responses and/or futile interstate negotiations’.
justified ‘reifying militarization of policy responses, and naturalizing the proliferation of violent
In a way it

conflicts’ and ‘humanitarian disasters’ (Ahmed, 2011: 335-336). In coming decades, wars are unlikely to be fought over claim on territories. Rather, the
current global crisis, such as, demographic expansion, environmental degradation and energy depletion are likely to lead to ‘geopolitical conflicts’ over dominant
strategic resources, such as, food, water and energy. For instance, the UN International Panel on Climate Change reported in 2007 that the increase of fossil fuel
emissions at the then rate would result in the rise of global average temperature by 6°C by the end of 21st century making the planet earth mostly ‘uninhabitable’
(IPCC Report, 2007). To retain a safe climate, it would be necessary to contain it at 2°C, though we have already crossed this danger limit despite the risk of
‘catastrophic’ and ‘irreversible climate change’ (Hansen et al, 2008). Similarly, excessive exploitation of fossil fuel, such as, oil, gas and coal, has also led to depletion
of essential resources. The crude oil production cannot meet the current demands. According to the Oilwatch Monthly, ‘world conventional oil production fell by
almost one million barrels per day from July to August 2008’. Both nuclear power and coal were also facing similar fate accompli. According to the Strategic Survey
(2007: 47-60), the ‘existential security threat’ that ‘will come increasingly to the forefront as countries begin to see falls in available resources and economic vitality,
increased stress on their armed forces, greater instability in regions of strategic import, increases in ethnic rivalries, and a widening gap between rich and poor’. To
Campbell (2007), global crisis, such as, climate change, can lead to state failure in the form of ungovernability. The strategic implications of variegated climate
change could be in the form of ‘food and water shortages, proliferation of infectious diseases, increased frequency of natural disasters, heightened energy
insecurity, environmental refugees and the greater probability of inherently unpredictable wild cards’ (Dupont, 2008: 29-54). In fact, the
climate change
and energy depletion have not only disrupted global food production and economic systems but have
also led to ‘the crisis in international relations’ (Ahmed, 2011: 341). Climate change and other crises are studied today in the context of
their strategic implications in ‘exacerbating vulnerability to violent conflict’ or in the context of ‘interstate negotiations and global governance’ (Deuchars, 2010).
scholars focus on the role of natural resource shortage or abundance in creating situation of
Whereas some
anarchy and violence, others go deeper by investigating the capacity or inability of the states to negotiate ‘viable cooperative international regulatory
frameworks to prevent or respond to crises’ (Ahmed, 2011: 344). To O’Keefe (2009: 1-2), biophysical environment plays an important role in ‘triggering and
prolonging the structural conditions that result in conflict’. To her, environmental anarchy occurs in weak state that lack ‘active government regulation’ of internal
distribution of natural resources, resulting into a ‘tragedy of the commons’. Resource scarcities often lead to ‘security dilemmas’ over ownership of resources often
settled by ‘resort to violence’ (O’Keefe, 2009: 1-2). Such
a theory fails to understand the interstate system today that itself
exploits the biophysical environment . It is interesting to note that violence occurs not only in weaker states but
also in ‘resource abundant states’ where greed plays a pivotal role rather than the needs . For instance, intra-
state conflicts were financed by the export of commodities, such as, diamonds in the case of Angola and Sierra Leone and tropical timber in the case of West Africa
(Bannon and Collier, 2013: 8-16). The neoliberal policy of structural adjustments, economic liberalization and privatization also led to the erosion of the state
Often under traditional neo-realist logic, it was
structures and generation of social crisis resulting into identity politics (Kaldor, 2007: 58).
assumed that to deal with such crisis, it was necessary to expand the state-military capabilities under
centralized governance. Neo-realism took ‘interstate competition, rivalry and warfare as inevitable functions of

the states’ (Lacy, 2005). It could not understand the complex interdependence of global crisis . These crises
cannot be placed simply in the context of an international system based upon ‘a set of states’. These
have to be placed in the context of ‘a transnational global structure based upon an exploitative
relationship with biophysical environment’. The current global crises cannot be understood merely as
new issues appended to existing security agendas because if we do so, then we cannot analyse the root
causes for such crises . Ironically, the neo-realist approach legitimizes militarization of foreign and
domestic policy as a necessary response to such crises on pragmatic grounds, but it actually leads to
‘escalation of resource wars’ in the name of security (Peters, 2009: 212-14). Quite surprisingly, despite security being
the fundamental goal of state foreign policies, the states have, in practice, supported ‘global systemic
amplifiers of insecurity’ (Kahler, 1998: 919-41). Since the values of environmental regimes cannot be reduced purely to state interests, we find a lot of
emphasis on good governance based upon ‘more transparency’, ‘more accountability’, ‘more robust international regulation’, ‘corporate social responsibility’ and
‘cosmopolitan principles, such as, democratization, political equality and freedom of civil society’ (Frynas, 2009: 6). It is based on the assumption that in today’s
rapidly changing world scenario, gains of one state do not necessarily imply losses for another. It is in the mutual interest of the states to cooperate in an
interdependent world by avoiding unnecessary tensions or conflicts (Keohane, 1984). The theory of mutual maximization of power, in fact, results into the
formation of environmental regimes. It fails to understand the true relationship among the states, human beings and biophysical environment. The ‘human
metabolism with nature’ cannot be externalized from ‘state praxis’. Nor can the ‘international’ be fragmented into ‘a multiplicity of disconnected state units’
(Lacher, 2003: 521-41). To Simon Dalby (2004), ‘humans live in a complex interaction with environments that adapt and
change in much more complex ways than is facilitated by linear thinking within the territorial boxes of
contemporary administrative arrangements’. Hence it becomes necessary to understand the complex politics of local environment and
struggles over specific resources in the context of global markets and transnational connections. As such, colonization and imperialism in the 19th

and 20th centuries and global crisis today have to be studied in the context of ‘historicallyspecific socio-political

system’. According to Professor Ahmed (2011: 349), whether or not they lead to conflict depends on existing relations of power at local, national and
transnational scales, and on how those relations are configured by structures of resource ownership, mediated by ideas and values, a nd supported by military
power. The current trend is to militarise international relations by the economic and political hegemons in the name of urgency for securitisation in view of recent
global crisis. They justify resort to force by extra-legal powers. By labelling certain issues as grave and pertaining to security, some states succeed in moving them
‘outside the remit of democratic decision making’. For instance, the USA and the Coalition of Willing waged a war on Iraq for possessing weapons of massive
destruction during the Bush administration, though some allude to the fight for crude oil as the real cause. In some cases the militaries were entrusted the role of
the police to deal with internal problems of law and order or insurgencies. Often, the measures used in such cases had been disproportionate as is reflected in the
the
case of war on Iraq in the name of ‘war on terrorism’. Climate change can also provide a pretext for militarisation of international relations in future. In fact,

securitization of global crisis can only lead to further escalation in insecurities due to reification of
militarisation of social , economic and political relations. In the past, ‘the internal reductionism,
fragmentation and compartmentalisation’ plagued the orthodox theory by ‘externalising global crisis
from one another’, by ‘externalising states from one another’, by ‘ externalising the inter-state system
from its biophysical environment’ and by ‘externalising new social groups as dangerous outsiders’. It is
quite clear in the case of preoccupation of the USA and its western allies with military intervention in
the name of humanitarian intervention. Their premise is clearly based on the construction of ‘outsider identities’. Such exclusionary
devices are ‘intimately bound up with political and economic processes’, such as, their strategic interests in
‘proliferating military bases in the Middle East’, ‘economic interests in control of oil’, and ‘the wider political goal of
maintaining American hegemony’ by dominating resource rich regions in the name of globalisation (Stokes, 2009:
88). For instance, in the case of massive violence in the form of genocides, we can hold the ideological process of

identifying certain groups as outside the ‘imagined community of inclusion’ responsible. It makes wars
possible without ‘enemies’ . To Hinton (2002: 4-6), genocides constituted a process of ‘othering’ where previously ‘included’ groups become
‘ideologically recast’ and dehumanised as threatening and dangerous outsiders, be it along ethnic, religious, political or economic lines – eventually

legitimising their annihilation . Without a political act, genocide could not have taken place. Usually, the outsider group is first
constructed and then held responsible for crisis conditions and mass violence. It legitimises militarization of
international relations. For instance, the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defence Review (2014) reconfirmed a direct link between climate change and national security
which was suggested earlier by the Military Advisory Board in 2007. According to this report, ‘the accelerating rate of clima te change poses a severe risk to national
security and acts as a catalyst for global political conflict’. The Centre for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board held the climate change responsible for the draught
in Middle East and Africa resulting into conflicts over food and water and escalating ‘longstanding regional and ethnic tensions into violent clashes’. The report also
found that the rising sea levels could add to the refugee problem in Eastern India, Bangladesh and Mekong Delta in Vietnam. It also pointed out that an increase in
the ‘catastrophic weather events worldwide will create more demand for American troops, even as flooding and extreme weather events at home could damage
naval ports and military bases. Linking climate change with national security, the Pentagon officials held (Davenport, 2014: 15): The department certainly agrees
that climate change is having an impact on national security, whether by increasing global instability by opening the arctic or by increasing sea level and storm surge
near our coastal installations. John Conger, the Deputy Undersecretary of the Pentagon, said: We are actively integrating climate considerations across the full
spectrum of our activities to ensure a ready and resilient force. According to the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defence Review (2014), the effects of global warming in
the shape of ‘rising sea levels’, ‘extreme weather patterns’ and ‘terrorism’ are to be treated as ‘threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad, such as,
poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity’ requiring military intervention for
humanitarian causes. Time
is, therefore, ripe for pondering over the ‘hidden costs’ (Muth, 2012) and ‘true motives behind
militarization of i nternational r elations’.
 Impact – Epistemology – 2NC
Knowledge regarding the other is coded by desire prior to the process of information
gathering. Their representation of Others as either threats or opportunities partakes
in an Orientalist stereotyping of foreign policy behavior that projects US misbehavior
onto everything but ourselves. This comes from a gap inherent in data collection and
truth, which is filled by a fearful demand for certainty.
The implication of this is that you should assess all of their truth claims as ideological
statements serving a particular political end rather than objectively true or accurate
predictions about what China will do – specifically, the end of legitimizing the position
of the already powerful.
Pan, IR Prof @ Deakin University, 12
(Chengxin, “Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise,”
Introduction, pp. ebook)
To connect knowledge with desire is not to suggest that knowledge is reducible to any individual whim.
Like language, knowledge is first and foremost a social property, whose reception qua knowledge must
depend on its intersubjective appeal to collective emotion and social desire. Writings are driven by the
desire to write, which in turn is conditioned on the desire to read/know in the wider emotionally
imagined community, a process governed throughout by the ‘erotics of knowledge’.72 If it is through
knowledge that reality is made meaningful, it is social desire that makes certain knowledge desirable
and its production possible and profitable. To be sure, the role of desire in such a process is often
invisible, silent, unconscious, and largely unacknowledged. That is because while ultimately
knowledge is both a product of and for desire and emotion, in order to be worthy of the name,
knowledge has to conceal its emotive trace; or so it is believed. Even with the concealment, modern
science cannot deny its roots in the modern desire for certainty and identity. It is neither coincident
nor ironic that Descartes, whose anxious desire for certainty finds expression in the ‘Cartesian Anxiety’
of an Either/Or (either there is a secure foundation upon which our knowledge can be based, or we will
be engulfed in uncertainty and darkness),73 is credited with laying the foundation for modern science. It
is not despite but because of the Cartesian Anxiety that Descartes ‘discovered’ human reason (cogito
ergo sum, or ‘I think, therefore I am’) as the secure, indubitable foundation for certainty. From this
emerges also the certain identity of modern man as the rational knowing subject, an identity which
promises the ability to obtain objective knowledge about the world. Yet objective certainty, however
desirable or precisely because it is desirable, is an illusory effect of desire. The desire for certainty may
be satisfied only within desire and through the certainty of desire. When certainty is not within reach,
the modern knowing subject, unable or unwilling to give up its quest, turns to the illusive certainty and
comfort of what John Dewey called ‘emotional substitute’: ‘in the absence of actual certainty… men
cultivated all sorts of things that would give them the feeling of certainty’.74 Trust is one such feeling,
which is not based on objective certainty, but cultivated through a process of ‘emotional inoculation’. 75
Fears and fantasies are two other forms of emotional substitute, especially useful for making sense of
strangers. By fantasising about an uncertain other’s assimilability and eventual transformation into the
self, one can gain a sense of certainty. Alternatively, one may arrive at a sense of predictability by
reducing that other to an already known prototype of menace. Either way, these emotional substitutes
provide the much-desired antidote of certainty to the Cartesian Anxiety: either the other can be
converted, or it must pose a threat. In this way, the initial uncertainty of the other translates into the
certainty of an emotive either/or. As emotional substitutes for certainty, fears and fantasies have
figured prominently in what Robert Young calls ‘colonial desire’, which regulates colonialists’ encounters
with and their knowledge of various unfamiliar Others. These emotions together make up an
‘ambivalent double gesture of repulsion and attraction’ towards the colonised. 76 On the one hand,
colonial desire finds people of other races and colours ‘disgusting’ and ‘repulsive’, hence an object of
fear and paranoia. At the same time, colonial desire projects onto those (same) people some degree of
‘beauty, attractiveness or desirability’, 77 thus making them an exotic source of fantasy and wonder.
According to Homi Bhabha, underlying such ambivalent structures of feeling is precisely the modern
desire for certainty, identity and ‘a pure origin’.78 Thanks to this ever-present modern desire, the
aforementioned ambivalent colonial stereotype is able to acquire ‘its currency’ and ‘ensure[s] its
repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures’. In this sense, Orientalism is best seen as
‘the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements’. 79 What this latent form of
Orientalist knowledge reveals is not something concrete or objective about the Orient, but something
about the Orientalists themselves, their recurring, latent desire of fears and fantasies about the
Orient. Indeed, only when imbued with such unconscious but persistent desire can Orientalism get
‘passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another’.80 Western knowledge of China’s rise is
precisely such a text that has been caught up in the silent emotive current. For example, the ‘China
threat’ paradigm bears the stamp of fears, whereas the ‘China opportunity’ paradigm can be best seen
as manifestations of modern fantasies. These emotions about China’s rise are certainly not identical to
the Orientalist colonial desire in the nineteenth century. For instance, the overtly sexual/racial
connotation that once was a hallmark of old-style colonial desire is no longer prevalent in contemporary
writings on China. What used to be some of the main obsessions in European colonial fears and
fantasies, such as miscegenation and racial hybridity, have now been repackaged as issues of
multiculturalism, norm diffusion, socialisation, and so forth. Still, a similar structure of colonial desire
lives on; even the racial facet has not disappeared completely in contemporary China watching. 81 Thus,
to better understand the twin China paradigms, we need to put them in the context of (neo)colonial
desire, and ask how they have more to do with the West’s latent quest for certainty and identity than
with the manifest search for empirical truth about ‘Chinese reality’. If all social knowledge is yoked to
some intertextuality and worldliness, much of the worldliness of the ‘threat’ and ‘opportunity’
discourses of China is then made up of the (renewed) fears and fantasies accompanying the Western
modern desire and self-imagination. All knowledge, insofar as it is a manifestation of desire, implies a
power relationship with its desired object. ‘Where there is desire, the power relation is already
present’. 82 Thus, knowledge loses its ostensible innocence and reveals its ties with power. As
Foucault argues, ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge’,
nor is there ‘any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’.
Taken together, power and the production of knowledge ‘directly imply one another’ and are mutually
dependent and reinforcing. 83 The power/knowledge nexus has a constructivist import. Social
knowledge cannot be an objective reflection of reality, but it is not merely a text disconnected from
reality either. It is able to inform practice and help construct the reality it purports only to describe. If
reality is subject to wordly interpretation, then the interpreting word is ultimately worldly with ‘real-
world’ consequences.84 Jim George notes that ‘the process of discursive representation is never a
neutral, detached one but is always imbued with the power and authority of the namers and makers of
reality—it is always knowledge as power’. 85 In a similar vein, Nicholas Onuf suggests that ‘saying is
doing: talking is undoubtedly the most important way that we go about making the world what it is’.86
With his ‘Axis of Evil’ utterance, for example, George W. Bush effectively told Americans that ‘We can’t
go back to sleep again’. 87 In other words, something would have to be done (and indeed has been
done). In assuming knowledge as power and theory as practice, we should refrain from taking some self-
serving short-cuts. As we are most closely attached to our own desire and most acutely aware of our
knowledge, we might assume that the knowledge in the power/knowledge nexus is largely ‘our’
knowledge and the power mostly ‘our’ power. Such an assumption is evident, for example, in much of
the mainstream IR literature on ‘norm diffusion’ and ‘socialisation’, which often implicitly privileges
Western knowledge and power. But this ethnocentric reading of power/knowledge is problematic.
Reality is subject to interpretation and construction by knowledge, ideas and norms, but it is almost
always a result of co-interpretation and co-construction by a myriad of sources of knowledge as
power. Western knowledge is no doubt a dominant source (let’s assume for a moment that Western
knowledge is singular); nevertheless, it is only one among many contenders in an increasingly
democratic world of representation. Consequently, to argue for theory as practice is not to say that the
world is mainly of our making. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, all history is contemporary history, but
that ‘does not mean that all history is our contemporary history’.88
 A2: Great Peace – 2NC
Their representation of the US-led order as the guarantee of peace ignores the passive
role neoliberalism plays in creating organized violence beyond the state level – their
stats are self-serving and downplay slow violence which outweighs the case
Gregory, Geography Prof @ University of British Columbia, 10
(Derek, “War and peace,” Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 154–186 2010,
http://roundtable.kein.org/sites/newtable.kein.org/files/GREGORY%20War%20and%20Peace.pdf)
Ferguson is not alone in his silence. Many of those who regarded those continuing conflicts as ‘remote’– which excludes the
millions to whom those ‘theatres’ were their homes – elected to repress or to re-script the role of the global
North in provoking violence in the global South. Hence Mueller’s (2009) claim that, asymptotically, ‘war has almost
ceased to exist’, at least between ‘advanced states’ or ‘civilised nations’. Within those states, amnesia has now become so
common that Judt (2008) describes the 20th century as the forgotten century. ‘We have become stridently insistent that the past
has little of interest to teach us’, he writes: ‘Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.’ He suggests that ‘in our haste
to put the twentieth century behind us’, to lock horror and misery in the attic-rooms of our memories
and museums, we – particularly the ‘we’ that is US, so to speak –‘have forgotten the meaning of war’. The parenthetical
qualification is necessary because in Europe the remains of two world wars are etched deep into the cultural landscape. There, some have seen salvation in
–‘the obsolescence of war is not a global phenomenon’, Sheehan
Europe’s construction of ‘civilian states’ out of the wreckage
(2007, xvii) argues, ‘but
a European one, the product of Europe’s distinctive history in the twentieth century’– while others have sought
redemption in the constitutively (‘core’) European pursuit of Kant’s perpetual peace (Habermas 2006). But the meaning of modern war is not
confined to those terrible global conflicts, and their exorbitation of war as ‘total war’ was not a bolt from the blue. Its arc can be traced back to the Napoleonic
wars. Bell locates the origins of a recognisably modern culture of war in those ferocious campaigns and their ‘extraordinary transformation in the scope and
intensity of warfare’ (2007, 7). It was then, too, that the ill-fated French occupation of Egypt in 1798 and the savage expeditions through the Levant inaugurated
what Said (1978, 87) saw as a modern, profoundly martial Orientalism that was to be reactivated time and time again throughout the 20th and on in to our own
century. We should remember, too, that Napoleon also had to contend with insurgencies in Egypt and in Europe; 19th-century war cannot be reduced to a
succession of battles between the armies of contending states, any more than it can in subsequent centuries when, as Judt (2008, 6) reminds, war has ‘frequently
meant civil war, often under the cover of occupation or “liberation”‘. If these observations qualify the usual European genealogy of modern war, then its
Across the Atlantic a number of critics worry that, in the wake of 9/11,
supersession cannot be a European conceit either.
the United States continues to prepare its ‘serial warriors’ for perpetual war (Young 2005; Bromwich 2009). The
Pentagon has divided the globe into six Areas of Responsibility assigned to unified combatant commands – like US Central
Command, or CENTCOM (Morrissey 2009) – and relies on a veritable ‘empire of bases’ to project its global military power (Figure 1).2 And yet Englehardt reckons
that it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state,
that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. (2009) Writing barely a
year after the presidential election, he ruefully observed that the Bush administration, ‘the most militarily obsessed administration in our history, which year after
year submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress’, was succeeded by the Obama administration that had already submitted an even larger one.
There are of course differences in foreign and military policy between the two, butre-scripting the war in Afghanistan as ‘the good
war’, a war of necessity, even a Just War – the comparison is with Bush’s Iraq war – continues to license the re-scripting of a succession of
other wars from Korea or even the Philippines to Afghanistan (and beyond) as the imaginative scene for a heroic
interventionism by the United States and its allies – Kipling’s ‘savage wars of peace’ now waged by a stern but kindly Uncle Sam (Boot 2003a) – that
endorses a hypermasculinised military humanism (Barkawi 2004; Douzinas 2003). The shifting fortunes of inter-state wars and ‘small wars’ since the Second
World War have been charted by two major projects: the Correlates of War project ( COW) at the University of Michigan, devoted to ‘the systematic
accumulation of scientific knowledge about war’, and the joint attempt to establish an Armed Conflict Dataset by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Sweden
(UCDP), the International Peace Research Institute in Norway ( PRIO) and the Human Security Report Project in Canada (HSRP). Any quantitative
assessment is a battlefield of its own, involving disputes over definitions and data and, for that matter , over
the reduction of military violence to abstract metrics and body counts. This holds for individual wars –
think, for example, of the debates that have raged over estimates of casualties in Iraq – but it applies a fortiori to any global audit. The sources for such
studies are inevitably uneven and, as Østerud (2008a 2008b) reminds us, ‘deaths from decentralized and fragmented
violence are probably underreported relative to deaths from more centralized and concentrated violence’ (2008a, 226). The
screening and sorting devices that have to be used in these approaches only compound the difficulty. Most quantitative studies count as a ‘war’ only
armed conflicts that produce at least 1000 deaths each year, which is a necessarily arbitrary threshold, and the common restriction to ‘battle-field’ or ‘battle-related
deaths’ excludes many other deaths attributable to military or paramilitary violence. Although these tallies include civilians caught in the crossfire, they exclude
deaths from warinduced disease or starvation and, crucially, ‘the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians’.
These are serious limitations. To erase the deliberate killing of civilians makes a mockery not only of the
‘new wars’ I describe below, which are widely supposed to focus on civilians as targets, but also of old ones. What are we then to make of the bombing
offensives of the Second World War? For these reasons, I also rely on a third, more recent project, the Consolidated List of Wars developed by the Event Data
Project on Conflict and Security (EDACS) at the Free University of Berlin. This provides a database that reworks the thresholds used in other projects and, in
distinguishing inter-state wars from other kinds of war, operates with a threshold of 1000 military or civilian deaths (Chojnacki and Reisch 2008). These body counts
casualties do not end with the end of
(and the temporal limits their exclusions assign to war) are defective in another sense, however, because
war. Nixon (2007, 163) writes about the ‘slow violence’ of landmines, cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance. It costs roughly 100
more to remove a landmine than to lay it, and in consequence: One hundred million unexploded mines lie inches beneath our planet’s skin. Each year they kill
24,000 civilians and maim many times that number. They kill and maim on behalf of wars that ended long ago… In neither space nor time can mine-terrorized
communities draw a clear line separating war from peace. (Nixon 2007, 163) But, as Nixon emphasises, other lines can be drawn. Unexploded
ordnance
is heavily concentrated in some of the most impoverished places on the planet, often on the front lines
of the Cold War in the South, including Afghanistan (the most intensively mined state in the world), Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Somalia,
Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Landmines not only kill directly; they also have a dramatic effect on local political ecologies, since they are typically
used to interdict land-based resources and hence food supplies. In Mozambique, for example, large areas of prime agricultural land were sown with mines and have
remained unworkable for years, which has forced farmers to bring marginal lands into cultivation with serious consequences fo r land degradation and food security
Other slow killers that disproportionately ravage populations in the South also reach back
(Unruh et al. 2003).
to attack those in the North. Thus Blackmore (2005, 164–99) writes of ‘war after war’ – the long-term effects of exposure to agents like dioxins or
depleted uranium3 – and there are countless killings ‘out of place’ by veterans returning to the North from war-zones in the South suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder. These remarks are not intended to disparage the importance of quantitative studies. While I despair of those who reduce war to a mortuary
balancesheet – what Arundhati Roy (2002, 111) called the algebra of infinite justice: ‘How many dead Afghans for every dead American?’ – the raw numbers do
there is a world of meaning hidden behind the tallies and tabulations, which can never
mean something. But
summon up the terror, grief and suffering that constitute the common currency of war (cf. Hyndman 2007). With
these qualifications in place, the most relevant findings from these projects for my purposes are these. First, casting a long shadow over everything that follows,
more than two million battle deaths have occurred worldwide in nearly every decade since the end of the Second World War. It bears repeating that this figure
underestimates the carnage because the toll is limited to ‘battle deaths’.4 Second, the number of inter-state wars has remained low since the end
reappeared at the start of the
of the Second World War; they declined and even briefly disappeared in the last decade of the 20th century, but
present century. Third, while intra-state wars were more frequent than inter-state wars throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (with the exception of
the 1930s), by the end of the 20th century their numbers were increasing dramatically, with a corresponding increase in intra-state wars that drew in other states.
The considerable rise in the number of armed conflicts between the end of the Second World War and
the end of the Cold War was almost entirely accounted for by the increase in conflicts within states in
the global South (Sarkees et al. 2003, 61–4). The number of intra-state wars declined steeply after 1992, though they continued to account for the vast
majority of armed conflicts around the world; some have seen this trend continuing into the 21st century – in 2005 the Human Security Report trumpeted ‘a less
violent world’ – but others have detected a marked increase since the last fin de sie`cle (Chojnacki and Reisch 2008; Harbom and Wallensteen 2009). Whatever one
makes of the small print, it is clear that it is ‘small wars’ (wars that are not fought between sovereign states) that dominate the databases.
Today’s intra-state wars have overlapping geographies: they are staged disproportionately in the global South, they involve a
complex and shifting reticulation of territorial allegiances, and they are the selective sites of military intervention by the global North. But as Orford (2003, 85–7)
notes, it
is often the nexus of South–North relations that provokes violence there in the first place. She calls into
question the ‘imaginative
geography of intervention’ that creates a convenient distance between ‘the space of
the international community and the space of violence or terror’, in order to represent the North as
‘absent from the scene of violence and suffering until it intervenes as a heroic saviour’. On her contrary reading,
international institutions (not least the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) are often structurally implicated in these situations long before political
violence erupts. This is an indispensable qualification; small wars are rarely purely local affairs. Chojnacki (2006) describes them as ‘the dominant war phenomenon
on the global scale’ and distinguishes ‘ordinary’ intra-state wars between a state and non-state actors (a war of secession, for example, or a military coup) from
‘sub-state wars’ between (mostly) non-state actors. In his view, it is the latter that have increased most significantly over the last two decades (Figure 2), and he
The state has lost its monopoly of the
argues that they have involved a substantial change in the ‘structures and dynamics of conflict’:

legitimate use of force … or is unwilling to enforce it effectively against combating local groups (e.g. in Nigeria or parts of Pakistan). In other sub-
state wars the monopoly of violence has at least temporarily collapsed (Somalia, Lebanon) or is geographically restricted to the capital or
confined regions (Chad, Afghanistan). In exchange, non-state actors (warlords, local or ethnic militia) are able to establish alternative,
territorially restricted forms of centralized violence. In these instances, actor constellations can no longer be reduced to the state on
the one hand and more or less organized rebel groups, which direct their political and military strategy in accordance with the principle of statehood on the other.
Rather, multiple zones of military and political control emerge, giving rise to partially overlapping loyalties and identities. (Chojnacki 2006, 39–40) Chojnacki (2006,
42) concedes that the mutation and hybridisation of war makes these typological distinctions increasingly
problematic – or at any rate turns their black and white categories into so many shades of grey – and draws particular attention to the transnationalisation of
conflict and the emergence of complex conflict systems involving proxies and privatisations. Østrud (2008a, 230) goes further, insisting that ‘ the seamless
web of contemporary violence’ makes the categorisations of the databases actively misleading. In many
contemporary conflicts,‘there are deadly no peace – no war situations in which the prevailing types of violence
are missed by the categorizations and coding rules of the most prominent databases on war’. In fact, the
blurring of categories and the indeterminacy of parameters have become the watchwords of war. War,
observes Joenniemi (2008), has become unfixed, its concepts un-moored. This is not a scholastic affair; the new slipperiness has the most acutely
material consequences. The terms used to describe war (or to claim that it is something else altogether) shape its public response, its military conduct and its legal
regulation. For this reason, some have sought to reinstate the conventional categories – fighting to fix the old concepts – while others have sought to elaborate new
ones. It is to this that I now turn.

Prefer our data – theirs obscures the US’s role in instigating violence
Herman, Finance Prof @ University of Pennsylvania, 14
(Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania,
“Reality Denial : Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence,” Global Research, 7-28-14, DOA: 1-23-14,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066)
As we have noted, Pinker employs the “preferential method” of research, uncritically using sources that support
his claims and ideological agenda, and ignoring or criticizing harshly those that take positions incompatible with his. In our favorite
example, he often cites John Mueller’s work, but never mentions this same author’s 1999 article with Karl Mueller that claims the UN-U.S.
“sanctions of mass destruction” against Iraq were historically unique mass killers of civilians, a strategic silence almost surely determined by the
fact that the U.S. and its democratic allies were the killers.[162] Pinker never mentions Amartya Sen or Jean Drèze, both
distinguished scholars whose work often covers ground similar to Pinker’s in Better Angels, again almost surely because Sen
and Drèze
deal with structural violence under capitalism , do not regard the Mao-era famine in China as a case of deliberate mass killing,
and contend that deaths in India under the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation” of its capitalist system
greatly exceeded China’s famine deaths . Separately, Sen also stresses the diversity and tradition of tolerance within Islam, as
Pinker never does, and writes that the “hard sell of ‘Western liberalism’” notwithstanding, the “valuing of
freedom is not confined to one culture only, and the Western traditions are not the only ones that
prepare us for a freedom-based approach to social understanding,”[163] Instead, Pinker and his sources focus only on
Islam’s backwardness and violent proclivities, and “What went wrong?” There is no index reference to Sen or Drèze in Better Angels, but there
are eight indexed references to Rudolf Rummel in Pinker’s book, and four works by Rummel are listed in Pinker’s bibliography, including the
website for Rummel’s work at the University of Hawaii. A far-right fanatic, Rummel’s blog, A Freedomist View, rivals that of the Birchers. In the
first year of the Obama presidency, Rummel called Obama a “1960’s anti-war, socialist-radical activist” who believes “in love not war,” and he
assailed Obama for putting a crimp in the use of torture, thereby “undermining intelligence operations” by the good guys. Rummel also warned
that Obama’s plans called for “unnecessarily closing Guantanamo detention camp by January 22, 2010 as a sop to world and domestic leftist
opinion”—a fear that has yet to be realized.[164] Rummel even wrote that Obama and his associates were carrying out a coup d’etat in the
United States, and he was worried that under leftwing pressure the United States might fail to save Afghanistan, just as the left had forced a
regrettable U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam four decades earlier.[165] In what purports to be his scholarly work, Rummel writes that “U.S.
democide in [the Vietnam] war is most difficult to calculate,” but finds that “A prudent figure may be 5,500 overall.”[166] In contrast, he
estimated that the “communist” government of North Vietnam was responsible for 1,669,000 democidal deaths in the war, or more than 300
times as many as killed by the U.S. war machine. This remarkable pair of claims is based on two factors: Rummel’s requirement that in order for
deaths to count as “democide,” the killing of non-combatants must be carried out by agents acting on behalf of a government, with the clear
intent to kill members of a targeted population;[167] and Rummel’s own deep ideological belief that whereas communist regimes target and
kill non-combatants on a regular and systematic basis, the U.S. government meticulously upholds the laws of war and strives to protect civilians
(with the rarest exceptions). Free-fire zones,[168] high-level saturation bombing, destruction of villages in order to “save them,” napalm,
cluster bombs, the use of “six times” the tonnage of “bombs and shells” against Vietnam (South and North) than it used during all of World War
II (acknowledged by Rummel[169]), and the widespread application of chemical weapons to destroy civilian crops (Operation Ranch Hand), the
last causing crippling damage to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese children,[170] fail to resonate with Rummel, for whom it remains an
article of faith that the United States did not deliberately harm civilians in the war (and does not as a matter of policy). “[W]hat many…sources
label as [U.S.] atrocities or massacres may, by the Geneva Conventions and other accepted rules of warfare, be legitimate military actions or
accidents of war,” he counters. Indeed, the “most important fact of this bombing was the scrupulous care with which targets were selected and
bombed,” with the United States limiting “attacks to purely military targets….” “Civilians were killed,” he concedes, “but these deaths were
collateral to bombing military targets….”[171] These are truths that Rummel accepts for no reason other than that they pertain to his
government and to the communist enemy, and possess a kind of self-evident status for him. This is extreme fanaticism masquerading as
scholarship. In contrast with Sen and Drèze, Rummel writes that more than 35 million people were “murdered” in
the “Chinese Communist Anthill,” and of the famine victims he writes that “27 million starved to death,” every one of them
“sacrificed for the most massive, total social engineering projects ever forced on any society in modern history….”[172] But Rummel says
what Pinker wants to hear, so while Sen is ignored, Rummel is promoted to serious authority and his
numbers are used profusely and uncritically in Better Angels. In a similar fashion, Pinker makes lavish use of
the estimates of a contingent of mainly government- and foundation-funded experts devoted, like him, to
showing that war has been declining in importance— especially in the more civilized, lighter-skinned
parts of the world —and is becoming less harmful even to the darker-skinned peoples in the countries
under attack. The claims of these individuals and groups are often as preposterous as Rummel’s—even if they are better at keeping their
right-wing biases under wraps. One of Pinker’s major government-funded sources is the Human Security Report Project (HSRP) at Simon Fraser
University (Vancouver, Canada).[173] HSRP’s
Report 2009/2010 advanced many of the global themes reiterated in
Better Angels, in particular the decline of interstate wars since the “end of the Cold War” and the
development of a new “global security architecture.”[174] It is revealing that HSRP makes only one mention of NATO in its
entire report: As one of the “international organizations…[that] have increased the number of their peace operations” during the same
years.[175] Like Pinker, HSRP lauds the alleged “democratic peace” that has seen the number of “democracies” double while
the number of dictatorships was cut-in-half. HSRP admits that the “democratic peace thesis” has some holes in it, because although
“democracies” no longer fight wars among themselves, “theyfrequently fight nondemocracies.” [176] Never-mind
who starts these wars , what real purposes they advance , and whether they are consistent with the UN Charter and
international law, their targets are bad guys —“non-democracies,” “rogue states,” “failed states,” “terrorist havens,” and the
like. The 50 NATO member and partner states contributing troops and materiel to the U.S. war in
Afghanistan as of early 2012[177] were engaged in “counterterrorism,” “peacemaking,” “security,” and
“state-” and “democracy-building.” The fact that troops from this many countries were participating in
these alleged missions thus cannot be regarded as counter-evidence for the “New Peace” and the
“democratic peace,” but rather as support for both of them. [178] The Western Great Powers are good.
The development of “Islamic political violence” is a “particular source of disquiet for security planners in the West,” the HSPR adds, as “in 2008
four of the five most deadly conflicts in the world—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia—pitted Islamic insurgents against national
governments and their U.S. and other supporters.”[179]Like the “democratic peace,” which remains peaceful even
though the “democracies” go right on attacking other countries, the Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani, and Somali
theaters remain deadly due to “Islamic political violence,” not due to the attacks by the United States
and its allies. Among Pinker’s sources, definitional sleights-of-hand such as these abound. A 2011 paper by the International Peace
Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO) concluded in its comparison of its own work and that carried out by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in
Sweden (UCDP) that both “datasets agree that the severity of war, as measured by the annual battle deaths,
has decreased over the past twenty years,” and that “it seems evident that war is waning.”[180] But the strength of these claims
is exaggerated greatly by the fact that the UCDP and PRIO focus on direct or “battle-related deaths” to
the exclusion of deaths that can be far more numerous during wartime , but are not directly related to
actual battles.[181] “Direct deaths…conform to our basic intuition of what it means for an agent to be responsible for an effect that it
causes,” Pinker argues in defense of this method, “namely that the agent foresees the effect, intends for it to happen, and makes it happen via
a chain of events that does not have too many uncontrollable intervening variables.” He continues:[182] The problem with estimating indirect
[or non-battle-related] deaths is that it requires us to undertake the philosophical exercise of stimulating in our imagination the possible world
in which the war didn’t occur and estimating the number of deaths that took place in that world, which then is used as a baseline. And that
requires something close to omniscience….If Saddam Hussein had not been deposed, would he have gone on to kill more political enemies than
the number of people who died in the intercommunal violence following his defeat?…Estimating indirect deaths requires answering these sorts
of questions in a consistent way for hundreds of conflicts, an impossible undertaking. (299-300) Not only is this a disingenuous
argument, and Pinker’s counter-example of Iraq outlandish, but Pinker himself doesn’t believe it, as he and his sources
violate it whenever they deal with communist regimes. For these regimes (e.g., Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot), attributing indirect, non-combat-
related deaths to a deliberate plan requires no imaginative leap at all—the communists are maximally guilty for all of them, and estimating
deaths poses no methodological problems. (See “Communism versus Capitalism,” above.) Like Rummel, the HSRP, UCDP, and
PRIO minimize U.S.- and Western-led warmaking and killing. Indeed, so systematic are the UCDP and PRIO labors to
this end[183] that they treat the U.S. role in the wars in the Koreas (1950-1953)[184] and Vietnam (1954-1975)[185] as
“secondary,” that is, as merely providing support to the governments of South Korea and South Vietnam,
even though the United States established these governments (in 1945 and 1954), and bore overwhelming
responsibility for most of the killing and destruction in the wars. (Also see “’Islamic Violence’,” above, for how the
UCDP-PRIO minimizes the U.S. role in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past decade.) In the same dataset , the U.S. overthrow of
Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 is treated as an “internal” armed conflict between the Arbenz government and the
“Forces of Carlos Castillo Armas,” with the U.S. role suppressed.[186] The violence generated by the counterinsurgency
regimes of Guatemala (1965-1995)[187] and El Salvador (1979-1991)[188] is once again treated as the result of
“internal” armed conflicts , with no mention of the crucial U.S. role in arming, training, and
supporting these regimes. In Nicaragua, the U.S. role first in supporting the Somoza dictatorship against the
Sandinistas rebels (1978-1979) and later in creating and supporting the Contras and the FDN against the
Sandinista government (1980-1989) is also suppressed .[189] Many other examples could be added. In contrast, the Soviet
role in Hungary (1956)[190] and later Afghanistan (1979)[191] is treated as “primary,” with these armed
conflicts classified as “interstate,” that is, as occurring between the Soviet Union and Hungary and Afghanistan, with both
initiated by acts of cross-border Soviet aggression. It is on the basis of methodologies as politicized as these that the
“Long Peace,” the “New Peace,” and the “Democratic Peace” have been constructed. Among Pinker and
the rest of the “waning of war” cadre, the imperial role of the United States simply disappears.
 A2: Threats Real – 2NC
The world is overwhelmingly peaceful – assign a low risk to any vague uncertain threat
because humans cognitively assign great risk when none is present
Fetteweis, Poli Sci Prof @ Tulane University, 14
(Christopher, “Threatlessness and US Grand Strategy,” Survival 56(5): 43-68, DOI:
10.1080/00396338.2014.962793)
Empirical realities of the post-Cold War system tell a different story. As most scholars of international politics are now, or should be, aware,
global conflict levels have dropped precipitously since the collapse of the Soviet empire. Great powers have not fought
one another for at least six decades, depending on definitions used, which is the longest such stretch in history. Smaller powers resort to
violence much less frequently as well, and levels of internal conflict (civil wars, ethnic conflict, massacres of civilians, coups, and so on) are
at historic lows.8 The various ‘new’ threats of the current age are neither terribly new nor particularly threatening. Terrorism
remains a problem, but it is a relatively minor one. Even the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), though a brutal and frightening group, is at the time of
writing nothing more than a potential threat to the West. While some of its members apparently hold Western passports, it is important to
remember that the predecessor to ISIS, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was never able to carry out attacks outside the Middle
East. Indeed, there have been no al-Qaeda attacks anywhere in the Western world since 2005. The several thousand militants of ISIS certainly need to be
monitored, but they hardly pose an existential threat to the US or its allies. Proliferation is not gaining momentum; in fact, for most classes
of weapons (including nuclear, chemical and biological arms), its pace has slowed significantly since the Cold War.9 Neither are there
more failed states, and the threat posed by them remains minimal.10 Perhaps most significantly, the conquest of
states by their neighbours is all but dead: the number of UN members that have disappeared against their will is precisely zero (South
Vietnam held only observer status in 1975). Some have disappeared due to implosion or voluntary division, but none have been absorbed following aggression.
Vladimir Putin’s
conquest of Crimea was a notably rare exception to the otherwise sacrosanct borders of the twenty-first century.11
The states of the twenty-first century are essentially safe, and the strongest is the safest. Future historians
will look back on this era as either a golden age of peace and security, or perhaps the beginning of a
sustained period of relative peace .12 This diminution in global violence is occasionally acknowledged in the community of strategists, but it is
rarely taken seriously. A much more common reaction comes from senior strategist Colin Gray, who dismisses the new trends out of hand. For decades, Gray has
argued that nothing of fundamental importance to international politics ever changes, that there is nothing new under the sun, and that history shows how bad
times inevitably follow good. As the 1990s came to a close, Gray argued that ‘all truly transformational theory about international politics is, and has to be, a snare
and a delusion … humankind faces a bloody future, just as it has recorded a bloody past’.13 ‘The cold war is over, but does it really matter?’, he wrote in 1993.14
New wars, big and small, loom on the horizon, even if it may be hard for the average person to see
them, or even imagine what they might be. While grieving people eventually move past denial, many US strategists appear stuck in that
initial phase. One of the very few works to address the implications of essential threatlessness (or at least the absence of an enemy) on strategy denies that relative
safety tends to accompany the collapse of rivals. In her book, Power in Uncertain Times, Emily Goldman argues that ‘relative to the Cold War context’, the US now
confronts ‘a greater number of threats, greater diversity in the types of security actors that can threaten our interests, and a more interdependent world in which
rapidly emerging technologies quickly diffuse and are exploited by others in unanticipated ways’.15 A Soviet-free world is not necessarily a more secure world, in
other words. Goldman then goes on to identify a series of precedents for the strategic situation in which the US finds itself. Her examples, which include Russia and
Britain between the Crimean War and First World War, as well as the US and Britain between the world wars, are not well chosen. The states in her cas e studies all
faced real threats, or at least rival great powers willing to pursue their interests by force. The inclusion of the interwar period is particularly bizarre, since the latter
half of that epoch was dominated by an expansionist empire in the Pacific and a rising, revisionist power in Europe. These pe riods were hardly analogous to the
While the past may contain some examples of societies that could
post-Cold War US, which has little to learn from them.
operate in virtually threat-free environments due to geographic isolation, it is hard to think of a great
power in more recent times that had to make strategy without danger. Widespread denial has
guaranteed that few have spent much time considering the ways in which greatly reduced levels of
threat affect foreign policy or grand strategy. The list of tangible threats in the post-Cold War system
may seem insufficient to justify consistently high levels of spending. Fortunately for those who fear major cuts to the budget,
there is no limit to the dangers posed by intangible, vague, unknowable dangers that fecund Pentagon imaginations can devise. If there is one unifying theme across
two decades of US strategic thinking, it is that the post-Cold War era is marked by complexity, uncertainty and ‘unknown unknowns’. Such vague concepts
can be quite frightening, as long as they are not considered in any real depth. The threat to defence spending posed
by the absence of threats to the country was first addressed by a group of analysts at the RAND Corporation in the early 1990s. James Winnefeld and other
‘uncertainty hawks’, in the words of Carl Conetta and Charles Knight, pioneered the idea that the new system was not in
fact any safer, appearances notwithstanding.16 ‘Out with the old, in with the ?????’ and ‘Certitude vs. Uncertainty’ were among
Winnefeld’s self-explanatory subheadings.17 ‘Uncertainty is the dominating characteristic of the landscape’, wrote Paul Davis, editor of a 1994 RAND volume on
defence planning that focused on the dire challenges posed by the collapse of the lone threat to American security.18 It did not take long for US national-security-
strategy documents to pick up the theme. ‘The real threat we now face’, according to the 1992 ‘National Military Strategy’, ‘is the threat of the unknown, the
uncertain’.19 The message has been consistent, in both official and unofficial outlets, for more than two decades. The 2005 ‘National Defense Strategy’ elevated
uncertainty (rather than, say, stability) to the position of the ‘defining characteristic of today’s strategic environment’.20 In 1997 Secretary of Defense William
Cohen said that ‘while the prospect of a horrific, global war has receded, new threats and dangers – harder to define and more difficult to track – have gathered on
the horizon’.21 At a press conference five years later, in the days leading up to the war in Iraq, his successor Donald Rumsfeld warned about unknown unknowns,
which were the threats that ‘we don’t know we don’t know’, which ‘tend to be the difficult ones’.22 Uncertainty hawks are now prevalent in the United Kingdom as
well. The 2010 UK national-security-strategy document, titled ‘A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty’, claims that, ‘today, Britain faces a different and more
complex range of threats from a myriad of sources’, and that ‘in an age of uncertainty, we are continually facing new and unforeseen threats to our security’.23
That the world of today is more complex, and
Such claims are rarely questioned, much less subjected to any kind of scrutiny.
therefore less predictable and knowable, than that of prior eras has entered into the realm of belief,
accepted without the need for further justification.24 The claims of uncertainty hawks contain a number of consistent elements. First
and foremost, one of the more frightening aspects of unidentifiable threats is that little can be known about their relative levels of intensity. Unknown unknowns
might be rather benign, catastrophically severe or somewhere in between. For many observers of US foreign policy, the possibility that unseen threats are
exceptionally dangerous simply cannot be ruled out. ‘At present, Americans confront the most confusing and uncertain strategic environment in their history’,
writes prominent historian and strategist Williamson Murray. ‘It may also be the most dangerous to the well-being of their republic.’25 ‘Known knowns’ can be
measured, understood and combatted; those left to the imagination quickly expand to ominous proportions. ‘To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in
general to be necessary’, Edmund Burke noted centuries ago. ‘When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of
the apprehension vanishes.’26 The
dangers posed by unknown unknowns, perhaps because of their obscurity, tend
to appear unlimited and especially terrible. Secondly, since the present is so uncertain and frightening, these analyses tend to downplay the
dangers of the past. Such intangible threats are strategically meaningless unless presented comparatively;
presumably, emphasising them is meant to imply that the current era is more complex, uncertain and
unknowable than other epochs. The modern-day global security environment presents an ‘increasingly complex set of challenges’ in comparison
to those that have come before, according to the 2012 US ‘Defense Strategic Guidance’.27 Nostalgia for the Cold War – a simple, straightforward, even less
dangerous era – is depressingly common in the US strategic community. The US left a ‘time of reasonable predictability [for] an era of surprise and uncertainty’,
claimed the 2006 ‘Quadrennial Defense Review Report’.28 Although the assertion that the Cold War was predictable might surprise those who waged it, to the
strategists who came afterward the struggle against the Soviets seems to have been relatively uncomplicated, even quaint, nuclear danger notwithstanding.
Uncertainty and complexity have technological roots. The third theme of claims by uncertainty hawks relates to the technological roots of uncertainty and
complexity. They argue that the proliferation of science and advanced technology provides the enemies of the future with far greater potential for mayhem. The
evolution of technology, therefore, is ominous not only for US national security, but for the peace and stability of the world. The US National Intelligence Council
predicted in 1996 that ‘accelerating rates of change will make the future environment more unpredictable and less stable’.29 Weapons proliferation is the most
troubling aspect of this, but the potentially destabilising effects of general scientific advancements should not be underestimated. The 2006 ‘Quadrennial Defense
Review Report’ suggested that the US needed to pay attention not only to ‘catastrophic’ technologies that future enemies might employ but also to those that are
merely ‘disruptive’.30 Few topics obsess US planners as much as cyber warfare, with the result that the US Cyber Command was created in 2009.31 ‘The world is
applying digital technologies faster than our ability to understand the security implications and mitigate potential risks’, warned a report of the US Intelligence
Sociologists have
Community in 2013. ‘Compounding these developments are uncertainty and doubt as we face new and unpredictable cyber threats.’32
long understood that technological change tends to be accompanied by increases in anxiety and
predictions of ill effects to come.33 Since the speed of that change has never been greater, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the anxiety
it has generated is greater as well.34 Fourthly, the rise of intangible threats has found a receptive audience in the American strategic community due in large part to
its traditional concern, perhaps even obsession, with surprise attack. For decades, a variety of observers have argued that a powerful, unreasonable fear of surprise
has been a central part of US strategic culture since at least Pearl Harbor.35 The attacks of 9/11 seemed to suggest that dangers can arise virtually out of the blue.
Arnold Wolfers observed decades ago that the nations that tend to be most sensitive to threats ‘have either experienced attacks in the recent past or, having
passed through a prolonged period of an exceptionally high degree of security, suddenly find themselves thrust into a situation of danger’.36 Periods of apparent
A seemingly safe world, where
calm are not comforting to those societies conditioned to believe that surprise attacks can materialise out of nowhere.
the sources of those inevitable surprises remain obscure, can seem more frightening than one with
obvious dangers. Finally, the obsession with the intangible prevents proper consideration of what is
probably the most important force-planning question: how much is enough? How many ‘super-carriers’ are enough to
address a complex future, for instance? How many F-22s, cyber warriors or spy satellites does the US need to keep

its people safe from unknown unknowns? A security environment characterised primarily by drastic ‘unknowables’ offers no guidance to
those seeking to construct military forces. When danger is limited only by imagination, states will invariably purchase far more than they need, wasting money on
weapons systems that will never be used in the hopes of addressing threats that they do not yet perceive. As long as human rationality remains bounded,
incorporating a certain degree of flexibility will remain part of any sagacious strategy. Those making planning decisions, however, must take probabilities into
Even if there are no
account, while establishing priorities. While anything is possible, if we are to believe the cliché, surely not everything is plausible.
limits to the potential dangers that the human mind can manufacture, there will always be very definite
boundaries on the specific threats that reality contains. Despite the assertions of uncertainty hawks, the current
strategic environment has proven to be not only rather stable and predictable, but benign for the West. No new strategic threats
have arisen out of the blue, whether small groups of psychotics – international intelligence services were well aware of al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 – or major peer
competitors. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to imagine how the latter could possibly emerge without the US having fairly substantial warning. Serious
threats cannot rise in secret. Goldman wrote that, ‘unlike the prior interwar period, the uncertainty engendered by the end of the Cold War shows
few signs of abating’.37 In this, she is essentially correct, even if her analysis is backward. The lack of identifiable, tangible, immediate
threats to US security has caused strategists to look towards intangible, unidentifiable, future dangers, and this
shows little sign of changing. This age of uncertainty, however, is an age of relative safety. Until the day comes when American
strategists are forced to replace vague threats with concrete ones, the basic security of the US is assured.
 A2: Liberalism Good
Liberalism causes biopolitical war
Evans, senior lecturer of International Studies @ University of Bristol, 11
(Brad, “The Liberal War Thesis: Introducing the Ten Key Principles of Twenty-First-Century Biopolitical
Warfare,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, pp. 747-756)
1. Liberal wars are fought over the modalities of life itself . Liberalism is undoubtedly a complex historical phenomenon, but if there is one
defining singularity to its war-making efforts, then it is the underlying biopolitical imperative, which justifies its actions in relation to the protection and advancement of modes of existence.
Liberals continuously draw reference to life to justify military force.3 War, if there is to be one, must be for the protection and
improvement of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favor. More recently, for instance, it has underwritten the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation
that is seen to offer a more humane and locally sensitive response.4 If liberal peace can therefore be said to imply something more than the mere absence of war, so it is the case that liberal
With war appearing integral to the logic of peace insofar as
war is immeasurably more complex than the simple presence of military hostilities.

it conditions the very possibility of liberal rule, humanity’s most meaningful expression actually appears
through the battles fought in its name. It would be incorrect, however, to think that this logic represents a recent departure.5 Life has always been the principal
object for liberal political strategies. Hence, while the liberal way of rule is by definition biopolitical, as it revolves around the problems posed by species life, so it is the case that liberal ways of
war are inherently biopolitical, as they, too, are waged over the same productive properties that life is said to possess. The reason contemporary forms of conflict are therefore seen to be
emergent, complex, nonlinear, and adaptive is not incidental. Mirroring the new social morphology of life, the changing nature of conflict is preceded by the changing ontological account of

Liberal wars operate within a global

species being that appears exponen-tially more powerful precisely because it is said to display post-Newtonian qualities. 2.

imaginary of threat. Ever since Immanuel Kant imagined the autonomous individual at peace with the wider political surroundings, the liberal subject has
always been inserted into a more expansive terrain of productive cohabitation that is potentially free of
conflict. While this logic has been manifest through local systems of liberal power throughout its history, during the 1990s a global imaginary of threat appeared that directly correlated
liberal forms of governance with less planetary endangerment. This ability to collapse the local into the global resulted in an

unrivaled moment of liberal expansionism.6 Such expansion did not, however, result from some self-
professed planetary commitment to embrace liberal ideals. Liberal interventionism proceeded instead on
the basis that localized emergency and crises demanded response. Modes of incorporation were therefore justified on the grounds that although populations still exist beyond the liberal pale,
for their own betterment they should be included. This brings us to the martial face of liberal power. While liberalism is directly fueled by the
universal belief in the righteousness of its mission, since there is no universally self-evident allegiance to the project, war is necessarily
universalized in its pursuit of peace: “However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the
instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to
geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in pursuit of its own global project of
emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal
peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims.”7 3. Liberal wars take place by “other” means.

Liberalism declares otherness to be the problem to be solved. The theory of race dates back to canonical figures like Kant, John Locke, and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose progressive account of life originally conceived of noble savagery. While this desire to subjugate “the other” is a

permanent feature of liberal biopolitics, the idea of human security that emerged in the early 1990s instilled it directly into policies that sought to pacify
the global borderland.8 Directly challenging the conventional notion of state-based security, human security discourses found a remedial solution to the problem of maladjustment in
This led to the effective “capitalization of peace,” since conflict and instability became
sustainable development.

fully aligned with the dangers of underdevelopment. Inverting then Carl von Clausewitz’s formula that war represents a continuation of politics by
other means, war-making efforts were increasingly tasked with providing lasting capacities for social cohesion and peace. Liberal ways of war and development thus became part of the same
global strategic continuum. While it could be argued that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 concern with sovereign recovery unsettled this narrative by giving sure primacy to military force,
the contemporary postinterventionary phase of liberal occupation signals its effective reawakening. The veritable displacement of the figuration of the terrorist by the body of the insurgent is
insurgents are a problem of population
fully revealing of this strategic reprioritization.9 Unlike the problem of terrorism that is a problem of (dis)order,

whose violence is the product of causal resentment. Their resistance pertains from unfortunate locally
regressive conditions that can be manipulated to resuscitate the vitality of local life systems . Since insurgencies
then are open to remedy and demand engagement, like the savages of the colonial encounter, they are otherwise redeemable. 4. Liberal wars take place at a distance. The Clausewitzean
inversion identified above does not simply incorporate every aspect of civic governance into the global war effort. Since the unity of life incorporates every political strategy into a planetwide
the destiny of the species as a whole is wagered on the success (or failure) of its own political strategies. As
battle,

global war cannot be sustained by relying on interventionary forces. Not only

recent liberal incursions make clear, however,

do such interventions lead to localized resistance, but the relationships to violence they expose are
politically unsustainable. Waging war at a distance is the favored policy choice. This policy of getting
savages to fight barbarians in the global borderlands involves a broad range of interconnected
strategies.10 These include the abandonment of political neutralities; arming and training of local militias; instilling the correct political architecture to prevent credible political
opposition; funding development projects that have a distinct liberal agenda; and marginalizing any community that has the temerity to support political alternatives. This distancing does not
 Creating conditions wherein the active production of all compliant life-
simply reveal the microphysics of liberal biopolitical rule.

sustaining flows (biopoliticized circulations) does not jeopardize the veritable containment of others, liberal war
makes possible the global partitioning of life . This is not simply about security understood in the conventional sovereign sense of upholding territorial
integrities. It is about deciding what must be made to live and what must be allowed to perish in the global

space of flows. 5. Liberal wars have a distinct relationship to territory insomuch as spa-tiality is firmly bound to active living space. Liberal power triangulates security,
populations, and territory in a way that binds geostrategic concerns to the active production of ways of life.11 Through the capitalization of peace, this triangulation has gone global as the
management of local resources has become a planetary security concern. The development-security nexus tied the dramatic materialization of life to conditions of social cohesion. More
recently, it has widened its security ambit to include protection of the environment and climate adaptation strategies. Leading to the generalization of liberal biopolitical rule, the
development-environment-security nexus (DESNEX) is now part of a mobilization for war on all fronts—from human to biospheric.12 As the security apparatus of a new liberal
environmentalism, DESNEX is no longer satisfied with policing and maintaining the life chances between the globally enriched and the globally denied. This is a highly politicized maneuver
predicated on the geographical containment of the poor and dispossessed. It is forging a new global settlement around the control and management of the biosphere. A new speciation of
global life is therefore taking place according to its ability to properly manage and care for the environment and, at the same time, maintain capitalist accumulation. For DESNEX, containment
is now not enough—a locked-in global poor must be made fit for such stewardship. 6. Liberal wars are wars of law. One of liberal power’s foundational myths is its commitment to law.
Constitutional law is presented as being the natural foundation for any civilized society. Without this arrangement, the concept of “a people”—understood to be a legally binding community of
political beings—appears to hold no meaning. A people, however, is never made by laws. Neither are laws politically neutral. Whatever the jurisdiction, laws are enacted in a highly tactical way
Advocates of liberal war reconcile their
largely in response to crises that are never value free. This brings us to the problem of the norm.

commitment to law by relating juridical safeguards to agreed normative standards. Norms as such appear to
be the logical outcome of reasoned political settlement. Our discourse of battle, however, appreciates that power defines the
norm such that those who deviate from it pose a threat to the biological heritage of life . The norm is
another way of suppressing political differences. There are then no universal, all-embracing, value-
neutral, timeless, or eternal a priori norms that inhibit some purified and objective existential space
where they await access by the learned justices of the peace. There is no absolute convergence point to
human reason. Every norm is simply the outcome of a particular power struggle . Its inscription always follows the
contingency of the crisis event. That is why no universalizing system of law can ever account for or suppress the particular calls for justice that directly challenge moral authority. When Philip
Bobbitt advocates for a more tactical and strategic approach to law, he is not calling for some neorealist revival.13 He is simply asking for liberal market states to be more efficient and
effective in response to those problems than they now are. 7. Liberal wars move beyond states of exception to take place within a
condition of unending emergency. Walter Benjamin warned that while exceptional moments of crisis were politically dangerous, the effective normalization of rule
could be far more sinister. With order finally restored, what previously shattered the boundaries of acceptability

now begins to reside in the undetected fabric of the everyday. Ours is no longer a time of exception. What marks the
contemporary period is terrifyingly normal. While there is no law without enforcement, no enforceability exists without intimate relation to crisis.14
Every law and every decision respond to an exceptional moment. It brings force to bear on what breaks from the norm to rework the
basis of normality anew. There is therefore no pure theory of the exception, no absolute break from law. Law reserves the right to transgress its own foundations, where it encounters
continuously emerging crises, untimely moments that require varying degrees of intensity in the subsequent deployment of force. It is no surprise, then, to find that states of exception are all
too frequent once the broad sweep of liberal history is considered. Not only do crises permit the reworking of the boundaries of existence, but the fluctuating shift from (dis)ordered sovereign
recovery (external modes of capture) to progressive security governance (internal modes of interventionism) defines the liberal encounter. 8. Liberal wars depoliticize within the remit of
humanitarian discourses and practices. Even when some epiphenomenal tension exists, the inclusive image of thought invoked by liberals immediately internalizes the order of battle. This is
what
no mere sovereign affair. Liberal war has always been immeasurably greater than the juridical problem of order.15 It has always pertained to the life and death of the species. Since

is at stake in contemporary theaters of war is the “West’s ability to contain and manage international
poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means,” each
crisis of global circulation marks out a terrain of “global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the
modalities of life itself.”16 With depoliticization therefore occurring when life is primed for its own betterment—that is, within humanitarian discourses and practices—it is possible to offer an
alternative reflection on Giorgio Agamben’s bare life. Agamben’s notion of bare life draws on sovereign terms of engagement. Life becomes exposed on account of its abandonment from law.

The biopolitical encounter in contrast denies political quality, as the “bare essentials” for species
survival take precedence . No longer reduced bare in a juridical sense of the term, life is stripped bare since its maladjusted qualities impede productive salvation. Hence,
while this life is equally assumed to be without meaningful political quality— though in this instance because of some dangerous lack of fulfillment— allowing the body’s restitution displaces

Liberal wars are intimately bound to the

exceptional politics by the no less imperial and no less politically charged bare activity of species survival. 9.

active production of political subjectivities . Security discourses have always had a particular affinity
with political authenticity, which sets out who we are as people and defines what we are to become. It
places limits around what it means to think and act politically. The liberal approach to security implies that political authenticity is not
simply tied to those identity formations defined by epiphenomenal tension. It breaks free of such static demarcations. The liberal subject instead is constructed

by living freely through contingent threats to insecurities around its existence. Within a broader and more positive continuum of
endangerment, liberal subjectivity has never been in crises, if we understand those to be the disruptions to

fixed modes of being. Born of the paradoxically anxious conditions of its ongoing emergence, the liberal
subject is the subject of crises. It lives and breathes through the continual disruption to its own static modes of recovery. While this subject has gone through many key
changes, the disrupted subject is made real today on account of its need to be resilient. Again this does not infer a static state of ontological affairs. Resilient life must uphold the principles of
 danger is
adaptation and change held true by our radically interconnected age. Since what is dangerous today is seen as integral to the very life processes that sustain liberal life,

directly related to the radically contingent outcomes on which the vitality of existence is said to depend.
With liberal societies having to endure what has been termed the “permanent emergency of its own emergence,”17 our predisposition to the unknowable contingency of every new
encounter—the event of contemporary life itself—appears at the same time to be the source of our potential richness and the beginning of all our despairs. 10. Liberal wars are profoundly
ontotheological. When Barack Obama reconciled the problem of “evil” with the “imperfections of man” in his Nobel laureate speech, he reaffirmed the Kantian belief that evil is very much
part of this world—not that people are born of evil but that unnecessary suffering results from bad or dangerous political judgment.18 Offering then a humanistic reworking of the story of the
fall—one in which life, always assumed to be perpetually guilty of its own (un)making, must continually seek its own recovery from the ashes of its own potential demise— we uncover why
sovereignty is not the transcendental frame of reference for liberal power.19 Kant-inspired liberalism preaches universality but accepts that the universal is beyond the realms of lived
experience. It preaches the international virtues of law but accepts that one’s encounter with moral law has to be contingent. It insists on life’s autonomy even though it offers an account of
freedom in which humankind has fallen to the guilt of its own unmaking. It promotes human progress yet puts forward the thesis of infinite regress to highlight humankind’s imperfections.
And it claims that all life has an original predisposition to good and a simultaneous propensity to evil. Liberal life is forced to endure a self-imposed temporal purgatory— life is always guilty of
the moral deficiencies of the past, yet incapable of exorcising them in the future. These imperfections are actually demanded so that the antiproductive body can prove its moral and political
worth. While this morally deficient default setting invariably moves us beyond any metaphysical attachment to the humanitarian principle (humanity is after all too flawed to become the
unifying principle) and while the power of law alone is insufficient to overcome the imperfections of modern people, faith is restored by something in the order of the divine economy of life
itself. One could argue here that contemporary liberalism is in itself facing terminal crises. Whatever one’s opinions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is clear that Western populations
have no taste for new forms of military interventionism and lasting engagement in the global borderlands. And whether one considers a resurgent socialism in Latin America, the emergence of
new forms of capitalization by alternative geopolitical powers, the changing nature of religious movements that have used democratic procedures to their own political advantage, or the
liberalism appears to be operating
continuation of indigenous struggles that challenge any hold over the terms rights, freedom, democracy, and justice,

within a declining zone of political influence. As recent events in Libya illustrate, however, we must be wary of signaling
its lasting demise. Throughout modern history, liberalism has proved to be resilient when faced with its own crises of legitimacy and authority. Its claims to
violence in particular seem to enjoy a remarkable ability to regenerate as the memory of indigenous
subjugation and depoliticization fades with time. One could be more cynical and suggest that given the only things that liberal
regimes in Western zones of affluence can materially export today are war and violence , rather than write of its demise, the liberal war thesis
is only beginning to enter a new retrenching chapter, which will resonate for a considerable time. Each of the essays in this Against the Day section looks to the new political contours of the
liberal war thesis. Highlighting in particular the spatial, subjective, and ontotheological stakes, Mark Duffield, Julian Reid, and Michael Dillon provide new critical reflections on the nature of
twentyfirst-century biopolitical warfare. Around 2000, it was clear that our understanding of conflict needed to move beyond the highly reductionist statecentric frames that dominated
conventional discourse. While the authors here take up this challenge, the principal message—that life will continue to fight to retain its radical otherness—continues to escape liberal
theorists and practitioners. In spite of the professed desire to make the world habitable, the political as a function of difference still appears to require resolution. Offering, then, a Kantian
War has
notion of enmity through which all life is seen to be guilty of its own (un)making, the wholesale transformation of societies continues to be justified without exception.

therefore become increasingly normalized , such that it either is waged in the name of planetary peace or

does not even register without our critical referents. Until we appreciate that the world consists of subjects who are
willing to defend their radical otherness, peaceful cohabitation will continue to elude us.
Alternative
 Alternative – 2NC
The alternative is a framework question – if we win the debating about the AFFs
assumptions is important, then we win as long as we prove them wrong
Critique of securitization reclaims the political – highlighting contradictions unlocks
potentialities and forges political praxis – immanent critique is comparatively better
than their impulse to act without reflection
Nunes, IR Lecturer @ University of York, 12
(João, Reclaiming the political : emancipation and critique in security studies. Security Dialogue, Vol.43
(No.4). pp. 345-361)
It thus becomes clear that critique for emancipatory approaches is not the questioning of security in the general sense. Predominant ideas and practices of security
do deserve close scrutiny and, very often, fierce opposition. However ,
by emphasizing the insecurities affecting people, this
approach moves beyond the idea that ‘security’ is merely a representation of reality or a modality for
dealing with issues . Rather, critique sets out to impact upon political actors’ perceptions and actions, so as
to pave the way for a reconstruction of security along more open, inclusive and democratic lines .
Critique strives to redress immediate insecurities and to work towards the long-term objective of a life
less determined by unwanted and unnecessary constraints. This leads to a third idea: the reconstructive
agenda of emancipatory approaches is supported by a practical strategy for transformation. Booth has advanced the term ‘emancipatory realism’ (2007: 6) to
denote the grounding of security as emancipation upon the real condition of insecurity and its wish to transform it. In fact, emancipatory realism draws on
immanent critique as an analytical method and a political strategy. Immanent critique was one of the stepping-
stones of Frankfurt School Critical Theory: for Max Horkheimer, philosophy should highlight contradictions and
unlock potentialities in current arrangements . In his words, ‘[p]hilosophy confronts the existent, in its historical context, with the claim
of its conceptual principles, in order to criticize the relation between the two and thus transcend them’ (1974 [1947]: 182). Immanent critique

follows logically from the acknowledgment of the insecurities of individuals and groups, and plays into
the normative and political agenda of security as emancipation . This is because the immanent method is at
once analytical and connected to political praxis: it ‘engages with the core commitments of particular
discourses, ideologies or institutional arrangements on their own terms, in the process locating
possibilities for radical change within a particular existing order’ (McDonald, 2012: 60). The internal contradictions of
predominant security arrangements, made visible by immanent critique , constitute fault-lines where
alternative visions of security can be fostered. Immanent critique also entails the identification of
transformative possibilities in the form of ideas and actors in particular contexts that have the potential
to contribute to change. Taken together, these three ideas – insecurity as the starting point; theory as praxis; and immanent critique – constitute a
promising steppingstone for reclaiming the political in CSS. They show that it is possible to avoid the closure inherent in pessimistic views of security: security is
ultimately about the experiences of real people in real places, and predominant versions of security can be challenged and eventually transformed. These ideas also
By drawing attention towards insecurities,
help to reclaim the political by strengthening the capacity of CSS to recognize political complexity.
emancipatory approaches add further layers in which the political construction of security can be
scrutinized – thus allowing for a better understanding of the meanings attached to security in particular
historical and social contexts. Finally, these ideas can help reclaim the political in CSS by bringing this field
closer to practical transformative politics . Immanent critique allows for judgments to be made in
relation to existing understandings and practices of security, in light of how they respond to the needs of the most vulnerable.
Simultaneously, the identification of contradictions and potentialities offers concrete steps for change.

Evaluate links before the alternative – if we win their method locks in oppressive
hierarchies, you vote NEG because the plan is unethical - it’s better to try and fail with
a new approach than to stick with one you know guarantees violence
 Rejection Solves – 2NC
Rejection solves – American imperialism is sustained through discursive commitment
to its virtues – refusing those values with complete indifference unravels the moral
justification for constant intervention
Pan and Turner, senior lecturer in IR @ Deakin University and Research Fellow in IPE @ University of
Manchester, 16
(Chengxig and Oliver, “Neoconservatism as discourse: Virtue, power and US foreign policy,” European
Journal of International Relations, pp. 1-26)
The discourses of American virtue and power, for all their apparent tendencies of mutual estrangement,
also contain tendencies of mutual attraction in which the rules of the constitution of neoconservatism
are on display. To begin with, the discourses of virtue have some built-in appreciation of the importance
of power. Indeed, power is welded to virtue not so much by ‘neoconservatives’ as by a logic of discursive
persuasion within the discourses of virtue. We suggest that this persuasion operates on two levels:
power as an entitlement and power as a necessity. At the first level, the imagery of a virtuous US
evokes a sense of entitlement to power and international leadership. A powerful myth in the US has
always been that, as a virtuous people, Americans have a special role or ‘manifest destiny’ towards
global spiritual rebirth (Hunt, 2009: 20). In consequence, the US has a natural right to power, leadership
and even hegemony. Jefferson’s vision of an all-encompassing ‘Empire of Liberty’ is a pertinent example
of how an image of virtue entails its claim to both power and expansion. As already suggested,
America’s assumed entitlement to power was first practised in colonists’ encounters with Native
Americans. Acting on assumptions of moral and civilisational superiority, President James Monroe
proclaimed that to civilise the ‘savage’ Native Americans, ‘the control of the United States over them
should be complete and undisputed’ (Monroe, 1896: 46). These discourses did not merely describe the
world; they constructed the reality of the world by justifying a foreign policy that hinged on both
American virtue and power. The effective exercise of power helped not only to consolidate a discourse
of American power, but also to reinforce discourses of American virtue. As James William Gibson (1989:
14) put it: ‘“American” technological and logistic superiority in warfare became culturally transmitted as
signs of cultural-moral superiority. … Might made right and each victory recharged the culture and
justified expansion’. In this process, thanks to domestic American ‘institutional ingenuity’, such as a
federal system and the separations of power, the US was able to become ‘both republic and empire’
(Kane, 2008: 36), thus helping mitigate the political tension between virtue and power. As well as an
entitlement, power has also been conceived as necessary for the survival of American virtue in an
otherwise evil world. The construction of a virtuous America necessarily implies the existence of evil
and/or barbarism. As Gaddis argues, the Founding Fathers considered the US a ‘beachhead for liberty’ in
a world of tyranny (quoted in Fettweis, 2009: 508). Under such Manichean circumstances, there is no
alternative to power to safeguard American virtue, and only through power can the struggle against evil
be won. In Theodore Roosevelt’s words, ‘the barbarian will yield only to force’ (LaFeber, 1994: 226), in
keeping with his famous mantra of ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. American power and primacy,
then, rather than the antithesis of American virtue, is almost its precondition. Virtue and power became
one in Podhoretz’s (1982) plea that ‘the survival not only of the United States but of free institutions
everywhere in the world depends on a resurgence of American power’, as much as in Franklin
Roosevelt’s belief in the ‘righteous might of the American people’ (quoted in Doenecke and Stoler, 2005:
197). Such discursive convergence between virtue and power, though not always recognised as
‘neoconservative’ in American history, has long provided the logic for contemporary ‘neocons’ to insist,
for instance, that ‘[t]he best democracy program ever invented is the U.S. Army’ (Michael Ledeen,
quoted in Bacevich, 2005: 85). This embrace of military power in the name of global democracy
promotion is therefore not a recent neoconservative deviation from the American liberal ideal, but an
essential part of its discursive logic. Robert Kagan unpacks this seductive logic when he asks: if the
United States is founded on universal principles, how can Americans practice amoral indifference when
those principles are under siege around the world? And if they do profess indifference, how can they
manage to avoid the implication that their principles are not, in fact, universal? (Quoted in Bacevich,
2005: 87) If the discourses of virtue contain a clamour for power, American discourses of power also
frequently arrive laden with convictions of American virtue. In Luce’s (1999 [1941]: 170) words, ‘our
vision of America as a world power [must] include a passionate devotion to great American ideals’. Of
course, a distinctively realist discourse of power in the US often cautions against moralism and
neoconservatism (see Williams, 2005), but the frequent need for such cautions testifies to the enduring
appeal for the US to use power in the name of virtue, ‘in search of monsters to destroy’, as John Quincy
Adams famously put it. From the outset, many Americans see US power as more than material
capabilities ‘out there’. It is often deemed a form of power that is soft and benevolent, imbued with a
universal moral purpose and responsibility. The Spanish–American War of 1898, for example, was
branded a conflict for ‘high purpose’ that gave ‘ten millions of the human race’ a ‘new birth of freedom’
(Republican Party, 1900). Such a discursive fusion of American power with ‘freedom’ (a favourite
embodiment of American virtue) continued with remarkable similarity in Woodrow Wilson’s explanation
of America’s occupation of Cuba — ‘Not for annexation but to provide the helpless colony with the
opportunity for freedom’ (quoted in Stelzer, 2004: 9) — and, of course, in George W. Bush’s (2003)
address on the Iraq War: ‘We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and restore control of
that country to its own people’. Enduring recourse to the language of virtue and freedom is essential not
only in justifying the use of military power, but also to sustaining the latter’s very existence. As Kristol
and Kagan (1996: 28) warn: ‘without a sense of mission, they [Americans] will seek deeper and deeper
cuts in the defense and foreign affairs budgets and gradually decimate the tools of US hegemony’.
They argue that without the justification and purpose of virtue, American power would be less likely to
survive, hence the need for virtue to remain integral to Americans’ understanding of power. Thus,
despite the widely perceived polarisation between its realist and liberal traditions, the US can rarely be
accurately conceived as either a pure realist power or a stay-at-home liberal exemplar. The ‘mutual
attraction’ logic of the discourses of virtue and power suggests that it more often than not needs to be
both, so that ‘the power of American virtue ensure[s] the virtuousness of American power’, and vice
versa (Kane, 2008: 15). Rather than running independently or parallel to one another, they become one
in a neoconservative synthesis that encompasses both moral clarity and military strength. This is not to
say that neoconservatism is America’s destiny, or that Americans are an inherently ‘neocon nation’, as
Kagan (2008a) would have us believe. However, by unreflectively representing itself through the
discourses of virtue and power, the US lends itself to a syncretic neoconservative persuasion. At this
juncture, it is worth clarifying that neoconservatism is not an automatic, ahistorical construct of two
similarly ahistorical, deterministic discourses. With limitations of space, we cannot fully examine the
historical, disjointed and sometimes contingent nature of the discursive constitutions of
neoconservatism. Yet, it is worth noting that these discourses are formed in history and discursively
shaped by events such as the two world wars, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Soviet
Union and 9/11. Such historic events, as well as broad social trends, commonly stir debates about
American virtue and power, and how they should relate to one another in the face of changing
modernities at home and abroad. In turn, those debates may give rise to different discursive
arrangements of virtue and power, resulting in the formulation of different variants of neoconservatism,
realism and liberalism.1 For example, to ‘neocons’ such as Podhoretz (1996), the Cold War victory and
the disappearance of the Soviet ‘evil empire’, by vindicating America’s purpose and moral strength,
would paradoxically see the end of the neoconservative project and the ascendancy of realism. At the
same time, however, these historical changes emboldened some ‘second-generation neocons’ to agitate
for ‘nothing short of universal dominion’ (Krauthammer, 1991: 13). In short, when opportunities for, and
threats to, American virtue and power are conceived differently, virtue and power may in some
circumstances part their discursive company. Alternatively, they may result in different permutations or
discursive fusions of neoconservatism, some of which may appear more extreme, others more
expedient and circumspect, and still others possibly even unrecognisable as neoconservatism as we
commonly know it. Yet, insofar as the dominant American self-imagination continues to be co-
constructed by the discourses of virtue and power, the variations may mean changes in the specific
discursive formations of neoconservatism (such as from the so-called first-generation and second-
generation neoconservatisms), rather than the end of neoconservatism per se. A case in point is the de-
emphasis of military power and the call for a ‘restoration of America’s moral authority’ after the Iraq
War (Obama, 2009: 119). US foreign policy can deviate from the particular version of neoconservatism
— what Jacob Heilbrunn (2009: 219) calls ‘neoconservatism on steroids’ — championed by the
architects of that conflict. However, such deviation, as exemplified by Fukuyama’s (2007) critique of
‘Bushite’ neoconservative foreign policy, does not mean that we are necessarily entering a post-
neoconservatism period. A close inspection of Fukuyama’s (2007) After the Neocons, for instance,
reveals that he has not defected from neoconservatism altogether, but rather its excessive variant. His
call for a ‘realistic Wilsonianism’ can be seen as a return to what might be called ‘baseline
neoconservatism’. Being ‘good at reading “the moment”’ (Jacques, 2006), Fukuyama may be a
microcosm of where the US is today.
 Nonviolence – 2NC
Nonviolence solves - voting NEG aligns ideology with anti-imperialist movements –
impact is war – noncooperation is key
Martin, professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, 12
(Brian, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 47, No. 38, 22 September 2012, pp. 82-89)
Introduction The United States today has the world's most powerful military and until recently a successful economic system. The US government is able to impose its

will on other peoples of the world far more than any other government. Some see this as a good thing, because of US traditions and
practices of representative government and free markets. Others, though, see a dark side to US military, political and economic power -
they see it as a modern form of imperialism , of unprecedented scope. Both these views can be justified. The "US Empire" has very different qualities from the
"US Republic". Our aim here is not to argue about the nature of imperialism or whether the US fits one definition or another of imperialism or empire, but rather to look at challenges to forms
of domination associated with the exploitative US military, economic and political power. That US culture includes a number of good qualities is without doubt, some of them being inspirations
for resistance movements around the world. The US struggles for the abolition of slavery, universal voting rights, and civil rights for African-Americans are all important parts of the global
struggle against injustice. Authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr. are still essential reading for resisters globally. Three key features of US imperialism are military
force, capitalism and ideology. The US military is by far the most powerful in the world, built on nearly half of the world's military spending. Nuclear weapons provide dominance in the global
balance of nuclear terror. Advanced chemical, biological, and conventional explosives with sophisticated delivery systems are the most lethal ones available. US non-lethal weapons and
surveillance technologies are tools of social control. From the point of view of US political and military leaders, US military power provides necessary protection of democratic freedoms and
the "free world." From the point of view of many people in the rest of the world, though, US military force is used to protect US interests, including via attacks on countries (Blum 1995, 2000;
Buchheit 2008), support for client regimes and protection of US foreign investment. Then there is the system of capitalism, infiltrating every facet of daily life through jobs and the market, with
privatisation and corporate globalisation extending the reign of private property and market relations. Key elements in exploitative capitalism include sophisticated and brutal marketing,
monopolistic dominance, private control over public goods such as water, trade controls under the guise of "agreements", slave-like working conditions, obedient consumers, anti-union
policies and relentless attacks against cooperative forms of organising social life (Jawara and Kwa 2003; Klein 2001, 2007). Another key element of US imperialism is ideology: the standard
package of beliefs about the way the world should be organised. This includes acceptance of hierarchy in the workplace with the system of owners, managers and workers, the encouragement
of consumerism and associated acquisitiveness, the acceptance of social inequality as inevitable, and the belief in the necessity of armed force to protect against threats from internal and
external enemies. These beliefs are most powerfully inculcated through experiences in day-to-day life and are reinforced through the style and content of mass media and Hollywood
productions. This has been so successful that many consumers of products from exploitative workplaces hardly reflect on their place in the chain of profit making, pollution, and modern
Military dominance, capitalism and hegemonic beliefs are three of the key elements for understanding the place
slavery.

of the United States in the world. Should this package be labelled "imperialism"? There are debates about the relevance of the concept of imperialism and also about whether
it is appropriate to call the United States an empire (Ferguson 2004; Hobsbawm 2008; Todd 2003; Wallerstein 2003). We are not too concerned about the exact label - for our purpose, it
would be satisfactory to refer to a US-centred system with imperial elements. Our interest is in ways to challenge the exploitation and repression associated with this system. We focus here on
US imperialism, with the understanding that it is only one of the problems in the world, though one of the more serious and influential. There are other systems of imperialism. Some are
subordinate to US imperialism, for example Australian government domination of small countries in the south Pacific. Others are independent of or antagonistic to US imperialism, such as
Chinese government support for other regimes. Then there are systems of domination other than imperialism. Male collective domination of women is a separate system of oppression, with
some links to imperialism but not reducible to it: patriarchy and imperialism are each worthy of attention. Likewise, racial domination, subordination of people with disabilities, and
environmental exploitation - to name a few - can be considered systems of oppression that are important in their own right and separate from imperialism, though with some overlaps,
synergies and tensions. We focus on US imperialism in part because of its significant impact on people's lives and in part to emphasise that people's resistance is potentially one of the greatest
challenges to it. Much of the attention to US imperialism has come from left-wing critics who assume that armed struggle is, in the end, the only way to make an effective challenge. There is a
growing amount of evidence to question this assumption. People's resistance to imperialism occurs at every point, from workers'
struggles to antiwar activism. The question is, what are the most effective ways both to resist the imperial system and to lay the foundation for a just and equal society?
We argue here that the most potent challenges to US imperialism have involved people's direct action , without using

physical violence. This is commonly called nonviolent action, civil resistance, or people power . It involves much more than the usual image of mass rallies or well-

choreographed civil disobedience. A host of techniques and strategies can be used, including non-cooperation and setting up alternative
political and economic systems. We first give a general rationale for unarmed popular resistance to US imperialism. We then provide six case studies, each showcasing the successes achieved
The key to each of these cases is mobilising mass popular support, hence
through the use of nonviolent direct action.

undermining the military, economic and ideological pillars of imperialism . Several of these case studies involve challenges to
US military power and the economic exploitation enabled by this military power. All of them represent a serious dent in beliefs about the inevitability and benevolence of US imperialism. The
rationale for popular unarmed resistance The US military has an overwhelming superiority in the use of force, including weapons, intelligence and training in how to kill (Grossman 1995).
There is little disagreement that armed resistance to US forces is, at best, an exercise in asymmetric warfare: the raw strength of the US military machinery makes direct engagement a losing
proposition. The most effective guerrilla struggles have been ones that rely upon political mobilisation to gain popular support for liberation, so that military assaults create greater support for
the resistance - often as a result of civilian casualties (Joseph 1981; Meyer 2012). Even strong adherents of people's war or foco-ism agree that mass mobilization is at the focal point of any
winning strategy (Ely 2009). Armed struggle has almost always been carried out in more limited arenas of struggle, with smaller numbers of adherents taking part in the struggle (Howes 2010).
Firstly, direct participation in armed engagement is usually predominantly led by fit young men, with women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities less well represented. Secondly,
armed resistance provides a rationale for overbearing US military reaction; armed struggle often solidifies popular support for US policy, especially in the United States. Members of the public
interpret challenges more according to their most extreme methods than by their formal goals (Abrahms 2006). Rulers highlight violence by opponents to justify their own massive use of force
The practice of unarmed political
against all opposition, including peaceful activists. Thirdly, armed struggle involves engaging with empire at its strongest point.

resistance (Sharp 1973) avoids direct engagement with the US armed forces. Instead, it acts in ways that make US
imperial violence counterproductive , by spotlighting the injustices of empire. Focusing on the
overwhelming armed superiority that the imperial power holds, and on the inequities inherent in imperial rule, this
practice seeks to turn the empire's violence against itself . There are several reasons why strategic nonviolent action is ideal for making such a
challenge. Firstly, it allows and requires widespread participation: everyone can join a boycott. Secondly, it does not threaten the lives of civilians or soldiers and hence has greater potential for
winning them over. Thirdly, when violence is used against peaceful protesters, this often causes public outrage and ends up being counterproductive for the attackers (Martin 2007). Erica
Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011) carried out an analysis of 323 struggles against repressive regimes or occupations or in favour of secession, systematically comparing armed and
civil resistance is far more likely to be successful in achieving the aims of the
unarmed campaigns. Their conclusion is that

struggle, and that success using civil resistance occurs just as frequently against the most repressive
regimes as against softer opponents. The clear message is that nonviolent action can be effective against even the harshest opponents. Among the anti-dictator,
self-determination and anti-occupation struggles they studied, Chenoweth and Stephan did not separate out those that were anti-imperialist, but it is reasonable to expect that their
conclusions apply to this subset of their cases. Chenoweth and Stephan also found that successful people power movements are more likely to result in stable democratic governments,
whereas successful armed struggle is more likely to lead to repressive successor states (see also Johnstad 2010). In summary, civil resistance is more likely to succeed and, when it does
succeed, creates better prospects for a stable free society. The keys are widespread mobilisation and campaigners' strategic acumen. (See also Karatnycky and Ackerman 2005; Stephan and
Chenoweth 2008). Some critics argue that violence should remain in the activist toolkit and that to remain nonviolent is play into the hands of the state (Gelderloos 2007). Others, like Meyers
(2000: 1), argue that nonviolence "encourages violence by the state and corporations." However, these arguments have been limited to a critique of rigid and absolute pacifism, and have been
shown to be narrow at best in their understanding of the diverse meanings and uses of unarmed action (Meyer 2008). They give insufficient consideration to the greater capacity for popular
mobilisation using nonviolent methods (Martin 2008) and cannot account for the findings that civil resistance has been more successful than armed struggle against repressive opponents.
Here we describe six examples of popular nonviolent resistance to elements of the US imperial system. In each of these, military, economic and/or ideological aspects of the system have been
restrained and transformed. These and other such struggles have made US imperialism ever more susceptible to popular challenge. The Vietnam War Complaints about US war policy in
Vietnam started in the early 1960s. As the 1960s went on, university campuses became crucibles of anti-war protest, as students came to protest an unjust war, campus bureaucracy, and a
graduation that would make male students eligible for the draft. Because conscription loomed over male students' futures and provided an avenue for direct resistance to war on an individual
level, much student activism was concerned with the draft. Beginning in 1964, students began burning their draft cards as acts of defiance (DeBenedetti and Chatfield 1990; Hall 2012; Howlett
and Lieberman 2008). Manuals were written about how to avoid the draft (Shapiro and Striker 1970). In late July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the number of young men to be
drafted per month to go from 17,000 to 35,000, and on 31 August signed a law making it a crime to burn a draft card. The movement included well known people. Senator Edward M. Kennedy
objected to the Selective Service Act of 1967 and argued against the bill in support of conscientious objectors. In 1967, the world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to be
conscripted into the US military, based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. He was arrested, found guilty on draft evasion charges, and stripped of his boxing title. He
was not imprisoned, but did not fight again for nearly four years while his appeal worked its way up to the Supreme Court, where it was successful. In 1969, presidents of student bodies at 253
universities wrote to the White House to say that they personally planned to refuse induction into the military, joining the half million others who would do so during the course of the war
(Baskir and Strauss 1978: 68). It became clear that the war had less and less support. The younger generation convinced their parents that this war could not be justified. Many were willing to
go to jail or into exile in order not to be part of the "war machinery". No candidate for President and few candidates for Congress could be elected if they did not oppose the war in Vietnam.
The mass mobilizations, nonviolent civil disobediences, and moratoria to end the war grew in size and breadth over the course of a few short years. The Pentagon could have continued its
military campaigns against Vietnam and Southeast Asia for many years beyond 1973, ever-escalating its use of weaponry. Though Vietnamese military action undoubtedly played a significant
role, one key strategy signalled their own approach to winning the fight against the giant US military apparatus: popular engagement with both US soldiers and the essentially nonviolent US
anti-war movement (Dellinger 1975, Hunt 1999). As the war intensified, so did resistance tactics - including property destruction through breaking into draft offices and burning or pouring
blood on files relating to the war. A few US anti-war activists, most famously the Weather Underground, initiated a series of late-night bombings of symbols of the war, to challenge its
continuation and "bring the war home." While some credit these actions with causing greater government repression and discrediting or limiting the movement, even the staunchest of former
Weather members and supporters understand that the need now, as before, is to "take the greatest care to respect life and minimize violence as we struggle to end violence." (Gilbert 2012).
The caricatures of crazy, gun-toting revolutionaries, like those of anti-war activists spitting on returning veterans, have largely been the fabrication of reactionary, pro-war media. The truth
about the Vietnam War is that it became politically untenable to continue sending troops, getting more and more body-bags in return. Domestic opposition to US policy in Vietnam made it
impossible for the US government to continue its imperial war. Nuclear aspirations During World War II, the US military poured enormous resources into developing nuclear weapons and then
in August 1945 used them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even though the military rationale for this was questionable (Alperovitz 1966). Nuclear weapons have held a
central place in US military preparedness ever since; nuclear power has developed along similar lines, with similar aspirations for the proliferation of weaponry (Bunn 2007). During the cold
war, the Soviet government developed and tested nuclear weapons. The nuclear arms race led to the production and deployment of tens of thousands of weapons on both sides, plus
hundreds by several other countries. On numerous occasions, US political and military leaders contemplated using nuclear weapons, for example during the Vietnam war and the 1962 Cuban
missile crisis, but always held back (Burr and Kimball 2006; Kauzlarich and Kramer, 1998). The usual explanation is nuclear deterrence: US decision-makers were afraid of the Soviet nuclear
arsenal and vice versa. But there is another, complementary, explanation: popular deterrence. Lawrence Wittner (1993-2003), in his comprehensive history of protest movements against
nuclear weapons, draws on internal government documents to show that the key factor restraining nuclear developments has been mobilised popular opinion. When there was little protest,
nuclear arms races accelerated; when there was much vocal protest, arms races abated. More generally, government leaders know that there would be a huge public backlash should they use
nuclear weapons. The annual protest actions on Hiroshima Day reveal how long-lasting popular concern can be. There are numerous actions against nuclear weapons production, transport
and deployment, for example Ploughshares direct actions in which protesters are willing to risk months or years in prison to make a moral statement (Herngren 1993), the women's action at
the US nuclear base at Greenham Common in Britain (Hopkins 1984) and the campaign against the neutron bomb (Auger 1966; Wittner 2009). The many actions and protests against US
nuclear missiles in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s were crucial for creating a strong opposition against these deployments. These sorts of actions have, over the decades,
comprehensively stigmatised nuclear weapons in the public eye. Furthermore, the direct action campaigns of the late 1970s largely curtailed the US nuclear power industry, through use of
affinity group-based activities and intensive trainings in nonviolence (Epstein 1993; Sheehan and Bachman 2009). US military strategists have tried to overcome these public attitudes by
protesters and the public
developing miniature nuclear devices that are scarcely more powerful than the largest conventional weapons such as fuel-air explosives. But

continue to see a qualitative difference between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons and power, and
continue to call for resistance (Schell 2007). This has been a crucial factor in restraining the use of the
nuclear arsenal in support of US imperialism. Indonesia and East Timor Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1979) in The Political Economy of Human
Rights, their classic analysis of US imperialism, described a vast system of authoritarian client states that they characterised as sub-fascism. The US government propped up numerous Third
World regimes that kept their populations subjugated. One of the key client states was Indonesia. In 1965, left-wing president Sukarno was overthrown in a military operation involving
genocidal violence throughout Indonesia (Cribb 1990), in what Chomsky and Herman called "constructive terror" because it served the interests of US capital and foreign policy. The new
president, Suharto, maintained a repressive rule that was receptive to international capital and US military operations. In 1974, after the collapse of Portugal's fascist government, popular
movements in former Portuguese colonies asserted their independence. One of them was in East Timor, located on half an island in the Indonesian archipelago. In 1975, Indonesian military
forces invaded and occupied East Timor (Budiardjo and Liong 1984). Chomsky and Herman gave this case special attention. Fretilin, the leading movement in East Timor, used arms to resist the
occupation but, in the face of superior Indonesian forces, soon was forced to retreat to mountain areas. The armed struggle had a disastrous effect on the population through killings and
starvation, with a significant proportion of the civilian population dying over the next decade. In the late 1980s, Fretilin reconsidered its strategies, pulled back from armed attack and shifted
to civilian resistance in urban areas (Fukuda 2000). The turning point was on 12 November 1991, when Indonesian troops opened fire on peaceful protesters in a funeral march in the capital
Dili, just as they were entering Santa Cruz cemetery. The massacre was witnessed and recorded by Western journalists. They managed to smuggle photos and videos out of the country. The
story of the massacre galvanised the international support movement for East Timorese independence, laying the groundwork for independence a decade later (Nevins 2005). The Indonesian
military's killing of hundreds of peaceful protesters in Dili did more for the independence movement than a decade of armed struggle. That is because the armed phase of the resistance was
seen internationally as a struggle between two competing armed groups, despite the huge disproportion in their capabilities and in lives lost. The Dili massacre, on the other hand, aroused
international condemnation precisely because, as a case of violence versus nonviolence, it was seen as unjust. The struggle in East Timor was a prelude to political change in Indonesia in 1998.
Following the economic downturn of the Asian financial crisis, popular protest surged. When soldiers used force to crack down on student protesters, this only increased the level of protest.
There was some rioting, but there was no armed challenge to the government. The popular pressure was enough to cause Suharto to resign, and free elections followed (Aspinall et al. 1999).
Civil resistance was the key to transforming Indonesia from a "subfascist" client state to a society with a more vibrant
and independent public sphere. The invasion of Iraq In 2002, President George W. Bush and other US political leaders began publicly preparing the ground for an invasion of Iraq. The reasons
were complex and included Saddam Hussein's defiance of US government demands, Iraqi oil and the strategic role of Iraq in the Middle East. Bush, US Vice President Dick Cheney and others
manipulated public opinion by falsely claiming that the Iraqi government possessed or was developing nuclear weapons and that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and was responsible
for the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Rampton and Stauber 2003). In response to these war preparations, people around the world protested, including in massive demonstrations on 15 February
2003, with perhaps 10 million participants worldwide, the largest antiwar protest in history. Despite the massive opposition, the invasion proceeded the next month. Many peace activists think
that because the invasion went ahead, therefore they failed and protest was not enough. This perspective has an element of truth, but it misses something important: the protests put a
serious constraint on US imperial designs and indeed were a major setback for US neoliberal-military visions for the future. It also misses that fact that, like with the Vietnam war and the anti-
nuclear movements, it is official US government policy to deny that demonstrations make any difference - though Presidential memoirs and declassified documents prove that numbers are
always counted and large demonstrations have always prevented greater warfare (Wittner 1993-2003). The protests both triggered and reflected massive disillusionment with US plans for
military conquest.Following the invasion, public support for US policy declined around the world (Pew Global Attitudes Project
2003). It is important to remember that in 2003, the US government was still basking in international sympathy and support in the aftermath of 9/11: the US was seen as the victim of an
outrageous attack. As a consequence, the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan had widespread popular support, despite the fact that most of the 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia and
that the bombing of Afghanistan caused significant civilian casualties (Herold 2012). If the invasion of Iraq had proceeded with little popular
opposition, it is quite possible that Bush, Cheney and crew might have proceeded to further invasions, such as of Syria and
Iran. Indeed, for years there has been a concerted effort to demonise the Iranian government and lay the groundwork for undermining it. The huge protests against the invasion

of Iraq gave a taste of the likely response to further imperial adventures in the Middle East. Resistance to colonialism in
Puerto Rico One of the earliest US acts of empire-building took place in 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American war, when US Marines landed on the shores of San Juan, Puerto Rico to take
over this island territory which had just signed a treaty of autonomy with Spain less than six months earlier. Though acts of the US Congress ratified Puerto Rico as a part of the "mainland,"
there was always resistance to US colonialism, often linked to anti-military mobilisation (Lopez 1999). The Nationalist Party's first major campaigns involved support for a successful strike by
sugarcane workers in 1934 and a nonviolent parade in 1937, fired upon by Puerto Rican police and members of the National Guard in what came to be known as the Ponce Massacre. Student
strikes at the University of Puerto Rico and non-cooperation campaigns amongst the general population have met every major attempt of US corporate privatization of Puerto Rican services or
suggestion of increased imperial control, from the late 1960s to the current period (Nieves Falcón 2002). Since the United Nations Decolonization Committee first recognized Puerto Rico as a
non-self-governing territory in 1972, nonviolent demonstrations involving the Puerto Rican population (including Puerto Ricans living in the US) have been a common feature of periodic calls
for referendum, votes, and United Nations reviews - including several widespread anti-electoral stay-at-home efforts (FAE, 1989; Torres and Velázquez, 1998). The struggle for an end to US
Navy occupation and use of the Puerto Rican islands of Culebra (1939-1975) and Vieques (1941-2003) became symbolic of the larger struggle against colonialism and imperialism. From the
human blockades staged by scores of displaced fishermen to permanent encampments built on land controlled by the Navy, to massive occupation of the Navy firing range, the decades of
protest included some of the most creative uses of civilian resistance techniques. As a growing number of Puerto Ricans demonstrated willingness to put their bodies in the way of the bomb
testing and navy operations, more intentional and intensified nonviolence trainings were conducted. By 2003, the campaign had spanned across the entire spectrum of Puerto Rican social,
religious, and political society (from left to right and beyond), and the US Navy was forced into a complete withdrawal, amidst on-going calls for US government clean-up and reparations. The
Vieques demilitarization campaign won its demands shortly following and in the context of another anti-imperialist victory within the larger Puerto Rican movement. Widespread educational
efforts and door-to-door organizing characterized more than ten years of work on behalf of fourteen jailed Puerto Ricans widely recognized internationally as political prisoners. Despite the
fact that the political prisoners were part of armed clandestine organizations growing out of the militancy of the 1970s - many of whom, upon capture in the early 1980s, declared themselves
combatant prisoners of war - the movement for their freedom grew closer in form and ideology to nonviolent campaigns as the campaign developed. Well-planned civil disobedience actions in
front of the White House and Pentagon throughout the 1990s drew on solidarity and collaboration with the War Resisters League and Catholic Worker movements, and educational efforts and
study tours (held in conjunction with the Vieques campaign) were formulated with the assistance of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR 1992). By 1999, a dozen Nobel recipients had signed
on to the Call for Amnesty, including Coretta Scott King and Archbishop Desmond Tutu - both mentioned by President Clinton when he announced a clemency offer to many of the Puerto
Rican prisoners later that same year. The struggle for an end of US colonial rule over Puerto Rico is not yet complete. But the US government desires for unchecked economic exploitation
matched with unlimited political containment and repression has not been possible; US military plans, using Puerto Rico as a base of aggression against the rest of Latin American, have been
largely rolled back. With coordinated mass mobilizations across many decades and diverse issues, the Puerto Rican anti-imperial momentum has been carried forward utilizing many tactics,
the vast majority of which were unarmed. In addition, as the decolonization movements have gained increasing strength reaching greater numbers of the Puerto Rican population, the explicit
use of nonviolent actions and strategies has grown. Moving from one victory to the next, many Puerto Rican leaders originally convinced of the necessity of armed struggle have now shifted
emphasis, recognizing the efficacy of nonviolence against empire (Meyer 1999; WRI 2002). The not-just Arab Spring The government in Washington boasts it actively promotes democracy and
freedom across the globe. But democracy export is only for "unfriendly" regimes. Little or no government support is offered for most opposition movements in "friendly" dictatorships like
Chile (in the 1980s), Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Most Western governments are ready to support democracy only when friendly or acceptable groups are voted into power; others are labelled
"terrorists" even when they win free and fair elections, such as in Algeria in 1990 and Palestine in 2006 (Johansen 2011). Like the unarmed civilian resistance movement in Chile which forced
out dictator Augusto Pinochet (installed after the Central Intelligence Agency-supported 1973 coup against democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende), resistance to empire
does not always deal blows directly against the US structures themselves, but against the puppets, clients, and allies of the US government who do its bidding in strategic regions. This is part of
the background to the so-called Arab Spring (Cook 2012; Gardner 2011; Sowers and Toensing 2012). In late 2010 and early 2011, when ordinary people in Western Sahara, Sudan Somalia,
Cameroon, Nigeria, Cote D'Ivoire, the Gambia, and most famously Tunisia and Egypt escalated demonstrations, strikes and vigils against their own governments, they were well aware that this
was also against the elite in Washington, which for years had supported these regimes with money, military equipment, intelligence, and beneficial trade deals (Aswany 2011; Filiu 2011;

Western powers, and the US government especially, had long spoken about the "need for stability," a code for
Gardner 2011).

supporting dictatorships . In 2009, the Obama administration pumped in $1.7 billion as annual support to the Mubarak regime. As the anti-Mubarak protests gained
increasing sympathy inside Egypt and worldwide, elements within the US administration gradually moderated their support for the regime (Zunes 2012). The origins of these uprisings were
genuinely domestic and based on experiences from Arab history. It is no secret that academics and activists from Western states, the US included, had contributed with nonviolence trainings,
making manuals available in Arabic, and giving seminars on nonviolent strategies. But the claims from left and right of the political spectrum that these revolutions took place because of or
based upon these trainings and seminars is an Eurocentric/Orientalist notion which implies no agency, consciousness, initiative or leadership on the parts of the Tunisians, Egyptians, and
others involved. Recruitment, mobilisation and organising were vital to the success of these movements. With modern means of communication they were able to get sufficient protesters
together to make it hard for the state to ignore them. They had the patience, strength and courage to stay in the streets for weeks. The value of avoiding armed resistance, even when
protesters were attacked with brutal force, was understood and followed so every act of violence from the police or military generated greater support for the opposition. After some time,
quite dramatically, even parts of police and the military changed their loyalties for a time, and joined the opposition. The protesters were able to bring their countries to near standstills,
forcing Washington policy makers to do an about-face and scramble for newly-approved figureheads to help manage their neoliberal agendas. Conclusion US military technology and training
are so advanced that armed resistance is increasingly futile. Despite significant training, years of study and experience, and untold human, fiscal, and natural resources devoted to armed
struggle, armed movements have been repeatedly unable to provide a sustained challenge to US military and economic power. For 70 years, Communist states and insurgent armed
movements did prove to be a powerful short-term challenge to world capitalism. By 1989 however, as Eastern European communist governments collapsed in a process where people power
played a major role (Randle 1991), how to best take on the centres of imperial power became a central strategic question.To tackle an opponent on its
strongest point is illogical at best; foco-ist attempts to inspire mass participation have met with less than
enthusiastic response. Urban guerrillas stand as little chance of ongoing success against missiles, global surveillance, drones and soldiers prepared for battle with the latest
training techniques as did cavalry making a charge against machine guns in World War I. Furthermore, armed opposition provides an easy pretext for counter-attack, and often leads to
increased militarism throughout society. An alternative way to challenge US imperial might is through civil resistance: masses of people using a variety of techniques of protest, non-

The six case studies illustrate how popular unarmed resistance can help restrain arms
cooperation and intervention.

races , challenge authoritarian client states , undermine the political capacity for military interventions
and change political agendas . These case studies do not prove that US imperial power can be contained by unarmed resistance, but do give an indication that

people power offers a potent challenge whose full capacity has yet to be fully developed. Ideally, an
alternative to imperialism should reflect, through its methods and processes , the goal to be achieved,
namely a more democratic, egalitarian, and just society, without domination and exploitation. Far more than armed struggle, popular
unarmed resistance, with techniques such as rallies, occupations, boycotts and setting up parallel social institutions, enables widespread participation and internal democracy. Interestingly,
civil resistance can be considered to be an unarmed version of guerrilla warfare (Boserup and Mack 1974). Rather than using arms, the challengers use a variety of other techniques that
undermine the will and power of the opponent (Burrowes 1996).
 Grassroots Engagement – 2NC
The only worthwhile engagement is with China is between American and Chinese
workers for the purpose of labor solidarity to overturn neoliberalism
Hart-Landsberg, Econ Prof @ Lewis and Clark College, 10
(Martin, “The U.S. Economy and China: Capitalism, Class, and Crisis” Monthly Review 61(9): p. online)
Finally, there is little to be gained by demanding that China play by the accepted rules of capitalist
competition. The Chinese government has already transformed the country’s economy along capitalist
lines. Industrial production is primarily undertaken by private firms (most of it organized by
transnational corporations) and motivated by the pursuit of profit. Labor markets are already highly
“flexible.” Workers are largely unorganized (or unrepresented, even when an official union exists) and
have minimal protection, either on the job or off. Given the nature of capitalist competition in the
United States, this demand can only mean that U.S. capital seeks more advantages from producing in
China. These types of policies encourage U.S. workers to believe that the root cause of existing problems
lies not in the functioning of the U.S. economic system, or capitalism more generally, but rather in the
behavior of a foreign government. Unfortunately, too many workers in the United States are already too
quick to blame other workers—Chinese and/or Latin American—for their declining living and working
conditions. An appropriate response to the current crisis will, by necessity, have to challenge
capitalism and its imperatives. One target has to be capital mobility. We have seen the destructive
consequences of capital’s freedom of movement. We therefore have to find ways to strengthen those
movements that seek to dismantle free trade agreements and the broader global institutions, such as
the WTO and IMF, which underpin them. Another target has to be production for profit. Capital’s
pursuit of profit has created an economy that is not responsive to our needs, whether as individual
workers or as members of broader communities. In terms of the former, we have to intensify our efforts
to achieve a radical transformation of labor laws, thereby helping to ensure living wages and the right to
unionize. In terms of the latter, we have to build support for the demand that all who want to work
should be employed in the production of needed goods and services (as determined democratically by
communities). This will require, among other things, not only transforming and strengthening the public
sector so that it is capable of regulating private (production, investment, and trade) decisions, but also
planning, organizing, and directly engaging in production itself. This, in turn, means that we must fight to
reverse the long-term decline in tax payments by the wealthy and corporations, and work to strengthen
the ability of public sector unions to represent and defend the broader public interest. Significantly,
these general demands are ones that increasingly motivate the activism of growing numbers of
Chinese workers. This should not be a surprise since, as I have tried to demonstrate, they are
oppressed by the very same system that oppresses U.S. workers. If we can successfully incorporate
that understanding into our own organizing, we are likely to find ourselves with valuable allies.
Affirmative Answers
Framework/Perm
 Framework – 2AC
Only evaluate arguments based off the plan text-any alternatives are self serving and
regressive which makes 2AC predictability and offense impossible-evaluate the
consequences of the AFF and alternative because it is the only wholistic way to
evaluate prior questions.

Their framework/alternative arguments distract from institutional analysis – that

undermines their sustainability and effectiveness – that’s net offence
Welsh, Comm Prof @ Appalachia State University, 13
(Scott, “The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy: How Deliberative Ideals Undermine Democratic Politics,”
pg. 81)
Certeau does not, however, reduce political contest to the "micro" politics of everyday life. Just because he recognizes that the power
of the weak resides in the effective authority of the strong does not mean that we can rest assured
that everything will simply work out in the end. Jodi Dean finds a naive faith of this kind in those who
imagine that accelerated and broadly dispersed conversations, made possible by the Internet and
social media, might ultimately deliver free and equal democratic deliberation. So in response, she argues that
such efforts "to displace polities onto the activities of everyday or ordinary people" draw attention
away from the still very real need for political challengers to build support, win elections, and
ultimately exercise authority themselves . While Certeau is partly responsible for drawing recent scholarly attention to the
politics of everyday life, he never- theless deliberately avoids falling into the trap Dean identifies. Instead, as important as the daily "capture of
speech" is to democratic politics, we must not, Ceneau argues, attribute a magical democratic power to vernacular voices. Speech, he
is not an adequate "substitute" for "work." S2 Certeau's distinction between speech and work, however, may be
clarifies,
either more or less than meets the eye. It signals, rather, the necessity of a sustained capture of speech , which is
only possible upon winning a measure of institutional authority . Hence, Certeau rejects the "jubilation" of
intellectuals "who wish to collapse a system of authority without preparing for its replacement." 83
Instead, meaningful change requires forms of symbolic resistance that plan an eventual campaign for and
a reintegration with state authority . He writes, "If it is not organized, if it is not inscribed, ewen as a strategy, within the network
of national forces in order to effec'ively change a system, (al demand Of conscience Will be neither reformist nor revolutionary," but Will be '
'extinguished.'

Evaluate the benefits of the plan before our epistemology – knowledge is always
contextual and fractured which means specificity is the only way to verify the 1AC’s
truth claims – focusing debate on our assumptions in the abstract is intellectual hubris
and makes managing violence and environmental destruction impossible – turns the k
Lake, Poli Sci Prof @ University of California San Diego, 14
(David, “Theory is dead, long live theory: The end of the Great Debates and the rise of eclecticism in
International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 19(3) 567–587,
https://quote.ucsd.edu/lake/files/2014/02/Lake-EJIR.pdf)
*ableism corrected
In the end, I prefer progress within paradigms rather than war between paradigms, especially as the latter would
be inconclusive . The human condition is precarious. This is still the age of thermonuclear weapons.
Globalization continues to disrupt lives as countries realign their economies on the basis of comparative advantage, production chains are
disaggregated and wrapped around the globe, and financial crises in one country reverberate around the planet in minutes. Transnational
terrorism threatens to turn otherwise local disputes into global conflicts, and leave everyone everywhere feeling
unsafe. And all the while, anthropomorphicchange transforms the global climate with potentially catastrophic
consequences. Under these circumstances, we as a society need all the help we can get . There is no monopoly
on knowledge . And there is no guarantee that any one kind of knowledge generated and understood
within any one epistemology or ontology is always and everywhere more useful than another. To
assert otherwise is an act of supreme intellectual hubris. This is not a plea to let a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand
intellectual flowers bloom. Scholars working in cloistered isolation are not likely to produce great insights, especially when the social problems
besetting us today are of such magnitude. All knowledge must be disciplined. That is, knowledge must be shared by and with others if it is to
count as knowledge. Positivists and post-positivists are each working hard to improve and clarify the standards of knowledge within their
respective paradigms. This is an important turn for both, as it will facilitate progress within each even as it raises barriers to exchange across
approaches. So, if not a thousand flowers, it is perhaps better for teams of scholars to tend a small number of separate gardens, grow what
they can best, and share when possible with the others and, especially, the broader societies of which they are part. Do not mourn the end of
the Great Debates and especially the paradigm
theory, if by theory we mean the Great Debates in International Relations. Too often,
wars became contests over the truth status of assumptions . Declarations that ‘I am a realist’ or
pronouncements that ‘As a liberal, I predict …’ were statements of a near quasi-religious faith, not
conclusions that followed from a falsifiable theory with stronger empirical support. Likewise, assertions
that positivism or post-positivism is a better approach to understanding world politics are similarly
[misleading] blinding. The Great Debates were too often academic in the worst sense of that term. Mid-level
theory flourished in the interstices of these debates for decades and now, with the waning of the
paradigm wars, is coming into its own within the field. I regard this as an entirely positive development. We may be
witnessing the demise of a particular kind of grand theory , but theory — in the plural — lives. Long may they
reign.
 Case First – 2AC
Case disproves the critique – the alts normative ethical vision for IR is unattainable
and gets coopted. Managing insecurity through the plan is better than the alt – AND
only evaluate link args if they win alt solvency
Chandler, IR Prof @ University of Westminster, 13
(David, “No emancipatory alternative, no critical security studies,” Critical Studies on Security, 2013 Vol.
1, No. 1, 46–63)
We would argue that the removal of the prefix ‘critical’ would also be useful to distinguish security study based on critique of the world as it
exists from normative theorising based on the world as we would like it to be. As long as we keep the ‘critical’ nomenclature, we are affirming
that government and international policy-making can be understood and critiqued against the goal of emancipating the non-Western Other.
Judging policy-making and policy outcomes, on the basis of this imputed goal , may provide ‘critical’ theorists
with endless possibilities to demonstrate their normative standpoints but it does little to develop
academic and political understandings of the world we live in. In fact, no greater straw [person] man could
have been imagined, than the ability to become ‘critical’ on the basis of debates around the claim that
the West was now capable of undertaking emancipatory policy missions . Today, as we witness a
narrowing of transformative aspirations on behalf of Western policy elites, in a reaction against the
‘hubris’ of the claims of the 1990s (Mayall and Soares de Oliveira 2012) and a slimmed down approach to
sustainable, ‘hybrid’ peacebuilding, CSS has again renewed its relationship with the policy sphere. Some
academics and policy-makers now have a united front that rather than placing emancipation at the
heart of policy-making it should be ‘local knowledge’ and ‘local demands’. The double irony of the birth and
death of CSS is not only that CSS has come full circle – from its liberal teleological universalist and
emancipatory claims , in the 1990s, to its discourses of limits and flatter ontologies , highlighting differences and
pluralities in the 2010s – but that this ‘critical’ approach to security has also mirrored and mimicked the policy
discourses of leading Western powers. As policy-makers now look for excuses to explain the failures of the promise of liberal
interventionism, critical security theorists are on hand to salve Western consciences with analyses of non-
linearity , complexity and human and non-human assemblages. It appears that the world cannot be transformed
after all. We cannot end conflict or insecurity , merely attempt to manage them . Once critique becomes anti-
critique (Noys 2011) and emancipatory alternatives are seen to be merely expressions of liberal hubris , the
appendage of ‘critical’ for arguments that discount the possibility of transforming the world and stake
no claims which are unamenable to power or distinct from dominant philosophical understandings is
highly problematic . Let us study security, its discourses and its practices, by all means but please let us not
pretend that study is somehow the same as critique.
 A2: Agency/Plan Doesn’t Happen/Won’t Be a Policymaker

Saying we aren’t policy makers is self-fulfilling and a cop out---it is only true if you
accept their totalizing critique that eschews pursuing concrete policies of
accountability for individual thinking
Chandler, Westminster IR senior lecturer, 2004
(David, “Building Global Civil Society `From Below'?”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies,
March, 33.2, SAGE)

The celebration of global civil society ‘from the bottom up’ would appear to be based less on any emergence of new political forces at the global level than the
desire of Western activists and commentators to justify their avoidance of accountability to any collective source of political community or elected authority. The
focus on the shared interests with those ‘excluded’, or the ‘imagined’ global community of radical
activists, is a way of legitimising the avoidance of any accountability to those still ‘trapped inside’—the
electorate.113 The struggle for individual ethical and political autonomy, the claim for the recognition of
separate ‘political spaces’ and for the ‘incommunicability’ of political causes, demonstrates the limits of
the radical claims for the normative project of global civil society ‘from below’. The rejection of the
formal political sphere, as a way of mediating between the individual and the social, leaves political
struggles isolated from any shared framework of meaning or from any formal processes of
democratic accountability. This article should not be read as a defence of some nostalgic vision of the past, neither does it assert that the key
problem with radical global civil society approaches is their rejection of formal engagement in existing political institutions and practices. The point being
made here is that the rejection of state-based processes, which force the individual to engage with and
account for the views of other members of society, is a reflection of a broader problem—an
unwillingness to engage in political contestation. Advocates of global civil society ‘from below’ would
rather hide behind the views of someone else, legitimising their views as the prior moral claims of others—the courtly advocates—or
putting themselves in harm’s way and leading by inarticulate example, rather than engaging in a public debate. The
unwillingness of radical activists to engage with their own society reflects the attenuation of political community rather than its expansion. Regardless of

the effectiveness of radical lobbying and calls for recognition, this rejection of social engagement can
only further legitimise the narrowing of the political sphere to a small circle of unaccountable elites. If
the only alternative to the political ‘game’ is to threaten to ‘take our ball home’—the anti-politics of
rejectionism—the powers that be can sleep peacefully in their beds.

Awareness and ethical individual orientations don’t do anything-overhwelming

empirics
Pugh, Newcastle Postcolonial Geographer, 2010
(Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State”,
Globalizations, March-June, ebsco)
In this polemical piece I have just been talking about how, following an ethos of radicalism as withdrawal from the state, some from the radical Left
were incapable of being able to respond to the new stakes of radical politics. In particular, they were not
found at the state, where the passive public turned to resolve the crisis. I will now go on to examine how
in recent years significant parts of the radical Left have also tended to prioritise raising awareness of our
ethical responsibilities, over capturing state power. I am going to say that it is important to create this awareness. However, in an effort
to draw attention to the stakes of politics as we find them now, post-2008, I will also point out that we should not place too much faith in this approach alone.
Against the backdrop of what I have just been saying, it is important to remember that while much attention is focused upon President Obama, in many other parts
of the world the Right and fundamentalism are gaining strength through capturing state power. The perception that the USA has changed is accompanied by a sense
However, the European Elections of 2009, the largest trans-national vote in history,
of relief among many radicals.
heralded a continent-wide shift to the Right (and far Right) in many places—in Austria, Belgium,
Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Estonia,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portgual, Slovenia, Spain, Romania, as just some examples (Wall Street Journal,
2009). Despite Obama’s election and a near depression, neo-liberalism continues to be implemented through a world spanning apparatus of governmental and
intergovernmental organisations, think tanks and trans-national corporations (Massey, 2009; Castree, 2009). The power of the Right in countries like Iran, while
Albertazzi et al. (2009) draw attention to how a disconnected Left is leaving
checked, remains unchallenged by the Left.
power in the hands of the Right in many other countries nationally, like Italy for example. Reflecting upon
contemporary radical politics, the British Labour politician Clare Short (2009, p. 67) concludes: In the fog of the future, I see a rise of fascistic movements . . . I am
afraid it will all get nastier before we see a rise in generous, radical politics, but I suspect that history is about to speed up in front of our eyes and all who oppose
the radicalisation of fear, ethnic hatred, racialism and division have to be ready to create a new movement that contains the solutions to the monumental historical
problems we currently face. So, the stakes of politics are clear. The Right is on the rise. Neo-liberal ideology is still dominant. How is the Left responding to these
stakes? I have already discussed how some from the radical Left are placing too much faith in civil society organisations that seek to withdraw from the state. I will
Post-crisis, the increasing
now turn to how others have too much faith in the power of raising awareness of our ethical responsibilities.
popularity of David Chandler’s (2004, 2007, 2009a, 2009b) work reflects the sense that radicals too
often celebrate the ethical individual as a radical force, at the expense of wider representational
programmes for change. His central argument is that this leaves radicals impotent . Chandler (2009a, p. 78–79) says
that many radicals argue that there is nothing passive or conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and
anti-globalisation protests, the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I
these new forms of protest are highly individualised and personal ones— there is no attempt to
disagree;

build a social or collective movement . It appears that theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and
bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of awareness, rather than
attempts to engage politically with society. In one way, Chandler’s reflective insight here is not particularly unique. Many others also
seem to think that radicals today are too isolated and disengaged (Martin, 2009).5 Neither is it particularly original to say that there is too much emphasis upon
creativity and spontaneity (what Richard Sennett, 2004, calls ‘social jazz’), and not enough upon representational politics. Indeed, go to many radical blogs and you
find radicals themselves constantly complaining about how it has become too easy to sign up to ethical web petitions, email complaints, join a variety of ethical
causes, without actually developing the political programmes themselves that matter. So it is not Chandler’s point about radicals being disengaged from
instrumental politics that concerns me here. It is his related point—that there has been a flight into ethics, away from political accountability and responsibility that
I find intriguing. Personal statements of ethical awareness have become particularly important within radical politics today. It is therefore interesting to note, as I
will now discuss, that we have been here before. In his earlier writings Karl Marx (1982) criticised the German Idealists for retreating into ethics, instead of seizing
Unwilling to express their self-interests politically through capturing
the institutions of power that mattered for themselves.
power, the Idealists would rather make statements about their ethical awareness. Such idealism, along
with an unwillingness to be held accountable for political power, often goes hand in hand. For Marx, it is
necessary to feel the weight, but also the responsibility of power. Chandler argues that, just as when the early Marx critiqued German Idealism, we should now be
drawing attention to the pitfalls of the flights to ethics today. He says: In the case of the German bourgeoisie, Marx concludes that it is their weakness and
fragmentation, squeezed between the remnants of the ancien re´gime and the developing industrial proletariat, which explains their ideological flight into values.
Rather than take on political responsibility for overthrowing the old order, the German bourgeoisie denied their specific interests and idealised progress in the
otherworldly terms of abstract philosophy, recoiling from the consequences of their liberal aspirations in practice. (Chandle r, 2007, p. 717) Today we are witnessing
Fragmented, many radicals retreat into abstract ethical slogans like
a renewed interest in ethics (Laı¨di, 1998; Badiou, 2002).
‘another world is possible’, ‘global human rights’, or ‘making poverty history’. As discussed above, we are also of course
seeing the return of Kant’s cosmopolitanism. While I think we should not attack the ethical turn for its values, as many of these around environmental issues and
human rights are admirable, it is equally important to say that the turn to ethics seems to reflect a certain lack of
willingness to seize power and be held accountable to it. For the flight to ethics, as it often plays out in radical politics today, seems
to be accompanied by scepticism toward representational politics. Continuing with this theme for a moment, Slavoj Zizek (2008) also sheds some more light upon
why ethics (when compared to representational politics) has become so important to the Left in recent years. He says that many of us (he is of course
writing for the Left) feel that we are unable to make a real difference through representational politics on a larger scale, when it comes
to the big political problems of life. Zizek (2008, p. 453) talks of this feeling that ‘we cannot ever predict the consequences of our acts’; that nothing we do will
‘guarantee that the overall outcome of our interactions will be satisfactory’. And he is right to make this point. Today, our geographical imaginations are dominated
by a broader sense of chaos and Global Complexity (Urry, 2003; Stengers, 2005). These ways of thinking, deep in the psyche of many radicals on the Left may be one
other reason why so many have retreated into ethics. When we do not really believe that we can change the world through developing fine detailed instruments,
capturing the state, or predictive models, we are naturally more hesitant. It is better to try and raise ethical awareness instead. Whereas in the past power was
something to be won and treasured, something radicals could use to implement a collective ideology, today, with the risk posed by representation in fragmented
societies, top-down power often becomes a hazard, even an embarrassment, for many on the Left (Laı¨di, 1998). This is, as I have already discussed, where the Right
Putting what I have just said another way, there is a need
and neo-liberal ideologues are seizing the opportunity of the moment.
to be clear, perhaps more so in these interdisciplinary times—ethics and politics (particularly
representational politics) are different. Of course they are related. You cannot do politics without an ethical perspective. But my point
here is that the Right and neo-liberal ideologues will not simply go away if the Left adopt or raise
awareness of alternative ethical lifestyles. The Right are willing to capture state power, particularly at
this time when the state is increasingly powerful. When we compare the concerted political programme of neo-liberalism, first developed by
Reagan, Thatcher, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, multi-national banks, and the G20, as just some of many examples, ethical individuals across the world offer
some counter-resistance. But
the 2008 crisis, and the response of protests like the Alternative G20, demonstrated
how weak ethical resistance is in the face of the institutions of the neo-liberal economy. Another reason
for this is because the ethical individual contributes so much to neo-liberal societies themselves. To explain
how, we must briefly step back. The new social movements of previous decades have, in general, been effectively recuperated by the existing system of capital, by
satisfying them in a way that neutralised their subversive potential. This is how capital has maintained its hegemonic position in post-Fordist societies. Luc Boltanski
They say the new
and Eve Chiapello (2005) explain how capitalists have worked with, rather than against, the characteristics of new social movements.
social movements desire for autonomy, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical exigency,
and the search for authenticity, were important in developing post-Fordism. These replaced the hierarchical framework
of the Fordist period with new forms of networked control. And so, in this way, we see that the relationship between new social movements and capital has been
productive. In turn, and this is the important point I want to make about the present moment, clearly the stakes of radical politics have now changed once more. As
Without the
discussed earlier, it would now seem that post-Fordist society is actually more hierarchical and controllable than many previously thought.
neoliberal state, and the public’s subordination to its actions, it would not now exist in anything like its
present form. Our subordination to the state has stopped a post-crisis implosion of neo-liberalism. And
this is of course where one of the central characteristics of the ethical individual has been so productive.
Endemic individualism, so dominant in liberal societies, has been recuperated by the ethical individual
who is unwilling to seize the state. So the salient point here is that the ethical individual is reflective of
the conservative forces in society today.
 Perm – 2AC
Permutation solves – Pan concedes China and the US may go to war – its all contextual
Pan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University, 12
(Chengxin, “China Watching and Contemporary Geopolitics of Fear and Fantasy,”
http://elgarblog.com/2012/12/12/china-watching-and-contemporary-geopolitics-of-fear-and-fantasy-
by-chengxin-pan/)
There is nothing wrong with feeling anxious about China . After all, the Chinese themselves may have been
caught by surprise by the speed of their country’s ascendancy on the world stage, and many are grappling with the
meanings and implications of China’s new global role. Meanwhile, aware of unease felt by neighbouring countries, the Chinese leadership has tried to reassure the
rest of the world that China’s rise will be peaceful. Yet, this ‘reassurance’ policy has done little to ease that fear, for the latter has become interwoven with the
This fear-induced China knowledge, now
expert knowledge of the ‘China threat’ offered by some quarters of the China watching community.
compounded by the widespread anxiety about impending US/Western decline, has in part given impetus to the
Obama administration’s ‘Rebalancing’ to Asia. Although the US constantly denies that this strategic
move aims at containing China, its unease with Beijing’s perceived growing clout has been at least one
of its main driving forces . Interestingly but not surprisingly, despite their belonging to the opposite sides of the American partisan politics, Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton and former Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney both share this latent fear about America’s future as well as China’s ambition.
Neither wants to see the widely anticipated Asian (Pacific) Century become a Chinese, rather than American, century. Herein lies America’s new geopolitics of fear,
following the decade-long ‘War on Terror’. But as the focus of this new geopolitical game turns to China and the Asia Pacific at large, fear is not the only emotion at
play. Fantasy, as it may be called, is another, and perhaps even more enduring, emotional underpinning of the US’s Asia Pacific strategy. From the American
business community’s ‘Bridge the Pacific’ campaign in the late nineteenth century through Ronald Reagan’s ‘America is a Pacific nation’ declaration to Bill Clinton’s
‘Pacific Century’ statement, the Pacific has long been envisaged as an American Lake and a new frontier in the US’s ‘manifest destiny’ to lead the world from
darkness to light. At the heart of Oriental darkness has been China, marked by its backward civilisation, despotic political system, and deplorable human rights
records. Therefore, the dream of transforming the Oriental Other in American image has run deeply through US China-engagement policy ever since the
missionaries’ ‘Christ for China’ campaign, business executives’ ‘Oil for the lamps of China’ slogan, and more recently, the ‘constructive engagement’ policies of the
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Considering that modern China studies and, by extension, contemporary China watching, owe much to the
missionary writings on China, it is clear that fantasy or a desire to see ‘a huge country with an ancient civilization transforming herself into a modern, democratic,
Christian nation and following the lead of the United States’ has been part and parcel of contemporary China research agenda, although t he terminology has been
changed from religious conversion of China to economic and institutional integration as well as normative socialisation. Despite the intellectual,
commercial and strategic efforts of engaging China, America’s China dream, now as then, proves to be
elusive. As a result, a large part of the China fantasy has turned into disillusionment and even fear. In this context, the US’s ‘Rebalancing’ to Asia
and its hedging against China represent a new and more sophisticated manifestation of the geopolitics
of fear and fantasy . While no doubt many China observers are busy observing the fascinating new
geopolitical manoeuvring in the Asia Pacific, they could do well to also critically observe the role of
their China knowledge – strongly coloured by fear and fantasy – in the making of this strategic shift that
is likely to profoundly shape global politics in the coming decades.
Impact
 Engagement Good
Foreign policy elites in China have diverse viewpoints but realists gain the upper hand
with decesionmakers when the US attempts to contain them – the plan’s shift is more
likely to produce non-interstate war outcomes by giving pragmatic harmonists more
influence – our research methods are verified by Chinese party scholarship
Lynch, IR Prof @ USC, 9
(Daniel, “Chinese Thinking on the Future of International Relations: Realism as the Ti, Rationalism as the
Yong?,” The China Quarterly / Volume 197 / March 2009, pp 87-107)
Thomas J. Christensen, Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross call in the concluding section of their 2006 edited volume on New Directions in the Study of China's Foreign Policy for scholars
and policy makers to try harder “to see China and the world the way that influential Chinese see China and the world.”23 Inquiring into how Chinese political and academic elites view the
future of international relations is precisely the purpose of this article. It seeks to answer a series of questions that the literature reviewed above does not typically address.24 ***[To
Footnote]*** 24My methodology was straightforward: I sampled and analysed 63 book chapters and journal articles published between
2001 and 2007 in which the authors (mostly PRC academics specializing in international r elations and political science, but also some Party

and state political figures) explicitly and substantively address the international future, even if only in subsections. The
articles were published in leading social science or neibu policy journals. The books were published by leading academic and policy presses. The sampling procedure was simple: I included
nearly every article or chapter from such sources that I could locate at the Universities Services Centre library in Hong Kong, and in Beijing and Shanghai bookshops during research trips in
December 2006, July–August 2007 and May 2008. I also accessed certain journals on the internet. To triangulate and check for errors, I supplemented the reading with 26 interviews at PRC
government foreign-policy think tanks and at a leading university. Only a representative subset of the writings and interviews can be discussed in the limited space of this article. ***[END
FOOTNOTE]***First, how far and in what directions has Chinese thinking on the international future actually moved since the mid-1990s? The answer is not immediately apparent from the
English-language literature. With some exceptions, this literature relies on a rather crude dichotomy portraying China as
having moved from dangerously Realist and potentially threatening to the US-dominated world order (a
“power-transition” logic) in the 1990s to well-integrated, co-operative, firmly enmeshed in networks and regimes, and generally Neoliberal in world view in the 2000s: an easy glide

along a two-dimensional scale from prickly and potentially disruptive to friendly and firmly supportive of
the status quo.25 This is just the image Zheng Bijian sought to cultivate with his “peaceful rise” and then “peaceful development” slogans. But when Chinese elites think ahead to the day the
PRC's material power is much greater than it is now, does their Realism remain repressed? Or does it suddenly reappear? And to the extent it does reappear, specifically what kind of Realism is
it: dangerous and threatening to the global order, or moderate and defensive? Similarly, to the extent CCP elites genuinely imagine a co-operative international future, even as PRC material
power increases, exactly how far in the direction of co-operation are they willing to go? Shirk reports optimistic Chinese who envisage Sino-US relations becoming as close as UK–US relations.

But just how common or uncommon are such views and what are the implications for the actual evolution of Chinese foreign policy? This article
addresses these questions by moving beyond the Realist-versus-Neoliberal approach and using some of the potentially more nuanced “English school” tools of analysis.26 English school
international relations theory focuses on exploring the inter-relationships among three longstanding traditions in the history of Western thinking on the subject: Realism, Rationalism and
Revolutionism. English school Realism is not so different from American (classical) Realism (see note 6), except that English school writers emphasize the obstacles a Realist world view poses to
forging workable institutions within the international society of states. “The more a thinker emphasizes sovereignty and the authority, dignity, and coherence of the state … the more he will
tend to discount a suggestion that the state is [even] a member of a wider society of states.”27 English school Rationalism is rooted squarely in the concept and possibilities of international
society. Although on the surface similar in key respects to American Neoliberal international relations theory – in particular, the belief that states prefer co-operation and absolute gains to
conflict and relative gains – Rationalism focuses on how diplomacy helps to achieve “the institutionalization of shared interest and identity amongst states, … the creation and maintenance of
shared norms, rules, and institutions.”28 The third tradition, Revolutionism (sometimes “cosmopolitanism” or “Kantianism”), suspends the assumption that states are, or should be, the core
actors in world politics and that the institution of sovereignty is unchallengeable (hence the label “revolutionary”). Revolutionism asserts “individuals, non-state organizations, and ultimately
the global population as a whole as the focus of global societal identities and arrangements.”29 It proclaims “a world society of individuals, which overrides nations or states, diminishing or
dismissing this middle link.”30 Thinking in this tradition has ranged from Kantian and Leninist formulations to the contemporary theorizing of global civil society (GCS) advocates. Rather than
viewing Realism, Rationalism and Revolutionism as completely discrete categories, English school theorists portray them as overlapping within a closed circular continuum (Figure 1).
Rationalism thus ranges from a solidarist variant that shades into Revolutionism to a pluralist variant that shades into Realism. The solidarist–pluralist debate within Rationalism – essential to
assessing the progress of Chinese thinking since the 1990s – hinges on the question of the type and extent of norms, rules, and institutions that an international society can form without
departing from the foundational rules of sovereignty and non-intervention that define it as a system of states. Pluralists think that the sovereignty/non-intervention principles restrict
international society to fairly minimal rules of coexistence. Solidarists think that international society can develop quite wide-ranging norms, rules, and institutions, covering both coexistence
issues and cooperation in pursuit of shared interests, including some scope for collective enforcement.31 The blurriness of the boundaries marking off the three traditions is also crucial. As
most Chinese writers who assess the international future oscillate between shades of Realism
explained below,

and pluralist Rationalism. Many writers assert Rationalism but belie or devolve into Realism. They are not necessarily being disingenuous (although some appear to be so);
they simply seem unable to extricate themselves from a deeply-engrained Realist world view. Even the apparently sincere Rationalists who assert the doctrine and stick to it carefully defend
They reject the notion of a solidarist world taking root in future decades
the boundary line between pluralism and solidarism.

because to them, solidarism implies all states becoming institutionally and culturally alike through
Westernization . For related reasons, no Chinese writer articulates a purely Revolutionist vision of the future (although two or three come close). Some Chinese analysts address
Revolutionist concepts, such as the growing importance of global civil society, but ultimately reject them as impractical or illegitimate. Chinese analysts are generally not comfortable with the
idea of the global. They prefer to see the world as constituted by essentially-unlike nation-state units. The only question then becomes how much friction there will be among the states. The
Wang Jisi 王缉思 – long a leading America specialist – promotes Rationalism with a palpable
dean of Peking University's School of International Studies,

sincerity in the preface to his 2006 compendium of recent articles and book chapters. Wang writes that decades of experience and research have taught him that the major purpose of
Chinese foreign policy should be to establish the conditions under which the Chinese people's security and welfare can be consolidated and improved. This purpose rules out the adventurous
foreign policies associated with power-maximizing Realism but not necessarily the still somewhat risky policies associated with moderate Realism. Yet Wang goes further and contends that
advanced forms of international co-operation are necessary in order to improve and consolidate Chinese welfare and security. “If today's world is truly a ‘new Spring and Autumn Warring
he is evidently challenging those who assert
States period,’ will our country still be able to proceed stably along the path of reform and opening?”32 Here,

that conflict between China and the United States is inevitable. Wang acknowledges the possibility of
China and the US becoming enemies – more specifically , of the US making an enemy out of China and
China then having no choice but to respond. But he notes that there are many Americans who want friendly
relations with China and that working with them to consolidate a harmonious relationship is possible. His conscience tells him this is the
wiser path to take .33 The same logic applies to China's relations with the other great powers. Wang asks: “Can we not, through rationally reflecting on international politics,
find a way to reduce the sources of friction among countries and resolve some of the disasters facing humankind?”34 Not only is the answer “yes,” according to many Chinese writers, but just

as importantly, the PRC is uniquely well-qualified to lead the world to a future state of harmony because its
strategic culture is inherently Rationalist . (The goal of establishing a “harmonious world” was first
articulated by Hu Jintao in April 2005.) “Strategic culture” refers – in Johnston's words – to “consistent and persistent
historical patterns in the way particular states (or state elites) think about the use of force for political ends.”35
Johnston found China's strategic culture to be Realist (at least from the 1360s to the 1990s). But some Chinese writers and interview subjects insist

that it has always been, for thousands of years, Rationalist. The problem is that this insistence itself often seems to reflect a strategic
rationale – raison d’État may now require defining China as an inherently harmony-seeking state. Men Honghua 门洪华, a professor at the Central Party School's International Strategy

Institute, argued in 2005 that “China's strategic culture is built upon such traditional fundamental concepts

as benevolence (ren 仁), propriety (li 礼), morality (de 德) and harmony (he 和).”36 Prior to the 19th century, Men claims, China fully implemented this culture in its interactions
with neighbouring countries through the tributary system. “Chinese people emphasized that ‘harmony is precious’ (he wei gui 和为贵) … [but only] harmony in diversity (he er bu tong 和而不
同),” a vision in which essentially distinct entities enter into interdependent relationships “to ameliorate each other's shortcomings and share each other's strengths, thereby forming a

China
harmonious world in which all within the boundaries of the four seas are brothers.” Men acknowledges that the pre-modern Chinese state occasionally resorted to violence: “

could not have abandoned the military option [in its foreign policy], but in the realm of beliefs it
certainly was vastly different from the West … [because] China opposed the blind use of force and regulated war with
morality.”37 Force was a necessary adjunct to a state policy that, in essence, sought peace. Unfortunately, this ideal state of affairs was shattered by Western and Japanese
imperialism. During the 19th and 20th centuries, “the harmony-is-precious orientation of China's strategic culture, which had persisted for many thousands of years, changed to a conflict-
the deepest infrastructural levels of
oriented culture … that sought to use armed struggle to realize national independence and unification.” But crucially, “

Chinese strategic culture – based on an embrace of universal human society (tianxia 天下) and moral
rationality – have not been completely destroyed.”38 The essential China, with 5,000 years of history, has always valued harmony, peace and
interdependence. Only the situational factors associated with Western and Japanese imperialism could have temporarily

diverted China onto a Realist path . Today, with China rising, the Chinese people can rediscover their Rationalist
roots and contribute centrally to the construction of a harmonious world. Wang Yiwei 王义桅 of Fudan University elaborates this vision by outlining three dimensions to the harmonious
world soon to come. The first is institutional harmony (zhixu hexie 秩序和谐). The regional institution-building celebrated in Neoliberal international relations theory and among diplomatic
practitioners in Europe and ASEAN, among other places, can be important for achieving peace through papering over differences, but cannot achieve genuine harmony and stability. Regional
institution-building fails to address – and even locks in – regional inequalities, both within countries and across national borders. Scholars and practitioners must develop an “integrated world
view” (shijie zhengtiguan 世界整体观) that comprehends how regions interrelate in this way and how the world's component parts all fit together. Then they will understand how some

regions exploit others, and on the basis of this new insight, learn to craft policies that will eventually reduce world inequality and ensure long-term stability.39 The second
dimension is power harmony (liliang hexie 力量和谐). Harmony among nation-states requires moving beyond the Western Realist goal of achieving (mere) peace
through maintaining a balance of power. A balance of power may give the world's leading states an enhanced sense of security, however illusory. But it fails completely to enhance the security
states must develop
of smaller or weaker countries, many of whose interests will be sacrificed in pursuit of the desired balance. In order to achieve genuine world harmony,

a deeper commitment to co-operation and to achieving all-sides-win outcomes. They must internalize
this orientation and meet its requirements with earnestness and sincerity.40 The final dimension is values harmony
(jiazhi hexie 价值和谐). Here, Wang reiterates that “harmony is precious” but only “harmony in diversity.” The problem is that achieving this dimension of
harmony “faces the challenge of [a certain party] promoting democracy to consolidate its current hegemony.”41 While states must continue in future years to promote openness and be
willing to learn from each other, they should also respect the diversity of civilizations, religions and values, and particularly the sovereign right of each country to choose its own social system
and developmental model.42 Wang Yiwei seems generally to be a pluralist Rationalist, but he also enjoys speculating on how pursuing the harmonious world as a foreign policy objective could
help China to increase its soft power relative to that of the West. “The harmonious world view [of China] surpasses the narrow ‘democratic peace’ and biased ‘clash of civilizations’ [of the
West], showing the way for an international relations of the 21st century.”43 If the concept works – if Chinese diplomacy succeeds in making it work – then China will become a cultural and
ideological world leader, having drawn upon its rich heritage to produce a new model for solving international problems superior to the models offered by the West. Notably optimistic about
this particular prospect is Li Jidong 李继东, a lecturer at the International Politics Research Centre of the PLA's Foreign Languages Institute. Li's point of departure is “how to make
Confucianism's inherent intelligence and attractiveness serve our country's development strategy and national interests.”44 The challenge is “how to contest the West's, especially America's,
‘discourse hegemony’ … The ‘Realism’ that they promote … now constitutes the mainstream of international political culture. Under the circumstances of this kind of ‘power politics’ culture,
would it be possible for China's ‘benevolent culture’ to ascend and become international political culture's mainstream?”45 Li is optimistic for three reasons. First, “when a country's national
[material] power increases, its culture naturally becomes an object of imitation.”46 This would suggest that if China's economy continues to grow rapidly, its soft power will automatically
increase. Second, even during the Cold War, when China's material power was negligible, “the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, reflecting the intelligence of the Chinese people, already
obtained widespread acclamation from international society.”47 Third, “Confucian culture has broad influence in a number of countries and regions, especially places where ethnically-Chinese
people are concentrated. We can further expand the propagation of Confucianism on the basis of these already-existing resources.”48 Some Chinese writers completely ignore the harmonious
world discourse and assert their Realism straightforwardly and unabashedly.49 In a widely-reprinted essay first published in 2006, Peking University's Pan Wei discusses seven categories of
core values present in all modern societies – seven categories that systematically interrelate in a concentric-circle pattern. At the centre is morality governing relations among individuals; at
the outer edge is morality (or its absence) governing relations among nation-states. (There is no possibility of transboundary relations among non-state entities; all individuals and corporate
groups are contained by nation-states.) The basic reality of the international realm is not “mutual interdependence” but instead an anarchy in which “the strong eat the meat of the weak.”
When a nation-state is being oppressed by more powerful nation-states, its people must clearly recognize this fact and act accordingly or else the entire seven-layered structure of values will

collapse.50 This is precisely the crisis China is currently facing. Elites are not united in patriotism against American hegemony . Some
blame China for problems in the US–China relationship and a few even go so far as to excoriate healthy Chinese patriotism as extreme
nationalism. Because the seven categories of values are interlinked in a system, the incompleteness of elite patriotism has already had

negative effects on Chinese political values. Some elites are championing the so-called “universal values” promoted by the
United States – especially democracy. But these values are not truly universal; they are only designed cynically by the hegemon to advance its geopolitical interests.51 If this corrosive process
China's
is allowed to continue, the eventual result will inevitably be China's collapse (in the same way as the former Soviet Union). The entire chain of logic is brutally straightforward:

having lost its core values began from changes in conceptions of the international realm, starting from
the assessment [in the 1980s] that a new world war could not break out and eventually developing into today's
“doctrine of integration” [the notion that China can integrate into a benign, US-centred international society]. If we seek to rebuild core social values, one effective method
would be to start from conceptions of the international and reassess our country's strategic direction, … gradually adjusting it into the direction of balancing against hegemonism.52 Other
scholars take a similarly Realist approach but write with less of a sense of crisis and with less truculence. Qinghua University's Yan Xuetong 阎学通 gently chides the Rationalists by arguing that
relative gains are, and will continue to be, more important for the Chinese people in their international dealings than absolute gains: Obviously, to advance ourselves but still steadily fall
behind other countries is inconsistent with the Chinese people's interests … The people cannot be satisfied with [merely] advancing themselves, but instead are demanding that we hasten to
close the gap with other countries. Therefore, we seek to surpass Japan [by 2020] … The interest in surpassing and the interest in expanding (tuozhan 拓展) are the interests of a rising
country.53 Unlike the deeply worried and therefore hostile Pan Wei, Yan is optimistic. He forecasts that China's comprehensive national power may come to equal that of the United States by
2040. He does not foresee the US even being in a position to choke off China's rise or to destroy its value system.54 Some authors develop forecasts of the future that begin by sounding like
pluralist Rationalism but then morph into Realism. For example, PLA scholars Luo Shou 罗授 and Wang Guifang 王桂芳, of the Military Sciences Institute Strategy Research Division, envisage
three stages to China's rise. In the first stage (the present), China will “construct a secure surrounding environment” as shown partly “by the integrity of state sovereignty and the national
territory not becoming even more split.”55 Constructing a secure surrounding environment requires maintaining or developing strategic partnerships with neighbouring countries, especially
Russia, India and even Japan, and playing an active (sometimes leading) role in such regional organizations as ASEAN and the Shanghai Co-operation Organization. China must vigorously guard
against Tibetan and Uyghur independence in this stage, and “especially try to stabilize cross-Strait relations within the ‘one China framework,’ absolutely not permitting Taiwan to split apart
from the fatherland.”56 The ultimate goal in this stage is “to construct a surrounding environment that guarantees the sustainability of China's economic growth, secures its social stability, and
affirms that its international political position will continually rise.”57 The second stage requires moving beyond the Asian region in order to “mould” (suzao 塑造) a global security
environment more beneficial to China's interests. “This is a kind of active, initiative-taking posture, chiefly exemplified by expanding our international space and realizing the unification of our
fatherland.” This stage will demand significantly greater efforts from China diplomatically. “China will no longer be just a regional great power, but will have marched into the ranks of the
world's great powers. This will require that China shoulder more responsibilities and make more contributions.” The Luo–Wang vision clearly combines elements of Rationalism (China
contributing to a global community) with Realism (Chinese power relative to that of other states increasing). “China's interests will no longer be limited to the Asia-Pacific region but will have
expanded to the world”; therefore, China must “play a suitable functional role in the world's most important strategic regions and in all important international affairs … and have a stronger
voice in what transpires.”58 With consolidation of the second stage, strategic relations between China and the United States will stabilize as the US, however reluctantly, acknowledges the
reality of Chinese power. China's relations with Europe will expand from being mostly economic in nature to jointly defending the integrity and stability of the Eurasian continent, including
through military co-operation. Territorial disputes with India, South China Sea island claimants and Japan will have been resolved through compromise. Taiwan will have been unified
“peacefully” – but here is where Luo and Wang most visibly trade Rationalism for Realism: “To uphold core national interests and guarantee national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the
peaceful rise does not rule out using military methods as an unavoidable last resort … Making the commitment to peace does not equate to abandoning the use of military force to maintain
peace, to create peace.”59 When China enters the third stage – towards the middle of the century – it will have joined the ranks of the world's supreme powers. Its primary task will then be to
“plan and operate (jinglue 经略) a new international political and economic order that can universally be accepted by international society.” The “plan and operate” stage will be the highest
level of the peaceful rise. China's national interest will have fundamentally completed the process of fusing with the global interest; that is, China will comprehensively blend into international
society while the situation and developments in other parts of the world directly impact upon China's own interests. This will require China to take a global perspective in deliberating and
planning its policy toward the outside, putting into place a clearly global strategy and carrying out strategic arrangements and deployments of a global nature.60 China will, in the third stage,
work actively to create “an international order of peaceful coexistence that the vast majority of countries – including in the Third World – can identify with.” It will “profoundly lead and guide
the international situation's direction of development, working hard to uphold the international strategic balance” and guaranteeing international stability. “Especially important is that China
will develop its discourse power within international politics, and through the dissemination of China's unique cultural values, will influence the world's discourse environment – cultivating
influence over the world's direction of development within the realm of culture and values and, as a result, obtaining universal world respect.”61 In his September 2004 Shanghai television
interview, Zheng Bijian flatly rejected images of an international future in which borders dissolve, nations lose their essential distinctiveness, and/or states yield their political dominance to
international organizations, multinational corporations and the NGOs of global civil society: I believe that in the present and for a very, very long time into the future, the human world will only
be able to take [distinct] nation-states as the basic form of organization. Even though we have all manner of international organizations; even though we have economic globalization and
regional integration; and despite the fact nations can unite together in this way and that, even yielding a portion of their sovereignty, the nation-state – this fundamental thing – will not
change. Speaking with regard to China's own national conditions, it is even less likely to change.62 Such a logic undergirds the “harmonious but distinct” formulation, whose proponents
contend it would be impossible – or at least exceedingly undesirable – for all nation-states to start becoming alike institutionally and culturally or for other types of organization to begin
assuming their functions. In the December 2002 Contemporary International Relations, Cai Tuo 蔡拓 (then of Nankai University) and Liu Zhenye 刘贞晔 (Tianjin University of Commerce) distil
six “influences on international relations” predicted by foreign specialists on global civil society in part one of a two-part article. The authors discuss, in turn, Revolutionist predictions that GCS
will, first, push international relations on to a development path leading to coherent integration63; second, create conditions for units other than states to become significant actors64; third,
“smash the inside-the-state/outside-the-state political boundary” while “dissolving state rights and powers”65; fourth, democratize the international realm through increasing the participation
of new actors in global policy making66; fifth, “undermine the international realm's special characteristic of anarchy” by “pushing international politics onto a developmental path of rule-by-
law-ization”67; and finally, as a result of all of the foregoing, usher international relations into a new post-Machiavellian era in which “world politics will march in the direction of good politics
(shan de zhengzhi 善的政治) and ethical values will start to return to world politics.”68 So rich and detailed is the literature review that at the end of part one, the reader is convinced Cai and
Liu are Revolutionists highly sympathetic to the GCS agenda and its vision of a cosmopolitan world future. But this conclusion is called sharply into question by the approach the authors take in
part two, which appears in the January 2003 Contemporary International Relations. Here, Cai and Liu concentrate on explaining four key deficiencies in GCS that will prevent it from playing the
expansive and transformative roles predicted by foreign scholars and activists. First, GCS organizations can only become influential in issue-areas ignored by states. Once states decide to focus
on an issue-area, they quickly and easily brush GCS organizations aside.69 Second, NGOs suffer from a legitimacy deficit in the world outside the West – something which cannot (generally) be
said of states. (Many states are legitimated effectively through nationalism.) After NGOs become large and institutionalized, they often appear indistinguishable from any other organization
pursuing interests and advantages. This undercuts their claim to being uniquely altruistic.70 Third, GCS activities are distributed unevenly, with most of the powerful NGOs locating their
headquarters in the West. Already “quite a few NGOs even go so far as to expend great energy to promote the interests of Western countries,” especially in the realms of human rights and
environmental politics.71 This also undermines their claim to neutrality and altruism. Finally, while GCS is in many ways a positive philanthropic force, it also includes among its ranks “anti-
social elements that go against the tide,” such as (ironically) anti-globalization activists, but also terrorists, national extremists, criminal syndicates and cults.72 Restricting the activities of such
groups – which have become “the chief sickness of GCS” – is the responsibility of states. GCS organizations cannot police themselves as they lack the capacity. More broadly, the legal
frameworks states provide are necessary for even the positive philanthropic NGOs to flourish, since only states can guarantee contracts and uphold legal order.73 In short, GCS must remain
superseded and even caged by the international society of states. A cosmopolitan or Revolutionist future in which an increasingly number of state functions and powers is assumed by NGOs
would be impossible to achieve and dangerous to attempt.74 One of the government think-tank scholars interviewed in December 2006 did allow for the possibility of radical changes to the
international order of the future – but primarily the distant future.75 The scholar – who had evidently given the matter serious thought – began by discussing how Hu Jintao's harmonious
world will emerge from the successful establishment of “harmonious societies” in each of the individual key leading states. Between now and approximately 2050, states that have built
harmonious societies internally will begin coming together to form harmonious regions. “Some countries in Northern Europe have already built harmonious societies,” particularly Sweden.
Therefore, Northern Europe will soon emerge as the world's first harmonious region. Asia is still rather distant from the goal. Among Asian countries, Singapore has made good progress, “but
still isn't democratic enough.” Japan has also achieved much that is praiseworthy, but “there's still too much conformity and cultural repression in Japan for it to be considered a harmonious
society. With dissent stifled, it can't even be considered truly democratic.”76 China, he believes, will make significant progress towards building a harmonious society by 2025 but is unlikely to
complete the process until 2040–50. Once China does succeed, it can begin co-operating with neighbouring states to construct a harmonious Asian region. Here is where the scholar begins
departing from the orthodox Chinese position that solidarist Rationalism and Revolutionism are unworkable and normatively undesirable. He finds that China already shares with the United
States, Britain, Japan and other democratic states the core value that governance should be “people-based” (minben 民本), stressing peace, democracy, development and a concern for others.
He even argues that people-based governance is becoming a universal (pushi de 普世的) value. It has not always been a universal value; in fact, it has only become a genuine Chinese value in
recent years. (Ancient Confucians used the term but Imperial Chinese society was in practice emperor-based.) As globalization deepens and states intensify their interactions, people-based
governance will emerge as a universal value, establishing the cultural preconditions for building a harmonious world. At some point after 2050, the scholar predicts, the world will move in the
direction of “integration into a single unit” (yitihua 一体化). This is clearly a solidarist or even Revolutionist vision and was surprising to hear from a leading Chinese government-connected
analyst, since the orthodox viewpoint is that states can interact harmoniously but will never fuse together or become identical. Yet the think-tank scholar believes that the global economic
integration already under way will inevitably “spill over” into politics. The trend is, moreover, “unavoidable and irreversible,” although it will take a very long time to complete. Economic
integration is likely to require 100 years. Political integration may take 300 or 400 years, and socio-cultural integration a little less. But eventually they will all occur. Even though the process of
think-tank scholar believes the world is already developing in the direction of
political integration is expected to take a very long time, it is significant that the

integration, already embarked upon a process whose end goal is predetermined . Still, he expects that sovereign, autonomous states
will continue to be the overwhelmingly dominant actors in the decades leading up to 2050. They will not yet have merged together nor ceded their leading roles to NGOs or other GCS actors.
And that is a good thing, the scholar contends, because states – though born as war-fighting machines – have evolved in recent decades into highly-effective problem-solving organizations
providing indispensable management services. NGOs can assist states in the decades leading up to 2050, but states will, and should, continue to play the leading roles.77 By taking an English
school approach to analysing Chinese thinking on the future of international relations, we find that the “Rationalist turn” in PRC foreign policy detailed by Western scholars in the early and
mid-2000s may have weak cognitive foundations. Realist categories emphasizing increases in China's material and ideational power relative to that of foreign countries remain at the core of
most Chinese thinking on the future. This Realism is not always moderate or defensive, particularly when the scholar is articulating scenarios for more than about two decades ahead.
Meanwhile, Chinese Rationalist accounts not only frequently devolve back into Realism, but almost universally defend pluralism against solidarism. Few scholars articulate Revolutionist
visions. All of this suggests the limits to how far CCP elites would be willing to go in co-operating with foreign states even in best-case scenarios – limits difficult to map without the aid of
English school analytical techniques. The notion that China could one day become as close to the United States as Britain – as some of her interlocutors told Susan Shirk – seems highly
questionable in the light of most foreign policy elites’ consistent rejection of solidarism in their writings and interviews. Of course, there is no straight line from what elites say and write to
what China will actually do in the years and decades ahead. International realities may constrain the CCP from acting on its intellectual and political elites’ Realist instincts. Zheng Bijian may be
right when he contends that the only possible rise for China is one rooted in economic interdependence and political
co-operation. If this is so, then anticipating that any challenge to regional or world order would meet with opposition, Chinese
strategists could learn to suppress their Realist impulses. Over time, the impulses might even fade away. Such a trend would be reinforced by Chinese

elites coming to identify with an image of their country's strategic culture as having always been
Rationalist and seeking harmony. But there are at least three problems with this scenario. First, crises will unavoidably develop that require
China's leaders to make snap decisions under immense political pressure and with incomplete
information . In periods of crisis, it will surely matter a great deal that Chinese analytical categories and impulses remain Realist or at best pluralist Rationalist. PRC leaders
will already feel a degree of alienation from foreign states, especially the West and its democratic Asian allies. (This alienation
will probably be a part of the reason the crisis develops.) They will tend to distrust the foreign states and worry that these states’

long-term global ambitions and objectives are distinctly different from those of China. Alienation and mistrust
will in this way inevitably complicate crisis-management. They will keep the various parties involved on edge and
always questioning at some level whether a long-term stable relationship between China and the democracies
is really possible. This doubt may fuel further alienation and a sense that the relationship(s) will always be troubled. In contrast, resolving crises would become significantly easier
if China and the democracies were to start viewing each other as partners in a common global mission. But that would be solidarism. Second, it is easy to imagine that 20 or 30 years into the
future, China's relations with Asian and other countries will be marked not by true interdependence but instead by one-sided dependence. While the United States, much of Europe and
probably Japan will still enjoy varying degrees of economic autonomy, many other countries will probably become completely dependent upon China for their economic well-being. As a result,

the fact that Realism seems to remain firmly at the core of Chinese strategic thinking could mean that
PRC leaders will be tempted to push their advantage and try to establish clear domination over Asia.
They may also decide to compete vigorously with the U nited S tates for influence in other world regions. The popular nationalism that Shirk and others
document suggests that such a forward foreign policy would meet with strong public approval in China, or even alacrity. Finally, rejecting solidarism and GCS's importance (as suggested by
Revolutionism) could become a practical foreign policy Achilles’ heel for the CCP. Democratic governance is firmly consolidated in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. In South and South-East Asia
the picture is cloudier, but middle classes in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, India and probably Malaysia evidently derive strong psychic benefits from identifying with their country as
democratic or moving in that direction. It will be difficult for the middle classes in these countries to accept Chinese regional hegemony should the PRC decide to become more pugnaciously
Realist. The political-ideological differences within the region would suddenly start to loom as significantly more meaningful than previously imagined.

The alternative is neo-containment – only engagement can break conflict spirals and
create a positive sum game
Kai, lecturer at the Graduate School of International Studies @ Yonsei University in South Korea, 14
(Jin, The US, China, and the 'Containment Trap', http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/the-us-china-and-the-
containment-trap/)
Given the current situation, even the slightest possibility of U.S. military involvement may push Beijing
to alter its expectations and act more decisively and consistently regarding the enduring dispute, all
while still trying to prevent the situation from getting worse. After all, recent joint U.S.-Japan military
exercises demonstrated to China that the U.S. has already prepared several operation plans for possible
military assistance. In fact, China is concerned not only about the probability of U.S. military
intervention, but also about the long-term impact of this reassurance toward Japan and the complexity
it may add to the current Sino-Japanese standoff. Despite U.S. assurances, in Beijing’s view, a number of
signs indicate that the U.S. policy toward China intends to “contain” rather than “engage.” The U.S.
supports the Philippines on the South China Sea dispute, reiterates Washington’s security commitment
to Japan on the East China Sea dispute, and has also agreed to sell more advanced arms to Taiwan. In
almost every dispute that involves China, the U.S. seems to automatically support any party that has
trouble with China, either directly or indirectly. Meanwhile, the U.S. labels China’s overseas economic
activities as neo-colonialism and calls China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors evidence of
expansionism. The U.S. has also called China one of the biggest sources for cyber espionage activities
(although Mr. Edward Snowden told the world another story). For the U.S., the rise of China just seems
to be an uncomfortable fit with the dominant, U.S.-led system. So the U.S. may rely on its still-dominant
power and its alliance relations (especially with its key partners) to sustain its supremacy in and beyond
the Asia-Pacific region — particularly without making substantial compromises to accommodate China’s
“core interests.” By containing China with regard to Beijing’s “core interests,” the U.S. is trying to gain
strategic advantages. Such measures and policies may put real pressure on China in the near future, but
they are risky. The fact is that the U.S. might have already been hijacked by its military alliances in East
Asia and thus finds it increasingly difficult to handle its relations with both its traditional allies and a
rapidly emerging China. The U.S. faces a difficult situation: if it fails to subdue a powerful China, it loses
respect and trust from its allies. Hence, at least for the time being, the U.S. is more willing to hold its
ground, especially with support and assistance from its traditional allies. But this expedient makeshift
can hardly solve the fundamental problem. A rising China, like other great powers, needs strategic room
for its survival and further development. China surely needs to adapt to regional and global
arrangements, while the international community also needs to accommodate or constructively engage
this newly emerged great power. In the 1970s and 1980s, improvements in China-U.S. relations
contributed to Washington’s strong and successful containment of the former Soviet Union in Europe –
the traditional region of concern for the U.S. But the Cold War has been over for decades. The same
policy and approach will not necessarily work for an emerged China under completely different
international conditions. And that’s not even mentioning the challenge of confronting two great powers
(China and Russia) simultaneously. However, the current situation suggests that the U.S. is in danger of
falling into the “containment trap” – the more it loses its global supremacy and the more it expects
support and assistance from its traditional allies, the more obligated the U.S. will feel to push forward
hard-line policies toward China. Such containment might work, given comprehensive and unconditional
support from U.S. allies, but reality is rarely that simple. Meanwhile, the U.S. should not underestimate
China’s strategic determination and counter-measures to containment. That being said, the rise of
China and its disputes with neighboring countries inevitably pose challenges for the long-established
regional and global arrangements. Hence China’s rise may cause concerns. In view of this, China needs
to handle and adjust its diplomacy very cautiously to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings and
misperceptions. On the other hand, particularly in East Asia, the current power structure and regional
arrangements were built either during the Cold War era, when there was confrontation between two
super powers, or after the Cold War, when U.S. unilateral supremacy prevailed. During these two
periods, China did not need and could not afford sizable strategic room. That’s no longer the case today,
when China has already become a sizable great power and is still rising. In the long run, the U.S. cannot
contain China. Accordingly, rather than relying on excessive containment or a check-and-balance
approach, the world and especially the U.S. might find more opportunities from deeper and more
constructive policies of engagement with China. Hopefully this engagement can truly be a win-win
game.
 A2: Liberalism Bad/Competitiveness
Pursuit of liberalism is inevitable – US led international order that adheres to
democratic norms and procedures is the best pathway to peace – engagement with
China on nuclear policy proves liberalism prevents large international conflicts
Ikenberry, Professor of Politics and International Affairs @ Princeton, 14
(John, The Illusion of Geopolitics: The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order, Foreign Affairs,
http://aa.usembassy.or.kr/pdf14/IN38.pdf)
Not only does Mead underestimate the strength of the United States and the order it built; he also
overstates the degree to which China and Russia are seeking to resist both. (Apart from its nuclear
ambitions, Iran looks like a state engaged more in futile protest than actual resis- tance, so it shouldn't
be considered anything close to a revisionist power.) Without a doubt, China and Russia desire greater
regional in- fluence. China has made aggressive claims over maritime rights and nearby contested
islands, and it has embarked on an arms buildup. Putin has visions of reclaiming Russia's dominance in
its "near abroad." Both great powers bristle at U.S. leadership and resist it when they can. But China and
Russia are not true revisionists. As former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has said, Putin's
foreign policy is "more a reflection of his resentment of Russia's geopolitical marginalization than a
battle cry from a rising empire." China, of course, is an actual rising power, and this doesinvite
dangerous competition with U.S. allies in Asia. But China is not currently trying to break those alliances
or overthrow the wider system of regional security governance embodied in the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations and the East Asia Summit. And even if China harbors ambitions of eventually
do- ing so, U.S. security partnerships in the region are, if anything, getting stronger, not weaker. At
most, China and Russia are spoilers. They do not have the interests-let alone the ideas, capacities, or
allies-to lead them to upend existing global rules and institutions. In fact, although they resent that the
United States stands at the top of the current geopolitical system, they embrace the underlying logic of
that framework, and with good reason. Openness gives them access to trade, investment, and
technology from other societies. Rules give them tools to protect their sovereignty and interests.
Despite controversies over the new idea of "the responsibility to protect" (which has been applied only
selec- tively), the current world order enshrines the age-old norms of state sovereignty and
nonintervention. Those Westphalian principles remain the bedrock of world politics-and China and
Russia have tied their national interests to them (despite Putin's disturbing irredentism). It should come
as no surprise, then, that China and Russia have become deeply integrated into the existing
international order. They are both permanent members of the un Security Council, with veto rights,
and they both participate actively in the World Trade Organi- zation, the International Monetary Fund,
the World Bank, and the G-20. They are geopolitical insiders, sitting at all the high tables of global
governance. China, despite its rapid ascent, has no ambitious global agenda; it remains fixated inward,
on preserving party rule. Some Chinese intel- lectuals and political figures, such as Yan Xuetong and Zhu
Chenghu, do have a wish list of revisionist goals. They see the Western system as a threat and are
waiting for the day when China can reorganize the international order. But these voices do not reach
very far into the political elite. Indeed, Chinese leaders have moved away from their earlier calls for
sweeping change. In 2007, at its Central Committee meeting, the Chinese Communist Party replaced
previous proposals for a "new international economic order" with calls for more modest reforms
centering on fairness and justice. The Chinese scholar Wang Jisi has argued that this move is "subtle but
important," shifting China's orientation toward that of a global reformer. China now wants a larger role
in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, greater voice in such forums as the G-20, and
wider global use of its currency. That is not the agenda of a country trying to revise the economic order.
China and Russia are also members in good standing of the nuclear club. The centerpiece of the Cold
War settlement between the United States and the Soviet Union (and then Russia) was a shared effort
to limit atomic weapons. Although U.S.-Russian relations have since soured, the nuclear component of
their arrangement has held. In 2010, Moscow and Washington signed the New start treaty, which
requires mutual reductions in long-range nuclear weapons. Before the 1990s, China was a nuclear
outsider. Although it had a modest arsenal, it saw itself as a voice of the nonnuclear developing world
and criticized arms control agreements and test bans. But in a remarkable shift, China has since come to
support the array of nuclear accords, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It has affirmed a "no first use" doctrine, kept its arsenal small,
and taken its entire nuclear force off alert. China has also played an active role in the Nuclear Security
Summit, an initiative proposed by Obama in 2009, and it has joined the "P5 process," a collaborate
effort to safeguard nuclear weapons. Across a wide range of issues, China and Russia are acting more
like established great powers than revisionist ones. They often choose to shun multilateralism, but so,
too, on occasion do the United States and other powerful democracies. (Beijing has ratified the un
Conven- tion on the Law of the Sea; Washington has not.) And China and Russia are using global rules
and institutions to advance their own interests. Their struggles with the United States revolve around
gaining voice within the existing order and manipulating it to suit their needs. They wish to enhance
their positions within the system, but they are not trying to replace it. Ultimately, even if China and
Russia do attempt to contest the basic terms of the current global order, the adventure will be daunting
and self-defeating. These powers aren't just up against the United States; they would also have to
contend with the most globally organized and deeply entrenched order the world has ever seen, one
that is dominated by states that are liberal, capitalist, and democratic. This order is backed by a U.S.-led
network of alliances, institutions, geopolitical bargains, client states, and democratic partnerships. It has
proved dynamic and expansive, easily integrating rising states, beginning with Japan and Germany after
World War II. It has shown a capacity for shared leadership, as exemplified by such forums as the G-8
and the G-20. It has allowed rising non-Western countries to trade and grow, sharing the dividends of
modernization. It has accommodated a surprisingly wide variety of political and economic models-social
democratic (western Europe), neoliberal (the United Kingdom and the United States), and state
capitalist (East Asia). The prosperity of nearly every country-and the stability of its government-
fundamentally depends on this order. In the age of liberal order, revisionist struggles are a fool's errand.
Indeed, China and Russia know this. They do not have grand visions of an alternative order. For them,
international relations are mainly about the search for commerce and resources, the protection of their
sover- eignty, and, where possible, regional domination. They have shown no interest in building their
own orders or even taking full responsibility for the current one and have offered no alternative visions
of global economic or political progress. That's a critical shortcoming, since in- ternational orders rise
and fall not simply with the power of the leading state; their success also hinges on whether they are
seen as legitimate and whether their actual operation solves problems that both weak and powerful
states care about. In the struggle for world order, China and Russia (and certainly Iran) are simply not in
the game. Under these circumstances, the United States should not give up its efforts to strengthen
the liberal order. The world that Washington inhabits today is one it should welcome. And the grand
strategy it should pursue is the one it has followed for decades: deep global engagement. It is a strategy
in which the United States ties itself to the regions of the world through trade, alliances, multilateral
institutions, and diplomacy. It is a strategy in which the United States establishes leadership not simply
through the exercise of power but also through sustained efforts at global problem solving and rule
making. It created a world that is friendly to American interests, and it is made friendly because, as
President John F. Kennedy once said, it is a world "where the weak are safe and the strong are just."
 A2: Structural Violence

War turns structural violence but not the other way around
Joshua Goldstein, Int’l Rel Prof @ American U, 2001, War and Gender, p. 412
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace
scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then, if one believes
that sexism contributes to war one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in
order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor,
minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests
that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism,
gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and
outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So,”if you want
peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does
not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments
up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military
may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that peace work
focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this
book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically
inadequate.
 A2: Psychology Explains

No empirical basis for applying psychology to state action

Epstein, Sydney IR senior lecturer, 2010
(Charolotte, “Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics,”
European Journal of International Relations 20.10, ebsco)
One key advantage of the Wendtian move, granted even by his critics (see Flockhart, 2006), is that it simply does away with the level-of-analysis problem
altogether. If states really are persons, then we can apply everything we know about people to understand how they behave. The study of individual identity is not
only theoretically justified but it is warranted.This cohesive self borrowed from social psychology is what allows Wendt to
bridge the different levels of analysis and travel between the self of the individual and that of the state,
by way of a third term, ‘group self’, which is simply an aggregate of individual selves. Thus for Wendt (1999: 225) ‘the state is simply a
“group Self” capable of group level cognition’. Yet that the individual possesses a self does not logically entail that the state possesses one too. It is in
this leap, from the individual to the state, that IR’s fallacy of composition surfaces most clearly. Moving beyond Wendt but maintaining the psychological
self as the basis for theorizing the state Wendt’s bold ontological claim is far from having attracted unanimous support (see notably, Flockhart, 2006; Jackson, 2004;
One line of critique of the states-as-persons thesis has taken shape around
Neumann, 2004; Schiff, 2008; Wight, 2004).
theresort to psychological theories, specifically, around the respective merits of Identity Theory (Wendt) and SIT (Flockhart, 2006; Greenhill,
2008; Mercer, 2005) for understanding state behaviour.9 Importantly for my argument, that the state has a self, and that this self is pre-social,
remains unquestioned in this further entrenching of the psychological turn. Instead questions have revolved around how this pre-social self (Wendt’s ‘Ego’) behaves
once it encounters the other (Alter): whether, at that point (and not before), it takes on roles prescribed by pre-existing cultures (whether Hobbessian, Lockean or
Kantian) or whether instead other, less culturally specific, dynamics rooted in more universally human characteristics better explain state interactions. SIT in
particular emphasizes the individual’s basic need to belong, and it highlights the dynamics of in-/out-group categorizations as a key determinant of behaviour (Billig,
2004). SIT seems to have attracted increasing interest from IR scholars, interestingly, for both critiquing (Greenhill, 2008; Mercer, 1995) and rescuing constructivism
(Flockhart, 2006). For Trine Flockart (2006: 89–91), SIT can provide constructivism with a different basis for developing a theory of agency that steers clear of the
states-as-persons thesis while filling an important gap in the socialization literature, which has tended to focus on norms rather than the actors adopting them. She
shows that a state’s adherence to a new norm is best understood as the act of joining a group that shares a set of norms and values, for example the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO). What SIT draws out are the benefits that accrue to the actor from belonging to a group, namely increased self-esteem and a clear
cognitive map for categorizing other states as ‘in-’ or ‘out-group’ members and, from there, for orientating states’ self–other relationships. Whilst coming at it from
a stance explicitly critical of constructivism, for Jonathan Mercer (2005: 1995) the use of psychology remains key to correcting the systematic evacuation of the role
of emotion and other ‘non-rational’ phenomena in rational choice and behaviourist analyses, which has significantly impaired the understanding of international
politics. SIT serves to draw out the emotional component of some of the key drivers of international politics, such as trust, reputation and even choice (Mercer,
2005: 90–95; see also Mercer, 1995). Brian Greenhill (2008) for his part uses SIT amongst a broader array of psychological theories to analyse the phenomenon of
self–other recognition and, from there, to take issue with the late Wendtian assumption that mutual recognition can provide an adequate basis for the formation of
The main problem with this psychological turn is the very utilitarian, almost mechanistic,
a collective identity amongst states.
approach to non-rational phenomena it proposes, which tends to evacuate the role of meaning. In other words, it further shores up
the pre-social dimension of the concept of self/// that is at issue here. Indeed norms (Flockhart, 2006), emotions (Mercer, 2005) and
recognition (Greenhill, 2008) are hardly appraised as symbolic phenomena. In fact, in the dynamics of in- versus out-group categorization emphasized by SIT,
language counts for very little. Significantly, in the design of the original experiments upon which this approach was founde d (Tajfel, 1978), whether two group
members communicate at all, let alone share the same language, is non-pertinent. It is enough that two individuals should know (say because they have been told
so in their respective languages for the purposes of the experiment) that they belong to the same group for them to favour one another over a third individual.
The primary determinant of individual behaviour thus emphasized is a pre-verbal, primordial desire to belong, which
seems closer to pack animal behaviour than to anything distinctly human. What the group stands for, what specific set of meanings
and values binds it together, is unimportant. What matters primarily is that the group is valued
positively, since positive valuation is what returns accrued self-esteem to the individual. In IR Jonathan Mercer’s (2005) account of the relationship between
identity, emotion and behaviour reads more like a series of buttons mechanically pushed in a sequence of the sort: positive identification produces emotion (such as
trust), which in turn generates specific patterns of in-/out-group discrimination. Similarly, Trine Flockhart (2006: 96) approaches the socializee’s ‘desire to belong’ in
terms of the psychological (and ultimately social) benefits and the feel-good factor that accrues from increased self-esteem. At the far opposite of Lacan, the
concept of desire here is reduced to a Benthamite type of pleasure- or utility-maximization where meaning is nowhere to be seen. More telling still is the need to
downplay the role of the Other in justifying her initial resort to SIT. For Flockhart (2006: 94), in a post-Cold War context, ‘identities cannot be constructed purely in
relation to the “Other”’. Perhaps so; but not if what ‘the other’ refers to is the generic, dynamic scheme undergirding the very concept of identity. At issue here is
the confusion between the reference to a specific other, for which Lacan coined the concept of le petit autre, and the reference to l’Autre, or Other, which is that
symbolic instance that is essential to the making of all selves. As such it is not clear what meaning Flockhart’s (2006: 94) capitalization of the ‘Other’ actually holds.
The individual self as a proxy for the state’s self Another way in which the
concept of self has been centrally involved in circumventing the
level-of-analysis problem in IR has been to treat the self of the individual as a proxy for the self of the state. The literature on norms in particular has
highlighted the role of individuals in orchestrating norm shifts, in both the positions of socializer (norm entrepreneurs) and socializee. It has shown for example how
some state leaders are more susceptible than others to concerns about reputation and legitimacy and thus more amenable to being convinced of the need to adopt
a new norm, of human rights or democratization, for example (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Risse, 2001). It is these specific
psychological qualities pertaining to their selves (for example, those of Gorbachev; Risse, 2001) that ultimately enable the norm shift to
occur. Once again the individual self ultimately remains the basis for explaining the change in state behaviour. To
summarize the points made so far, whether the state is literally considered as a person by ontological overreach, whether so only
by analogy, or whether the person stands as a proxy for the state, the ‘self’ of that person has been consistently
taken as the reference point for studying state identities. Both in Wendt’s states-as-persons thesis, and in the broader psychological
turn within constructivism and beyond, the debate has consistently revolved around the need to evaluate which of the essentialist assumptions about human
It has never questioned the validity of starting from these
nature are the most useful for explaining state behaviour.
assumptions in the first place. That is, what is left unexamined is this assumption is that what works for
individuals will work for states too. This is IR’s central fallacy of composition, by which it has persistently
eschewed rather than resolved the level-of-analysis problem. Indeed, in the absence of a clear demonstration of a
logical identity (of the type A=A) between states and individuals, the assumption that individual interactions
will explain what states do rests on little more than a leap of faith, or indeed an analogy.
 A2: Complexity
Linearity might not be true but it’s provisionally useful
Dr. Sebastian L. V. Gorka et al 12, Director of the Homeland Defense Fellows Program at the College
of International Security Affairs, National Defense University, teaches Irregular Warfare and US National
Security at NDU and Georgetown, et al., Spring 2012, “The Complexity Trap,” Parameters,
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/parameters/Articles/2012spring/Gallagher_Geltzer_Gorka.pdfThese
competing views of America’s national security concerns indicate an important and distinctive characteristic of today’s global landscape: prioritization is

simultaneously very difficult and very important for the United States. Each of these threats and potential threats—
al Qaeda, China, nuclear proliferation, climate change, global disease, and so on—can conjure up a
worstcase scenario that is immensely intimidating. Given the difficulty of combining estimates of probabilities with the levels of risk associated with
these threats, it is challenging to establish priorities. Such choices and trade-offs are difficult, but not

impossible . 30 In fact, they are the stock-in-trade of the strategist and planner. If the United States is going to
respond proactively and effectively to today’s international environment, prioritization is the key first
step —and precisely the opposite reaction to the complacency and undifferentiated fear that the
notion of unprecedented complexity encourages . Complexity suggests a maximization of flexibility and
minimization of commitment ; but prioritization demands wise allotment of resources and attention in
a way that commits American power and effort most effectively and efficiently. Phrased differently, complexity
induces deciding not to decide; prioritization encourages deciding which decisions matter most.
Today’s world of diverse threats characterized by uncertain probabilities and unclear risks will overwhelm us if the specter of
complexity seduces us into either paralysis or paranoia. Some priorities need to be set if the United States is to find the
resources to confront what threatens it most. 31 As Michael Doran recently argued in reference to the Arab Spring, “the United States must train itself to see a large dune as something more
This is not to deny the possibility of nonlinear phenomena, butterfly effects,
formidable than just endless grains of sand.”32

self-organizing systems that exhibit patterns in the absence of centralized authority, or emergent properties. 33 If anything, these
hallmarks of complexity theory remind strategists of the importance of revisiting key assumptions in
light of new data and allowing for tactical flexibility in case of unintended consequences. Sound strategy requires hard
choices and commitments, but it need not be inflexible. We can prioritize without being procrustean.
But a model in which everything is potentially relevant is a model in which nothing is.

Complexity of IR doesn’t make policy recommendations irrelevant – violence can be

minimized and relative gains are possible
Drezner, IR Prof @ Tufts, 9
(Daniel, “Defending the Realist Interest: Policy Advocacy and Policy Planning in an Anarchical World,”
http://danieldrezner.com/research/defendingrealistinterest.pdf)
This distinction is important. Structural approaches will often posit substitutable causal processes
through which the independent variable can affect the dependent variable (Most and Starr 1984). A
great power might choose to advance its global policy preferences by coalition-builing within a
universal-membership international organization or engage in forum-shopping to a club-membership
organization governance (Krasner 1985a, 1991; Gruber 2000; Drezner 2007a). The offense/defense
balance can affect the likelihood of war through multiple influences, including changes in grand
strategies and leader perceptions (Van Evera 1999:259-262). Structural effects can take different forms
at different junctures, depending on the foreign policy choices made by a powerful state. Realists are
well-positioned to offer policy advice than minimizes deadweight losses in situations where the
equilibrium outcome is clear – but the variegated pathways to that equilibrium outcome have different
costs and benefits. Consider, for example, the advice a realist policy advocate might provide to a rising
military power. Realists do not claim that all great powers necessarily act in a security maximizing
manner. Realists do predict, however, that any state that aggressively expands its power and capabilities
will trigger concern among other actors about the implications of rising power in an anarchic world
structure. That concern would likely be translated into either an arms race or a balancing coalition.
Either of those policy responses will constrain the rising power’s autonomy. Knowing this, a realist could
proffer policy advice that encourages a government to husband its power so as to avoid triggering the
balancing coalition. Note that whether the advice is heeded or not, the outcome is eventually the same
– the rising power’s autonomy is circumscribed. The difference is how that power is circumscribed –
through self-restraint, an arms race, or the creation of a balancing coalition. To use more generic
language, a realist is not being logically inconsistent when proffering generic advice along the lines of:
“No matter what you do as a policymaker, the inevitable outcome is going to be X. However, if you
choose policy action A, X will happen with a lot of military brinksmanship that could trigger unnecessary
bloodshed and expenditure. If you choose policy action B , X happens with a minimum of negative policy
externalities and collateral damage. As realists, we recommend option B.” This is also thoroughly
consistent with Waltz’s (1979) refusal to assume states are rational actors. He assumes that the
evolutionary processes created by the anarchical world structure force irrational states out of existence.
This allows for structure to impose serious long-term constraints on state action, while allowing for the
possibility of deviations away from realist prescriptions in the short term.
 A2: Engagement Link
We don’t construct China as the opposite of the West OR in competition with the US –
their link argument reifies the antagonism between the occident and the orient – flips
the K
Noesselt, Research Fellow @ GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, 13
(Nele , “Is There a “Chinese School” of IR?” https://www.giga-
hamburg.de/en/system/files/publications/wp188_noesselt.pdf)
Post‐structuralist and post‐colonial ambitions to internationalize IR theory through the inte‐ gration of
voices from the non‐“Western” world – which were previously marginalized and silenced – have come to a temporary
standstill . The only outcome of the post‐structuralist as‐ sessment of “Chinese” IR consists of a handful
of essays about the state of IR studies in China. These do not go much beyond the earlier overview
articles published by area specialists. Nonetheless, the main contribution of these post‐structuralist investigations into Asian IR
is the fact that the possibility of “alternative” IR formulations has come to be accepted by a wider audience of IR scholars, most of whom
The obvious isolation of the post‐positivist search for
refused to accept “Chinese” IR as a theory dur‐ ing the 1990s.
“Asian” or, to be more general, non‐“Western” IR approaches from area studies and intra‐area discourses has evoked
severe criticism from scholars specialized in the Asian region . Alagappa has commented on the ab‐
sence of a direct dialogue between Asian IR experts and the group of post‐structuralist IR scholars. As a
result, he argues, IR theory in the non‐“Western” world is analyzed and classi‐ fied in terms of the structures
and basic categories of “Western” IR theory .18 As long as the epistemological foundations of IR theory
continue to be restricted to a “Western” philosophy of science, it is unlikely that the discipline’s
parochial bias can be resolved (Alagappa 2011). Furthermore, the predetermined dichotomy between
“Western” and “Asian” IR that post‐colonial studies assume raises more questions than it can solve.
There is no unified “Western” IR tradition (Acharya 2011: 620–621), nor can IR in Asia be reduced to one
single, homogenous approach (China, India, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia) (Alagappa 2011). Strictly speaking, the assumed
antagonism between regional concepts of world order and world views mirrors the Orientalism versus
Occidentalism controversy . “Asia” is portrayed as the “other” against which the “West” defines itself
and consolidates its political and national identity. Reciprocally, the intra‐Chinese debate contrasts
“Western bourgeois” and socialist theories and bases its own national project on the latter. Whereas the
“West’s” post‐ structuralist community pursues the goal of decentralizing and pluralizing IR through the inclusion of the history of the global
South, the intra‐Chinese debate returns to the roots of Chinese philosophy to reactivate indigenous concepts that cannot automatically serve as
universal frameworks or be considered “theory.”
 A2: Reps = War
No impact – reps don’t drive intervention – empirics
Rodwell 5 (Jonathan Rodwell is a PhD student at Manchester Met. researching the U.S. Foreign Policy
of the late 70's / rise of ‘neo-cons’ and Second Cold War, “Trendy But Empty: A Response to Richard
Jackson,” http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/rodwell1.htm)
To be specific if the U.S. and every other nation is continually reproducing identities through ‘othering’ it is a
constant and universal phenomenon that fails to help us understand at all why one result of the
othering turned out one way and differently at another time. For example, how could one explain how the
process resulted in the 2003 invasion of Iraq but didn’t produce a similar invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 when
that country (and by the logic of the Regan administrations discourse) the West was threatened by the ‘Evil Empire’. By the
logical of discourse analysis in both cases these policies were the result of politicians being able to discipline and control the political agenda to
produce the outcomes. So why were the outcomes not the same? To reiterate the point how do we explain that the language of
the War on Terror actually managed to result in the eventual Afghan invasion in 2002? Surely it is impossible
to explain how George W. Bush was able to convince his people (and incidentally the U.N and Nato) to support a war
in Afghanistan without referring to a simple fact outside of the discourse; the fact that a known terrorist in
Afghanistan actually admitted to the murder of thousands of people on the 11h of Sepetember 2001. The point is that if the discursive
‘othering’ of an ‘alien’ people or group is what really gave the U.S. the opportunity to persue the war in
Afghanistan one must surly wonder why Afghanistan. Why not North Korea? Or Scotland ? If the discourse is
so powerfully useful in it’s own right why could it not have happened anywhere at any time and more often? Why could the British
government not have been able to justify an armed invasion and regime change in Northern Ireland
throughout the terrorist violence of the 1980’s? Surely they could have just employed the same discursive trickery as George W. Bush? Jackson
is absolutely right when he points out that the actuall threat posed by Afghanistan or Iraq today may have been thoroughly misguided and
conflated and that there must be more to explain why those wars were enacted at that time. Unfortunately that explanation cannot simply
come from the result of inscripting identity and discourse. On top of this there is the clear problem that the consequences of the discursive
othering are not necessarily what Jackson would seem to identify. This is a problem consistent through David Campbell’s original work on which
Jackson’s approach is based[iii]. David Campbell argued for a linguistic process that ‘always results in an other being marginalized’ or has the
potential for ‘demonisation’[iv]. At the same time Jackson, building upon this, maintains without qualification that the systematic and
institutionalised abuse of Iraqi prisoners first exposed in April 2004 “is a direct consequence of the language used by senior administration
officials: conceiving of terrorist suspects as ‘evil’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘faceless enemies of freedom creates an atmosphere where abuses become
The only problem is that the process of differentiation does not actually
normalised and tolerated”[v].
necessarily produce dislike or antagonism. In the 1940’s and 50’s even subjected to the language of the
‘Red Scare’ it’s obvious not all Americans came to see the Soviets as an ‘other’ of their nightmares. And in Iraq the
abuses of Iraqi prisoners are isolated cases, it is not the case that the U.S. militarily summarily abuses prisoners as a result of language. Surely
the massive protest against the war, even in the U.S. itself, is also a self evident example that the language of
‘evil’ and ‘inhumanity’ does not necessarily produce an outcome that marginalises or demonises an
‘other’. Indeed one of the points of discourse is that we are continually differentiating ourselves from all others
around us without this necessarily leading us to hate fear or abuse anyone .[vi] Consequently, the clear fear of the
Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, and the abuses at Abu Ghirab are unusual cases. To understand what is going on we must ask
how far can the process of inscripting identity really go towards explaining them? As a result at best all discourse analysis provides us with is a
set of universals and a heuristic model
Alternative
 Alt Fails – 2AC

The alt doesn’t change the framework states operate within – that takes out all of
their root cause claims, external impacts, and justifies our epistemology – their
heuristic makes war and structural violence more likely
de Araujo, professor for Ethics at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 14
(Marcelo, “Moral Enhancement and Political Realism,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 24(2): 29-
43)
Some moral enhancement theorists argue that a society of morally enhanced individuals would be in a

better position to cope with important problems that humankind is likely to face in the future such as, for instance, the
threats posed by climate change , grand scale terrorist attacks , or the risk of catastrophic wars. The assumption here is quite

simple: our inability to cope successfully with these problems stems mainly from a sort of deficit in human

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

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

enhanced by an increase in the levels of oxytocin in the organism (Zak 2008, 2011; Zak and Kugler 2011; Persson and Savulescu 2012, 118–119).
Oxytocin has also been reported to be “associated with the subjective experience of empathy” (Zak 2011, 55; Zak and Kugler 2011, 144). The question I would like to examine now concerns the
supposition that moral enhancement – comprehended in these terms and assuming for the sake of argument that, some day, it might become effective and safe – may also help us in coping
The assumption that there is a relationship between, on the one hand, threats to the
with the threat of devastating wars in the future.

survival of humankind and, on the other, a sort of “deficit” in our moral dispositions is clearly made by some moral
enhancements theorists. Douglas, for instance, argues that “according to many plausible theories, some of the world’s most important problems — such as developing
world poverty, climate change and war — can be attributed to these moral deficits” (2008, 230). Walker, in a similar vein, writes about the possibility of “using biotechnology to alter our
biological natures in an effort to reduce evil in the world” (2009, 29). And Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson go as far as to defend the “the need for moral enhancement” of humankind in a
series of articles, and in a book published in 2012. One of the reasons Savulescu and Persson advance for the moral enhancement of humankind is that our moral dispositions seem to have
remained basically unchanged over the last millennia (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 2). These dispositions have proved thus far quite useful for the survival of human beings as a species. They
have enabled us to cooperate with each other in the collective production of things such as food, shelter, tools, and farming. They have also played a crucial role in the creation and refinement
of a variety of human institutions such as settlements, villages, and laws. Although the possibility of free-riding has never been fully eradicated, the benefits provided by cooperation have
largely exceeded the disadvantages of our having to deal with occasional uncooperative or untrustworthy individuals (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 39). The problem, however, is that the same
dispositions that have enabled human beings in the past to engage in the collective production of so many artifacts and institutions now seem powerless in the face of the human capacity to
destroy other human beings on a grand scale, or perhaps even to annihilate the entire human species. There is, according to Savulescu and Persson, a “mismatch” between our cognitive
faculties and our evolved moral attitudes: “[…] as we have repeatedly stressed, owing to the progress of science, the range of our powers of action has widely outgrown the range of our
spontaneous moral attitudes, and created a dangerous mismatch” (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 103; see also Persson and Savulescu 2010, 660; Persson and Savulescu 2011b; DeGrazie 2012,
2; Rakić 2014, 2). This worry about the mismatch between, on the one hand, the modern technological capacity to destroy and, on the other, our limited moral commitments is not new. The
political philosopher Hans Morgenthau, best known for his defense of political realism, called attention to the same problem nearly fifty years ago. In the wake of the first successful tests with
thermonuclear bombs, conducted by the USA and the former Soviet Union, Morgenthau referred to the “contrast” between the technological progress of our age and our feeble moral
attitudes as one of the most disturbing dilemmas of our time: The first dilemma consists in the contrast between the technological unification of the world and the parochial moral
commitments and political institutions of the age. Moral commitments and political institutions, dating from an age which modern technology has left behind, have not kept pace with
technological achievements and, hence, are incapable of controlling their destructive potentialities. (Morgenthau 1962, 174) Moral enhancement theorists and political realists like
Morgenthau, therefore, share the thesis that our natural moral dispositions are not strong enough to prevent human beings from endangering their own existence as a species. But they differ
as to the best way out of this quandary: moral enhancement theorists argue for the re-engineering of our moral dispositions, whereas Morgenthau accepted the immutability of human nature
and argued, instead, for the re-engineering of world politics. Both positions, as I intend to show, are wrong in assuming that the “dilemma” results from the weakness of our spontaneous
both positions are correct in recognizing
moral dispositions in the face of the unprecedented technological achievements of our time. On the other hand,

the real possibility of global catastrophes resulting from the malevolent use of, for instance,
biotechnology or nuclear capabilities. The supposition that individuals’ unwillingness to cooperate with each other, even when they would be better-off by
choosing to cooperate, results from a sort of deficit of dispositions such as altruism, empathy, and benevolence has been at the core of some important political theories. This idea is an
important assumption in the works of early modern political realists such as Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. It was also later endorsed by some well-known authors writing about the origins
of war in the first half of the twentieth century. It was then believed, as Sigmund Freud suggested in a text from 1932, that the main cause of wars is a human tendency to “hatred and
destruction” (in German: ein Trieb zum Hassen und Vernichtung). Freud went as far as to suggest that human beings have an ingrained
“inclination” to “aggression” and “destruction” (Aggressionstrieb, Aggressionsneigung, and Destruktionstrieb), and that this inclination has a “good
biological basis” (biologisch wohl begründet) (Freud 1999, 20–24; see also Freud 1950; Forbes 1984; Pick 1993, 211–227; Medoff 2009). The attempt to employ Freud’s

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

correctly argues that “structural issues,” rather than human nature, constitute the main factor
underlying political conflicts (Sparrow 2014, 29). But he does not explain what exactly these “structural issues” are, as I intend to do later. Sparrow is right in rejecting
the human nature theory underlying the human enhancement project. But this underlying assumption, in my view, is not trivially false or simply “ludicrous,” as he suggests. Human nature
realism has been implicitly or explicitly endorsed by leading political philosophers ever since Thucydides speculated on the origins of war in antiquity (Freyberg-Inan 2003, 23–36). True, it
might be objected that “human nature realism,” as it was defended by Morgenthau and earlier political philosophers, relied upon a metaphysical or psychoanalytical conception of human
nature, a conception that, actually, did not have the support of any serious scientific investigation (Smith 1983, 167). Yet, over the last few years there has been much empirical research in
fields such as developmental psychology and evolutionary biology that apparently gives some support to the realist claim. Some of these studies suggest that an inclination to aggression and
conflict has its origins in our evolutionary history. This idea, then, has recently led some authors to resume “human nature realism” on new foundations, devoid of the metaphysical
assumptions of the early realists, and entirely grounded in empirical research. Indeed, some recent works in the field of international relations theory already seek to call attention to
evolutionary biology as a possible new start for political realism. This point is clearly made, for instance, by Bradley Thayer, who published in 2004 a book called Darwin and International
Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict. And in a paper published in 2000, he affirms the following: Evolutionary theory provides a stronger foundation for realism
because it is based on science, not on theology or metaphysics. I use the theory to explain two human traits: egoism and domination. I submit that the egoistic and dominating behavior of
individuals, which is commonly described as “realist,” is a product of the evolutionary process. I focus on these two traits because they are critical components of any realist argument in
explaining international politics. (Thayer 2000, 125; see also Thayer 2004) Thayer basically argues that a tendency to egoism and domination stems from human evolutionary history. The
predominance of conflict and competition in the domain of international politics, he argues, is a reflex of dispositions that can now be proved to be part of our evolved human nature in a way
that Morgenthau and other earlier political philosophers could not have established in their own time. Now, what some moral enhancement theorists propose is a direct intervention in our
“evolved limited moral psychology” as a means to make us “fit” to cope with some possible devastating consequences from the predominance of conflict and competition in the domain of
international politics (Persson and Savulescu 2010, 664). Moral enhancement theorists comprehend the nature of war and conflicts, especially those conflicts that humankind is likely to face in
the future, as the result of human beings’ limited moral motivations. Compared to supporters of human nature realism, however, moral enhancement theorists are less skeptical about the
prospect of our taming human beings’ proclivity to do evil. For our knowledge in fields such as neurology and pharmacology does already enable us to enhance people’s performance in a
the question, of course, is whether
variety of activities, and there seems to be no reason to assume it will not enable us to enhance people morally in the future. But

moral enhancement will also improve the prospect of our coping successfully with some major threats to the survival
of humankind , as Savulescu and Persson propose, or to reduce evil in the world , as proposed by Walker. V. The point to which I would next like to call
attention is that “human nature realism” – which is implicitly presupposed by some moral enhancement theorists – has been much criticized over the last decades within the tradition of
political realism itself. “Structural realism,” unlike “human nature realism,” does not seek to derive a theory about conflicts and violence in the context of international relations from a theory
of the moral shortcomings of human nature. Structural realism was originally proposed by Kenneth Waltz in Man, the State and War, published in 1959, and then later in another book called
Theory of International Politics, published in 1979. In both works, Waltz seeks to avoid committing himself to any specific conception of human nature (Waltz 2001, x–xi). Waltz’s thesis is that
the thrust of the political realism doctrine can be retained without our having to commit ourselves to any theory about the shortcomings of human nature. What is relevant for our
understanding of international politics is, instead, our understanding of the “structure” of the international system of states (Waltz 1986). John Mearsheimer, too, is an important
contemporary advocate of political realism. Although he seeks to distance himself from some ideas defended by Waltz, he also rejects human nature realism and, like Waltz, refers to himself
states
as a supporter of “structural realism” (Mearsheimer 2001, 20). One of the basic tenets of political realism (whether “human nature realism” or “structural realism”) is, first, that the

are the main, if not the only, relevant actors in the context of international relations; and second, that states compete for power in the
international arena. Moral considerations in international affairs, according to realists, are secondary when set against the state’s

primary goal, namely its own security and survival . But while human nature realists such as Morgenthau explain the struggle for power as a result of
human beings’ natural inclinations, structural realists like Waltz and Mearsheimer argue that conflicts in the international arena do not stem from human nature, but from the very “structure”

it is this structure that compels individuals to act

of the international system of states (Mearsheimer 2001, 18). According to Waltz and Mearsheimer,

as they do in the domain of international affairs. And one distinguishing feature of the international system of states is its “anarchical
structure,” i.e. the lack of a central government analogous to the central governments that exist in the context of domestic politics. It means that each
individual state is responsible for its own integrity and survival. In the absence of a superior authority, over
and above the power of each sovereign state, political leaders often feel compelled to favor security over morality , even if, all other things
being considered, they would naturally be more inclined to trust and to cooperate with political leaders of other states. On the other hand, when political leaders do trust and cooperate with
other states, it is not necessarily their benevolent nature that motivates them to be cooperative and trustworthy, but, again, it is the structure of the system of states that compels them. The
concept of human nature, as we can see, does not play a decisive role here. Because Waltz and Mearsheimer depart from “human nature realism,” their version of political realism has also

even if human beings turn out to become morally enhanced in the future,
sometimes been called “neo-realism” (Booth 1991, 533). Thus,

humankind may still have to face the same scary scenarios described by some moral enhancement theorists. This is likely to
happen if, indeed, human beings remain compelled to cooperate within the present structure of the system of states. Consider, for
instance, the incident with a Norwegian weather rocket in January 1995. Russian radars detected a missile that was initially suspected of being on its way to reach Moscow in five minutes. All
levels of Russian military defense were immediately put on alert for a possible imminent attack and massive retaliation. It is reported that for the first time in history a Russian president had
before him, ready to be used, the “nuclear briefcase” from which the permission to launch nuclear weapons is issued. And that happened when the Cold War was already supposed to be over!
In the event, it was realized that the rocket was leaving Russian territory and Boris Yeltsin did not have to enter the history books as the man who started the third world war by mistake
(Cirincione 2008, 382).3 But under the crushing pressure of having to decide in such a short time, and on the basis of
unreliable information, whether or not to retaliate, even a morally enhanced Yeltsin might have given
orders to launch a devastating nuclear response – and that in spite of strong moral dispositions to the
contrary. Writing for The Guardian on the basis of recently declassified documents, Rupert Myers reports further incidents similar to the one of 1995. He suggests that as more states
strive to acquire nuclear capability, the danger of a major nuclear accident is likely to increase (Myers 2014). What has to be changed, therefore, is not human

moral dispositions, but the very structure of the political international system of states within which we currently
live. As far as major threats to the survival of humankind are concerned, moral enhancement might play an important role in the future only to the extent that it will help humankind to change
moral enhancement may possibly have desirable results in some areas of human cooperation that do not badly threaten our
the structure of the system of states. While

will not motivate political leaders to dismantle their nuclear

security – such as donating food, medicine, and money to poorer countries – it

weapons . Neither will it deter other political leaders from pursuing nuclear capability, at any rate not as
long as the structure of international politics compels them to see prospective cooperators in the
present as possible enemies in the future. The idea of a “structure” should not be understood here in metaphysical terms, as though it mysteriously
existed in a transcendent world and had the magical power of determining leaders’ decisions in this world. The word “structure” denotes merely a political arrangement in which there are no
in the absence of the kind of security that law-enforcing institutions have the
powerful law-enforcing institutions. And

force to create, political leaders will often fail to cooperate, and occasionally engage in conflicts and wars, in those areas
that are critical to their security and survival. Given the structure of international politics and the basic goal of survival, this is likely to continue
to happen, even if, in the future, political leaders become less egoistic and power-seeking through moral enhancement. On the other
hand, since the structure of the international system of states is itself another human institution, there is no reason to suppose that it cannot ever be changed. If people become morally
enhanced in the future they may possibly feel more strongly motivated to change the structure of the system of states, or perhaps even feel inclined to abolish it altogether. In my view,

addressing major threats to the survival of humankind in the future by means of bioengineering is
however,

unlikely to yield the expected results, so long as moral enhancement is pursued within the present
framework of the international system of states.
 Alternative Fails – 1AR
Emancipation driven theory is useless – bottom up focus that uses discursive
frameworks ignores that root causes are structural
Chandler, IR Prof @ University of Westminster, 15
(David, “Contesting postliberalism: governmentality or emancipation?,” Journal of International
Relations and Development, 2015, 18, 1–24)
Societal practices and the ‘everyday’ have become a focal point of international intervention and they
have been legitimised on the basis of empowering the voice and agency of the postcolonial and post-
conflict subject.4 This postliberal discourse of societal empowerment seems to coincide both with the
dominant post-classical economic understandings of the problem of rational agency and with the
radical or critical approaches to the liberal subject and liberal peace understandings. However, there is
little likelihood of the ‘bottom-up’ alternative having a greater transformative effect on the subjects of
these policy interventions. The focus on societal practices and associations in the societal sphere,
rather than social or economic transformation, focuses on social interaction in the environmental
milieu as generative of ideas and understanding. This framework is problematic in that, despite its
claims to ‘deeper’ and more ‘bottom-up’ or ‘social’ understandings of post-conflict peace, it remains
entirely within the world of superficial appearances. The ‘root causes’ of problems are not located in
the materiality of social relations but in the ‘materiality’ of the mind-set of the subject, understood to be
false, imaginary or ideological, due to the problematic societal practices in which they are embedded.
If social practices are understood within a materialist framework, rather than an idealist one, then it is
clear that they neither produce ‘false’ ideas nor the social world of appearances.
 Pan Wrong – 2AC
Pan is reductionist and the alt fails
Jones, Professor of Politics at University of Glasgow, 14
(David Martin Jones, , PhD from LSE, Australian Journal of Political Science, February 21, 2014, 49:1,
"Managing the China Dream: Communist Party politics after the Tiananmen incident ", Taylor and
Francis Online)
Notwithstanding this Western fascination with China and the positive response of former Marxists, such
as Jacques, to the new China, Pan discerns an Orientalist ideology distorting Western commentary on
the party state, and especially its international relations (6). Following Edward Said, Pan claims that such
Western Orientalism reveals ‘not something concrete about the orient, but something about the
orientalists themselves, their recurring latent desire of fears and fantasies about the orient’ (16). In
order to unmask the limits of Western representations of China’s rise, Pan employs a critical
‘methodology’ that ‘draws on constructivist and deconstructivist approaches’ (9). Whereas the ‘former
questions the underlying dichotomy of reality/knowledge in Western study of China’s international
relations’, the latter shows how paradigmatic representations of China ‘condition the way we give
meaning to that country’ and ‘are socially constitutive of it’ (9). Pan maintains that the two paradigms of
‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’ in Western discourse shape China’s reality for Western ‘China
watchers’ (3). These discourses, Pan claims, are ‘ambivalent’ (65). He contends that this ‘bifocal
representation of China, like Western discourses of China more generally, tell us a great deal about the
west itself, its self -imagination, its torn, anxious, subjectivity, as well as its discursive effects of othering’
(65). This is a large claim. Interestingly, Pan fails to note that after the Tiananmen incident in 1989,
Chinese new left scholarship also embraced Said’s critique of Orientalism in order to reinforce both
the party state and a burgeoning sense of Chinese nationalism. To counter Western liberal discourse,
academics associated with the Central Party School promoted an ideology of Occidentalism to deflect
domestic and international pressure to democratise China. In this, they drew not only upon Said, but
also upon Foucault and the post-1968 school of French radical thought that, as Richard Wolin has
demonstrated, was itself initiated in an appreciation of Mao’s cultural revolution. In other words, the
critical and deconstructive methodologies that came to influence American and European social science
from the 1980s had a Maoist inspiration (Wolin 2010: 12–18). Subsequently, in the changed
circumstances of the 1990s, as American sinologist Fewsmith has shown, young Chinese scholars
‘adopted a variety of postmodernist and critical methodologies’ (2008: 125). Paradoxically, these
scholars, such as Wang Hui and Zhang Kuan (Wang 2011), had been educated in the USA and were
familiar with fashionable academic criticism of a postmodern and deconstructionist hue that
‘demythified’ the West (Fewsmith 2008: 125–29). This approach, promulgated in the academic journal
Dushu (Readings), deconstructed, via Said and Foucault, Western narratives about China. Zhang Kuan, in
particular, rejected Enlightenment values and saw postmodern critical theory as a method to build up a
national ‘discourse of resistance’ and counter Western demands regarding issues such as human rights
and intellectual property. It is through its affinity with this self-strengthening, Occidentalist lens, that
Pan’s critical study should perhaps be critically read. Simply put, Pan identifies a political economy of
fear and desire that informs and complicates Western foreign policy and, Pan asserts, tells us more
about the West’s ‘self-imagination’ than it does about Chinese reality. Pan attempts to sustain this claim
via an analysis, in Chapter 5, of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the China threat, followed, in Chapters 6
and 7, by exposure of the false promises and premises of the China ‘opportunity’. Pan certainly offers a
provocative insight into Western attitudes to China and their impact on Chinese political thinking. In
particular, he demonstrates that China’s foreign policy-makers react negatively to what they view as a
hostile American strategy of containment (101). In this context, Pan contends, accurately, that Sino–US
relations are mutually constitutive and the USA must take some responsibility for the rise of China
threat (107). This latter point, however, is one that Australian realists like Owen Harries, whom Pan
cites approvingly, have made consistently since the late 1990s. In other words, not all Western
analysis uncritically endorses the view that China’s rise is threatening. Nor is all Western perception
of this rise reducible to the threat scenario advanced by recent US administrations. Pan’s subsequent
argument that the China opportunity thesis leads to inevitable disappointment and subtly reinforces the
China threat paradigm is, also, somewhat misleading. On the one hand, Pan notes that Western
anticipation of ‘China’s transformation and democratization’ has ‘become a burgeoning cottage
industry’ (111). Yet, on the other hand, Pan observes that Western commentators, such as Jacques,
demonstrate a growing awareness that the democratisation thesis is a fantasy. That is, Pan, like Jacques,
argues that China ‘will neither democratize nor collapse, but may instead remain politically authoritarian
and economically stable at the same time’ (132). To merge, as Pan does, the democratisation thesis into
its authoritarian antithesis in order to evoke ‘present Western disillusionment’ (132) with China is
somewhat reductionist. Pan’s contention that we need a new paradigm shift ‘to free ourselves from the
positivist aspiration to grand theory or transcendental scientific paradigm itself’ (157) might be
admirable, but this will not be achieved by a constructivism that would ultimately meet with the
approval of what Brady terms China’s thought managers (Brady: 6).