Crisis Rhetoric Relies on Unquestioned Assumptions

K – Security
Joe Fenner//Teddy Hill-Weld

Note: the link section is organized alphabetically by impact/advantage
Each section has a 1NC card with some 2NC material (Crisis Rhetoric & Privacy IP)
--There are 3 terror cards here, but y’all should go to the CTS file
Impacts are also alphabetical; y’all can probably put them in the 2NC since most of the 1NC links
have their own impacts
--Many of the impacts could be spun as a link if you really want to
~ if the link you want isn’t in here, the neoliberalism file most likely has it, and if it isn’t there just
ask me <hillweld32@gmail.com> to find one
psssst joefenner@rocketmail.com too
Links
Crisis Rhetoric
1NC Crisis Rhetoric
The aff’s use of crisis rhetoric relies on taken-for-granted assumptions about
social organization while mobilizing threat of catastrophe to depoliticize them,
reproducing inequality
Roitman 14
(Janet Roitman, Associate Prof. in Anthropology @ Graduate Program for International Affairs at
the New School for Social Research, Anti-Crisis, pgs. 10-14)
we observe how academic and nonacademic

To do so, we embark on a trek over the anxious terrain of crisis narration. This trek is one of observation:
observers themselves observe economic and financial actors, both human and technical, which they locate, define, and
interpret as having produced crisis. We observe, then, the blind spot of second-order observation. Moreover, through this survey of the practice of crisis in
contemporary narrations of “the 2007–9 financial crisis,” we see how accession to crisis engenders certain narrations and note how
the term enables and forecloses various kinds of questions. Through this review of a host of recent narratives of financial crisis, I am not seeking to
establish the relative veracity of these accounts; I am not interested in whether or not certain purported explanations of “the crisis” are more or less tenable. Although I do
explore questions relating to the production of value and risk, and the status of subprime and houses, I do so only insofar as these terms constitute the grammar of financial
The point of this grand tour of crisis narratives is not to determine the best way to decipher the crisis or
crisis narratives.
to establish who “got it right” in recent analyses. The point is to demonstrate how the term “crisis” establishes the
conditions of possible histories and to indicate how it is a blind spot in social science narrative
constructions.¶ We thus take a journey through a wide-ranging array of interpretations, each of which claims a particular tradition: liberal economy, neo-Keynesian,
neo-Marxist, cultural studies, and cultural economy. All proceed from the question, what went wrong? All search for origins, sources, roots, causes, reasons . . . none waver in
All seek to demonstrate deviations from the proper

their faith in crisis, a term that is posited without question or doubt.
course of history and distortions in human knowledge and practice—the discrepancy between the
world and human knowledge of the world. Crisis signifies a purportedly observable chasm
between “the real,” on the one hand, and what is variously portrayed in the accounts reviewed below as fictitious, erroneous, or
an illogical departure from the real, on the other. The chasm signifies a supposed dissonance between empirical history and a philosophy of history—between
truly grounded material value, on the one hand, and hypothetical judgments and evaluations, on the other.13 What is at issue is our alienation from history and the potential for
revelation of true value and the true significance of events—of redemption, emancipation, deliverance. I ask: how can we claim to represent that chasm? What is the basis of a
claim to know the locus of our alienation from underlying value, from material value, from real value, from truth value?¶ To conclude this expedition over the terrain of crisis
narration, I put a set of particularly pragmatic questions to the narratives that I review herein: When does a credit (asset) become a debt (toxic asset)? How do we distinguish the
former from the latter? At what point do houses figured as equity become figured as a debt? At what point do subprime mortgage bonds transform from an asset to a liability?
And the ultimate question: When does the judgment of crisis obtain? We see, by putting these questions to contemporary crisis narratives, how crisis, in itself, cannot be located
or observed as an object of first- order knowledge. The observation “money” is a first-order observation based on a distinction (money/not money); the statements “I lost
money” or “Lost money is a crisis” are second-order observations. A first-order observation (money) does not indicate how the distinction (money/not money) was made; and
the distinction (how the observation was made) is necessarily the object of a second-order observation.14 But taking note of crisis as a distinction, or as a second-order
operation, does not amount to denying crisis. The point is to take note of the effects of the claim to crisis, to be attentive to
the effects of our very accession to that judgment. Crisis engenders certain forms of critique, which politicize interest
groups. This is a politics of crisis. Would not crisis, if it effectively obtained, engender not merely critique of existing relations
and practices, but rather occasion the reorganization and transformation of the very boundary between “the
economic” and “the political,” and, more significant, the transformation of the very intelligibility of
constitutive terms, such as “debt,” “liquidity,” and “risk” ? In assuming crisis as a point of
departure, we remain closed off in a politics of crisis. We can ask, echoing the Occupy Wall Street movement, who should bear the
burden of fading prosperity? But other constitutive questions , related to the production of effective practice, remain unarticulated,
such as, how did debt come to be figured as an asset class in the first place ?¶ To answer this latter question, I
turn to the few studies of the production of value through market devices and financial infrastructures that help us to account for the efficacy of economic and financial
instead of financial crisis due to irrational speculation,

practices, which sustain the production of value—figured as debt. Here,
missed forecasting, or systemic failure and underlying contradictions,

corrupt culture, erroneous policy, faulty regulation, defective models,
we have an accounting of specific practices and the production of positive —or, better, practical—
knowledge, such that the claim to crisis becomes a particular (political) solution to what is declared
a problem for certain domains of life. These rare observations of the production of economic and financial value without positing crisis help us to
grasp how “crisis” is less a claim about error in valuation than a judgment about value. But noncrisis accounts
cannot be taken as distinct “alternative” narrations insofar as they do not provide evidence against “X account of crisis” so as to prove or affirm “Y account of crisis.” In that
sense, my turn to these accounts is a thought experiment: this exercise explores the grounds of narrative without crisis, but these are not alternative explanations because crisis
is not their object. Doubtless, this thought experiment risks reproducing the “problem of meaning”— or the belief that there is a discrepancy between history and
critique and crisis are

representations of history—insofar as it raises the possibility of narrating history otherwise.15 But here I want to underscore that
cognates, and so want to bring to our attention the forms of critique engendered by crisis
narratives. We see that these forms of critique rest on assumptions about how categories like “the
market” or “finance” should function and therefore generate conjecture about how deviations
from “true” market or financial value were produced; they do not account for the ways that
such value is produced in the first place. In other words, when crisis is posited as an a priori, it
obviates accounts of positive, pragmatic spaces of calculative possibility. I therefore raise the possibility of
noncrisis narratives and explore how possible, alternative narratives about houses and their worth might be generated without recourse to a “sociology of error” (Bloor 1991,
12), without constructing a post hoc narrative of denunciation or post hoc judgments of deviation and failure.16¶ Ultimately, I invite the reader to put
less faith in crisis, which means asking what is at stake with crisis in-and-of-itself . “Crisis” is a
term that is bound up in the predicament of signifying human history , often serving as a
transcendental placeholder in ostensible solutions to that problem. In that sense, the term “crisis” serves as
a primary enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge. That is, crisis is a point of view, or an
observation, which itself is not viewed or observed . I apprehend the concept of crisis through the metaphor of a blind spot so as to apprehend
crisis as an observation that, like all observations or cognitions, does not account for the very conditions of its observation.17 Consequentially, making that blind
spot visible means asking questions about how we produce significance for ourselves . At least, it
means asking about how we produce “history.” At most, it means asking how we might construct accounts without
discerning historical significance in terms of ethical failure . Thus we might ask: what kind of narrative could be produced
where meaning is not everywhere a problem?18 An answer to that question, no matter how improbable, as we will see below, requires, as a
first, inaugural step, consideration of the ways in which crisis, as an enabling blind spot for the
production of knowledge, entails unremitting and often implicit judgment about latencies, or
errors and failings that must be eradicated and, evidently hopefully, overcome.
Cyber Security
1NC Cyber Security
The AFF employs a militarized discourse of cybersecurity --- that inflates threats
and ignores dangerous vulnerabilities
Myriam Dunn Cavelty 12, lecturer for security studies and a senior researcher in the field of
risk and resilience at the Center for Security Studies, “The militarisation of cyber security as a
source of global tension,” STRATEGIC TRENDS 2012: Key Developments in Global Affaris ed. by
Daniel Möckli, Center for Security Studies, p. 114-21, fwang
The militarisation of cyber security is first and foremost based on the belief in a massive threat
of a large-scale cyber attack. There are two aspects to this perception: In the first subsection, it is shown how and why the past and current level of the
threat is overrated. The second subsection places the future likelihood of cyber war into perspective. It shows that now and in the future, the probability of a large-scale attack is
very low. The third subsection looks at an additional reason for how widespread the fear of cyber war has become: Most countries simply follow the threat perception and
reasoning of the US, even though the strategic context and disparity in power positions warrant a different threat assessment. The fourth subsection finally criticises the
Such vocabulary insinuates a reality governed by the

widespread use of vocabulary that is full of military analogies.
traditional logic of offense and defence – a reality that does not exist. Even worse, it is
decoupled from the reality of the threat and the possibility for meaningful countermeasures
and is complicit in solidifying the militarisation of cyber security .
An overrated threat
There is no denying that different political, economic, and military conflicts have had
cyber(ed) components for a number of years now. Furthermore, criminal and espionage activities involving the use of computers
happen every day. It is a fact that cyber incidents are continually causing minor and only occasionally major
inconveniences: These may be in the form of lost intellectual property or other proprietary data,
maintenance and repair, lost revenue, and increased security costs. Beyond the direct impact, badly handled cyber
attacks have also damaged corporate (and government) reputations and have, theoretically at least, the potential to reduce public confidence in the security of Internet
transactions and e-commerce if they become more frequent.
there are no examples of cyber attacks that resulted in actual

However, in the entire history of computer networks,
physical violence against persons (nobody has ever died from a cyber incident), and only very few had a substantial
effect on property (Stuxnet being the most prominent). So far, cyber attacks have not caused serious long-term
disruptions. They are risks that can be dealt with by individual entities using standard
information security measures, and their overall costs remain low in comparison to other risk
categories such as financial risks.
These facts tend to be almost completely disregarded in policy circles . There are several reasons why the
threat is overrated. First, as combating cyber threats has become a highly politicised issue, official statements about the level of
threat must also be seen in the context of competition for resources and influence between
various bureaucratic entities. This is usually done by stating an urgent need for action and describing the
overall threat as big and rising.
psychological research has shown that risk perception, including the perception of
Second,
experts, is highly dependent on intuition and emotions . Cyber risks, especially in their more extreme form, fit the
risk profile of so-called ‘dread risks’, which are perceived as catastrophic, fatal, unknown, and
basically uncontrollable. There is a propensity to be disproportionally afraid of these risks
despite their low probability, which translates into pressure for regulatory action of all sorts and the
willingness to bear high costs of uncertain benefit.
the media distorts the threat perception even further . There is no hard data for the
Third,
assumption that the level of cyber risks is actually rising – beyond the perception of impact
and fear. Some IT security companies have recently warned against overemphasising sophisticated
attacks just because we hear more about them. In 2010, only about 3 per cent of all incidents were
considered so sophisticated that they were impossible to stop. The vast majority of attackers
go after low-hanging fruit, which are small to medium sized enterprises with bad defences . These
types of incidents tend to remain under the radar of the media and even law enforcement.
Cyber war remains unlikely
Since the potentially devastating effects of cyber attacks are so scary, the temptation is very
high not only to think about worst-case scenarios, but also to give them a lot of (often too
much) weight despite their very low probability. However, most experts agree that strategic cyber war remains
highly unlikely in the foreseeable future, mainly due to the uncertain results such a war would
bring, the lack of motivation on the part of the possible combatants , and their shared inability to
defend against counterattacks. Indeed, it is hard to see how cyber attacks could ever become truly
effective for military purposes: It is exceptionally difficult to take down multiple, specific
targets and keep them down over time. The key difficulty is proper reconnaissance and
targeting, as well as the need to deal with a variety of diverse systems and be ready for
countermoves from your adversary.
Furthermore, nobody can be truly interested in allowing the unfettered proliferation and use of cyber war tools, least of all the countries with the offensive lead in this domain.
the world’s big powers have an overall strategic interest in

Quite to the contrary, strong arguments can be made that
developing and accepting internationally agreed norms on cyber war, and in creating
agreements that might pertain to the development, distribution, and deployment of cyber
weapons or to their use (though the effectiveness of such norms must remain doubtful). The most obvious reason is that the countries that
are currently openly discussing the use of cyber war tools are precisely the ones that are the
most vulnerable to cyber warfare attacks due to their high dependency on information
infrastructure. The features of the emerging information environment make it extremely
unlikely that any but the most limited and tactically oriented instances of computer attacks
could be contained. More likely, computer attacks could ‘blow back’ through the interdependencies
that are such an essential feature of the environment . Even relatively harmless viruses and worms would cause considerable
random disruption to businesses, governments, and consumers. This risk would most likely weigh much heavier than the
uncertain benefits to be gained from cyber war activities .

Certainly, thinking about (and planning for) worst-case scenarios is a legitimate task of the national security apparatus. Also, it seems almost inevitable that until cyber war is
proven to be ineffective or forbidden, states and non-state actors who have the ability to develop cyber weapons will try to do so, because they appear cost-effective, more
cyber war should not receive too much attention at the

stealthy, and less risky than other forms of armed conflict. However,
expense of more plausible and possible cyber problems . Using too many resources for highimpact, low-probability events – and
therefore having less resources for the low to middle impact and high probability events – does not make sense, neither politically, nor strategically and certainly not when
applying a cost-benefit logic.
Europe is not the US
The cyber security discourse is American in origin and American in the making: At all times, the US government shaped both the threat
perception and the envisaged countermeasures . Interestingly enough, there are almost no variations to be found in other countries’
cyber threat discussions – even though the strategic contexts differ fundamentally. Many of the assumptions at the heart of the
cyber security debate are shaped by the fears of a military and political superpower. The US
eyes the cyber capabilities of its traditional rivals, the rising power of China and the declining
power of Russia, with particular suspicion. This follows a conventional strategic logic: The main question is whether the
cyber dimension could suddenly tip the scales of power against the US or have a negative
effect on its ability to project power anywhere and anytime. In addition, due to its exposure in world
politics and its military engagements, the US is a prime target for asymmetric attack .
The surely correct assumption that modern societies and their armed forces depend on the
smooth functioning of information and communication technology does not automatically
mean that this dependence will be exploited – particularly not for the majority of states in
Europe. The existence of the cyber realm seems to lead people to assume that because they
have vulnerabilities, they will be exploited. But in security and defence matters, careful threat
assessments need to be made. Such assessments require that the following question be carefully deliberated: ‘ Who has an interest
in attacking us and the capability to do so, and why would they? ’ For many democratic states, particularly in Europe,
the risk of outright war has moved far to the background and the tasks of their armies have
been adapted to this. Fears of asymmetric attacks also rank low. The same logic applies to the
cyber domain. The risk of a warlike cyber attack of severe proportions is minimal; there is no
plausible scenario for it. Cyber crime and cyber espionage, both political and economic, are a different story: They are here now and will remain the biggest
cyber risks in the future.
The limits of analogies
Even if the cyber threat were to be considered very high, the current trend conjures up wrong
images. Analogies are very useful for relating non-familiar concepts or complex ideas with more simple and familiar ones. But when taken too far, or even
taken for real, they begin to have detrimental effects. Military terms like ‘cyber weapons’, ‘cyber capabilities’, ‘cyber
offence’, ‘cyber defence’, and ‘cyber deterrence’ suggest that cyberspace can and should be
handled as an operational domain of warfare like land, sea, air, and outer space (cyberspace has in fact been officially recognised as a
new domain in US military doctrine). Again, this assumption clashes with the reality of the threat and the
possibilities for countermeasures.
hacker tools are not really like physical weapons.

First, calling offensive measures cyber weapons does not change the fact that
They are opportunistic and aimed at outsmarting the technical defences . As a result, their effect is
usually not controllable in a military sense – they might deliver something useful or they might not. Also, even though code can be copied,
the knowledge and preparation behind it cannot be easily proliferated . Each new weapon
needs to be tailored to the system it is supposed to attack . Cyber weapons cannot be kept in a ‘silo’ for a long time, because at
any time, the vulnerability in the system that it is targeted at could be patched and the weapon
would be rendered useless.
thinking in terms of attacks and defence creates a wrong image of immediacy of cause
Second,
and effect. However, high-level cyber attacks against infrastructure targets will likely be the
culmination of long-term, subtle, systematic intrusions. The preparatory phase could take place over several years. When
– or rather if – an intrusion is detected, it is often impossible to determine whether it was an
act of vandalism, computer crime, terrorism, foreign intelligence activity, or some form of
strategic military attack. The only way to determine the source, nature, and scope of the
incident is to investigate it. This again might take years, with highly uncertain results. The
military notion of striking back is therefore useless in most cases .
deterrence works if one party is able to successfully convey to another that it is both
Third,
capable and willing to use a set of available (often military) instruments against the other side if the
latter steps over the line. This requires an opponent that is clearly identifiable as an attacker
and has to fear retaliation – which is not the case in cyber security because of the attribution
problem. Attribution of blame on the basis of the cui bono logic is not sufficient proof for political action. Therefore,
deterrence and retribution do not work in cyberspace and will not, unless its rules are
changed in substantial ways, with highly uncertain benefits . Much of what is said in China and
in the US about their own and the other’s cyber capabilities is (old) deterrence rhetoric – and
must be understood as such. The White House’s new International Strategy for Cyberspace of 2011 states that the US reserves the right to retaliate to
hostile acts in cyberspace with military force. This ‘hack us and we might bomb you’ statement is an old-fashioned
declaratory policy that preserves the option of asymmetrical response as a means of deterrence, even though both sides actually know
that following up on it is next to impossible .
cyberspace is only in parts controlled or controllable by state actors . At least in the case of democracies,
Fourth,
power in this domain is in the hands of private actors, especially the business sector. Much of the expertise
and many of the resources required for taking better protective measures are located outside
governments. The military – or any other state entity for that matter – does not own critical (information)
infrastructures and has no direct access to them. Protecting them as a military mandate is
impossible, and conceiving of cyberspace as an occupation zone is an illusion. Militaries cannot defend the
cyberspace of their country – it is not a space where troops and tanks can be deployed , because the logic of
national boundaries does not apply.
2NC Cyber Security
It’s a question of sequencing – their discourse produces fear-based responses
that ensure error replication – consider the link prior to evaluating the risk of
their advantages
Watkin and Brito 11 – [Tate – Research Associate @ Mercatus Center @ George Mason University. Jerry –
Senior Research Fellow @ Mercatus Center @ George Mason University] [LOVING THE CYBER BOMB? THE DANGERS OF THREAT
INFLATION IN CYBERSECURITY POLICY] (http://tinyurl.com/pnmhhru) (accessed 7-17-15) //MC
CONCLUSION
Cybersecurity is an important policy issue, but the alarmist

rhetoric coming out of Washington that focuses on
worst-case scenarios is unhelpful and dangerous. Aspects of current cyber policy discourse
parallel the run-up to the Iraq War and pose the same dangers. Pre-war threat inflation and conflation of
threats led us into war on shaky evidence. By focusing on doomsday scenarios and conflating
cyber threats, government officials threaten to legislate, regulate, or spend in the name of cybersecurity
based largely on fear, misplaced rhetoric, conflated threats, and credulous reporting. The public should have access to
classified evidence of cyber threats, and further examination of the risks posed by those threats , before
sound policies can be proposed, let alone enacted .
Furthermore, we cannot ignore parallels between the military-industrial complex and the
burgeoning cybersecurity industry. As President Eisenhower noted, we must have checks and balances on the close
relationships between parties in government, defense, and industry. Relationships between these parties and
their potential conflicts of interest must be considered when weighing cybersecurity policy
recommendations and proposals.
--Total War
Cybersecurity creates an omnipresent environment of threat that ensures total
war – security measures constitute the dangers they attempt to resolve
Väliaho 14
Pasi Väliaho, Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London,
Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain, MIT Press, p. 86-7, fwang
Here the correspondence between the immunitary logic of self-preserva-tion and the therapeutic logic of the virtualization of war,
on the one hand, and the political and economic logic of contemporary wars, on the other, becomes apparent. Just as, in the
epistemo-politics of PTSD, virtual
reality therapies such as Virtual Iraq see the psyche as a war zone, where
defense against threats to it becomes priority number one , and where images are evoked for the
sake of self-preservation, to fight against pathogenic memories and to make patients
operative and flexible again, so Western societies see the globe as a war zone, where they fight
to defend and expand the neoliberal way of life against threats to it, incorporating the outside
under their rule. Thus virtual reality images, on one level, and current wars, on another, both positively
promote the neoliberal way of life and its impulse to adapt and expand by incorporating the
outside to the point where inside and outside become indistinguishable . Thus, too, "self-defense"
in the age of the preemptive "war on terror" comes to mean expansion through destruction of
all threats to the collective organism.
At the same time, however, posttraumatic stress disorder reveals an inherent and fundamental paradox in this notion of life's
emergence and self-protection. That contemporary
wars, in attempting to protect and pro-mote life by
administering death, produce as their effective outcome the traumatic body of PTSD in
constant crisis runs directly counter to immunitary logic, turning self-preservation into self-
destruction. In the traumatic body, certain memories integral to the organism are identified as
foreign to it, as something the organism can get rid of only by destroying itself: seeing itself as
a foreign body, the species-being attacks itself. This persistent state of emergency , according to
Esposito, embodies the autoimmunitary crisis of wars waged after 9/11, a crisis within the
immunity system of the collective organism, whereby the imperative of protecting and
promoting life is pursued so aggressively that it turns against itself :
War is no longer the always possible inverse of global coexistence, but the only effective
reality, where what matters isn't only the specular reality that is determined between adversaries ... but ... the
exponential multiplication of the same risks that would like to be avoided , or at least reduced,
through instruments that are instead destined to reproduce them more intensely .
Thus the immunitary paradigm of protecting life from what threatens it is inverted , and the
preservation of life becomes its destruction, a suicidal project. In contemporary wars, as the problematic of PTSD
demonstrates, the promotion of the neoliberal way of life with advanced military techno-logical
power produces traumatic events and endogenous simulations destructive of this very way of
life. In this respect, the self-destructive tendencies of PTSD, as currently understood and treated, closely
correspond to the self-destructive tendencies that emerge in the excessive pursuit of the
biopolitical imperative to protect and promote life.
The forces that define life in our current world are the very ones that seek to erase it, whence
the impossibility of making clear distinctions between the active and the passive, or between
the promotion of life and its destruction, that characterizes the traumatic body in particular
and neoliberal subjectivity in general. Posttraumatic stress disorder and biopsychiattic efforts to treat it crystallize the
logic of contemporary biopolitics, according to which "it is no longer only death that lies in wait for life, but life itself that constitutes
the most lethal instrument of death." Thus Virtual Iraq can be seen to implement the suicidal logic of
biopolitics, repeatedly reproducing the trauma of PTSD patients and accelerating the fears that
animate it, which is to say, turning the organism further against itself by presenting it with
constant flight-or-fight situations, colored by ever-growing fear that finds no relief because
fear is seen as essential to the very life of the organism . It may well be that, in attempting to immunize the
psyche by turning the world into the brain's endogenous apparition, the images circulating on military, virtual
reality, and video game screens end up triggering the psyche's potential for self-destruction ,
producing, instead of salvation from trauma, the world as a never-ending nightmare.
--Turns Case
Cybersecurity is a particular manifestation of securitization that is enhanced by
technical discourse --- their framing translates into further surveillance
measures
Jin et al 14
Dal Yong Jin et al, Andrew Feenberg, Catherine Hart, *Associate Professor at the School of
Communication at Simon Fraser University, **Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of
Technology in the School of Communication, ***masters student in the School of
Communication at Simon Fraser University, “The Insecurity of Innovation: A Critical Analysis of
Cybersecurity in the United States,” International Journal of Communication, Vol. 8, p. 2863-4,
fwang
Further cementing the influence of hegemonic power structures are cybersecurity’s focus on
“hypothetical futures” or estimations of risk and threat (Buzan et al., 1998), and the reliance in security
and technical fields on “experts” who are not always held accountable . Bigo remarked on the
“lack of precision required for threats identified by the professionals who know some secrets .
Amateurs always need to prove their claims, whereas professionals, whether international, national, or local, corporate or public, can evoke without
demonstrating” (2002, p. 74). Indeed, Hansen and Nissenbaum (2009, p. 1168) argue that although cybersecurity is not uniquely reliant on technical,
expert discourse, it is the field where “[technifications] have been able to take on a more privileged
position than in any other security sector,” as computer security often requires knowledge that is unavailable to
the general public. This is important because the effect of “technifications,” as speech acts similar to
securitization, is that “they construct an issue as reliant upon technical, expert knowledge, but
they also simultaneously presuppose a politically and normatively neutral agenda, that
technology serves” (ibid., p. 1167). The simultaneous use of both securitization and technification in
cybersecurity discourse is therefore significant because they “work to prevent it from being
politicized in that it is precisely through rational, technical discourse that securitization may
‘hide’ its own political roots” (ibid., p. 1168).
Increasingly, security agencies and law enforcement advance the securitizing argument . Resultant
attempts to control the development of networked computing reflect a desire to know and to
secure that is central to both the security of the state and society’s normalization and
productive functioning. Foucault discussed this as governmentality, a method of governance that protects, controls, and fosters economic expansion, and as
such is inextricable from economic liberalism (2007). Surveillance in response to insecurity is a way of knowing a
population, rendering it calculable and thereby manageable. It not only informs state action but also influences the way
subjects think about themselves. This is evident in Foucault’s illustration of the panopticon: surveillance (or the assumption of surveillance) induces in the subject “a state of
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (1995, p. 201). Theoretically, this produces a disciplined, ordered, productive society
Neocleous addressed police as a form

without the need to enforce, punish, or necessarily carry out the surveillance in the first place. Similarly,
of governmental power for the administration of society and active fabrication of social order
(2000, p. 14).
--Link – Blackouts
Disaster planning papers over communal relationships necessary to ensure
successful disaster response
Nye 10
(David Nye, Professor of American History at the University of Southern Denmark, When the
Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America, pgs. 180-184)
The sociologist Lee Clarke noted how institutions

often issue such reassurances and create detailed crisis
instructions, although these preparations are largely “fantasy documents.”20 Many civil defense plans to
deal with nuclear attacks are implausible, Clarke noted, including one for commandeering commercial aircraft to evacuate the entire
population of New York City in three days—a comforting but impossible scenario. Many plans
narrowly focus on the
point of failure and lose sight of the complexity of the problem . If “the critical infrastructure is
made up of those systems required to maintain life ,”21 then it extends considerably beyond police,
fire departments, and repairmen. In the influenza outbreak of 1918, hospitals, morticians, and graveyards were
overwhelmed with dead bodies. As corpses literally piled up, the population became demoralized, normal life ceased, and in some
communities public services collapsed. People fled, seeking to escape the disease, often leaving their dead to rot. Clarke argues that
those who try to plan for “worst cases” tend to define preparations in narrow, technical terms
and to focus on imagined “first responders” (e.g., police and firemen). Disaster plans typically
overemphasize technical repairs and maintaining public order but overlook the centrality of
actual first responders, many of whom work for schools, taxi companies, bus companies, churches, mortuaries, hospitals,
and cities, but some of whom may be random passers- by. Plans seldom integrate a wide range of institutions
into contingency plans or recognize that in practice the first to respond are people accidentally on the
scene, who must improvise. In Clarke’s view, “social networks rather than formal organizations” are
“far more likely” to save a life or evacuate an area in time.22¶ The collapse and blackout of New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina (2005) shows how the definition of critical infrastructure extends beyond the technical system to include a wide
range of people and institutions. After Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi, 1.8 million people were without power. Major hospitals
and homes for the elderly had to be evacuated. The Superdome, a football stadium designated as a safe haven for those who could
not escape the city, also lacked electricity. About 20,000 people sweltered there in a fetid atmosphere, many suffering from heat
exhaustion. And as in the London Blitz or the 1977 New York blackout, some people took advantage of the evacuation to loot,
seeking not only survival necessities but also luxuries. Even hospitals were attacked. Without electricity to light the streets, sound
alarms, or run pumps and other equipment, the disaster worsened each day. The National Guard went in to restore order, but much
of the city remained unlivable. ¶ As
with Hurricane Katrina, the official response to disaster is often slow,
disorganized, and inadequate. “Worst case disasters are too unexpected and overwhelming for
organizations to fold into their standard operating procedures.” 23 When the levees broke and the flood
came, the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to respond to the human needs of those trapped in the city. While FEMA
dithered, volunteers saved thousands.24 Six months after the hurricane, some New Orleans neighbor- hoods were still without
electricity and uninhabitable.¶ Without
electricity, present-day life loses most of its critical infrastructure .
Yet the US electrical system is hard to protect because of its sheer extent . A hurricane strikes the grid
randomly, but the saboteur strikes a vulnerable point where severe damage can be done, transforming social spaces that sustain life
into anti-landscapes that do not. Though American grids have not been attacked, it is not because they are impregnable. Perhaps
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 film Sabotage suggests why transmission systems are not yet a target of choice. The film begins with a
blackout that darkens a whole district of central London. A saboteur has thrown sand into some powerhouse equipment, and it
takes an hour to clean and restart the system. The public response to this unexpected darkness, however, is not fear but
nonchalance and even considerable laughter. Like the crowds in the 1965 New York blackout three decades later, Hitchcock’s
Londoners take it with aplomb. Frustrated at this result, the saboteurs then decide to bomb a crowded public place. This seems
more likely than a blackout to cause panic. Even in 1936 it was clear that short-lived power outages cause few or no deaths and little
destruction, whereas a bomb causes both and is terrifying. A blackout, far from being demoralizing, may
strengthen the bonds of community. Accounts of the 2003 New York blackout suggest that this is what happened. A
sociologist who happened to be in Brooklyn when the blackout began spent hours walking the streets, where he found people
extremely helpful and far less reserved toward strangers than usual.25 ¶ After
the rolling blackouts of the 1990s, and
especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the public was not likely to take blackouts
lightly. Rather, they improvised moments of solidarity, based on the implicit belief that the power would soon
come on again. Yet the public knows that prolonged system failure will not merely paralyze a city but will also threaten them with
food shortages, dehydration, and the failure of essential services, while rendering office buildings and apartments uninhabitable.
Nevertheless, New Yorkers’ behavior during the 2003 power failure often recalled that of 1965. Once initial fears of a possible
terrorist attack were dispelled, people
flocked into the streets, which took on a holiday air . The blackout
became a carnival, not an apocalypse. The Russian critic Bakhtin once wrote that during a carnival “people
who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free and familiar
contact.”26 Something similar occurred in New York in 2003. Even after a decade with many small power failures, a blackout
could still become a moment of sociability and friendliness. As in 1965, few people could work without
electricity, and all had to negotiate a city without most of its amenities. At Muldoon’s Irish Pub on Third Avenue, “the loss of power
meant a license to party.”27 Patrons ordered extra beer, and many ambled outside, glasses in hand. As was recalled in a blog titled
“The Gothamist,” at first the event “made New Yorkers wonder if there was another terrorist attack” but “then they just settled in
for some street parties after finally making it home.” Many brought out battery-powered audio players, sat on their front stoops,
and partied into the night. Afterward, The New Yorker published a cartoon that suggested both the solidarity that developed among
those trapped in the city that day and also how quickly that unity dissolved again. A homeless man in ragged clothing chases after a
businessman, calling out “Don’t you remember me? During the blackout we slept on the same sidewalk.” According to one
interpreter, the “August 14 event was a bit like the medieval Feast of Fools, the Yuletide holiday when in towns around Europe class
distinctions were suspended, if only for a day, and masters and servants switched places, church observances were mocked, and
revelry overruled solemnity.”28 ¶ For anyone moving about, the city was “re-materialized.” A visiting Brazilian architect
later wrote: “Forget Virilio and Baudrillard and the virtual realities, there is no compression of time and space anymore. You are
left alone with the disvirtual reality of space .”29 Suddenly it was not possible to mediate one’s
relation to the built environment, which had to be measured by the body and its ability to climb, to walk, and to adjust.
“Without neon lights and electronics, space becomes what it has always been,” and one “cannot hide behind a wireless phone nor
dive yourself into the Internet.”30 When
electrified space is decompressed, the world suddenly seems
populated by unavoidable others . “Others on the stairway, Others down the street, Others on the way home. It’s dark,
and as a result, you start to see more and more Other people.”31 The sheer physicality of the world and its inhabitants had become
bewilderingly near.
Blackout discourse overstates the scale of crisis – best evidence concludes the
population will respond with solidarity and community solutions
Silvast 13
(Antti Silvast, PhD, University of Helsinki Department of Social Research, ANTICIPATING
INTERRUPTIONS: SECURITY AND RISK IN A LIBERALIZED ELECTRICITY INFRASTRUCTURE,
Academic Dissertation, https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/40138, pgs. 25-26)
If electricity is understood as a societal infrastructure vital for people’s well-being, then the ways in which
lay persons cope with its failures is an important research topic . The premise of my third case study is that
blackouts – albeit their many potentially disastrous impacts for the national state and industries – are also events of
everyday life. It analyses the systemic effects of blackouts for energy users by asking the following research question: how
do lay people reconstruct blackouts and their effects as risks in households? When choosing this question, however, it
is not just at issue that experts might not be interested in everyday folk . On the contrary, numerous
expert measures exist that try to determine the quality “expectations” of energy consumers and
their willingness to accept power cuts, cope with their effects, and possibly pay for higher-quality electricity (see, e.g., Forstén 2002;
CEER 2005, 2010, 2011; Kauppa- ja teollisuusminis- teriö 2006), or purchase prepayment energy and opt-out when they cannot pay
(Graham & Marvin 2001, 208-209). Indeed, these experts often assume a particular rationality for lay
people: that of a prepared individual who constantly reflects on financial harms and
compensations for a power cut. Such a starting point pays virtually no attention to more habitual
forms of thinking or to whether people are interested and able, or even willing, to do such calculations
in everyday life (Silvast & Virtanen, forthcoming). The habitual forms of thinking are in turn in my interest in the third case
study.¶ A partiality of a different sort also figures in some disaster mitigation activities according to researchers. Anthropologists
Julien Langumier and Sandrine Revet (2010; Revet 2013) have both drawn on the long tradition of sociological and anthropological
disaster research (see Dynes & Drabek 1994; Perry 2007) to approach catastrophes ethnographically. One thing they and their
colleagues (Langumier & Revet 2010, 6; Revet 2013, 47; 50) note is that several sources like the media, disaster relief,
and simulated crisis exercises often portray people merely as passive “victims” of a disaster.
Suggested by the Finnish Boxing Day blackout media stories, this “victimization” happens in Finland too. For instance, it is
emphasized how anxious people are during a long blackout and how they simply want to go
back to their normal life (see HS 31 December 2011, 1 January 2012, 2 January 2012). This gives little
consideration for how people have learned from past risks and remember them , thus shaping
what can be considered “normal” life to begin with (Langumier & Revet 2010, 6; Revet 2013, 40).¶ To address
such everyday reasoning about risk, the term lay people, though also used here for brevity’s sake, is indeed somewhat
inappropriate. The term indicates some lay sphere of a population or victims that is completely separate from the sphere of experts.
Yet, as Revet (2013, 43) points out, local people tend to be intrinsically involved with disasters and many
experts know this: a natural disaster, for example, creates novel interactions among rescue workers and residents. New studies
about major or recurrent infrastructure failures in Sweden (Höst et al 2010) and Russia (Alapuro 2011) suggest
that such encounters in a catastrophe even have a political potential : experiencing a failure,
people may start to act collectively to communicate the harm they suffered to expert decision
makers, or purchase community power generators , for example. Whether they will in fact take these kinds of
actions is an empirical problem. With this issue in mind, I want to pay attention to some ways in which Finnish people reconstruct
blackout events and try to resume their habitual actions when the power fails (Kilpinen 2000). I shall also talk about the interactions
that blackouts motivate – or could motivate – between homes, electricity experts, and authorities. The material in the third case
study consists of interviews and a questionnaire on Finnish homes.
----Turns Case
“Blackout” rhetoric uses particular “risk technique” patterns that determine the
plan’s implementation – this structures the relationship between the public,
electricity infrastructure, and government institutions and turns the case
because of serial policy failure
Silvast 13
Recently, many scholars have taken a different approach to the topic of risk than outlined
above. In new studies about risk governance, its rationalities, and its concrete technologies (O’Malley 2004; Helén 2004; Collier, Lakoff &
Rabinow 2004; Jauho 2007; Collier 2008; Collier & Lakoff 2008; Lehtonen & Liukko 2010, 2012; Liukko 2013), the concern is not primarily with broad and global societal
the research
transformations, with the multiple societal effects of new hazards, or with the cultural perceptions of risks. Certainly these issues remain relevant, but
objective is different. This objective is to study those rationales and technologies which are
applied when enacting hazards as objects for thought and action.¶ A key object of this tradition is
called risk techniques, where technique has many meanings and uses. It highlights those tools –
like statistical calculations, contracts, social and private insurance, simulated scenarios, policy
programmes, and wider political processes – that operationalize risk government aspirations,
which are hence not exclusively “mental” phenomena to begin with (O’Malley 2004, 12-13). This
line of reasoning comes close to social scientific Science and Technology Studies (STS): the
“technical” features of any given technology are rarely easy to separate from its “social” or
“cultural” features (Pollock & Williams 2009a, 57-58). Technique also means a particular way of
doing something: risk, specifically, enacts threats in a particular way by uncovering their
probability and impact and signifying them as harms to be acted upon (Helén 2004, 32-33). Such techniques can be
further drawn upon to found policy programmes about risk mitigation, responsible conduct, and government (Ewald 1993, 61-62; O’Malley 2004, 13). The technique of
A risk technique, once rationalized and used

insurance in the welfare state offers a typical example (Ewald 1993; Liukko 2013).¶
systematically by actors, can also be understood as a style of reasoning regarding the

maximization of security. The concept, popularized by the philosopher Ian Hacking (2002, 178-199), focuses on how people explore, classify, and name the
objects that they inquire. To these ends, both abstract concepts and measuring equipment are deployed by a style of reasoning to propose regularities, possibilities,
explanations, and proofs – or “truths” and ”falsities” – that can then, subsequently, be applied locally and also debated publicly (Lehtonen 2003, 5-8). Examples of styles of
reasoning include statistical analysis, postulation, empirical experimentation, and the construction of hypotheses and models (Hacking 2002, 181-182). However, while the
concept of a style often exemplifies “sweeping” and “generous” phenomena (Hacking 2002, 178-180) and emphasizes a small number of broad scientific traditions, my use of
there are
the concept is more situated corresponding with other works (Collier 2008, 2011). For instance, anthropologist Stephen Collier (2008, 230) has stressed that
multiple styles of reasoning about risk with their own “systemicity, specificity, and rigour” and
provision of “frameworks (...) for choice”. ¶ Styles of reasoning, like risk techniques, have a close
connection with practical deployment. As researchers argue, “articulations of ideas and techniques (of risk government) are always practical”
(O’Malley 2004, 12), while styles of reasoning are never separate from the instances where they are manifested (Lehtonen 2003, 6). What does the term “practical” mean here
and what are the said instances of manifestation like? Let me suggest a final conceptual extension, which, I believe, adds colour to discussions about those situations in which
risk outlines a problematic situation like a surprise, a crisis, or a

people manage risks in practice.¶ By definition,
disaster. Risk management then suggests ex-ante anticipatory actions, prudence, and foresight
about this situation. That is, if the combination of the problematic situation’s probability and
harm is high, then it is rational to mitigate the problem through performative actions (Luhmann
1993). At the same time, pragmatist sociologists and philosophers would say that people
generally try to solve problematic situations by drawing on their habits: their common sense
about those actions that have already worked before on several occasions (Joas 1992, 190-195;
Kilpinen 1998; Kilpinen 2000, 57-60; see also Rabinow 2008, 6- 11). My proposal here is that risk
techniques are placed in a similar context. From this premise, then, risk techniques are deployed
first of all in problematic situations and when people sense that the techniques work. If they do
not work, however, the result can be doubt about the technique and restructuring of its
practices of use. Collier (2008, 239) has shown this in the disaster mitigation context in the US: unlike a strong “risk society” thesis foresees, anomalic observations
and doubt are seldom a reason for abandoning technical expert reasoning more than for redeploying such thinking little by little.¶ When I say habit, I do not mean routines,
my concern with habits is in continuous

mannerisms, or action that is repeated mechanically (see Kilpinen 2000, 57). Rather, like pragmatists,
and general phenomena, or “rules of action” (ibid, 59), which people can deploy as a resource
when making sense of those varying problematic conditions that the theme of risk suggests. To me,
habit is a relatively flexible concept that can refer to engineering habits and skills (Suchman 2000), to everyday habits of energy use (Shove 2003, 2010) or to acquired knowledge
all such habitual phenomena, as I claim and

that is often named as tradition (Giddens 1994, 190; Hänninen & Laurila 2008). However,
illustrate later, provide new insight into the risks of electricity infrastructures, especially compared to the
more popular assumptions in some risk-based debates: namely, that risk transforms the society and its activities as a whole or that a priori mental perceptions determine all
forms of risk management (Joas 1992, 232; Kilpinen 1998).
----Blackouts Inevitable
System-wide complexity and competing decisionmaking incentives make
blackouts inevitable – the aff’s attempts at management fail and
misunderstand the functioning of large-scale infrastructure systems
Silvast 13
Over the past 15 years, empirical disaster and crisis studies have covered various major blackouts including Auckland, New Zealand
in 1998 (Stern, Newlove & Svedin 2005), Canada in 1998 (Scanlon 1999), Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1999 (Ullberg 2005), and
Sweden in 2005 and 2007 (Höst et al 2010). Blackouts, as these studies found, became urgent and threatening
situations for various reasons: the complexity of the electricity infrastructure failure, its knock-on
effects on other infrastructures, and the difficulty of coordinating among privatized utilities and
public stakeholders on many different levels (Ullberg 2005; Höst et al 2010). In many cases, electricity utilities and
decision-making bodies undermined worst-case scenarios and sought short-term operational
goals at the expense of longer-term crisis management perspectives (Stern, Newlove & Svedin 2005;
Ullberg 2005). In all of these cases, the blackout soon developed into a collective crisis of public credibility –
even as electricity companies themselves suffered as “victims” of the power failures (Stern, Newlove & Svedin 2005; Ullberg 2005).
In Canada (Scanlon 1999) and Sweden (Höst et al 2010), groups and organizations not directly concerned with electricity networks
began to manage the disaster, including social services, road support staff, and regional water services, self-organized municipal
resource groups, and a federation of farmers.¶ According to Bennett (2005) who studied the public response to the North American
blackout in 2003, blackouts often incite blame: the question here is, who or what can be held responsible for the electric power
failure? A useful illustration is given by official blackout reports: typically, their explanations centre on immediately operational
contexts or relatively non-specific political-economic framings of a blackout (such as the role of private markets and their regulation)
(e.g. CRE & AEEG 2004; UCTE 2004, 2007; see Silvast & Kaplinsky 2007). In this context, contrasting with simple mechanisms of
blame, the above research provides an interesting and relevant vantage point to understand the emergence of a collective crisis. It
details the rich and varied practices through which a blackout disaster or crisis was problematized by actors and then mitigated – or
not, as sometimes was the case. These are relevant insights for my interest in risk as practical problem solving. But another question
is, why had the electricity infrastructures failed: what
was the system-level background to these crises of
large infrastructures? It would seem that this issue, while important, is not central to the mentioned
studies whose focal point is in the disaster or crisis and its decision making , not in whether the incident
was caused by a technical failure, a natural disaster, human error, or other reasons (Ullberg 2005, 69). However, according to one
relatively brief argument by crisis scholars (Stern, Newlove & Svedin 2005, 3; 108-110), rapidly
cascading failures are
“inherent” to large- scale systems and thus they might be impossible to avert.¶ The last consideration
stems from a perspective which moves closer to the large technological systems and their actual functioning. In 1984, sociologist and
organizational scholar Charles Perrow (1999) published Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Tech- nologies, which concerns
various human-built systems (e.g. nuclear power plants, air traffic, DNA recombination, space missions). It
characterizes their
two related traits: interactive complexity and tight coupling . The first trait refers to the degree of
unexpected interactions among system components; the second to the pace in which effects
propagate from one component to the other . When interactive complexity and tight coupling
are both high in a system, accidents – damaging, unintended and disrupting events (Perrow 1999, 63-64) – become
difficult to anticipate and, over time, almost inevitable. To highlight this inevitability, Perrow calls such specific
disruptive events system accidents or normal accidents (see Silvast & Kelman 2013). Probably the best-known complex and tightly
coupled technological case by Perrow is nuclear power plants, but electricity supply systems are also discussed briefly in the book.
Perrow (1999, 97) sees the power grid as a tightly coupled, but relatively linear rather than complexly interactive system. Recently,
however, studies
have suggested that the complexity of energy systems is growing. In particular,
when these systems are liberalized, the number of system components grows and unexpected
interactions are highly likely especially when energy trading starts to happen increasingly real-time (Roe & Schulman
2008). This view also seems to be shared by Perrow (2008, Chapter 7) in his recent case study about the US liberalized electricity
transmission grid and has also been considered by Van Der Vleuten and Lagendijk (2010) while discussing the European blackout in
2006.
--Link – Critical Infrastructure
Economic collapse and critical infrastructure impact claims reproduce
neoliberalism – even if cyber security threats are real, they prioritize market
continuity and business interests, cementing neoliberal social relations
Cavelty 2014 [Myriam Dunn (Lecturer for security studies and a senior researcher in the field of risk and resilience @ Center
for Security Studies), “Breaking the Cyber-Security Dilemma: Aligning Security Needs and Removing Vulnerabilities”, Sci Eng Ethics
(2014) 20:701–715, AX]
Cyber-security linked to critical infrastructures creates and is implemented in a special type of security
environment. Whereas the traditional logic of national security suggests unilateral
government action and policy, the policies of cyber-security are inevitably blurred by
liberalization, domestic considerations and other policy imperatives (Coaffee and Murakami Wood 2006).
The management of infrastructure is in general not (or no longer) the prerogative of government;
instead it is based on the logic of the market. While it remains the essential task of a government to provide the
security of society, it has simultaneously become impossible for any government to achieve this by
itself. What is at stake is not the body of the state or its borders, ‘‘but the conjoined body of public and private-
sector networks’’ (Der Derian and Finkelstein 2008: 102). Therefore, the private sector becomes instrumental
in not only helping with the act of ‘‘identification’’ of critical objects, but also more directly in assuring the health of networks and
the services provided by them. Whereas the methodology employed to identify critical assets is very similar in both the public and
private sector, the commonalities end when it comes to the protection goals. From the public sector’s perspective, criticality is linked
to the loss of one or more broad national functions. That set of functions—or protection principles—has expanded over time,
beginning with national defense and economic security, to include public health and safety, and then national morale (Kristensen
2008). Through definition of these national functions along the lines of general well- being of a nation and its citizens, the link
between critical infrastructure protection and national security is forged. For
the state, the goal of protection is the
collective well-being represented as a way of liberal life (Anderson 2010)—but, by implication, also the
continued function of the state. The relationship between state and infrastructure emerges as an alternative to the
image of Abraham Bosse’s Leviathan on the frontispiece of Hobbes famous book: Instead of being made up of its citizens, the state is
regarded as consisting of the things inside its territory that make life there ‘good’; assets that are not directly identified with its
citizens, but material assets that give substance (and significance) to the state through being its foundation (Dunn Cavelty and
Kristensen 2008). Forthe private sector, the reference point varies depending on the business
model; in the abstract, however, it is their functioning, or ‘business continuity’, that is the ultimate
protection goal. The reference object for companies, therefore, is themselves. Crucial for the
continued performance and effectiveness of many of today’s companies that operate as
traders of information/knowledge with the help of information/knowledge networks, is
protection against loss of information and routine preservation of knowledge. These techniques
sever the human mind/body as ‘‘’incubator’ of this knowledge’’ from the knowledge itself (Der Derian and Finkelstein 2008: 102),
which is given autonomous value over that which becomes replaceable as a result of these practices. In this view, humans
become reduced to nodes in the network, needed to ensure the wealth and health of the
networks, but not their own health. National Security versus Human Security in Cyberspace In cyber-security as
currently understood and practised, human beings are seen as victims , as weakest link in the system, as direct threat—
but not (or only very indirectly) as beneficiaries of the type of security that states (and companies)
want. On the one hand, the neglect of the human element is a direct consequence of a focus on technical systems as targets and
technology-based countermeasures in cyber-security. On the other hand, the lack of consideration for ‘‘the human’’ in this field also
seems to be an effect of the issue that human security scholarship has already tackled decades ago: that too much focus on the state
and national security tends to crowd out consideration for the individual citizen, with often detrimental effects for security overall
(cf. Burgess and Owen 2004). I look at both aspects and their consequences for security below and then turn to the clash between
this type of security and human security. Technical Systems, Political Consequences A focus on technical objects is not a bad thing
per-se. In fact, the type of security that emerges directly from the wish to ensure cyber-security is one that seemingly dodges
problematic issues normally associated with security, at least in the first instance. Ultimately, we are looking at the practice of
protecting inanimate things; the regulation of machines and their performance. Computers, servers, and the computer-powered
infrastructures are non-human objects, which are someone’s legitimate property and have a certain (usually undisputed) value for
societies. Cyber-security measures thus imagined have little to no bearing on citizens’ lives directly. Most importantly, there are no
concerns about freedom/security trade-offs, and no civil liberty issues (Buzan et al. 1998). This security does not depend upon the
invocation of a state of emergency, but is ‘clean’ and ultimately, ‘good’, since everybody seems to benefit from an interruption-free
performance of vital systems. However, this view is inevitably problematized, because these machines
cannot be isolated
from human life. The image of modern complex critical infrastructures is one in which it
becomes futile to try and separate the human from the technological . Technology is not simply a tool
that makes life livable: rather, technologies become constitutive of novel forms of ‘a complex subjectivity’, which is characterized by
an inseparable ensemble of material and human elements (Coward 2009: 414). Therefore, even if technologies may
appear to regulate objectively and apolitically, there is always a connection to a place, to a
space, to a space of protection, to values, to life. An even closer look at the seemingly apolitical
management of a technical issue with technical means reveals a deeply political nature, because the
selection of referent objects as described above always entails a larger argument about protection : Endangered
entities are judged to have legitimate claims to protection (while others do not). In other words,
this type of security will only provide relief to a valued referent object—not necessarily ‘‘the
citizen’’ or humans more generally. In cyber-security, as argued above, economic imperatives like
profit maximization are decisive. It is not a given, then, that cyber-security is a truly public good,
understood as security for all. Quite the opposite: the type of security that emerges mainly benefits a
few and already powerful entities and has no or even negative effects for the rest. The type of
referent object to be protected and by implication, the type of life to be saved, is represented by the
uninterrupted flow of information linked to the accumulation of capital and economic growth
(Swyngedouw 2007), which in turn is linked to national security. This is at the heart of the cyber-security
dilemma, in which the dominant form of security is making large parts of the population
arguably less secure. Various security needs are not aligned; and while they do not always have to be, more awareness of
the clash between them is needed.
Infrastructural development to avert catastrophe is a key securitizing move – it

enables the mobilization of militarized violence
Aradau 2010 (Claudia, Senior Lecturer in International Relations & Centre for the Study of
Political Community, Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection, Oct.
14, Sage, thw_)
The securitization of critical infrastructure is pre-eminently about the protection of objects .

Critical infrastructure protection is generally held to have emerged as a security issue in the mid-1990s and the terminology of ‘critical
infrastructure’ itself to have been coined by Clinton administration in 1996. Critical infrastructure allegedly signifies a difference from earlier
usages of ‘infrastructure’. While infrastructure was part of military strategy to weaken the enemy, its transformation into a matter of national
security has been variously located either during the Cold War (Collier and Lakoff 2007) or after 9/11 (Center for History and New Media 2009).
If military strategy could also 9 involve the destruction of one’s own infrastructure, the
securitization of critical
infrastructure assumes an understanding of infrastructure as foundational . Societies are
‘grounded’ in infrastructure, their functioning, continuity and survival are made possible
by the protection of infrastructure. A 1997 report by the Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection was symbolically
entitled ‘Critical Foundations’ (Commission for Critical Infrastructure Protection 1997). Definitions of critical infrastructure list heterogeneous
elements, from communications, emergency services, energy, finance, food, government, health, to transport and water sectors (Centre for
the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) 2009). The general argument about the necessity to protect critical infrastructure is framed
along these lines (with little variation from a report to another and from an author to another): Our modern society and day to day activities
are dependent on networks of critical infrastructure – both physical networks such as energy and transportation systems and virtual networks
such as the Internet. If terrorists attack a piece of critical infrastructure, they will disrupt our standard of living and cause significant physical,
psychological, and financial damage to our nation (Bennett 2007: 9). The UK’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure defines the
effects of any failure in national infrastructure to lead to ‘severe economic damage, grave social disruption, or even large scale loss of life’
(Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) 2009). Naming infrastructures as critical for the purposes of protecting them
against terrorist attacks is a securitising move. Where critical infrastructure experts would look for the adequacy of representation to the
reality of objects threatened – by drawing up lists of critical infrastructure as a result of risk assessment scenarios – a performative approach
wouldconsider the constitution of reality through the iterative speech acts that securitize
infrastructure by naming as ‘critical’ and in need of protection against potential terrorist
attacks and/or other hazards. The Centre for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure in the UK encapsulates this double move:
The most significant threat facing the UK comes from international terrorism and its stated ambitions to mount ‘high impact’ attacks that
combine mass casualties with substantial disruption to key services such as energy, transport and communications. This is a threat that is
different in scale and intent to any that the UK has faced before (Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) 2010b). Yet, for
the Copenhagen School of security studies for example, objects are also relegated to the status of external conditions of speech acts.
Objects that are generally held to be threatening (for example, tanks or polluted waters) play a facilitating
role in the process of securitization (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998: 33). Energy blackouts, transport
failures and so on could also be read as facilitating conditions of the speech act . In this approach,
there is ontological and epistemological ambiguity about the role of objects: as they outside speech acts or the result of speech acts? As the
next section will show, this approach cannot account for different materializations of critical infrastructure – the matter of critical
infrastructure is not constant and given but varies depending on the agential cuts created.
--Link – Data Flows/Economy
The focus on protecting data flows and developing strong information networks
proves our link – the imperative on protecting information companies allows
neoliberal expansion to continue unimpeded
Webster 6
[Frank Webster, Professor of Sociology @ City University London, “Theories of the Information Society Third Edition”, Routledge
Publishing, pg. 126-128, AX]
In the writing of Herbert Schiller there are at least four arguments that are given special emphasis. I signal them here and expand on
them later in this chapter. The first draws attention to the pertinence of market criteria in informational developments. In this view
it is essential to recognise that the market pressures of buying, selling and trading in order to
make profit decisively influence information and communications innovations. To Schiller (and also
to his wife of fifty years, Anita, a librarian who researches informational trends) the centrality of market principles is
a powerful impulse towards a second major concern, the commodification of information, which means
that it is, increasingly, made available only on condition that it is saleable. In this respect it is being treated
likeother things in a capitalist society: ‘Information today is being treated as a commodity . It is something
which, like toothpaste, breakfast cereals and auto-mobiles, is increasingly bought and sold’ (Schiller and Schiller, 1982, p. 461). The
third argument insists that class
inequalities are a major factor in the distribution of, access to and
capacity to generate information. Bluntly, class shapes who gets what information and what kind
of information they may get. Thereby, depending on one’s location in the stratification hierarchy,
one may be a beneficiary or a loser in the ‘information revolution’. The fourth key contention of Herbert
Schiller is that the society that is under-going such momentous changes in the information and
communications areas is one of corporate capitalism. That is, contemporary capitalism is one
dominated by corporate institutions that have particular characteristics. Nowadays these are
highly concentrated, chiefly oligopolistic – rarely monopolistic – organisations that command a
national and generally international reach. If one wishes to picture this , then one has but to
imagine, say, the clutch of oil companies which dominate our energy supply : Shell, BP, Exxon, Texaco
and a few others are huge, centralised enterprises, though they also have enormous geographical spread, linking across continents
while also reaching deep into every small town and sizeable village in the advanced nations.To the Critical Theorist, modern-day
capitalism is of this kind: wherever one cares to look corporations dominate the scene with
but a few hundred commanding the heights of the economy (Trachtenberg, 1982; Barnet and Müller,1975).
For this reason, in Herbert Schiller’s view, corporate capitalism’s priorities are especially telling in the
informational realm. At the top of its list of priori-ties is the principle that information and
ICTs will be developed for private rather than for public ends. As such it will bear the impress of
corporate capitalism more than any other potential constituency in contemporary society .
Clearly these are established features of capitalism. Market criteria and class inequalities have been
important elements of capitalism since its early days, and even corporate capitalism has a
history extending well over a century (cf.Chandler, 1977), though many of its most distinctive forms appeared in the
latetwentieth century. But to Herbert Schiller this is precisely the point: the capitalist system’s long-established
features, its structural constituents and the imperatives on which it operates are the defining
elements of the so-called ‘information society’. From this perspective those who consider that informational
trends signify a break with the past are incredible since, asks Schiller, how can one expect the very forces that have generated
information and ICTs to be super-seded by what they have created? Far more likely to anticipate that the
‘information
revolution’ does what its designers intended – consolidates and extends capitalist relations.
What we have here is a two-sided insistence: the ‘information society’ reflects capitalist imperatives – i.e.
corporate and class concerns and market priorities are the decisive influences on the new
computer communications facilities – and, simultaneously, these informational developments
sustain and support capitalism. In this way Schiller accounts for the importance of information and ICTs in ways which
at once identify how the history of capitalist development has affected the informational domain and how information has
become an essential foundation of that historical development.
--Link – Public/Private
Public-private cyber security arrangements use inflated threats as a basis for
outsourcing government administration and security responsibilities to private
corporations
Eriksson and Giacomello 9 [Johan (Swedish Institute of International Affairs) and Giampiero (University of Bologna),
“Who Controls the Internet? Beyond the Obstinacy or Obsolescence of the State”, International Studies Review (2009) 11, 205–230,
JSTOR, AX]
There are some difficulties for studying information age security issue from an academic perspective, mainly because the majority of
books and articles on national security aspects of the Internet published over the last 10–15 years tend to be highly specific and
policy-oriented, are US-centric, and do not communicate with more general international relations theory and research (prominent
examples for this kind of literature include Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1997; Alberts and Papp 1997; Henry and Peartree 1998. For a
broader discussion of IR theory and information age security, see Eriksson and Giacomello 2007). A common feature of most of the
literature on the information revolution is the particular belief that in
the ‘‘information age,’’ information is
becoming the major resource of power. One of the core arguments in this literature is that the technological
development enhances two trends that diminish the importance of the state , both of which have
implications for security: increasing internationalization and increasing privatization. Two central
conflicts reveal the nature of an ongoing redistribution of power: first, the notion that the information revolution empowers new
forms of international actors, such as NGOs and activists, thus challenging the state’s status as the major player in the international
system; and second, the idea that the emergence of a global electronic marketplace would inevitably imply a collapse of the state’s
economic pillar of power as companies increasingly become global citizens and economic boundaries no longer corre-spond to
political ones. Both of these trends have particular implications for nation-states’ room for maneuver when it comes to security.
More recently, some scholars have focused on the construction of information-age security threats by using frameworks informed
by constructivism, particularly securitization theory (Eriksson 2001; Bendrath 2003; Dunn Cavelty 2008). From this, valuable insights
can be gained with regard to threat perceptions and policy reactions, but more research is warranted particularly with regard to
comparative studies of threat constructions in countries other than the United States. Post-structuralism has influenced another
body of literature, which focuses on so-called ‘‘Postmodern War’’ (Hables Gray 1997, 2005; Der Derian 2001), seen as a discourse on
technical–military interaction that also focuses on the centrality of information. Information
becomes the ‘‘new
metaphysics of power’’ (Dillon and Reid 2001:59), with various implications of such a conceptualization
for the military itself and society as a whole. This kind of literature focuses less clearly on the loss of control by
state actors, but, by their very nature, strongly on questions of power and control more generally (see also Franklin). How National
Security and Cyberspace Became Interlinked In order to understand the security debate surrounding the
Internet today, we need to consider two interlinked and at times mutually reinforcing debates that have largely
shaped the current discussions and are also reflected in the literature as discussed above. The first is the expansion of
the threat spectrum after the Cold War, especially in terms of malicious actors and their
capabilities. During the ColdWar, threats were mainly perceived as arising from the aggressive intentions of states to achieve
domination over other states. Among other things, the end of the Cold War also heralded the end of
unambiguous threat perceptions: following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a variety of
‘‘new’’ threats were moved onto the security policy agendas of most countries. The main
distinguishing quality of these ‘‘new’’ challenges is the element of uncertainty that surrounds
them. The notion of ‘‘threat’’ as something imminent, direct, and certain no longer accurately
describes these challenges. Rather, they can be characterized as ‘‘risks,’’ which are by definition
indirect, unintended, uncertain, and situated in the future, since they only materialize when
they occur in reality (Rasmussen 2001). As a result of these diffuse risks and due to difficulties in locating
and identifying enemies, parts of the focus of security policies has shifted away from
actors,capabilities, and motivations towards general vulnerabilities of entire societies. The catchphrase in
this debate is ‘‘asymmetry,’’ and the US military has been a driving force behind the shaping of this
threat perception in the early 1990s(Rattray 2001). The US, as the only remaining superpower, was seen as being pre-
destined to become the target of asymmetric warfare. Specifically, those adversaries who were likely to fail
against the American war machine might instead plan to bring the United States to its knees
by striking against vital points at home that are fundamental not to the military alone, but to the essential
functioning of industrialized societies as a whole. These points are called critical infrastructures(CI). They are
deemed critical because their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating impact
on the national security and the economic and social welfare of a nation (Abele-Wigert and Dunn 2006;
Dunn Cavelty and Kristensen 2008). Fear of asymmetrical measures against such ‘‘soft targets’’ was aggravated by the
second debate, revolving around new kind of vulnerabilities due to modern society’s dependency on
inherently insecure information systems. Under the heading of vital system security, protection concepts for
strategically important infrastructures and objects have been part of national defense
planning for decades, though they played a relatively minor role during the Cold War (Collierand Lakoff 2008). Around the
mid-1990s, however, the possibility of infrastructure discontinuity caused by attacks or other
disruptions attracted fresh attention among security strategists , mainly due to the information
revolution. ‘‘The Internet’’, understood here as a network of networks linking computers to computers that share
protocols for communication, seemed to add a variety of novel aspects to the older debate about
vital system security (Eriksson 2001). Aspects of Control: The Internet as Target and Weapon Subsequently, the question of
whether the Internet was becoming the new Achil-les’ heel of modern societies began to be discussed in earnest. In this debate,
infor-mation infrastructures are regarded as the backbone of critical infrastructures, given
that the uninterrupted exchange of data is essential to the operation of infra-structures in general and the services that
they provide. Centralized Supervisory,Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are widely employed to remotely monitor and
control infrastructures. But SCADA-based systems are not secure:once-cloistered systems and networks are increasingly using off-
the-shelf productsand IP-based networking equipment, and require interconnection via the Internet,which opens the door to
attackers from the outside in addition to the inside. The
complex interdependence of liberal (risk) societies
and their growing technological sophistication have transnationalized and technologized the
types of security problems that they face. We seem be witnessing scalar changes moving in opposite directions: the
power to resist vulnerability moves outwards to international markets and international organizations while the power to cause
vulnerability moves inwards, through classes and groups to the individual. Representations of this security threat are very broad and
also very vague, both in terms of what or who is seen as the threat and of what or who is seen as being threatened. Global
information networks, so the argument goes, make it much easier to attack even the strongest
powers, as such an attack no longer requires big, specialized weapons systems. In theory,
attacks can be carried out in innumerable ways by anyone with a computer connected to the Internet,
and for pur-poses ranging from juvenile hacking to organized crime, political activism, or strategic warfare. The technology employed
for attacks is simple to use, inexpen-sive, and widely available. The methods of attack have become increasingly auto-mated and
more sophisticated, resulting in more damage from a single attack. In addition, Internet attacks in general are quick, easy,
inexpensive, and may behard to detect or trace, especially since the globe-spanning networks grant a great deal of anonymity. In this
debate, ‘‘the Internet’’—or rather the information infrastructure—plays three different roles: first, the Internet is used for
controlling aspects of critical infrastructures (often remotely); second, the Internet is seen as an attractive tar-get; third, the Internet
can be a weapon or at least a kind of ‘‘delivery system’’for attacks. In
an attempt to control what they consider to
be ‘‘malicious activity’’ online and to increase security, states (i) aim to enhance the security of
the control infrastructure to ensure reliable functionality of services and (ii) strengthen national law-enforcement
capacities and international cooperation. There are also sporadic calls for arms control efforts or multilateral
behavioral norms for the military use of computer exploitation (Denning 2001a,b; Rathmell 2001).Due to
the breadth of issues subsumed under the virtual threat, all three dimen-sions of Internet control mentioned in the introduction
(access to the Internet, functionalityof the Internet, and activityon the Internet) are implied. Actors: Distributed Security Through
Distributed Responsibility Considering
its framing as national security issue or ‘‘high politics,’’ forceful
attempts by nation states to control undesirable effects in this domain could be expected. What we do
see, however, is that governments fail to provide security by themselves so that policies are
predicated on the concept of voluntarily sharing responsibility with private actors . There is little
consensus among a variety of public and private actors regarding both the nature of the problem and the approaches to
be taken. Depending on their viewpoints, they may see information infrastructures as tools for maintaining
a competitive edge over business adversaries, as technical–operational systems, as facilitators
of criminal activities, or as defense-relevant strategic assets. This leads to tensions between different
stakeholders when it comes to addressing necessary control and security measures. On the one hand, turf battles among
government actors are frequent. As is the case for every ‘‘new’’ threat that needs negotiation in
the political process, different government agencies compete with each other by bringing their
own perspective to bear on the problem and try to shape future policies accordingly (Bendrath 2001; Dunn
Cavelty 2008). This also has specific implications for how the issue can be addressed theoretically (see below). On the other hand,
governments see themselves in need to engage with the technological community and the
private sector as the main proprietor and operator of the critical information infrastructure . In
many countries, the provision of energy, communication, transport, financial services, and health care have all been, or are being,
privatized as previously protected markets are deregulated. In a nonliberalized economy, the state assumes the responsibility as well
as the costs of guaranteeing functioning systems and services. In a liberalized global economy, however, assigning
responsibility for securing such systems and services is becoming a major issue (Andersson and Malm 2006). It comes as no surprise,
therefore, that governments seek to integrate the private owners of critical infrastructure in CIP practices by
means of so-called public–private partnerships and information-sharing initiatives (Suter 2007). This is,
however, not an easy task: In many countries, discontent between the private sector and government is deeply rooted and there
are continuing struggles over the question of whether ‘‘security’’ means the security of the
state as a whole, or whether it only refers to the security of individual users or technical systems , and
should therefore be handled by authorities other than national security bodies. We can thus argue, by re-quoting Salhi, that
state not only ‘‘allowed non state actors to take on crucial roles’’—but that they actually need
nonstate actors in order to provide one of the core tasks of the nation state: security for their citizens.
Economy
1NC Economy
Economic securitization leads to protectionism and turns the case
Lipschutz 98 (Ronnie, Director – Politics PhD Program, UC Santa Cruz, 1998. “On Security” p.
11-12 thw_)
The ways in which the framing of threats is influenced by a changing global economy is seen nowhere
more clearly than in recent debates over competitiveness and "economic security." What does it mean to be
competitive? Is a national industrial policy consistent with global economic liberalization? How is the security component of this issue socially
constructed? Beverly Crawford (Chapter 6: "Hawks, Doves, but no Owls: The New Security Dilemma Under International Economic Interdependence")
shows how strategic economic interdependence--a consequence of the growing liberalization of the global economic system, the
increasing availability of advanced technologies through commercial markets, and the ever-increasing velocity of the
product cycle--undermines the ability of states to control those technologies that, it is often argued, are
critical to economic strength and military might. Not only can others acquire these
technologies, they might also seek to restrict access to them. Both contingencies could be
threatening. (Note, however, that by and large the only such restrictions that have been imposed in recent years have all come at the behest of
the United States, which is most fearful of its supposed vulnerability in this respect. ) What, then, is the
solution to this "new security dilemma," as Crawford has stylized it? According to Crawford, state decisionmakers can respond in three ways. First, they
can try to restore state autonomy through self-reliance although, in doing so, they are likely to undermine state strength via reduced competitiveness.
Second, they can try to restrict technology transfer to potential enemies, or the trading partners of potential enemies, although this begins to include
pretty much everybody. It also threatens to limit the market shares of those corporations that produce the most innovative technologies. Finally, they
can enter into co-production projects or encourage strategic alliances among firms. The former approach may slow down technological development;
the latter places control in the hands of actors who are driven by market, and not military, forces. They are, therefore, potentially unreliable. All else
being equal, in
all three cases, the state appears to be a net loser where its security is concerned. But
this does not prevent the state from trying to gain.
2NC Economy
Increasing economic power is an attempt for securitization
Schweller, 11 (Randall, Prof. of Poli Sci @ Ohio State University, “Rational Theory for a Bygone
Era”, Security Studies Vol. 20 Issue 3, 8/25/2011,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2011.599196, RM)//thw_
But geography and policies rooted in geopolitics have become less relevant to the formation of strategy and
politics than they were when raw materials and land were the major prerequisites for state power. We no longer live in a
world governed by the logic of the mercantilist age, when military conquest to control territory and achieve
autarky (or a monopoly on goods) was the surest route to riches and power . Today, the traditional link between
territory and wealth has been largely broken. The current era of high technology, instant communication, and nuclear weapons has
significantly raised the benefits of peace and the costs of war. What
matters most today is not a state's ability to exert
direct control over resources but its capacity to purchase them in a free global market. Accordingly, the
foundation of modern state power has shifted away from traditional military power toward an emphasis
on economic production and a sustained capacity to generate ideas and commercial innovations that create wealth. To be
perfectly clear on this point, innovation and economic growth remain key building blocks of military
power; I am not suggesting otherwise. Rather, I am saying that military power is no longer an essential building block of economic
growth and wealth creation; and this has deeply changed the nature of international politics and how the
game is played.
--Turns Case
Securitizing against threat of economic decline and threats to technology leads
to a culture of panoptic surveillance
Tuathail 96 (Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Prof. of Govt & Int’l Affairs & Director of the Public & Int’l
Affairs program @ Virginia Tech, September 1996. “AT THE END OF GEOPOLITICS?.”
http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/Website/Publish/papers/End.htm thw_)
A second cluster of postmodern geopolitics is that emerging from the efforts of intellectuals and institutions of statecraft to re-map
the global strategic landscape after the Cold War. While the crude Manichean world of the Cold War may be gone for now, the
preoccupation of the national security establishment with "rogue states and nuclear outlaws" is indicative
of a persistent territorial conceptualization of danger in international security studies. Underwriting these
territorializing specifications of danger are, of course, old-fashioned essentialist identities --
totalitarian states, Islamic fundamentalists, die-hard Communists, terrorists, criminals and devils (like Saddam Hussein) -- and a
longstanding strategic commitment on the part of the Western security apparatus to pro-Western
states like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The effort of NATO to extend this zone of strategic commitment and protection in Central
Europe is evidence that a state-centric territorial geopolitics does persist, but increasingly it is also non-territorial "postmodern
terrorist" threats in a speeding hybrid world that preoccupy the defense planners in the Pentagon, at NATO headquarters in
Brussels, and elsewhere. Threats from contraband flows and proliferations -- the spread of nuclear weapons,
plutonium, terrorists, drugs, illegal migrants, infectious diseases, money laundering, sensitive high-tech assets, biological and
chemical agents, etc. -- and threats to vital official flows and ports -- oil pipelines, subways, world trading centers,
airports, teleports, secret data archives, fiber-optic lines, international financial networks, and global sporting spectacles -- have
brought into being a postmodern geopolitics of security where the geographies are in fluid flowmations
not fixed formations. Ostensibly preoccupied by a geography of territorial fixities during the Cold War, security
discourse has expanded to encompass the protection of fundamental spaces of flows from
material attack or the immaterial terrorism of computer hackers and software viruses. The
creation of a Belfast-style "ring of steel" and CCTV system around the City of London -- a strategic space of
financial flows -- and the militarization of U.S. airports in response to recent spectacular bombings disclose a
geopolitics that mixes traditional forms of containment and detainment with new panoptic
surveillance and scanning technologies. Again, media vectors are also implicated in the creation of these landscapes,
one of their "strategic" functions being the simulation of security and the containment of media borne viruses of panic and hysteria.
US economic liberalism damages other countries sense of security – causes a

self fulfilling cycle of securitization
Lipshutz 95 (Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Asst Prof. of Politics @ UCSC, 1995. On Security p. 15-16
thw_)
In order to
Consider, then, the consequences of the intersection of security policy and economics during and after the Cold War.
establish a “secure” global system, the U nited States advocated, and put into place, a global system of
economic liberalism. It then underwrote , with dollars and other aid, the growth of this system.43 One
consequence, of this project was the globalizations of a particular mode of production and accumulation, which relied on the re-
creation, throughout the world, of the domestic political and economic environment and preferences of the United States. That such
the idea was that
a project cannot be accomplished under conditions of really-existing capitalism is not important:
economic and political liberalism would reproduce the American self around the world. 44 This
would make the world safe and secure for the Untited States inasmuch as it would all be the
self, so to speak. The joker in this particular deck was that efforts to reproduce some version of American
society abroad, in order to make the world more secure for Americans, came to threaten the cultures
and societies of the countries being transformed, making their citizens less secure. The process
thereby transformed them into the very enemies we feared so greatly . In Iran, for example, the Shah’s
efforts to create a Westernized society engendered so much domestic resistance that not only did it
bring down his empire but so, for a time, seemed to pose a mortal threat to the American Empire based on Persian Gulf oil.
Islamic “fundamentalism,” now characterized by some as the enemy that will replace Communism, seems to be U.S.
policymakers’ worst nightmares made real,45 although without the United States to interfere in the Middle
East and elsewhere, the Islamic movements might never have acquired the domestic power they now
have in those countries and regions that seem so essential to American “security.”
Failed States/Cartels
1NC Failed States
Discourse of failed states legitimizes US imperialism, framing the
underdeveloped as inferior Others to be controlled
Abrahamsen 2005 (Rita Abrahamsen, Prof. Intl Pol @ U Whales, “Blair’s Africa:
The Politics of Securitization and Fear” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political January 2005 vol. 30
no. 1 70-71 thw_)
Rather schematically, it could be argued that the policies that follow from securitization are formulated to win over,
contain, or destroy the external enemy or threat. In the case of “failed” and “underdeveloped” states, a
strategy of containment is on its own rendered largely ineffective by Labour’s understanding of the world as increasingly interconnected and
borderless. Because the “zones of chaos” cannot successfully be sectioned off from the “zones of
peace,” strategies to win over the enemy predominate and operate alongside strategies of containment. At the same time, the possibility of
destruction is never ruled out. Conquest and conversion, as William Connolly has remarked in a different context, remain the
two authorized responses to otherness.60
The Blair government’s main answer to the problem of how to deal with those who do not subscribe to the values of the
“international community” is conversion, or strategies of assimilation and incorporation : the dangerous areas must be
included (or won over) in order to be controlled and managed. Hence, for Blair, “the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the
ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the desert of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are
our cause.” And the cause is “to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people around the world.”61
This fairly aggressive liberal universalism cannot be understood without reference to security and the ambivalent relationship between freedom and
security in liberal societies.62 While
liberalism seeks to free the individual from the clutches of the state, it is also
concerned to ensure that people will exercise that freedom according to appropriate
standards of civility and reason. In other words, in order to act freely, the subject must first be shaped, guided, and molded into one
capable of exercising that freedom in a responsible manner. Thus, what makes it possible for the free inhabitants of modern liberal societies to be
governed via state mechanisms that appear to rest on their consent is the fact that the vast majority of those people have already been trained in the
dispositions and values of responsible autonomy.63 Security, in other words, is best achieved through creating and expanding the
conditions where people can enjoy the right kind of rights and liberties. At the level of international relations, development assistance can be regarded
as a government practice seeking to shape and regulate the behavior and conduct of freedom in
recipient states and societies.64
Through detailed interventions to reduce poverty, increase literacy, promote free trade, create representative institutions and 70 practices, and build
capacity and institutions, development aid can be seen as a technique of government whereby Africa comes to conform to the liberal values of the
“international community,” such as free markets and democracy. Development
interventions also create a framework
within which the West can introduce itself “as an intimate, regular presence” in African states and in the
life of their populations.65 Development, in other words, serves to guide states and their populations toward the responsible conduct of their freedom,
so that “we” can continue to enjoy our freedom and way of life.66
At the same time, it is important to remember that liberalism always contains the possibility of illiberal
interventions in the lives of those who do not conform to the accepted standards of civility or possess the attributes
required to join the liberal community. In John Stuart Mill’s formulation, for example, liberty applied only to human beings “in
the maturity of their faculties,” and hence he regarded authoritarian government of the colonies as perfectly consistent with liberal
values.67 Liberalism’s principled belief in equality can thus be seen to function simultaneously as a dividing
practice, so that those who do not make use of the opportunities available for improvement
toward civility or the “maturity of their faculties” can legitimately be excluded and treated
outside conventional liberal rules of engagement. Today, states that refuse to reform according to
the rules and norms of the “international community” face at best abandonment and the withdrawal of development assistance, at
worst illiberal interventions to enforce compliance and ensure the survival of the international community. In Cooper’s
fairly blunt terminology, this means that “[a]mongst ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of
the jungle.”68
2NC Failed States/Cartels [LA Specific]
Stories of cartel violence and failed states are used to justify unhindered US
imperialism in Latin America
Carlos 14 (Alfredo, Q.A. Shaw McKean Jr. Fellow @ Rutgers U School of Management and
Labor Relations and Doctoral Candidate in Political Science @ U California – Irvine, Mexico
“Under Siege”: Drug Cartels or U.S. Imperialism?, Latin American Perspectives, Issue 195, Vol. 41
No. 2, March 2014, p. 43-59 thw_)//LA ***We don’t endorse gendered or ableist language.
Michel Foucault (1972–1977: 120) argues that “discourse serves to make possible a whole series of interventions,
tactical and positive interventions of surveillance, circulation, control and so forth.” Discourses generate knowledge and “truth,”
giving those who speak this “truth” social, cultural, and even political power . This power “produces; it
produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (Foucault, 1979: 194). For Foucault (1972–1977:119), “what
makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is . . . that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge,
produces discourse.” In essence, power produces discourse that justifies, legitimates, and increases it .
Similarly, Edward Said (1994: 14), speaking in reference to literary discourse, says that literature as a cultural form is not just about
literature. It is not autonomous; rather, it is about history and politics. He says that literature supports, elaborates, and consolidates
the practices of empire. Television, newspapers, magazines, journals, books, advertisements, and the Internet all help construct
stories, creating cultures of “us” that differentiate us from “them” (Said, 1994: xiii). They all elaborate and consolidate the practices
of empire in multiple overlapping discourses from which a dominant discourse emerges.
Dominant discourses are constructed and perpetuated for particular reasons. As Kevin Dunn (2003: 6) points out,
representations have very precise political consequences. They either legitimize or delegitimize
power, depending on what they are and about whom (Said, 1994: 16). Said asserts that a narrative emerges that
separates what is nonwhite, non-Western, and non-Judeo/Christian from the acceptable Western
ethos as a justification for imperialism and the resulting policies and practices and argues that discourse is
manipulated in the struggle for dominance (36). Discourses are advanced in the interest of exerting power over
others; they tell a story that provides a justification for action . For Said, there is always an intention or will to
use power and therefore to perpetuate some discourses at the expense of others. It is this intentionality that makes them dangerous
and powerful. As Roxanne Doty (1996: 2) suggests, through
repetition they become “regimes of truth and
knowledge.” They do not actually constitute truth but become accepted as such through discursive
practices, which put into circulation representations that are taken as truth. Dominant discourses, meta-narratives (master frames
that are often unquestioned [see Klotz and Lynch, 2007]), and cultural representations are important because they
construct
“realities” that are taken seriously and acted upon . Cecelia Lynch (1999: 13) asserts that “dominant narratives
do ‘work’ even when they lack sufficient empirical evidence, to the degree that their conceptual foundations call upon or validate
norms that are deemed intersubjectively legitimate.” They establish unquestioned “truths” and thus provide justification for those
with power to act “accordingly.” They allow the production of specific relations of power . Powerful social
actors are in a prime position to construct and perpetuate discourses that legitimize the policies they seek to establish. Narrative
interpretations don’t arise out of thin air; they must be constantly articulated, promoted, legitimized,
reproduced, and changed by actual people (Lynch, 1999). Social actors with this kind of power do this by what Doty (1996)
calls self-definition by the “other.” Said (1994: 52) suggests that the formation of cultural identities can only be
understood contrapuntally— that an identity cannot exist without an array of opposites . Western1 powers,
including the United States, have maintained hegemony by establishing the “other” : North vs. South,
core vs. periphery, white vs. native, and civilized vs. uncivilized are identities that have provided justifications for the
white man’s civilizing mission and have created the myth of a benevolent imperialism (Doty,
1996: 11; Said, 1994: 51). The historical construction of this “other”’ identity produces current events and policies (Dunn, 2003).
Through constant repetition, a racialized identity of the non-American, barbaric “other” is constructed, along with a U.S. identity
considered civilized and democratic despite its engagement in the oppression, exploitation, and brutalization of that “other.”
Consequently, dominant discourses and meta-narratives provide a veil for “imperial encounters,”
turning them into missions of salvation rather than conquests or, in Mexico’s case, economic control (Doty,
1996). Dunn (2003:174) suggests that dominant discourses legitimize and authorize specific political actions, particularly economic
ones.
Scholars, intellectuals, and academics also engage in the perpetuation of discourses and participate in their construction. There is
a large body of scholarly literature that describes Latin America as a “backward” region that
“irrationally” resists modernization. Seymour Martin Lipset (1986), drawing on Max Weber and Talcott Parsons,
portrays Latin America as having different, “inherently” faulty and “detrimental” value systems that lack the
entrepreneurial ethic and are therefore antithetical to the systematic accumulation of capital .
A newer version of this theory is promoted by Inglehart and Welzel (2005), who focus on countries that allow “self-expression” and
ones that do not. Howard Wiarda (1986) suggests that the religious history of Latin America promotes a
corporatist tradition that is averse to democratic and liberal values, a sentiment more recently echoed by
the political scientist Samuel Huntington (1996). Along these same lines, Jacques Lambert (1986) argues that the
paternalistic latifundia (feudal-like) social structure of Latin America provides no incentive for self-
improvement or mobility. Ultimately, the discourse created by the modernization and development
literature focuses on the “backward” values of the “other” and becomes the West’s
justification for the continued underdevelopment of the region. These interpretations lead to
partial, misleading, and unsophisticated treatment of complex political and economic dynamics ,
particularly in Latin America. They ignore the long history of colonization and imperialism.
--US Policies à Violence
US policies strengthen cartels and directly increase poverty
Thornton & Goodman 14 [Christy Thornton, former Executive Director of NACLA, graduate
student in the Department of History at NYU, and Adam Goodman, doctoral student in history at
the University of Pennsylvania, “How the Mexican Drug Trade Thrives on Free Trade,”
7/15/14] http://www.thenation.com/article/180587/how-mexican-drug-trade-thrives-free-
trade# nufh_
In some places where the state has been eviscerated, the cartels have emerged as a kind of parastate , delivering
much-needed services and the promise of economic opportunity. Some expressed shock and disbelief when hundreds of people
took to the streets in Sinaloa after the arrest of Chapo Guzmán in February. But it makes sense: El
Chapo had infused
millions of dollars into the economy of a poverty-stricken state and created jobs —in security,
transport and manufacturing of drugs—that otherwise would have been nonexistent.
Indeed, in 2008, the drug trade was Mexico’s fifth-largest employer. It’s likely the marchers were thinking about what El Chapo’s
capture will mean for them and their ability to put food on the table, rather than its impact on the drug war.
And of course, those marching in Sinaloa weren’t alone in their support of the cartel. The Mexican newspaper El Universal recently
uncovered evidence that both
the Mexican government and US Drug Enforcement Agency adopted a
policy of supporting key parts of the Sinaloa organization in hopes of rooting out rival cartels —
from the Tijuana, Juárez and Beltrán Leyva cartels in the north, to the Familia Michoacana and Knights Templar in central-western
Mexico, to the Zetas in the east and along most of the Gulf Coast. The
backing of both states helped the Sinaloa
cartel defeat rival groups and reinforce its already dominant position relative to other cartels .
Although Peña Nieto may have celebrated the recent captures of El Chapo and the Zetas boss Miguel Ángel Treviño, known
as Z-40, and the killing of Nazario “El Chayo” Moreno González, one of the founders of La Familia Michoacana (whom the Calderón
administration claimed to have already killed in 2010), they represent only symbolic victories . As Mexican journalist
Diego Osorno commented, “The current administration relied on the old strategy of turning off the fire alarm, even though the fire is
still ablaze.”
Moreover, Peña Nieto’s decision to extend Calderón’s “kingpin” strategy is useless: the capture
of El Chapo will not
dismantle the Sinaloa cartel or solve the root problems that have allowed cartels to flourish ,
just as the arrest of Jamie Dimon would not take down JP Morgan nor lead to real changes to the banking industry. It’s not to say
that cartel leaders shouldn’t be held accountable or brought to justice; it’s that the problems underlying the multinational
businesses they oversee are much larger than any one individual.
In his new book Campo de guerra, Mexican writer Sergio González Rodríguez notes that rampant corruption, a
“false state of
law,” and a “culture of a-legality” allow the legal and illegal to co-exist in Mexico. The
restructuring of the country’s licit economy and the simultaneous and often symbiotic growth of its illicit economy
have led to unprecedented levels of economic and political inequality and insecurity . Indeed, even
the violence of the drug war itself has been used as a pretense for processes of “urban renewal” in cities
like Ciudad Juárez, displacing poor and working people and benefitting multinational real estate-
interests.
The quantity of capital injected into the Mexican and global economies by the drug trade is staggering—traffickers in Mexico and
Colombia together make up to $39 billion each year in profit, according to a US Department of Justice report. Mexican banks
have a decades-long history of involvement in both the laundering of drug money and the
support of political candidates. As finance becomes increasingly transnational, foreign banks have become more closely
tied to the drug trade, as well. As one observer put it, “the global banks are now the financial services wing of the drug cartels.”
With the recent settlements against international banks like HSBC and Wachovia, which protected the
banks from criminal prosecutions after they were caught laundering billions of dollars for the
cartels, the US government has signaled that the smooth functioning of the global financial
system takes precedence over rooting out the cartels . Peña Nieto’s reform strategy shares these priorities.
At the same time as the state and legitimate economies come to rely on illicit funds, the cartels have diversified into new
markets—not just extortion and kidnapping, but into formerly legitimate sectors as well, operating in a grey area
between legality and illegality. The Zetas, for example, use their dominance in the regions that produce oil and natural gas to
allegedly steal and sell it to companies such as Royal Dutch Shell. In addition, the Knights Templar have made serious inroads into
the mining industry, using violence, extortion and robbery, as well as simply opening new unregulated mines themselves.
The cartels’ move into extractive industries has been made not just to launder money but also to seek new profit streams. Tracing
shell companies set up with cartel funds to take advantage of deregulation in the petroleum sector, for example, is difficult, and the
demand for heavy metals and energy sources from countries like China mirrors the demand for illegal drugs in the States. With the
promise of profits to be made, the
cartels are coming more and more to resemble diversified
multinational corporations.
This reality, however, while shaped by the structural forces of international capitalism, is also the result of policy
decisions made by the Mexican and US governments . If Mexico is going to be “saved,” as a recent Time
magazine cover put it, it will not be through doubling down on the market-driven policies that have structured
the country’s dual economies over the last few decades but through sustained pressure, from below and across borders, to bring to
light the contradictions of capitalism and to fight for economic and social justice. Here in Mexico, that fight has put thousands in the
streets of the capital in recent months, and as John Ackerman recently reported, resistance to Peña Nieto’s reforms is growing.
That the rise of the cartels and the deregulation of the Mexican economy occurred together is not a coincidence: both
have
used state structures to drive a relentless upward redistribution of wealth, while visiting
immense physical and economic violence on the majority of Mexicans. Reversing this trend will require
recognizing the extent to which Mexico’s “good” and “bad” capital are increasingly inextricable. Elite politicians, businessmen, and
cartel leaders aren’t strange bedfellows in Mexico—they share the billions under the mattress.
--Orientalism
Failed states discourse portray international stability and interventionism as
white man’s burden
Kaplan 3 [Amy, “Violent belongings and the question of empire today presidential address to the
American studies Association” American Quarterly, vol. 56, no.1, march 2004, muse, pg 5-7 jf]
This is also a narrative about race. The

images of an unruly world, of anarchy and chaos, of failed
modernity, recycle stereotypes of racial inferiority from earlier colonial discourses about races
who are incapable of governing themselves, Kipling's "lesser breeds without the law," or Roosevelt's "loosening
ties of civilized society," in his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In his much-noted article in the New York Times Magazine entitled
"The American Empire," Michael Ignatieff appended the subtitle "The Burden" but insisted that "America's empire is not like empires
of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden?" Denial
and exceptionalism are apparently
alive and well. In American studies we need to go beyond simply exposing the racism of
empire and examine the dynamics by which Arabs and the religion of Islam are becoming
racialized through the interplay of templates of U.S. racial codes and colonial Orientalism.
These narratives of the origins of the current empire-that is, the neoconservative and the liberal interventionist-have much in
common. They take American exceptionalism to new heights: its paradoxical claim to uniqueness and universality at the same time.
They share a teleological narrative of inevitability, that America is the apotheosis of history, the embodiment of universal values of
human rights, liberalism, and democracy, the "indispensable nation," in Madeleine Albright's words. In this logic, the
United
States claims the authority to "make sovereign judgments on what is right and what is wrong"
for everyone else and "to exempt itself with an absolutely clear conscience from all the rules that it proclaims and applies to
others."'-' Absolutely protective of its own sovereignty, it upholds a doctrine of limited sovereignty for others and thus deems
the entire world a potential site of intervention. Universalism thus can be made manifest only through the threat
and use of violence. If in these narratives imperial power is deemed the solution to a broken world ,
then they preempt any counter narratives that claim U.S. imperial actions, past and present, may have something to do with the
world’s problems. According
to this logic, resistance to empire can never be opposition to the
imposition of foreign rule; rather, resistance means irrational opposition to modernity and
universal human values.
Although these narratives of empire seem ahistorical at best, they are buttressed not only by nostalgia for the British Empire but also
by an effort to rewrite the history of U.S. imperialism by appropriating a progressive historiography that has exposed empire as a
dynamic engine of American history. As part of the "coming-out" narrative, the message is: "Hey what's the big deal. We've always
been interventionist and imperialist since the Barbary Coast and Jefferson's 'empire for liberty.' Let's just be ourselves." A shocking
example can be found in the reevaluation of the brutal U.S. war against the Philippines in its struggle for independence a century
ago. This is a chapter of history long ignored or at best seen as a shameful aberration, one that American studies scholars here and in
the Philippines have worked hard to expose, which gained special resonance during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Yet proponents of
empire from different political perspectives are now pointing to the Philippine-American War as a model for the twenty-first
century. As Max Boot concludes in Savage Wars of Peace, "The Philippine War stands as a monument to the U.S. armed forces'
ability to fight and win a major counterinsurgency campaign--one that was bigger and uglier than any that America is likely to
confront in the future."" Historians of the United States have much work to do here, not only in disinterring the buried history of
imperialism but also in debating its meaning and its lessons for the present, and in showing how U.S. interventions have worked
from the perspective of comparative imperialisms, in relation to other historical changes and movements across the globe.
The struggle over history also entails a struggle over language and culture. It is not enough to expose the lies when Bush hijacks
words such as freedom, democracy, and liberty. It's imperative that we draw on our knowledge of the powerful alternative
meanings of these key words from both national and transnational sources. Today's reluctant imperialists are making arguments
about "soft power," the global circulation of American culture to promote its universal values. As lgnatieff writes, "America fills the
hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires?" The work of scholars in popular culture is more important than
ever to show that the Americanization of global culture is not a one-way street, but a process of transnational exchange, conflict,
and transformation, which creates new cultural forms that express dreams and desires not dictated by empire.
In this fantasy of global desire for all things American, those
whose dreams are different are often labeled
terrorists who must hate our way of life and thus hate humanity itself. As one of the authors of
the Patriot Act wrote, "when you adopt a way of terror you've excused yourself from the
community of human beings."' Although I would not minimize the violence caused by specific terrorist acts, I do want to
point out the violence of these definitions of who belongs to humanity. Often in our juridical system under the Patriot Act, the
accusation of terrorism alone, without due process and proof, is enough to exclude persons from the category of humanity. As
scholars of American studies, we should bring to the present crisis our knowledge from juridical, literary, and visual representations
about the way such
exclusions from personhood and humanity have been made throughout
history, from the treatment of Indians and slaves to the internment of Japanese Americans
during World War II.
Thus the
current discourse about the American Empire embodies fantasies of a global
monolithic order extending outward from a national center. How can we draw on our knowledge of the past
to bring a sense of contingency to this idea of empire, to show that imperialism is an interconnected network of power relations,
which entail engagements and encounters as well as military might and which are riddled with instability, tension, and disorder-as in
Iraq today? And we must further understand how empire
doesn't just take place in faraway battlefields , but
how it exerts its power at home-in fact, in the interconnections between the domestic and the
foreign, words already freighted with imperial meanings , and for which we need better vocabularies.
Hegemony
1NC Hegemony
US militarism creates a permanent state of war against to justify its expansion
Shor 10
[Fran Shor, History Department at Wayne State University, 2010, Journal of Critical Globalisation
Studies Issue 2, “War in the Era of Declining U.S. Global Hegemony”, pg 73-74 jf]
Thus, a geopolitical strategy for global dominance becomes obsessed with any global resistance
that defies imperial prerogatives. As argued by Ira Chernus, “changes anywhere in the world that
would challenge U.S. hegemony spell chaos and constant alarm” (2006, p. 202). According to Chernus,
part of the process of seeking global dominance results in seeing and, even, of creating
monsters to slay. Although the morphing of those monsters from communists to terrorists marks certain discursive changes,
U.S. imperial policy is remarkably consistent, irrespective of ideological shadings. One of the last Defense
Department directives to be issued by the Bush Administration found support from President Obama with the
assertion that for the “foreseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremists
will be the central objective of U.S. policy.” Wedded to what can only be construed as
permanent war, U.S. imperial policy garners such consensus precisely because empire has become an American
way of life. A variation on this theme that puts the Long War into the long trajectory of U.S. imperialism is the following
formulation by Andrew Bacevich: “the Long War genuinely qualifies as a war to preserve the American way of life
… and simultaneously as a war to extend the American imperium (centered on dreams of a world re-made in America’s
image), the former widely assumed to require the latter” (2008, pp. 11 and 79-80).
While theLong War builds on the deep roots of U.S. imperial militarism, it also becomes the most recent
articulation of the search for global dominance . That global dominance relies heavily on the
forward positioning of military power throughout the world, but especially in areas laden with oil and other precious
resources essential to the perpetuation of U.S. hegemony. However, while there may be an economic connection between U.S.
imperial policy and the geopolitics of the extension of U.S. military power, it is important to understand how that imperial
militarism has an inherent logic that drives its thrust for global dominance. Certainly, if not yet
recognized by the American public, others in those strategically significant parts of the world readily understand how the presence
of the U.S. military, in whatever guise, embodies the search, whether illusive or not, for global dominance. According to the Indian
activist and writer, Arundhati Roy, “It’s become clear that the War against Terror is not really about terror, and the War on Iraq not
only about oil. It’s about a superpower’s self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony” (2004, p. 34).
--Competition
U.S. primacy is based on an epistemologically flawed view of other nations as
“competitors” – ensures endless war and economic collapse
Foster, 5
(John Bellamy Foster, prof of sociology @ Oregon, Monthly Review, “Naked Imperialism,”
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm)
The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is
heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological
destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons
development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May–June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy:
“The United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared
to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we
believe it is in our interest to do so.” The
nation with the greatest conventional military force and the
willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest
nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fit—setting the whole world on edge. The nation
that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any other
(representing approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global
warming and the world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility of the collapse of civilization
itself if present trends continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the
planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization
between the global rich and the global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing
nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international
instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S.
power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by Venezuela’s
Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce,
seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial overstretch. With the United States brandishing its
nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control of such
weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to
enter the “nuclear club.” Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized
reality, generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping
historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global
capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is
potentially the most dangerous period in the history of imperialism. The course on which U.S and world
capitalism is now headed points to global barbarism—or worse. Yet it is important to remember that nothing in the development of human history is
inevitable. There still remains an alternative path—the global struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable society.
--Exceptionalism
Exceptionalism and military motivations for US policy lead to imperialism and
backlash
Shor 10
Convinced that they were beyond the reproach of history and the owners of the future, postwar U.S. policymakers and their
ideological advocates sought to establish U.S. pre-eminence in the world by both overt and covert means. Among the overt designs
was the development of numerous international and multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such institutional arrangements reinforced
and expanded U.S. hegemony. The covert means, deployed when coercion needed to trump a particular ideological consensus,
focused primarily on the role of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency to foster favorable political arrangements and to
underwrite cultural enterprises during the Cold War. Although U.S. interventions and regime change had predated the
operationalization of U.S. global hegemony, those foreign
adventures increased in the developing world
during the Cold War through what critics have called “stealth imperialism ,” becoming, in turn, even
more frequent, open, and brazen after the fall of the Berlin Wall.2
There can be no doubt that a more emboldened imperialism and militarism have been the hallmarks of
recent U.S. geopolitical strategy. Carl Boggs has traced that ‘revitalized U.S. imperialism and
militarism’ to a number of factors: “a growing mood of American exceptionalism in international
affairs, the primacy of military force in U.S. policy, arrogation of the right to intervene around
the world, the spread of xenophobic patriotism, [and] further consolidation of the permanent
war system” (2005, p. x).3 However, as acknowledged by Boggs and other critics of U.S. imperialism, such imperialism
and militarism not only exacerbate and/or even create local insurgencies, but constant saber-
rattling by the U.S. also produces global resistance, such as the massive world-wide mobilization of millions that
occurred on the eve of the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in February 2003. In effect, the pursuit of imperial dominance
through geopolitical militarism and war contains contradictions that further undermine
hegemony abroad and legitimacy at home, reinforcing, in the process, a crisis of empire.
Yet, in reviewing the last several decades of U.S. foreign policy, especially in Latin America and the Middle East, it is clear that the
ruling elite in Washington continue to believe in their right to determine the fate of others . In fact,
the policies enacted by the decision-makers in DC have become even more harried and brutal in light of those others who have the
temerity to exercise their right of self-determination. In the aftermath of the crushing defeat in Vietnam and the crisis of legitimacy
confronting ruling circles in the U.S., imperial policy suffered some setbacks, including the erosion of the prerogatives of the imperial
presidency with the congressional passage in 1973 of the War Powers Act. Nonetheless, neither presidents nor the Pentagon felt
constrained by the congressional restrictions, even though the pursuit of geopolitical military strategies varied to a certain degree
depending on the soft or hard imperialist policy adopted by particular presidents. However, in Latin America, the bipartisan tradition
of intervention often obliterated those differences.
--Overstretch
Pursuit of US hegemony leads to imperial overstretch and backlash
Shor 10
Another very real dilemma for U.S. military imperialism and their global strategies, particularly as a
consequence of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, is imperial overstretch. Both in terms of the eventual costs, estimated in
the trillions of dollars just in the case of the war on Iraq, and the continuing drain on military personnel, these wars have further
underscored the inherent contradictions of U.S. military imperialism and its war strategies. Even with active troops, counting the
National Guard and Reserves, numbering over 2 million, the U.S. military has so depleted its human resources that it has resorted to
extending tours in ways that have lowered morale and created even more internal dissent about deployment. Attempts to offset
these problems by higher pay inducements, expansion of the numbers, and use of private contractors have only exacerbated the
overall contradictions endemic in maintaining the kind of global garrison embodied by U.S. military imperialism. According to world-
systems scholar Giovanni Arrighi, besideshaving “jeopardized the credibility of U.S. military might,” the
war and occupation of Iraq may be one of the key components underlying the “terminal crisis
of U.S. hegemony,” albeit without diminishing the U.S. role as “the world’s pre-eminent military
power” (2005, p. 80). Nonetheless, as pointed out by other scholars (Johnson, 2004; Mann, 2003; Wallerstein, 2003), imperial
overstretch was central to the demise of previous empires and now threatens the death of a
U.S. empire also bent on fighting debilitating and self-destructive wars.
Clearly, the pursuit of such wars also engenders resistance abroad and potential dissent at
home, the latter, however, contingent on some fundamental understanding of the whys and wherefores of prosecuting war.
Certainly, resistance to a militarized U.S. foreign policy is evident in various guises, from local insurgencies to
global protests. Irrespective of the form such resistance may take, including insurgencies that engage in terror , the
U.S. will encounter resistance as long as it insists on imposing its sense of order in the world. In effect, a “system of global
domination resting largely on military force, or even the threat of force, cannot in the greater scheme of things consolidate its rule
on a foundation of legitimating beliefs on values” (Boggs, 2005, p. 178). On the other hand, U.S.
perception of that
resistance, whether by the ruling elite, corporate media, or the public at large, is filtered
through an ideological smokescreen that either labels that resistance as “terrorism” or some
primitive from of know-nothing anti-Americanism. Part of the inability to recognize the reality of what shapes the
lives of others is the persistence of a self-image of U.S. benevolence or innocence, even in the face of the realities
spawned by U.S. intervention and occupation.20 Also, what remains both contentious and difficult to face is the degree to which the
United States, especially in its pursuit of global dominance through military
imperialism, has become, to quote Walter
Hixson, a “warfare state, a nation with a propensity for initiating and institutionalizing warfare”
(2008, p. 14). For Hixson the perpetuation of that warfare state requires reaffirming a national identity whose
cultural hegemony at home can provide ideological cover for “nation building, succoring vicious regimes, bombing shelling,
contaminating, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of innocents, and destroying enemy
others” (2008, p. 304).
--Link – Homeland
Homeland discourse creates militarization, violence against the other and
perceived racial purity
American studies Association” American Quarterly, vol. 56, no.1, march 2004, muse pg, 8-10 jf]
The image of the American Empire also projects a fantasy about national identity: the war on
terror, some would like to believe, has supplanted the so-called culture wars. The notion of empire
recuperates a consensus vision of America as a unitary whole, threatened only by terrorists,
but no longer contested and constituted by divisions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, or
sexuality. We can see this through the use of the word homeland , a recent addition to the lexicon of U.S.
nationalism, which gained currency along with empire, after 9/11, in the concept of homeland security. If empire insists on a
borderless world, where the United States can exercise its power without limits, the notion of the homeland tries to shore up those
boundaries. In the idea of America as the homeland we can see the violence of belonging.
The word homeland has many connotations." It

implies a sense of native origins, of birthplace and birthright. It appeals
to common bloodlines, ancient loyalties, and often to notions of racial and ethnic
homogeneity. Though U.S. national identity has always been linked to geography, these connotations represent a
departure from traditional images of American nationhood as boundless and mobile. In fact the
exceptionalist notion of the New World pits images of mobility against a distinctly Old World definition of homeland. A nation of
immigrants, a melting pot, the western frontier, manifest destiny, a classless society-all involve metaphors of spatial mobility rather
than the spatial fixedness and rootedness that homeland implies. Homeland
also conveys a different relation to
history, not a nation of futurity, but a reliance on a shared mythic past engrained in the land
itself. It resonates with the notion of the heartland.
This unitary notion of the homeland (it's always used with a definite article) underwrites the resurgent
nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment and policy. Where is there room for immigrants in this fusion of nation
and nativity? How many immigrants and their descendants may identify with America as their country or home but locate their
homelands elsewhere, as a spiritual, ethnic, or historical point of origin? How many U.S. citizens see themselves as members of a
diasporic community with a homeland in Ireland, Africa, Israel, or Palestine--a place to which they feel spiritual or political afilliation
and belonging, whether literally a place of birth or not? Does the idea of America as the homeland make such dual identifications
suspect and threatening, something akin to terrorism? Are you either a member of the homeland or with the terrorists, to
paraphrase Bush? And what of the terrible irony of the United States as a homeland to Native Americans?
At a time when the rights of so-called aliens and immigrants have been abrogated by the Patriot Act, when they can be
detained and deported in the name of homeland security, the notion of homeland itself contributes to making
their lives terribly insecure. It polices the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign not
simply by stopping aliens at the borders, but by continually redrawing those boundaries everywhere
throughout the nation, between Americans who can somehow claim the United States as
their native land, their birthright, and immigrants and those who look to homelands
elsewhere, who can be rendered inexorably foreign. This distinction takes on a decidedly racialized cast
through the identification of homeland with a sense of racial purity and ethnic homogeneity that
even naturalization and citizenship cannot erase.
An odd thing about the use of the term homeland for the United States is that it refers often to a nation that lacks a state and
territory, one to which a people or ethnic group aspires, such as Palestine, Kurdistan, or the Sikh. Tamil, or Basque homeland. Such
groups are often viewed as underdogs whose legitimate claims to territory have been usurped by another state. In this vein,
homeland also has a connection to the discourse of diaspora and exile, to a sense of loss,
longing, and nostalgia. In this meaning, homeland may evoke a sense not of stability and security, but of deracination and
desire. This also seems to be an appropriation and inversion. The idea of America as aspiring to a lost homeland
depends on evoking terrorism as the constant threat to sever Americans from their legitimate
aspirations. Thus the idea of the homeland works by generating a profound sense of insecurity, not only because of the threat
of terrorism but also because the homeland is a fundamentally uncanny place, haunted by all the unfamiliar yet strangely familiar
foreign specters that threaten to turn it into its opposite.
This nostalgic notion of the homeland goes hand in hand with a modem security state , for the
concept of homeland security emerged in the 1990s to integrate U.S. territory as one unit of
command in a global map of military departments . Indeed, recently seven offices of home-land security have
opened in different countries. Advocates for home-land security argue for more government and military coordination, for the
armed forces to be involved in this country as well, and for the state through surveillance and policing to intrude into all areas of civil
life. Although homeland security may strive to protect the domestic nation from foreign threats, it is actually about breaking down
the boundaries between inside and outside, about
seeing the home in a state of constant emergency,
besieged by internal and external threats that are indistinguishable. Thus the notion of the
homeland draws on comforting images of a deeply rooted past to legitimate modem forms of
imperial power.
--AT Benevolent Hegemony
Claims of benevolent hegemony make intervention seem moral
American studies Association” American Quarterly, vol. 56, no.1, march 2004, muse, pg 4-5 jf]
Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal interventionists, is that of the "reluctant
imperialist."10 In this version, the United States never sought an empire and may even be constitutionally
unsuited to rule one, but it had the burden thrust upon it by the fall of earlier empires and the failures of modern
states, which abuse the human rights of their own people and spawn terrorism. The United States is the
only power in the world with the capacity and the moral authority to act as military policeman and economic
manager to bring order to the world. Benevolence and self-interest merge in this narrative; backed by
unparalleled force, the United States can save the people of the world from their own anarchy, their descent into an uncivilized
state. As Robert Kaplan writes-not reluctantly at all-in "Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World": "The purpose of
power is not power itself; it is a fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those
characteristics include basic political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom;
and representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that
can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of liberal civil society."" This narrative does imagine limits to
empire, yet primarily in the
selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and shoulder the burden for
others, as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by the state. The
temporal dimension of this narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and peoples
to enter modernity, and its view of the future projects the end of empire only when the world
is remade in our image.
Democracy
1NC
Democracy today is a hollow signifier that creates projections that justify war
and atrocities
Ivie and Giner 04
[ROBERT L. IVIE professor emeritus of communications and culture & American studies at
Indiana University, OSCAR GINER Professor in the Theater department at Arizona State
University, December 2004, “Hunting the Devil: Democracy’s Rhetorical Impulse to War”,
Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 pg 594-595 jf]
Overall, then, the diabolical incantations of presidential

war rhetoric functioned as an inducement to
evacuate the political content of democracy, leaving a largely empty signifier in its place. Although
officially promoted, a narrowly circumscribed, truncated, distorted, and otherwise substantially purged simulacrum of democracy
suspended ad infinitum was the diminished extent of its troubled symbolic import. Shriveled, shrunken, and emptied of meaning,
democracy was relegated to the degraded role of a political cipher—a ready and reliable but badly
disfigured vehicle for sublimating a heavy burden of anxious self-loathing and transferring that
unwanted load to an external object of terror. Diluted democracy in the heroic guise of world
liberator and protector and under the firm control of presidential order substituted for robust democratic
deliberation and a full contestation of opinions. A failure to contain democracy implied a risk of chaos, an
outbreak of violence, a loss of civilization, a reign of terror. Killing terrorists substituted for acknowledging and
confronting the suppressed dark side of America’s political identity. The primal appeal of
presidential war rhetoric, its patriarchal inducement to rescue a feminized and infantilized
victim from the evil savagery of faceless tyranny, was to prove the nation’s virtue and virility. This
was the essence of a rhetorical diabolism that purged democratic anxiety by channeling it into an
impulse to war.
If Americans have inherited the Christian worldview from their ancestors, they have also inherited a naïve susceptibility to believe in
medieval villains, a language derived from an agonic cosmology which casts the devil as an eternal, ontological adversary, and a
superstitious conviction in the power of scapegoating as a ritual means of cleansing one’s sins. The length of influence of old fears
and the perpetuity of mental constructs are highlighted by the fact that the nation that chased devils in Salem in its infancy
grows up to declare war on terror and darkness. President Bush is not an exception or even an extreme example
of war mongering. What he is, as president, is the leading voice articulating the projection of a national shadow onto
terrorist enemies—a shadow forged by Americans and created in the image of their fears and anxieties
about democracy. Even the president himself is subject to becoming the target of such anxious projections,
as in the case of Newsweek’s February 19, 2007, issue, which merged into a single, front-cover image the left half of Bush’s face with
the right half of the demonized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s face, noting in an accompanying story that “ the
two
countries are now led by men who deeply mistrust the intentions and indeed doubt the sanity
of the other” (Hirsh and Bahari 2007, 30).
As long as these projections go unrecognized, they distort the nation’s vision, delude it into making mistakes, and create an
imaginary landscape that serves as a hideout for America’s enemies: “The effect of projection is to isolate the subject
from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one” ( Jung 1951, 146). This
fanciful terrain provides camouflage for the actual threat and is even a source of mistakes in
battle. At the turn of the century, arguing for a more complex understanding of the social phenomenon of Russian anarchist
terrorists, George Bernard Shaw (1952, 214) warned, “If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will not know what it
really is, or combat it effectively.”
The true danger to the nation that is posed by unexamined projections is twofold: first, unexamined
projections leave
us weak and vulnerable. Having cast our vital energy on others, we are left small and terrified before
imagined external dragons (like in those dreams in which we are chased by our own monsters). Second, by branding
others as evil—cruel and inhumane though they may be—we position ourselves as good, leaving our “evil spirit,”
in the words of Robert Johnson, free to “catch a Greyhound bus and ride” ( Johnson 1990, 46). Because we are good, we
believe ourselves justified in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo, in violating the rights of American citizens and
disregarding the Constitution. Also— somewhat inconsistently but nevertheless devilishly captivating—we are left free to
deny that these events occur, that they are wrong (How could good people perpetrate wrongful acts?), and that we are
complicitous in them. Thus the practical need, as well as the moral responsibility, to remove the “beam” from the nation’s collective
eyes. Perhaps, if we
gain the means and the moxie first to recognize and eventually to reclaim
democracy’s projected shadow, we might then dare to move forward toward a less
dehumanizing and more democratic future with a diminishing incentive for war.
--AT Democratic Peace Theory
Democratic peace theory leads to conflict – “liberal peace” relies on accounting
errors that ignore massive structural violence and ensure self-fulfilling prophecy
– solutions predicated on it cause error replication
Kiely 5
[Ray Kiely, Professor of International Politics @ University of London Queen Mary] [Empire in
the Age of Globalisation US Hegemony and Neoliberal Disorder] (http://tinyurl.com/qgmv49l)
(accessed 7-16-15) //MC
Liberal notions of democratic peace should therefore be seen in this light. It is true that liberal democracies in the advanced
capitalist countries are less likely to go to war with each other today than in the past. But this so-called ‘liberal
peace’ is
itself a product of a history of bloody conflict , and the idea that such peace can be simply
imposed on ‘pre-modern states’ ignores the ways in which the advanced powers have generated
bloody conflict in those parts of the world. It also ignores ongoing processes of state formation and
territorial conflict in relatively new states. Cooper’s division of the world into post-modern, modern and pre-
modern states has a simplistic appeal, but it is purely descriptive, and tells us nothing about the (violent) histories of state formation
that have led to such a division. It also betrays a simplistic linearity in which the virtues of the advanced
can quickly be imposed upon the backward. This is a version of modernisation theory, in which countries are
said to be poor simply because they are insufficiently globalised (see Chapter 5). Quick- fix solutions
such as the illiberal imposition of liberal democracy are thus likely to exacerbate such problems, no matter how
wellintentioned they may be – and we would do well to remember that past interventions have been justified by recourse to
support for freedom and democracy. Indeed, these have often been based on the idea that intervention in the past was ill-
intentioned or misguided, but that we have got it right ‘this time’. These
points are not made to support a blanket anti-
interventionist position, but they do warn against easy solutions, liberal follies and messianic rhetoric .
Moreover, no US administration has really been committed to genuinely democratic principles of

multilateral global governance. All
post-war US governments have upheld the belief in the desirability of US
hegemony, even if some have regarded multilateral negotiation as more important than others. It could of course be argued
that because the US is a liberal democracy it has a greater right than others to exercise world leadership. But if democracy is
to be valued, then it cannot be selective : it must apply to states not only in relation to their domestic populations,
but also in relation to the international system of nation-states.10 In this international system, the US has a poor record in
terms of democratic principles, as we have seen. Singer usefully makes the point:
Advocates of democracy should see something wrong with the idea of a

nation fewer than 300 million people
dominating a planet with more than six billion inhabitants . That’s less than 5 per cent of the
population ruling over the remainder – more than 95 per cent – without their consent. (Singer 2004: 191)
It may of course be utopian to espouse the cause of global democracy, even if, as cosmopolitan democrats point out, a similar
argument was used in the past to argue against democracy within nation-states. But surely it
is wishful thinking to
expect the world’s population to acquiesce passively to such a patently undemocratic
international system. This is not to romanticise much of the ‘anti-imperialist’ resistance to current US global domination,
much of which is reactionary. Terrorism should be condemned, and indeed efforts should be made to counter terrorist attacks. But it
is absurd to dismiss all resistance to the US as the actions of terrorist minorities, whose actions are completely beyond explanation.
Only the most ardent wishful thinking about ‘US destiny’ and the most dangerous amnesia about
history – such as that shared by George Bush and Tony Blair – can reduce global politics to simplistic struggles
between good and evil.11 This is hardly surprising, as it reflects a long tradition of liberal thought
justifying illiberal measures against ‘illiberal people’. John Stuart Mill argued that ‘despotism is a legitimate
mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement and the means justifi ed by actually
effecting that end’ (Mill 1974: 69). In the ‘war on terror’, terrorism
has been reduced to a totally inexplicable,
polymorphous mass. As a result, ‘[w]ithout defi ned shape or determinate roots, its mantle can be cast over any form of
resistance to sovereign power’ (Gregory 2004: 140)
Democratic peace theory contructs enemies that provoke conflict

Ivie and Giner 04
Previous to the fall of communism, scholars had warned that a rising rhetorical presidency constituted a serious and growing threat
to republican governance—that a worsening condition of presidential demagoguery, or direct appeal to the masses, bypassed
responsible deliberation in Congress (Tulis 1987; Ivie 1996, 157-60). In the midst of this worry over properly containing and
disciplining domestic, the nation’s political leadership endorsed a theory of democratic peace that
prescribed a thin veil of democratization as the way to global peace (Doyle 1996; Russett 1993; Weart 1998; Gilbert 1999). This
assumption legitimized an aggressive post-Cold War foreign policy and a subsequent doctrine
of preemptive warfare for fighting the tyranny of terrorism (Ivie 2005a, 92-116). George H. W. Bush’s Gulf
War quickly launched a brave new world order of “moving toward democracy through the door of freedom” and “toward
free markets through the door to prosperity” (quoted in Smith 1995, 313), exuding a distinctly crusading spirit that Amos
Perlmutter (1997, 9, 161) considered “mission oriented” and aimed at world domination. Bill Clinton, nervously following in Bush’s
presidential footsteps, proclaimed that America, as the one essential nation, must secure “democracy’s triumph around the world”
(quoted in Smith 1995, 320). Overtones
of national insecurity and vulnerability resonated throughout
Clinton’s rhetoric of democratic world order. Even the extension of democracy—assuming “the ennobling burdens
of democracy” to foster a “global village”—in these uncertain and tenuous times was a risky affair, it seemed, when the world’s
“oldest democracy” continued its “most daring experiment in forging different races, religions and cultures into a single people”
(quoted in Ivie 2005a, 113-14; see 111-16). Democracy was risky business at home and abroad.
By the logic of the prevailing metaphorical construct, securing
the demon of democratic passion inside a
rational container was the symbolic equivalent to quelling the forces of savagery that
threatened civilization. The inner conflict paralleled the outer struggle, and suppressing the
forces of savagery was the mythic motive for America’s historic mission of spreading
democracy’s empire. From the beginning, as Robert Kagan (2006, 3-5) argues, America was perceived by much of the world
as a dangerous nation because of its “aggressive and seemingly insatiable desire for territory and dominant influence.” This abiding
desire for control, along with a craving for ideological and commercial hegemony, posed the ongoing danger of “swallow[ing] up
those cultures with which it came into contact.” Yet, a lack of self-awareness about these expansive tendencies, “even as the United
States has risen to a position of global hegemony,” has left Americans perplexed when they discover that others hate and fear their
powerful reach. Empire was America’s unacknowledged vocation, its mythic calling expressed as
the sacred mission of an exceptional people to advance civilization by overcoming the evil forces of
savagery and securing a lasting democratic peace.
After 9/11, terrorism became the threatening face of savagery in democracy’s troubled empire
(Ivie 2005b, 56). Indeed, terrorism became not just democracy’s mortal antagonist but also its evil counterpart, at once an
enduring cause for unlimited warfare and a ready pretext for unruly democracy’s continuous restraint and indefinite
deferral. The demon of distempered democracy was symbolically subsumed under the war on
terror. The face of the terrorist enemy was a semblance of the face of the inner savage. The terrorist was the dark
brother, if not offspring, of the democratic demon. Democracy thus served ambiguously as both
war’s purpose and provocation, sought after in the ideal but arrested in the present while its distempered, totalitarian
shadow remained dangerously at large. Such a “disowned shadow” in troubled hero myths, as Janice Rushing and Thomas Frentz
(1995, 220) have observed, is readily projected onto an Other toward whom “we then relate . . . in an unconscious, undifferentiated
way, usually with automatic and dogmatic hatred or fear.”
Doyle McManus (2006), a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, captured this basic ambivalence over democracy. Under the
headline, “Kissinger Says Iraq Isn’t Ripe for Democracy,” McManus invoked the ghost of Vietnam to answer America’s post-election
riddle of protracted warfare in Iraq. “Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, a frequent advisor to President Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney,” the story began, “has concluded that the
United States must choose between stability
and democracy in Iraq—and that democracy, for now, is out of reach.” Fighting against what President George W. Bush
called the totalitarian ideology of global terrorism, like fighting world communism, amounted once again to something short of
fighting for the enrichment of democracy at home and abroad. At best, democracy would have to be deferred rather than
promoted. Kissinger, McManus reported, was a “long-declared” skeptic of the administration’s avowed aim of democratization,
especially as “the primary goal of U.S. foreign policy.” Democracy, Kissinger averred, might be implemented overseas only over
“longer historical periods.” The “evolution of democracy” could not begin by holding elections and building democratic institutions
“from the ground up” nor could it start before a strong Iraqi leader had stabilized the situation and a “nation [was] born.” Neither
total military victory nor complete withdrawal from the fighting was realistic by this measure. Moreover, Kissinger’s view was now
privately shared by “middle-ranking [Bush] administration officials.”
Democracy remained, in Sheldon Wolin’s astute term, a fugitive—a paradoxical marker of national identity at a time of increasing
alienation between the people and their rulers. Its invocation in American political rhetoric and media was “a tribute, not to its
vibrancy, but to its utility in supporting a myth that legitimates the very formations of power which have enfeebled it” by means of
anti-democratic strategies such as appeals to efficiency, stability, emergency, and so on. In this way, America’s superpower
“claim to democracy” was “a form of hypocrisy,” a shallow symbol without a substantive, participatory practice.
Democracy’s basic principle of collective self-rule was “fictitious” in the contemporary world that reduced “majorities” to “artifacts
manufactured by money, organization, and the media” (Wolin 2004, 601). Whether America’s
claim to a democratic
identity was paradoxical, hypocritical, or fanciful, it was freighted with tension, distrust, and
apprehension.
The force of this chronic democratic unease—this hellhound of national self-doubt and even self-loathing in the most extreme cases
—must be understood as a primal impulse to war that projects an odious self-image onto the persona of an evil, fearsome enemy.
This projection of democracy’s shadow is difficult to observe and acknowledge because, viewed directly, it appears too grotesque
and raw to emanate from the core of the national temperament. Americasees itself as an enlightened and
pacifically inclined agent of liberty and human advancement in a dark landscape of diabolical spirits, not as an
imperial beast of prey let loose upon the world, because “we are on the side of Light, they on
the side of Darkness” (Huxley 1952, 175). The mythic shading of the repressed enemy within—a deformed representation of
the people, a distempered image produced by an ingrained fear of democracy—is therefore expressed obliquely in presidential war
rhetoric.
Democratic peace theory necessarily constructs non-democratic nations as

threats
Hayes 09
[Jarrod Hayes, PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Southern
California and Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, 2 DEC 2009, “Identity and Securitization in the Democratic Peace: The
United States and the Divergence of Response to India and Iran's Nuclear Programs”,
International Studies Quarterly, Volume 53, Issue 4, page 982-983 jf]
The term securitization refers to the act by state leaders of choosing what issues should be considered under the security rubric
(Buzan et al. 1998). Crucially, the act of securitizing an issue involves both a securitizing actor (s), who
makes the claim that a particular object of value (referent object) is facing an existential threat requiring the suspension of normal
politics, and an audience, which must agree both that the referent object is a thing of value and that it is (existentially)
threatened in the way that the securitizing agent claims. For example, preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George Bush
argued that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could be used directly against Americans or given to terrorists who would deploy
them against Americans. Here, the securitizing actor is George Bush, the referent object is the physical safety of Americans, which
was threatened by Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. The
audience, the US public, agreed with the
assessment and accepted the movement of the issue out of normal politics (that is, the use of military
force).
Applying securitization to the democratic peace gives us an avenue for studying the role of norms and identity in the formation of
security policy in democratic states. It seats the locus of action at the domestic level, where decisions of war and peace are made.
Securitization gives us a structured way for looking at the security process and focusing on the communicative action of leaders and
their audiences. It also ties norms and structure together in explanation. To
securitize successfully, leaders must
use the language of security; they must appeal to certain norms and identities in order to communicate the
idea of a threat and that the object threatened is valuable. The nature of the audience (general public, small
group of oligarchs, military officers) as well as the norms and identity language the audience responds to are linked to the political
structure. Securitizers in autocracies face a very different audience, requiring a very different
language of securitization, than those in democracies.
This paper seeks to explore the role of identity language in the securitization process. I expect that political leaders use the
language of democratic identity and norms to signal possible threats or the lack thereof to
their securitizing audience. Consider the domestic identity of a democracy. The norms that inform democratic identity are
agreed to include non-violent conflict resolution, rule of law, compromise, and transparency (Maoz and Russett 1993; Russett 1993;
Dixon 1994; Owen 1994). In order for such an identity to work, there has to be flexibility in the other delimiters of identity.
Differences in religion, cultural practices, economic perspective, gender, and race all have to be tolerated if a democracy is to be
successful. The criteria for recognition and respect in a democracy must be fairly open (Williams 2001). Were they not, the
democracy would tear itself apart. A democracy can only operate if the population willingly buys into the program. If most people
chose to identify with their religion at the expense of their democratic identity, the state would quickly turn into a theocracy.
Democratic governance fundamentally rests on the democratic identity of its citizenry.
Democracy, like any other ideology, distinguishes between members of the self and the other. 2 If a state is to be democratic, then
democratic identity must be a significant factor in the imagined community that binds the society under the state together
(Anderson 1991). Policies involving negotiation and reconciliation—democratic political behavior—are justified by appealing to
democratic norms and identity. Leaders emphasize that the external state warrants these approaches
as a trustworthy member of the democratic community , that these behaviors are expected in return, and that
the situation can be approached without significant concerns over violence. Weart notes that ‘‘ group boundaries are
typically set in ways connected with political circumstances . In particular, democrats…normally
define even foreign democrats…as in-group, ‘people like us,’ at least in terms of what kind of political relations
they expect’’ (1998:18). Policies involving aggression and violence—nondemocratic political behavior—are justified
by demonstrating that the target state is beyond reason or trust, that their behavior could
result in violence against the home state (an existential threat). Political leaders achieve this aim by
emphasizing the undemocratic identity and unwillingness to reliably operate by democratic norms of the other.
The securitized state poses an existential threat because it is dissimilar from the democratic
self, a self defined by the exclusion of violence from conflict resolution.
The securitization dynamic is not unique to democracies. What is unique to democracies is the audience . In a
democracy, the public plays a critical role in large foreign policy decisions like war. It is inherent to the nature of democratic
governance: leaders are accountable to the public for their policy decisions. Consequently, it is to the dominant (democratic) identity
of the public and the attendant set of norms that leaders in democracies must appeal if they wish to securitize an external state.
Combining the work on the individual level with securitization produces a more complete picture of the mechanisms behind the
democratic peace. Democratic norms and identity shape the security policy of democratic political
leaders in two ways. First, leaders have internalized the democratic norms and identity, shaping their
personal perception of threat. Second, democratic political structures bind leaders to the
democratic norms and identity of the electorate. Leaders in autocracies face a very different identity and norms
environment. Political structure, identity, and norms are far more personalistic, indicated by small electorates and hierarchical
political structures (diZerega 1995). The governing identity(s) and the interests of the state are grounded in the particulars of the
ruling group.
Pursuing security through democracy causes militarization and prompts new

conflicts
Ivie 5 (Robert L Ivie, Prof. Emeritus, Dept of Comm & Culture @ Indiana U Bloomington. 2005 “Savagery in democracy's empire,
Third World Quarterly, 26:1, 55-65 thw_)
Although thetrope of savagery is not unique to American war rhetoric, it is¶ indigenous to it and deeply ingrained in
the political culture. The USA was¶ born in a new world that European settlers had cleared tribe by tribe, nation¶ after nation,
of its native savages. British rule was overthrown in the colonies ¶ with a call to arms against English monsters that thirsted for
American¶ blood.4 The War of 1812, considered by many to be America’s second war of¶ independence, was justified in
Congress and to the nation by
increasingly intense cries of British diabolism and decivilising metaphors of
force that conveyed the image of a people being trampled, trodden and bullied by an enemy
portrayed variously as beast of prey, common criminal, ruthless murderer, haughty pirate and
crazed tyrant.5 Similarly, the expansionist war¶ declared against Mexico in 1846 was portrayed by a partisan President Polk,¶
with a disciplined majority party in Congress, as a reluctant act of national ¶ defence in response to an irrational and evil Mexican
aggressor, a belligerent¶ foe that was easily inflamed and as unstable as a violent storm.6 President¶ McKinley’s justification of
commercial imperialism five decades later, as the¶ USA was about to enter the 20th century, was that America, by God’s grace,¶
would ‘uplift and civilize and Christianize’ those who ‘were unfit for selfgovernment’.¶ These savages of the Philippines would be the
beneficiaries of¶ America’s ‘noble generosity’ and ‘Christian sympathy and charity’.7
The savagery of war itself, as well as the rationalisation of slaughter, was marked particularly in the modern age by
the trope of the machine. War¶ became ‘the mechanical human beast’, adding yet another metaphor to the¶ heritage of
‘discursive support for military conflict’ and to the language of ‘common sense’ that legitimised its destructive
reality. A ‘delirium of¶ technology’ transformed the machine into a deranged and destructive
monster. The national character of the evil enemy was contained in this image of mechanised
madness, with expansionist Germany representing the¶ perfectly oiled war machine, its individual citizens reduced to uniform¶
mechanical cogs. The beast became a rampaging automaton, an anarchic machine, an abdication of
individuality and human responsibility, an uncontrolled threat to democracy that transformed
the savage lust of the masses into the modern menace of civilisation . Indeed, the ‘broad distinction
between ‘‘civilisation’’ and ‘‘barbarism’’’ that was so central to the language¶ of World War I rested heavily on
the pejorative characterisation of Germany¶ as a perversion of progress, a degeneracy of ‘over-rapid development’, a¶
mechanical mentality that elevated atrocity to ‘a science and a technology’.¶ The modern primitive had become a
‘murdering machine’, stripping its¶ victims of their humanity, reducing them to raw material—its mechanical¶ ethos
making war into an inevitability, into ‘the Frankenstein’s monster of¶ the twentieth century’.8 Thus Woodrow Wilson
called for a war against¶ Germany to make the world safe for democracy, with ‘civilization itself ¶ seeming to be in the balance’
because the menace of ‘autocratic governments¶ backed by organized force’ had taken control ‘of the will of their people’.9
The very militarisation of America led next, under this technological¶ shadow of war, into a second world conflagration.
Franklin Roosevelt, as¶ Michael Sherry observes, ‘did not merely perceive the importance of ¶ technology in modern warfare, he
seized on it as fitting the nation’s strengths¶ and he deepened
the American impulse to achieve global power
through¶ technological supremacy’. Such was his ‘ideological construction’ of national¶ security. Europe’s war-
mad barbarians were the product of a technological¶ determinism that assaulted ‘the foundations of
civilization’ and required the¶ USA to adopt ‘strategies of annihilation as the measure of its own
security¶ against the danger of new technologies and ideologies .10 Thus FDR called on¶ America, as the
world’s arsenal of democracy, to lead a crusade against the¶ evil Axis of fascist power, a diabolical enemy that feigned peaceful
intentions¶ even as it ravaged the world in the most shocking, brutal, and criminal acts of ¶ treachery. The Japanese
aggression at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, 7 December¶ 1941 was a cause for indignation, an affront to a God-fearing nation, and it¶
provided an exigency for defending civilisation by vanquishing rampant evil .¶ Roosevelt’s war rhetoric
condensed belligerency to its pure form for a¶ technological age and enemy.11
War itself became, even for Americans who prided themselves on their¶ individualism, a ‘mindless, anonymous’ expression of
‘machine-age dehumanization and cosmic purposelessness’ . The bombing of cities was portrayed¶ ‘as a
process of surgical destruction administered by cool-headed Americans’. This was an image of war rendered benign
and a sense of power inflated into a technological arrogance that culminated in the atomic extermination
of Japanese treachery and savagery.12 The mindset of Hiroshima among the US public was ‘a collective form of psychic numbing’
that carried forward into a regime of cold-war nuclearism. The
atomic bomb, President Truman announced in triumph, was
repayment for Pearl Harbor many fold, ‘a new and revolutionary increase in destruction’, a ‘harnessing of
the basic power of the universe’, which Americans were rightly ‘grateful to Providence’ that
decent people possessed, and with which they had righteously vanquished an evil enemy .13
Democracy creates fear of authoritarianism sparking conflict

Ivie and Giner 04
America's chronic impulse to war is provoked by democracy's shadow , which lurks at the far reaches of
the nation's political soul. Democracy casts a dark veil of anxiety over the public disposition -so much so that it
constitutes a national phobia. This deep distrust of the people, or "demophobia," confounds the identity and bewilders
the political will of a self-proclaimed exceptional nation (Ivie 2005a, 14, 34, 43-44, 90-91). It produces nothing short of a
cultural tension that is resolved in presidential rhetoric as a commanding motive for war.
There are several continuous phases in democracy's impulse to war. \We-the people-fear the enemy within: an
impassioned ogre of mob violence, a deformed Mr. Hyde who reflects the common fear and shared anxiety about democracy. This in
the crucible of collective weaknesses, misshapen by national ambivalence toward the political system Americans
claim to
honor-is readily projected onto external sources which are then conjured as evil and defined as the
public enemy. A discourse of diabolism swiftly follows to paint a threatening picture of the
enemy's evil savagery and goad the nation to defend its holy democratic soul against civilization's
wicked foes. The projection of a troubled identity, the displacement of the nation's own seeming vileness onto others-"in order to
wipe it out with their blood" (Miller 1987, 357)-is a recurring goad to fight.
This demonic impulse to war assumes many guises in U.S. presidential rhetoric. The devil, as an essential antagonist in the nation’s
cosmology, has had a long and notable history in national dramas playing the part of the enemy. To kill the foreign devil-
enemy is to reaffirm the nation’s special virtue as a chosen people destined to overcome malevolence so that
civilization may prevail. This heroic mask is the stuff of political myth. In the secular rituals of presidential rhetoric, the mask
pretends worldly realism in order to summon the god of war, which is a necessary posture in a world of
presumed enlightenment and a compensatory gesture in a fragmented postmodern political culture of hyper-symbolic transactions.
Even as the nation dances to the drums of war, it justifies aggression in the prosaic presidential idiom of the
real, the rational, and the practical. Herein lay the riddle of war’s apparent complexity but basic simplicity; thus the extraordinary
appeal of the contemporary call to arms.
Interested observers of this powerful mythos, upon detecting its presence in presidential rhetoric, need also to consider its
implications for democratic culture. Recognition of the mythic forces that inform American politics is crucial to an understanding of
governance in an age of imperial warfare. Can democracy, emptied of its incentive to humanize aliens by the diabolical incantations
of presidential rhetoric, function as an inclusive politics of contestation? Or must it succumb, as did the first French republic (Schama
1989, 858-59), to a culture of war? To answer this question, it is important to acknowledge that George W. Bush's presidential
rhetoric is not an aberration of American political culture; it is rather a manifestation of
unresolved issues of national identity being played out in a mythic ritual of redemptive
violence.
Iran
Democratic Peace Theory makes Iran seem like a threat – a securitized
approach can never solve
Hayes 09 [Jarrod Hayes, PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of
Southern California and Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at
the Georgia Institute of Technology, 2 DEC 2009, “Identity and Securitization in the Democratic
Peace: The United States and the Divergence of Response to India and Iran's Nuclear Programs”,
International Studies Quarterly, Volume 53, Issue 4, page 979 jf]
Consistently, the
political character of Iran is the central referent point in the threat discussion.
The undemocratic characteristics of Iranian governance were tied to, and juxtaposed against, the
threat to all ‘‘free’’ countries. This argument only makes sense if there is an implicit appeal to the public to accept the
securitization on the basis that the nature of Iran’s regime is fundamentally threatening to democracy. The argument is not a
strategic one (for example, Iran having a nuclear weapon is bad for US oil supply security), it is an argument based on democratic
identity. This assessment is reinforced by the call for Iran’s government to change in order to eliminate the threat to the
democracies of the world. If democratic
identity did not matter to the public in terms of securitizing
threats, there would be no need to call for democratization as a means to resolve the threat
facing it.
Within the US Congress, some senators and representatives contested the securitization of Iran . Bush’s
2002 ‘‘axis of evil’’ State of the Union speech provides a useful focal point for looking at securitization rhetoric within the Congress.
Two months after the State of the Union speech, Senators Joseph Biden (D-DE) and Charles Hagel (R-NE) made an argument for
keeping relations with Iran within the realm of normal politics and out of the security framework. Hagel, in introducing a speech by
Biden to the American-Iranian Council into the Congressional Record, argued that differences between the US and Iran should not
‘‘close off opportunities to influence Iranian behavior and work together constructively when we may share common interests’’
(Senator Hagel [NE] March 21, 2002).
Biden’s speech pays particular attention to the democratic aspects of Iran’s unusual divided governance, noting the reformist
message of Iranian elections. For Biden, the democratic aspects of Iran moderate the potential threat from the country. The
reformist will of the public, according to Biden, has created a ‘‘divided government… [a]n elected branch consisting of the
parliament and the presidency’’ aligned against an unelected ‘‘hardcore clique’’ from which all the policies threatening to US
interests arise: ‘‘they direct the policies that pose a threat to our interests.’’ Biden’s recognition of the democratic aspects of Iranian
governance forms the basis and justification for his desecuritized approach. It precedes his assessment of the threat Iran poses to US
interests (not to the United States itself) as well as his policy prescriptions. When Biden discusses threatening Iranian policies, he
categorically condemns all but Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, which enjoy significant levels of popular support within Iran. On
these points, Biden concludes, ‘‘we cannot simply dismiss Iran’s security concerns.’’ His policy prescriptions reflect Biden’s
unaggressive, desecuritizing
approach: permit American NGOs to support civil society
organizations within Iran, cooperate with Iran on issues of mutual interest, accept Iran’s bid to
initiate WTO accession talks, indirectly assist Iran on issues of refugees and narcotics, and
continue citizen exchanges. In his discussion of Iran, Biden, and by extension Hagel, clearly
attempt to position Iran and its relationship with the US within the realm of normal politics
and outside a security framework (Senator Hagel [NE] March 21, 2002).
A counter narrative, more in line with the securitizing approach of President Bush, vied with that of Hagel and Biden. A ‘‘sense of the
Senate’’ resolution contested Biden’s partial democratization of Iran. According to the sponsoring senators, while Iran’s ‘‘people
aspire to democracy, civil, political, and religious rights, and the rule of law,’’ the ‘‘ideological dictatorship presided over by an
unelected Supreme Leader…an unelected Expediency Council and Council of Guardians’’ represses the people’s will. The
senators dismiss the democratic elements of Iran’s government , pointing to ‘‘increasingly frequent anti-
Khatami demonstrations’’ and claiming that Khatami ‘‘clearly lacks the ability and inclina- tion to change the behavior of the State of
Iran…political repression, newspaper censorship, corruption, vigilante intimidation, arbitrary imprisonment of students, and public
executions have increased since President Khatami’s inauguration’’ (Senator Brownback [KS], Senator Wyden [OR], Senator Collins
[ME], Senator Dorgan [ND], Senator Grassley [IO], Senator Conrad [ND], Senator Smith [NH], and Senator Boxer [CA] July 25, 2002).
As in Bush’s rhetoric, the antidemocratic
characterization of Iran’s government precedes, and hence
is the source of, Iran’s threat to the United States. The sponsoring senators first argue that Iran is
wholly undemocratic and then outline the activities that threaten the United States. 6 While
the resolution and its sponsors argue that the US should focus its efforts on ‘‘the people, and
their hopes for a free and democratic nation’’ rather than use military force, the authors are
clearly constructing Iran as a security threat in the context of Iran’s undemocratic governance
(Senator Wyden [OR] July 25, 2002).
China/Iran
Democratic peace theory constructs nations like China and Iran as threats
What is remarkable about this quote is Specter’s assessment of threat. China poses a potential threat to the
United States not because it has nuclear weapons or the largest military in the world. Instead,
the Chinese threat arises from its authoritarian government. Conversely, India serves as a
counterbalance against the Chinese threat simply because it is a democracy. The implicit argument is
that India’s democratic governance naturally allies it with the democratic United States. Tellingly, after Specter links threat
assessment (or lack thereof) to Indian democracy he goes on to discuss his change of heart on the US-India nuclear deal. While
Specter claims to have been swayed by India’s argument that the NPT is discriminatory, it is unlikely that
he would have found these arguments compelling were they coming from nondemocratic
Iran.
It is difficult to measure public acceptance of the desecuritized construction of India and its nuclear program presented by
policymakers. To a certain extent, the focus on the policymaker in securitization accepts the assumption that, as politicians, these
actors are intimately aware of what policies and justifications they can, or cannot, ‘sell’ to the public. Public opinion polling should
offer some insight on the issue, but as will become clear shortly, polling data requires at least as much interpretation as political
speech and is critically dependent on both the content and the manner in which questions are asked (Moore 2004).
The Gallup organization has a long-running series of polls examining Americans’ perceptions of other states. While not directly
commenting on the perception of threat to the United States posed (or not) by India, Gallup did run a poll in the immediate
aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear tests. In it, 61% of the public felt the development of nuclear weapons in general was a ‘‘bad
thing.’’ Of these respondents, however, only 47% indicated that India’s development of a nuclear weapon would be a threat to
world peace. This contrasts sharply against the 66% of respondents who felt Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons posed a
serious threat to world peace, and the more than 80% of respondents who felt that nuclear weapons development by Iran and Iraq
posed a serious threat to world peace (Moore 1998). The Gallup data gives no indication as to why the threat perception of India is
so far below the threat perception of Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and nuclear weapons in general, and without other polling data on the
perception of India at the time, these conclusions mean little. These caveats aside, the
significantly lower level of
perceived threat with respect to India seems to support the argument presented in this paper
that India’s democratic governance inhibits threat perception in the public.
Long-term trends in general perception of India also seem to support this argument. Clearly, India enjoys a generally favorable
perception in the public. In 2000, 76% of Americans viewed India in a positive light–15% felt India was a US ally, while 61% saw India
as a friendly non-ally (Saad 2000). Differences in the question do produce significant variation in the numbers. A short year after the
2000 poll with no international incidents of note, India’s ‘favorability’ in the eyes of the public stood at only 58% (Moore 2001). By
2005, 75% of respondents saw India favorably, possibly reflecting the consequences of the December 2004 tsunami (Moore 2005). A
year later India’s favorability rating had fallen back to 66%, roughly consistent with its rating of 69% as of March 2008 (Jones 2006;
Saad 2008a). Despite the variation in poll ratings, India clearly maintains a broadly favorable position in the eyes of the public; the
country consistently ranks among the top ten nations in terms of favorability. It is not clear what factors drive positive public
perception of India, but it is telling that democracies
dominate the top of the favorability rankings. If
democracy does play an important role in structuring public threat assessment, India’s high
rankings are consistent with what we would expect of public opinion.
Prerequisite
Analyzation of securitization threats in relation to democracy is a prerequisite
for effective policy
The securitization framework has the potential to provide significant insight into the
mechanisms of the democratic peace—a considerable weakness in the literature. Muller and Wolff (2004) argue that
the dominant mechanisms in the literature—political structure and political norms—are monadic mechanisms attempting to explain
a dyadic phenomenon. The mechanistic ambiguity of the democratic peace leaves the theory open to legitimate counterarguments
based on critiques of correlation (Gartzke 2000; Green, Kim, and Yoon 2001; Ward, Siverson, and Cao 2007) or reverse causality
(Midlarsky 1995; Thompson 1996; James, Solberg, and Wolfson 1999). The lack of clear mechanistic understanding also makes it
difficult for scholars and policymakers to integrate the democratic peace into a coherent foreign policy to enable democracies to
take advantage of the phenomenon.
Securitization also serves to reintegrate the democratic peace back into security studies more broadly. The
democratic
peace represents a regularity in how security threats are constructed, not an exception. Using
securitization to trace that regularity and how it operates will improve our understanding of
how democracies in general construct their threat environment. Securitization also reasserts
the importance of politics in security policy. While the institutions and balance of power play a role in international
security, understanding how threats and policy responses are identified and constructed by
leaders both inside their heads and in public is critical for understanding international security
dynamics. Constructivist work on the democratic peace primarily focuses on the individual level of this duality. Securitization
gives us a theoretical basis for examining the second—public—aspect.
Turns Case
Attempts to save democracy through securitization prevent actualizing freedom
Ivie and Giner 04
Hints of a more robust democratic culture and practice, when they occasionally surfaced in
presidential war rhetoric, were directed to the future rather than the present, thus deferring
indefinitely a fuller realization of democracy while avoiding direct acknowledgement of a deep
and abiding anxiety over actually empowering the demos. Thus, Iraq was “making inspiring
progress toward building a lasting democracy,” and Afghanistan was “on the road to
democracy” (Bush 2005c, 2004b, 2004a). Likewise, America was “advancing the rights of
mankind” and standing up for “the advance of democracy” by helping countries “lay the
foundations of democracy” and showing them “the way toward democracy,” which was an
ongoing process, the president reminded Americans, that would test their patience because
“finding the full promise of representative government takes time” and “we are now in the early
hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom” (Bush 2004c, 2005a, 2006f). This was the
overall, well-removed future context in which the president occasionally gestured (and even
then jokingly) to debate as the “essence of democracy” (Bush 2005c) and made passing
reference to “a pluralistic, self governing society” (Bush 2004a). In the meantime, the “difficult
road ahead” required “the determined efforts of a unified country” that “must put aside our
differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us” in our common quest
for “a shining age of human liberty” (Bush 2006f).
The reason for continuously deferring the fulfillment of democracy’s larger promise was that
tyranny, like the devil who tempted Jesus, is irrepressible and only “departs for a season” (Luke
4:13). The present fight was a “current expression of an ancient struggle—between those who
put their faith in dictators, and those who put their faith in the people”; America faced an
enemy that was “never tired, never sated, never content with yesterday’s brutality” (Bush
2005c). Tyranny always returns, restored to its full savagery, at the first sign of civilization’s
weakness. It never stays dead or remains permanently defeated. It continues “violently opposed
to democracy” (Bush 2005a), forever challenging America to “back down” (Bush 2005e) and
constantly requiring the nation to “fight back” in order to disprove tyranny’s unshakable belief
that “democracies are weak” (Bush 2005b, 2004b).
When freedom was defined foremost in opposition to totalitarianism—as a continuous fight
with the dark ideological forces of tyranny spanning centuries, not just years and decades—it
lost its focus as a positive exercise of constitutionally privileged and protected civil rights and
its immediate relationship to democratic practice. Thus, fighting for freedom substituted for
putting freedom and democracy into practice and hindered thinking about what a robust
practice of liberal democracy might actually entail. It insinuated instead strong presidential
leadership as the appropriate mode of governance—indeed, the stronger the better, given the
immediacy of totalitarianism’s unending threat.
War on terror impact
Attempt to protect the world for democracy created the war on terror
Ivie and Giner 04
Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 pg 586-588
It was foundational in the sense of a base coat, or the gesso applied to a canvas before receiving
the artist’s painting. The defacement of America’s terrorist enemies by the president’s rhetoric
set the stage for a classic psychological projection. The phenomenon of projection is defined by
Carl Jung as “an unintentional transfer of a part of the psyche which belongs to the subject onto
an outer object” (von Franz 1991, 14, emphasis in original). Alluding to a Christian metaphor,
Marie-Louis von Franz reminds us that projections traffic in the “well-known business of the
beam in our eye which we do not see” (von Franz 1991, 14).1 Projections are “emotionally-
toned,” and characteristically “the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of
doubt, in the other person” ( Jung 1951, 146, emphasis in original). The rhetorical manufacture
of a blank slate allowed for the externalization of a vague, disturbing, shadowy persona.
“Terrorists try to operate in the shadows. They try to hide,” Bush observed, but America would
“rout out terrorism” no matter how long it might take. “No corner of the world will be dark
enough to hide in” (Bush 2001f, 2001b). Cast in a sinister undertone, the president’s portrait of
terror depicted America struggling in the dark to conquer its nemesis. This was “a time of
testing,” a “time of adversity” that would reveal “the true character of the American people”
(Bush 2001g, 2001l). It would be a difficult struggle, but the president assured Americans that
“we can overcome evil. We’re good” (Bush 2001k). Americans were fighting to prove that
evildoers could not “break our spirit” or “diminish our soul” (Bush 2001c, 2001b). America
would not succumb in the darkness to its evil counterpart and alter ego.
Jung reminds us that “projections change the world into a replica of our unknown face” ( Jung
1951, 146). Behind the mask of terrorist evil, the face of the distempered demon of democracy
could be observed. An observer tracking the language of terror through the president’s public
statements soon encounters visible markers of the enemy’s crazed brutality. On the side of
“chaotic violence” were the “barbaric acts” of “bands of murderers, supported by outlaw
regimes” and driven by “mad intent”; these “shadowy, entrenched enemies” were the “authors
of mass murder” (Bush 2001e, 2001q). Their “mad ambitions” and “fanaticism” constituted an
“axis of evil” that threatened “the civilized world” with “mass destruction” (Bush 2002b). The
“dim vision” of these “backwards,” “barbaric,” “cold-blooded killers,” and “parasites” that
“don’t have hearts” was to “brutalize” their victims with “torture” and “beheadings” contrary to
“all civilized norms” (Bush 2004a, 2004c, 2004d). The “fanatical,” “murderous ideology” (Bush
2005c) and sheer “savagery” of these terrorists (Bush 2006a) marked them not only “as brutal
an enemy as we’ve ever faced” (Bush 2005d) but especially as “violently opposed to
democracy” (Bush 2005a) and against “the idea of progress itself” (Bush 2005c). Ultimately,
America’s war on terrorism amounted to a “struggle between tyranny and freedom,” a quest
to “leave the desert of despotism for the fertile gardens of liberty” (Bush 2006f).
Particularly difficult-to-acknowledge apprehensions about democracy were expressed by
indirection and thereby attributed to an old adversary frequently revisited in presidential
rhetoric. “The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals” was “like the ideology of
communism,” the president allowed, in that it “is elitist.... teaches that innocent individuals can
be sacrificed to serve a political vision.... pursues totalitarian aims . . . [with] endless ambitions
of imperial domination. . . . is dismissive of free peoples.... [and] contains inherent
contradictions that doom it to failure” (Bush 2005c). This projection of fear and distrust onto a
totalitarian antagonist (in abnegation of democracy) was purportedly a display of what
democratic America precisely was not (elitist, authoritarian, imperialistic, aggressive,
belligerent, murderous, and doomed to defeat). Yet the dark image of this totalitarian, Islamic,
Communist-like enemy corresponded, perhaps too closely for comfort, to the nation’s ready
compliance with presidential rule and its involvement in a wooly regimen of continuous global
warfare.
AT Pinker
Pinker’s analysis is incomplete – solely framing peace as between great powers
ignores mass deaths at the hands of those powers
Herman & Peterson 12
(David, independent writer & researcher based in Chicago, and Edward, prof. @ Wharton School UPenn “Reality Denial : Apologetics
for Western-Imperial Violence” http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066 thw_)
Pinker’s standard for an interruption of the “Long Peace” would be a war between the “great
powers,” and it is true that the major Axis and Allied powers that fought each other during World War II
have not made war among themselves since 1945. But Pinker carries this line of thought even further: He
contends not only that the “democracies avoid disputes with each other,” but that they “tend to stay out of
disputes across the board,” (283) an idea he refers to as the “Democratic Peace.”[12] (278-284) This will surely
come as a surprise to the many victims of U.S. assassinations, sanctions, subversions, bombings
and invasions since 1945.[13] For Pinker, no attack on a lesser power by one or more of the great democracies
counts as a real war or confutes the “Democratic Peace,” no matter how many people die.
“Among respectable countries,” Pinker writes, “conquest is no longer a thinkable option. A politician in a democracy today who
suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or
laughter.” (260) This is an extremely silly assertion. Presumably, when George Bush
and Tony Blair sent U.S. and British
forces to attack Iraq in 2003, ousted its government, and replaced it with one operating under
laws drafted by the Coalition Provisional Authority, this did not count as “conquest,” as these
leaders never stated that they launched the war to “conquer” Iraq, but rather “to disarm Iraq, to
free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. ”[14] What conqueror has ever pronounced as his
goal something other than self-defense and the protection of life and limb? It is on the basis of devices such as this that Pinker’s
“Long Peace,” “New Peace,” and “Democratic Peace” rest. (See “Massaging the Numbers,” below.)
And it is in this kind of context Pinker throws-in his “gentle commerce” theme by advancing the so-called “Golden Arches Peace”
The “only unambiguous” exception that
idea—that “no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever fought in a war.”
he can name occurred in 1999, “when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.” (285) In an endnote he mentions that
an “earlier marginal exception was the U.S. attack on Panama in 1989,” but he dismisses this U.S.
war as too insignificant to make the grade—“its death count falls short of the minimum required for a war according to the
standard definition,”[15] though according to the UN Charter and customary international law, there
was nothing sub-standard about this unambiguous U.S. aggression against a sovereign country .
Here as in many other places, Pinker selects the estimated death toll that minimizes the U.S.-inflicted casualties and fits his political
agenda.[16]
Pinker mentions in passing that the post-World War II peace among the giants was possibly a result of the immense cost of wars that
might involve a nuclear exchange—and it did extend to the Soviet Union during its post-World War II life—but his
explanation
focuses mainly on the cultural evolution and biological adaptations of the Civilized,[17] in
contrast with the Uncivilized of the Third World. Why this new peaceableness of the Civilized
does not stop their violent interventions abroad he fails to explain . The exclusion of wars against the
Uncivilized from his definition of a “Long Peace” reflects gross political bias.
Pinker attributes the sense of increased violence to multiple “illusions,” one of which he believes is caused
by the development of media and other advanced forms of communication that allow a rushing to the spot of bloody events, and
recording them and transmitting them to the world. As he explained in a guest appearance on CBS TV’s The Early Show in mid-
December 2011: “Not only can we send a helicopter with a film crew to any troubled spot in the world but now anyone with a cell
phone is an instant reporter. They can broadcast color footage of bloodshed wherever it occurs and so we’re very aware of it.”[18]
Apparently Pinker believes that the media cover the world on a non-discriminatory basis,
reporting on Guatemalan peasants slaughtered by their army, civilian victims of U.S. drone
warfare in Afghanistan, Honduran protesters shot dead by their own military, and dead and
injured U.S. soldiers as aggressively as they report on civilian protesters shot dead on the streets
of Tehran, or the victims of the Syrian government or of the late Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.[19] The
naiveté here is staggering.
Pinker’s “Long Peace” and “New Peace” and their alleged

declines of violence not only coincide with the
numerous and ongoing attacks by the giants on the midgets, the huge expansion in arms, and the
new “burgeoning” of torture ,[20] but runs parallel with the increasing structural violence of a
global class war that has resulted in growing inequality within and between countries,
systematic dispossession of vast numbers, a widespread seizure of the commons, major
migrations, growing cities of slums, increased ethnic tensions and anti-Islamic fervor, deliberately stoked in a
troubled, receptive environment, mass incarceration of minority populations, and more vocal oppositional forces both here and
abroad.[21] These do not constitute “violence” in Pinker’s accounting system.
Privacy
1NC Privacy
Creating zones of privacy against state intrusion reinforces rather than
challenges the security state
Henry 13 (PhD candidate at Carleton University reading Sociology and Political Economy)
(Aaron, Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 9 (2) Winter 2013, THE PERPETUAL OBJECT OF REGULATION:
PRIVACY AS PACIFICATION)
There is a conviction today that privacy is in a state of irretrievable crisis. In addition to the collection and sale of day-to-day
personal activity by telecommunications services and social networking sites, programmes of surveillance and registration
have allegedly eroded what were previously understood as the firm borders between public and private spheres of relations.
That this has happened or is in the process of materializing has taken on the weight and opacity of a social fact. Yet, while
privacy is said to be in a state of crisis,
the ‘right to privacy’ is often trumpeted by liberals as the
counterweight to balance the intrusion of state projects into the lives of individuals .
Indeed, this appears to be the general sentiment that rests behind initiatives like the ‘Orwell Award’ given to companies that
have violated privacy, or the American Civil Liberties Union recent mobilization against Drones as a privacy concern. Thus,
privacy is presented as means to make intrusions into the life of the individual
proportional to the objectives of security projects, and in some instances security
projects are legitimized for the forms of privacy they safeguard (Cavoukian, 1999, 13). To this
end, privacy is subject to a rather peculiar positioning as both a relation threatened by security and
as a regulative principle capable of ensuring the ‘acceptable’ limits of security
projects.
What I want to demonstrate in this paper is that the relation of privacy to security as both an object threatened by security
and as a means of regulating security projects is the product of a longstanding relation between privacy, security and capital.
This relation is expressed in two ways. First, while privacy has been invoked as a means to resist projects of security, I argue
that privacy is in fact deployed as a means to structure the fields of relations
through which security interventions are made.2 In this sense, when the power of state or capital
intervenes upon the individual, privacy emerges as a concept. Privacy, a retroactive concept, exists as a means to assuage
individuals that the duration and scope of security projects will be ‘reasonable or proportional’; thus, security presupposes
and delimits privacy. Second, in the course of defending the individual's freedom and autonomy over their inner world,
privacy reinforces private property and private life, the very relations projects of security safeguard. Thus, privacy
acclimatizes us to a mode of existence where we are alienated from our collective
social power, and so we confront relations of domination and exploitation as private individuals. This
commodification of our selves is, I suggest, part of the condition of pacification.
First, I attempt to theorize how security and its relation to capital render it not only generative of privacy but structure its
perimeters. I demonstrate the formation of this relationship between security and privacy through a critical reading of
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Second, I offer a contemporary example of this relation between privacy and security through an
analysis of the Passenger Name Record (PNR) agreement between the United States and the EU. Finally, I conclude by
reviewing how privacy as desirable form of existence constitutes a form of pacification
insofar as it not only fails to challenge capital but has further entrenched the logics of
security into social life.
Proliferation
1NC Proliferation
Fears of proliferation are based in racism and colonialism
Lutz 9
[Catherine Lutz, professor of anthropology at Brown University and the Watson Institute for International
Studies, 2009, The Bases of Empire p. 29]
The reasons given for stationing U.S. forces overseas, though, cannot simply be called wrong. While the weight of evidence just
briefly reviewed suggests that they are, the pursuit ofthe immense project of circling the globe with soldiers and
equipment is fueled as much by mythic structures as by reason and rationality. It then becomes difficult
to distinguish one from the other. While such myths may be invalidated by rational argumentation, their explanatory power
often remains powerfully intact. Support for foreign military bases hinges first on the idea that war is often
necessary and ultimately inevitable. It is widely believed that humans are naturally violent and that war
can be a glorious and good venture. Racism adds the notion that the modern and not coincidentally white
nations have the responsibility, intelligence, religious ethic, and right to control more primitive (and more
chaotically violent) others through violence if necessary. These racial ideas made it possible for people in
the United States and Europe to support colonial exterminationist wars in the nineteenth century, but to find
wars between industrialized or civilized states increasingly unthinkable during the late nineteenth century
(despite what went on to happen in the twentieth). They also underpin the assumption that Gusterson (1999) has
labeled “nuclear orientalism,” which holds that only the United States and European powers can truly
be trusted with nuclear weapons. Such beliefs provide important foundation stones for support of the U.S. basing
system.16
2NC Proliferation Discourse
Proliferation discourse constructs nations as out of control to justify American
imperialism. This orientalist framing ends in absolute domination of the Other.
Gusterson 99 (Hugh Gusterson, Prof. Anthropology & Science & Tech Studies @ MIT, 1999,
“Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination,” thw_)
According to the literature on risk in anthropology, shared fears often reveal as much about the identities and solidarities of the
fearful as about the actual dangers that are feared (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Lindenbaum 1974). The immoderate reactions
in the West to the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan, and to Iraq's nuclear weapons program earlier, are
examples of an entrenched discourse on nuclear proliferation that has played an important
role in structuring the Third World, and our relation to it, in the Western imagination. This discourse,
dividing the world into nations that can be trusted with nuclear weapons and those that
cannot, dates back, at least, to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. The Non-Proliferation Treaty embodied a
bargain between the five countries that had nuclear weapons in 1970 and those countries that did not. According to the bargain ,
the five official nuclear states (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China)3
promised to assist other signatories to the treaty in acquiring nuclear energy technology as long as they did
not use that technology to produce nuclear weapons, submitting to international inspections when necessary to prove
their compliance. Further, in Article 6 of the treaty, the five nuclear powers agreed to "pursue negotiations in
good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date
and to nuclear disarmament" (Blacker and Duffy 1976:395). One hundred eighty-seven countries have signed the treaty,
but Israel, India, and Pakistan have refused, saying it enshrines a system of global "nuclear apartheid." Although the Non-
Proliferation Treaty divided the countries of the world into nuclear and nonnuclear by means of a purely temporal metric–
designating only those who had tested nuclear weapons by 1970 as nuclear powers- the treaty has become the legal
anchor for a global nuclear regime that is increasingly legitimated in Western public discourse
in racialized terms. In view of recent developments in global politics-the collapse of the Soviet threat and the recent war
against Iraq, a nuclear-threshold nation in the Third World-the importance of this discourse in organizing Western geopolitical
understandings is only growing. It has become an increasingly important way of legitimating U.S.
military programs in the post-Cold War world since the early 1990s, when U.S. military leaders introduced the
term rogue states into the American lexicon of fear, identifying a new source of danger just as the
Soviet threat was declining (Klare 1995). Thus in Western discourse nuclear weapons are represented so that
"theirs" are a problem whereas "ours" are not. During the Cold War the Western discourse on the
dangers of "nuclear proliferation" defined the term in such a way as to sever the two senses of the word proliferation.
This usage split off the "vertical" proliferation of the superpower arsenals (the development of new and
improved weapons designs and the numerical expansion of the stockpiles) from the "horizontal" proliferation of
nuclear weapons to other countries, presenting only the latter as the "proliferation problem."
Following the end of the Cold War, the American and Russian arsenals are being cut to a few thousand weapons on each side.5
However, the United States and Russia have turned back appeals from various nonaligned nations, especially
India, for the nuclear powers to open discussions on a global convention abolishing nuclear weapons. Article 6
of the Non-Proliferation Treaty notwithstanding, the Clinton administration has declared that nuclear weapons will play a role in the
defense of the United States for the indefinite future. Meanwhile, in a controversial move, the Clinton administration has broken
with the policy of previous administrations in basically formalizing a policy of using nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states to
deter chemical and biological weapons (Panofsky 1998; Sloyan 1998). The
dominant discourse that stabilizes this
system of nuclear apartheid in Western ideology is a specialized variant within a broader system of
colonial and postcolonial discourse that takes as its essentialist premise a profound Otherness
separating Third World from Western countries.6 This inscription of Third World (especially Asian and
Middle Eastern) nations as ineradicably different from our own has, in a different context, been labeled
"Orientalism" by Edward Said (1978). Said argues that orientalist discourse constructs the world in terms of a series
of binary oppositions that produce the Orient as the mirror image of the West: where "we" are rational and
disciplined, "they" are impulsive and emotional; where "we" are modern and flexible, "they"
are slaves to ancient passions and routines; where "we" are honest and compassionate,
"they" are treacherous and uncultivated. While the blatantly racist orientalism of the high colonial period has
softened, more subtle orientalist ideologies endure in contemporary politics . They can be found, as Akhil
Gupta (1998) has argued, in discourses of economic development that represent Third World nations as child nations lagging behind
Western nations in a uniform cycle of development or, as Lutz and Collins (1993) suggest, in the imagery of popular magazines, such
as National Geographic. I want to suggest here that another variant of contemporary orientalist ideology is also to be found in U.S.
national security discourse. Following Anthony Giddens (1979), I define ideology as a way of constructing political ideas,
institutions, and behavior which (1) makes the political structures and institutions created by dominant social
groups, classes, and nations appear to be naturally given and inescapable rather than socially constructed; (2)
presents the interests of elites as if they were universally shared; (3) obscures the connections between different
social and political antagonisms so as to inhibit massive, binary confrontations (i.e., revolutionary
situations); and (4) legitimates domination.
The Western discourse on nuclear proliferation is ideological in all four of these senses: (1) it makes the
simultaneous ownership of nuclear weapons by the major powers and the absence of nuclear
weapons in Third World countries seem natural and reasonable while problematizing attempts by such countries
as India, Pakistan, and Iraq to acquire these weapons; (2) it presents the security needs of the established nuclear powers as if they
were everybody's; (3) it
effaces the continuity between Third World countries' nuclear deprivation
and other systematic patterns of deprivation in the underdeveloped world in order to inhibit a massive north-
south confrontation; and (4) it legitimates the nuclear monopoly of the recognized nuclear powers. In the following pages I examine
four popular arguments against horizontal nuclear proliferation and suggest that all four are ideological and orientalist. The
arguments are that (1) Third World countries are too poor to afford nuclear weapons; (2) deterrence will be unstable in the Third
World; (3) Third World regimes lack the technical maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons; and (4) Third World regimes lack the
political maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons. Each of these four arguments could as easily be turned backwards and used to
delegitimate Western nuclear weapons, as I show in the following commentary. Sometimes, in the specialized literature of defense
experts, one finds frank discussion of near accidents, weaknesses, and anomalies in deterrence as it has been practiced by the
established nuclear powers, but these admissions tend to be quarantined in specialized discursive spaces where the general public
has little access to them and where it is hard to connect them to the broader public discourse on nuclear proliferation.7 In this
article I retrieve some of these discussions of flaws in deterrence from their quarantined spaces and juxtapose them with the
dominant discourse on the dangers of proliferation in order to destabilize its foundational assumption of a secure binary distinction
between "the West" and "the Third World." It is my argument that, in
the production of this binary distinction,
possible fears and ambivalences about Western nuclear weapons are purged and recast as
intolerable aspects of the Other. This purging and recasting occurs in a discourse characterized by
gaps and silences in its representation of our own nuclear weapons and exaggerations in its
representation of the Other's. Our discourse on proliferation is a piece of ideological machinery that
transforms anxiety-provoking ambiguities into secure dichotomies . I should clarify two points here. First, I
am not arguing that there are, finally, no differences between countries in terms of their reliability as custodians of nuclear
weapons. I am arguing that those differences are complex, ambiguous, and crosscutting in ways that are not captured by a simple
binary division between, on the one hand, a few countries that have nuclear weapons and insist they are safe and, on the other
hand, those countries that do not have nuclear weapons and are told they cannot safely acquire them. It is my goal here to
demonstrate the ways in which this
simple binary distinction works as an ideological mechanism to
impede a more nuanced and realistic assessment of the polymorphous dangers posed by
nuclear weapons in all countries and to obscure recognition of the ways in which our own
policies in the West have often exacerbated dangers in the Third World that , far from being simply
the problems of the Other, are problems produced by a world system dominated by First World
institutions and states.
--Anti-nuclearism
WMD policy justifies war in the name of preservation. Coercive tactics maintain
US dominance and justify nuke war
BondGraham & Parrish 2009 (Darwin BondGraham, sociologist and investigative journalist,
and Will Parrish, anti-imperialist scholar. 2006 "Anti-nuclear Nuclearism", http://fpif.org/anti-
nuclear_nuclearism/ thw_)
The Obama administration is likely to continue a policy that we call “anti-nuclear nuclearism.” Anti-nuclear
nuclearism is a foreign and
military policy that relies upon overwhelming U.S. power , including the nuclear arsenal, but makes rhetorical and
even some substantive commitments to disarmament , however vaguely defined. Anti-nuclear nuclearism thrives as a
school of thought in several think tanks that have long influenced foreign policy choices related to global nuclear forces. Even the national nuclear
weapons development labs in New Mexico and California have been avid supporters and crafters of it. As a policy, anti-nuclear
nuclearism is designed to ensure U.S. nuclear and military dominance by rhetorically calling
for what has long been derided as a naïve ideal: global nuclear disarmament . Unlike past forms of
nuclearism, it de-emphasizes the offensive nature of the U.S. arsenal . Instead of promoting the U.S. stockpile as a
strategic deterrence or umbrella for U.S. and allied forces, it prioritizes an aggressive diplomatic and military campaign of nonproliferation.
Nonproliferation efforts are aimed entirely at other states, especially non-nuclear nations with
suspected weapons programs, or states that can be coerced and attacked under the pretense that they possess nuclear weapons or a
development program (e.g. Iraq in 2003). Effectively pursuing this kind of belligerent nonproliferation regime requires half-steps toward cutting the
U.S. arsenal further, and at least rhetorically recommitting the United States to international treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT). Itrequires a fig leaf that the United States isn’t developing new nuclear weapons , and that it is slowly
disarming and de-emphasizing its nuclear arsenal. By these means the United States has tried to avoid the charge of hypocrisy , even though it
has designed and built newly modified weapons with qualitatively new capacities over the last
decade and a half. Meanwhile, U.S. leaders have allowed for and even promoted a mass proliferation of nuclear energy and material, albeit
under the firm control of the nuclear weapons states, with the United States at the top of this pile. Many disarmament proponents were elated last
year when four extremely prominent cold warriors — George P. Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn — announced in a series of op-
eds their commitment to "a world free of nuclear weapons." Strange bedfellows indeed for the cause. Yet the fine print of their plan, published by the
Hoover Institute and others since then, represents the anti-nuclear nuclearist platform to a tee. It’s a conspicuous yet merely rhetorical commitment to
a world without nuclear weapons. These four elder statesmen have said what many U.S. elites have rarely uttered: that abolition is both possible and
desirable. However, the
anti-nuclear posture in their policy proposal comes to bear only on
preventing non-nuclear states from going nuclear, or else preventing international criminal conspiracies from
proliferating weapons technologies and nuclear materials for use as instruments of non-state terror. In other words, it’s about other people's nuclear
This position
weapons, not the 99% of materials and arms possessed by the United States and other established nuclear powers.
emphasizes an anti-nuclear politics entirely for what it means for the rest of the world —
securing nuclear materials and preventing other states from going nuclear or further developing their
existing arsenals. U.S. responsibility to disarm remains in the distant future, unaddressed as a present imperative. Exclusive Route around the CTBT
Concerns about the nuclear programs of other states — mostly Islamic, East and South Asian nations (i.e., Iran,
North Korea, etc.) — conveniently work to reinforce existing power relations embodied in U.S.
military supremacy and neocolonial relationships of technological inequality and dependence. By invoking their
commitment to a "world free of nuclear weapons," the ideologues behind the anti-nuclear nuclearist platform justify invasions,
military strikes, economic sanctions, and perhaps even the use of nuclear weapons themselves against the
"rogue states" and "terrorists" whose possession of weapons technologies vastly less advanced than those perpetually stockpiled by the United States
is deemed by the anti-nuclear nuclearists the first and foremost problem of the nuclear age.
Orientalism à War
This causes war, genocide, and racism based off of orientalist fears of potential
threats
Batur 7
[Pinar Batur, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, 2007, “The Heart of Violence: Global Racism,
War, and Genocide,” in Handbook of the The Soiology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin,
p. 446-7]

At the turn of the 20th century, the “Terrible Turk” was the image that summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire,
American foreign policy exhibited how

stretching from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation of this imagery in
capitalism met with orientalist constructs in the white racial frame of the western mind (Vander Lippe 1999).
Orientalism is based on the conceptualization of the “Oriental” other —Eastern, Islamic societies as
static, irrational, savage, fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific “Occidental” Europe and the West (Said 1978). This is as an
elastic construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as the latest threat to Western economic expansion, political and cultural hegemony, and global domination
for exploitation and absorption.
later America used this iconography to define basic racist assumptions regarding
Post-Enlightenment Europe and
their uncontestable right to impose political and economic dominance globally. When the Soviet Union
existed as an opposing power, the orientalist vision of the 20th century shifted from the image of the
“Terrible Turk” to that of the “Barbaric Russian Bear.” In this context, orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms
of exclusion. It racialized exclusion to define the terms of racial privilege and superiority . By focusing on ideology,
orientalism recreated the superior race, even though there was no “race.” It equated the hegemony of Western
civilization with the “right ideological and cultural framework.” It segued into war and annihilation and
genocide and continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial hatred of others with the collapse of the Soviet “other.” Orientalism’s
global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and Islamic culture as to the “inferior other.” Seeing Muslims
as opponents of Christian civilization is not new, going back to the Crusades, but the elasticity and reframing of this exclusion is evident in recent debates regarding Islam in the
West, one raised by the Pope and the other by the President of the United States.
Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, and detention of Muslims without trial
in secret prisons, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany. He quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said, “show me
just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” In
addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as Islamic “holy war,” and said, “violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to
reason.” He also called for dialogue between cultures and religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims found the Pope’s speech “regrettable,” it also caused a spark of angry
protests against the Pope’s “ill informed and bigoted” comments, and voices raised to demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new
crusade, for Christian civilization to conquer terrible and savage Islam. When Benedict apologized, organizations and parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the
Pope and the Vatican (Lee 2006). Yet, when the Pope apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said, “I’m deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries
to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims” (Reuters 2006). In other words, he is sorry that
Muslims are intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Pope’s apology came as an effort to show justification for his speech—he was not apologizing for
being insulting, but rather saying that he was sorry that “Muslim” violence had proved his point.
Through orientalist and the white racial frame, those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion
themselves become agents of racist legitimization. Like Huntington, Bernard Lewis was looking for Armageddon in his Wall Street Journal
article warning that August 22, 2006, was the 27th day of the month of Rajab in the Islamic calendar and is considered a holy day, when Muhammad was taken to heaven and
returned. For Muslims this day is a day of rejoicing and celebration. But for Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the
apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world” (Lewis 2006). He cautions that “it is far from certain that [the President of Iran] Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such
cataclysmic events for August 22, but it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.” Lewis argues that Muslims, unlike others, seek self-destruction in order to reach heaven
faster. For Lewis, Muslims in this mindset don’t see the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a constraint but rather as “an inducement” (Lewis 2006). In 1993, Huntington
Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views Islam

pleaded that “in a world of different civilizations, each . . . will have to learn to coexist with the others” (Huntington 1993:49).
as the apocalyptic destroyer of civilization and claims that reactions against orientalist, racist visions such as his actually prove the validity of his
position. Lewis’s assertions run parallel with George Bush’s claims. In response to the alleged plot to blow up British airliners, Bush claimed, “This nation is
at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt
our nation” (TurkishPress.com. 2006; Beck 2006). Bush argued that “the fight against terrorism is the ideological struggle of the 21st century” and he compared it to the
20th century’s fight against fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though “Islamo-fascist” has for some time been a buzzword for Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean
Hannity on the talk-show circuit, for the president of the United States it drew reactions worldwide. M uslim Americans found this phrase
“contributing to the rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim community” (Raum 2006). Considering that since 2001, Bush
has had a tendency to equate “war on terrorism” with “crusade,” this new rhetoric equates ideology with religion and reinforces the worldview of a war of civilizations. As Bush
said, “ . . .we still aren’t completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in” (CNN 2006).
Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion in the imagination, and racialized exclusion has
an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the excluded. Annihilation , in this sense, is not only designed to
maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is institutionalized with the vocabulary of
self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never complete, genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary
racial ideology, and such is the logic of the outcome of the exclusionary process, that it can conclude
only in ultimate domination. War and genocide take place with compliant efficiency to serve the global
racist ideology with dizzying frequency. The 21st century opened up with genocide, in Darfur.
Relations
1NC Relations (Mexico cartels)
Cartels are a product of US policies in Mexico, the affirmative only increases the
widespread corruption and violence
Thornton & Goodman 14 [Christy Thornton, former Executive Director of NACLA, graduate
student in the Department of History at NYU, and Adam Goodman, doctoral student in history at
the University of Pennsylvania, “How the Mexican Drug Trade Thrives on Free Trade,”
7/15/14] http://www.thenation.com/article/180587/how-mexican-drug-trade-thrives-free-
trade# nufh_
Since 2006, more than 100,000 people have been disappeared or killed in Mexico, a country where more than 90 percent of crimes
go unpunished. While running for president in 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto promised a new security strategy for the country, and an
end to the highly militarized campaign waged by his predecessor, Felipe Calderón. Since taking office, however, Peña Nieto’s
strategy has focused not on the safety of its people but on the confidence of its international investors.
To make Mexico more attractive to overseas capital, he has pursued a market-based reform
agenda that includes a technocratic overhaul of education, a move to shake up the telecommunications sector and the opening of
the energy sector to foreign private investment. New narratives about the “Aztec Tiger” won’t make the kidnappings, beheadings
and mass graves disappear, but Peña Nieto is doing everything he can to make foreign investors forget about them.
The irony of touting market-based reforms as a means of sweeping the drug trade under the rug is that the cartels
themselves have become some of the most ruthlessly effective multinational capitalist
enterprises in Mexico. The cartels are beginning to diversify, making money not just from drugs and
other criminal activities like kidnapping and human trafficking but increasingly from control over industries like
mining, logging and shipping.
Meanwhile, finance and real estate sectors in Mexico and the United States are awash with cartel
profits, with one United Nations analyst arguing that drug money was the “only liquid investment capital”
that kept the international economy from completely imploding in 2008. Over the last few decades
Mexican capitalism has become a tangled web of legal and illegal activity, and the distinctions between licit and illicit economies
have become increasingly blurred. The policies of the Mexican and US governments are only
accelerating this trend.
There are two separate but deeply connected histories that have created the situation in
Mexico today: first, the neoliberal restructuring of the economy that began in the 1980s; and
second, the rise of the drug trade and the cartels that control it. Squarely at the center of both stories has
been the Mexican state, whose corruption, incompetence and often contradictory policy choices (in tandem with those of
the United States) have served to create vast sums of wealth for a few, while heightening insecurity
for Mexico’s working people. When we talk about the drug trade, we are talking about a deeply entrenched part of
contemporary capitalism in Mexico, not its undoing.
The restructuring of the Mexican economy in the 1980s occurred as the policy of inward-looking, state-led industrial development pursued by Mexico
from the 1940s through the 1970s came to a spectacular end with the 1982 debt crisis. A
structural adjustment agreement
negotiated with the International Monetary Fund required Mexico to devalue the peso, slash
government subsidies, cut funding for social programs and privatize hundreds of state-owned
enterprises in return for the refinancing of Mexico’s debt.¶ Then, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who came to power in a 1988 election widely
regarded as fraudulent, moved Mexico from a policy of temporary austerity to one of permanent state restructuring. He amended the constitution to
allow for the private sale of communal lands known as ejidos, deregulated the telecom sector, denationalized the banks and, most importantly,
reoriented Mexican industry toward the export sector, negotiating of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and
Canada.¶ Salinas promised that NAFTA would lift Mexicans out of poverty by creating new manufacturing jobs
and famously argued that the agreement would create a Mexico that exported goods rather than people. Mexico would become part of the first world,
Salinas proclaimed, and to prove it, he oversaw the country’s entry into the OECD, the club for the world’s leading industrial nations.
Twenty years after the implementation of NAFTA, however, it’s now clear that most of Salinas’s promises have gone unfulfilled.
Mexican economic growth during the period was among the lowest in Latin America, and
poverty and inequality levels remain at pre-NAFTA levels. A study from the Center for Economic and Policy
Research points out that while the poverty rate remained stagnant over the last two decades (at around 52 percent), population
growth has actually meant that 14.3
million more Mexicans were living in poverty in 2012 than in 1994.
Unemployment also increased in Mexico during the period, and some 4.9 million jobs were
lost in the family farm sector due to post-NAFTA declines in commodity prices and reductions
in state protections.
And while the exports of goods from Mexico did increase, as Salinas had promised, NAFTA didn’t stem the flow of people across the
border. Instead, the flow of undocumented workers across the border increased : according to a Pew
Research report, the number of Mexicans that immigrated to the United States rose from 430,000 in 1994 to 770,000 in 2000,
before tailing off because of increased border enforcement measures and the recent economic recession. (One additional result of
NAFTA is an increased exposure of the Mexican economy to downturns in its northern neighbor.) This spike in migration resulted in
the growth of the Mexican population in the United States from 4.5 million in 1990 to just under 12 million today.
Of course, while NAFTA forced people to migrate, concurrent policies of border militarization made that migration increasingly
difficult and dangerous. Insteadof integrating the North American labor market or adjusting the number of work visas to
match demand, the United States militarized its border with Mexico to previously unimaginable levels.
Since 1994 the number of Border Patrol officers has increased from just over 4,200 to more than 21,000; the number of hours
agents spent patrolling the border has gone from 3 million to more than 20 million; and the Border Patrol’s annual
budget has increased from $400 million to more than $3.4 billion.
At the same time, sectors that were privatized during structural adjustment but protected from competition under NAFTA—
telephone, television and transportation among them—are now monopolized by some of Mexico’s richest
men. Mexico’s new billionaires include the owners of the two largest television networks; the distributors of Coca-Cola; and Carlos
Slim, who controls more than three-quarters of all telephone service. (Recent reforms may begin to break up these
monopolies, but many believe they will actually benefit Televisa, the media giant with close
ties to the ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI). The top 10 percent in Mexico
now control more than 40 percent of its national wealth.
The policies of the last twenty years may have made a small group of Mexicans part of the global ultra-rich elite, but they left
the vast majority and the country as a whole no better, and in some cases much worse, than before.
It was in this same period that the drug trade intensified and cartel power expanded. As the historian Froylán
Enciso has shown, this was anything but inevitable. Instead, thecartels’ rise can be attributed to a combination of
domestic and international factors, including US policy and involvement in Mexico, Mexican government policy,
widespread corruption and impunity, and the $100 billion-a-year market created by demand for drugs north of the border. These
factors together have fostered conditions under which the drug trade has boomed , creating a
spectacularly violent twin for Mexico’s export-oriented “legitimate” economy.
--Link – EU/China/Russia
US relations with EU, Russia, and China are part of a drive to organize Empire
into “spheres of influence” – reproduces the central axis of imperialism
Negri ‘2, (Antonio, former Prof. of Poli Sci @ U of Padua, “The Order of War”,
http://www.generation-online.org/t/negriwar.htm)
Preventative war is not only a military doctrine; it is a constituent strategy of Empire. The American administration’s
September 20th document explicitly states so: preventative war is a just and necessary means to defend liberty, justice, democracy and economic
growth against terrorists and tyrants. It adds that preventative war should be considered immediately relevant
concerning three “rogue states”: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. To certain sectors of public opinion as well as to diplomats of some
countries it seemed as though the statement about the “Axis of Evil”, along with a succession of angry unilateralist declarations
on the part of White House representatives and their watchdogs indicated the suspension or definitive interruption of the nexus
between military doctrine and the constituent strategy of Empire. In reality such was not the case. On the
contrary, these statements represented items on the agenda [ordine del giorno] around which
constituent discussions between the global powers emerged . No sensible person could have ever really thought
that Iraq, Iran and North Korea posed substantial problems for a power like the USA, which could claim inordinate military power after its victory
against international communism. Now American military power, which is absolutely asymmetric, must also become intransitive; it must remain an
absolute superpower not so much with respect to the three ‘powers of Evil’ but rather in respect to the other world powers: the Axis of evil is
a metaphor for the great problems the monarchic power of the U nited States of America faces in three
strategic areas at the end of the cold war. Europe, Russia and China represent the problematic poles of
the new global order. Now, Iraq is a further indication of the European problem (and subordinately, of the
Japanese one) presented under the guise of energy supplies : without securing them the European economy cannot exist and
whoever controls energy supplies has his hands on the whole range of biopolitical functions of power in the old continent. On the other hand, Iran
(the area around the Caspian sea) represents the soft underbelly of Russian development . North Korea is in
the middle of the China Sea. How is Empire organized in these three fundamental zones? What is
its material constitution to become, today, in the presence of an American military superpower? How is the military supremacy of the monarchic power
over the new imperial order to be preventatively secured? It is well known that in Empire the sole exercise of military
power-or rather, of the monarchical function- is far from being sufficient to secure centrality and stability for the exercise
of global power. Moreover, 911 has shown (and with what dreadful evidence!) that the United States is in no respects an island .
The ensuing economic crisis –not only at the level of production but also and especially at the financial and monetary level- has
demonstrated that in Empire monarchy cannot survive unless it is in agreement with the
global aristocracy. Therefore, the war that’s brewing contains within its core a discussion on the imperial
constitution, and particularly, as far as Europe is concerned, the dimensions and roles of the European aristocracies in it. Chirac and Schroder
are neither pacifists nor warmongers: they are debating with Bush on the place of European capitalism in the imperial constitution. The major
decisions are not being made on the war on terrorism or on the conventional war against
tyrants, but rather on the forms of hegemony and the relative degrees of power that American
and/or European capitalist elites will have in the organization of the new world order . Preventative
decisions are not simply to do with war but more with market predominance in the sub
regions of the imperial organization .
Religious Freedom
1NC Religious Freedom
Attempts to allow religious freedom perpetrate colonialism
Rao 12
[Ramesh Rao, Professor at Columbus State University and an expert in Indian politics, August 5,
2012, “Imperialist Goals Masked in the Garb of Religious Freedom”
http://www.patheos.com/Hindu/Imperialist-Goals-Ramesh-Rao-08-06-2012?offset=2&max=1]
The U.S. State Department and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom submit annual reports evaluating
conditions in the nations of the world regarding the citizens of those countries and their ability to profess and
practice their faiths. Then there are myriad non-governmental organizations and activist groups, including the Hindu American Foundation,
of which I am an executive council member, publishing their own reports. Such a massive effort of looking into others'
internal matters is not undertaken by any other country. The U.S. is in many ways, the world's
self-proclaimed policeman, seeking to keep world order. Whether it is right or wrong is not the focus of this essay,
but instead we can argue that based on what the State Department's latest report says about religious freedom in India, the report and the exercise is
flawed, myopic, and blinkered.
These exercisesminding others' businesses should be carefully evaluated and critiqued so that we can
understand why we wish to pry into others' lives and to claim for ourselves the ability and the right to do so. A colonial, imperialist
hangover, one might say, as well as the Christian's wish to be his/her brother's/sister's
keeper. The White Man's Burden may indeed be heavy and self-imposed , but how that burden is carried
and is disposed of is no longer just the white man's concern but my concern too, and the concern of many like me --not Christian, not white, and not
burdened with minding others' businesses.
Scholars and academics of the West have spent enormous effort at "understanding" and
"describing" the other. Some have been sympathetic, some have embraced the other, but most have been very critical.
As Rajiv Malhotra says in his recent article about Oprah Winfrey's visit to India and what she said about India, " the history of the West is
replete with assertions of supremacy over the non-West on account of religious, racial,
cultural and economic factors." Those assertions and evaluations have led to the reshaping of
the world to imitate and mimic the West, at tremendous cost. Just to take the example of the ongoing Olympic
games, one wonders why the rest of the world should play the sports invented and organized by Western countries, building expensive stadia, training
athletes at enormous cost, and sending them to compete with others in a nationalistic rivalry replete with jingoistic slogans, and supremacist attitudes!
2NC Religious Freedom
Pursuit of religious freedom is used as a high horse to justify state violence
Hurd 10
[Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University,
March 23rd, 2010, “The global securitization of religion”,
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/03/23/global-securitization/ jf]
My first thought upon reading the Chicago Council’s report “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S.
Foreign Policy” is that the title is misleading. This report is not about engaging religious communities abroad—one hears little if at all
from such communities—nor does it say anything particularly new. There is, however, an imperative. This report is an attempt to
create a particular kind of world, one defined by the projection of American power—a certain kind of religious power. The report, as
Winni Sullivan observes in her companion piece, endorses an establishmentarian position in American foreign policy, meaning that
American policy could discriminate among religions, and fund and promote
religious activities that meet with U.S. government approval. This is a different kind of
religious power than what Sullivan describes as the “periodic and not altogether successful efforts” at disestablishment that we have
undertaken at home. Assuming that we agree with Sullivan, as I do, that “established religion is by definition not accepting of
report is not about engaging religious
‘pluralism, freedom, and democracy,’” it becomes clear that this
communities to promote either religious freedom or democracy. It is about the
projection of American power through the securitization of religion. Perhaps a more apt
title, borrowing in part from the language of the report itself, would have been “‘Savvy, selective, strategic, and targeted’: the
projection of American religious power and the global securitization of religion.”
I want to point to a few moments at which the report works especially hard to achieve these objectives. The first is in its definition of “religious freedom,” understood as the right to, “advance values publicly in
civil society and political life.” Religious freedom is to be articulated “in a way not viewed as imperialism, but as a means to support religious agency to undermine religion-based terrorism and promote stable
one of the great challenges of our time is to engage with and listen to
democracy.” Yet
those who enact religious agency and live religious freedom in ways that may
not conform to these protestant-secular understandings of religion and
religious freedom. In focusing exclusively on “values and beliefs,” the report not only fails to engage with, or allow spaces for, religious practice, habits, and ways of being in the
world that cannot be reduced to values and beliefs, but actively closes down such “religious agencies,” save those that are deemed to be “undermining religion-based terrorism” in the eyes of the National Security
Council (NSC). In tacitly sanctioning a protestant understanding of religion as the (only) legitimate way to be religious and modern, it forecloses upon a range of understandings of religion and arrogates to the NSC
the authority to decide who is “civil” enough to be allowed into the public sphere, and who isn’t. As Saba Mahmood has observed of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) itself, the report illustrates,
the exercise of sovereign power tends to subsume the secular principle of

“how
religious freedom .”
This rather astonishing exercise of sovereign theopolitical authority brings me to a second point involving the government regulation of religion. The report states: “We know
that government regulation of religion can lead to increased persecution and religious violence, forces that increasingly escape confinement within national borders.” This is a
striking statement. What is the Task Force calling for, if not increased government regulation through the securitization of religion? In recommending that the NSC direct, not
only governmental, but also nongovernmental engagement with religious actors and communities overseas, it vests in the government the authority and institutional capacity to
regulate religion both directly and through nongovernmental proxies, calling explicitly for “practical religious literacy” on the part of governmental and nongovernmental offices
and institutions. Will this lead to increased persecution and religious violence?
according to the logic of the report, because the secular state in general,
It won’t,
and the United States in particular, is ontologically incapable of particular kinds

of violence, “religious” violence, in particular. Violence undertaken by the
American state is by definition not religious. So, religious violence is something
undertaken by others, while secular violence disappears from the picture altogether, or is quietly subsumed and c Yet, is it not the case that, like the
errant “religious actors” described in the report, the United States also, at some times and in some places, “inspire(s) or legitimate(s) violent conflict by framing it as an act of
justice”? How is it that the United States manages to exempt itself from the critical scrutiny that it so avidly prescribes for its (religious) others? Could it be the case that
American exceptionalism and a particular notion of American religious freedom and American power are sacralized in this report, such that they are, in the words of the report,
religion is increasingly
lending “a sacred aura and intensity to disputes and campaigns that also have significant secular dimensions”? As
nationalized through this heady cocktail of religious freedom and American

exceptionalism, should we now brace ourselves for “calls to defend that which
is held sacred […] increasingly employed as a conflict escalator”? Should we not
at least consider the possibility that the United States, in its new role as self-
appointed theologian, might “invoke the sacred to sow violence and
confusion”? It is in closing down the possibility of this kind of self-scrutiny that
the report moves in dangerous directions.
In another example of the inherent goodness of American power, failed states,
in the eyes of the Task Force, are responsible for terrorism, and never the
international actions of the United States (such as in the invasion of Iraq) or
other actors. The United States floats above and outside the world, guided expertly by the NSC through the rocky shoals of political
theology and toward safer shores, in a carefully navigated approach, “tailored so as not to overstep the bounds by intervening unwisely in theological
disputes or, worse still, seeking to manipulate religion.”
War on Terror
look in Critical Terrorism Studies Generic
Link – Islamophobia
Construction of terror threats and US supremacy leads to militaristic
intervention
Kumar 13 (Deepa Kumar, associate professor of media studies and Middle Eastern studies at
Rutgers University and the author of the book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, "Twelve
Years Post 9/11, Islamophobia Still Runs High", www.truth-out.org/video/item/18759-twelve-
years-post-9-11-islamophobia-still-runs-high#, 9/11/2013, sr)
KUMAR: Islamophobia is basically the term, the name given to anti-Muslim racism. It is a form of
prejudice. And it involves making generalizations about an entire group based on the actions
of a few through this mythical understanding of what Islam is supposed to be. DESVARIEUX: Okay.
And we should mention that there was a poll that was conducted by the Arab American Institute that found that American attitudes
towards Arab and Muslims, specifically for Republicans and Romney voters in this last presidential election, were rated to be
strongly negative. Does this mean that Islamophobia is only a problem of right-wingers or conservative voters? KUMAR: Absolutely
not. Ithink it is true that larger numbers of conservative voters are racist. They are racist not
just in terms of their attitude towards Arabs and South Asians, but also to a whole host of
other groups. So it's true that this idea sort of concentrated within those ranks. But in fact
Islamophobia is far more systemic than that. That is to say, the idea of a Muslim enemy, the
idea of a terrorist enemy is one that actually goes back a couple of decades but was brought
to light after 9/11 by the political elite, by our political leaders. So in fact it is built into the
system of U.S. foreign policy in this country. And to simply look at the far right and to ignore
the fact that it has larger implications in terms of justifying U.S. foreign policy would be really
to have only an incomplete picture of what is at work in this form of racism. DESVARIEUX: Okay. Let's
talk about the mass media and how they depict Islam since 9/11. Can you describe for us how the mass media has depicted Islam?
KUMAR: Well, basically, the trauma of 9/11, the fact that, you know, 3,000 Americans died
meant that it enabled the U.S. media to actually draw on stereotypes that have been , you
know, propped up by Hollywood, by the news media, and so on for a few decades before that.
And that was the idea that these are crazy, irrational people. They are all apparently driven by
Islam to violence. And so we should lock them up, we should be suspicious of them, we should
detain them at airports, and so on and so forth. And so that's what you saw in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11. And this show called 24, which your viewers may know, is--it's about a lot
of things [incompr.] that it's about justifying the building of a national security state and
justifying practices like torture and so on and so forth. DESVARIEUX: Okay. And also the story of the day, of
course, is Syria, and everyone's attention is drawn to Syria. Can you describe for us just how does Islamophobia play a role in any of
the arguments for intervention in Syria, really? KUMAR: Okay. It doesn't play a direct role in that. It is--the idea of humanitarianism
has a long history in the United States. The
idea that there are victims all over the world, that the U.S.
government has then got to make war in order to, you know, somehow defend them, this
goes back all the way to the Spanish-American war of 1898, which was supposed to be about
rescuing Cubans. And similarly, you see these sorts of justifications given. You know,
Vietnamese need to be defended. In Iraq, it was babies, apparently, who were being
bayoneted in Kuwait, and therefore the U.S. needed to intervene and defeat Iraq in 1991. So
this idea of humanitarianism has a long history within the foreign policy establishmen t. But
what makes it particularly potent in this case is that after 9/11 what you see is the Bush
administration projecting this idea of clash of civilizations, which is basically the notion that
we in the West are democratic, we are rational, we are civilized, we are, you know, all things
wonderful, and they in the East are barbaric, they're misogynistic, and so on and so forth, and
therefore we have an obligation, what used to be called the white man's burden, to go off and
rescue them. And so you see some of that language, which is the idea that Arabs cannot bring
democracy by themselves, they cannot make change, and so we need to intervene . So it's a
combination both of the victim narrative, which has a long history, combined with this
language of clash of civilizations. DESVARIEUX: Okay. And how does this fit into domestic policy? How do they work
Islamophobia into domestic policy? KUMAR: Right. I mean, the comparison I make in the book and that I'm
actually working on in the next book is that the U.S. government, and U.S. imperialism in
particular, always needs an enemy. That is, when there is no humanitarian cause, an enemy is
an extremely useful way to justify wars abroad, as well as the policing of dissent at home. So,
for instance, during the Cold War we had been menacing enemy of the Soviet Union, against
whom both a hot and a Cold War had to be waged. And, of course, this justified, then,
McCarthyism, because there's always a reflection of the external enemy inside, and these
people have to be rounded up, blacklisted, and so on and so fort h. So that's the logic back then, and, of
course, it was entirely about a politics of fear. Today we have the same sort of thing. After 9/11, the war on terror
comes into being precisely about fighting endless wars. Remember, back in 9/11 the Bush
administration was going to start with Afghanistan, go to Iraq, and then Iran, Syria, and so on
and so forth. It didn't work out that way. But the idea was to drum up this fear of this
menacing terrorist enemy, which justified wars all over the world in order to gain the U.S.'s
interest in [incompr.] particularly in the oil-rich region in the Middle East. You asked me about
domestic politics. Always there was a reflection of the domestic in terms of the international
threat. And so what you've seen is innocent Muslims--and often actually not even Muslims,
people from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, some of them Sikhs, some some of
them Hindus, some of them Christians, and so on, being racially profiled because that is the
logic that comes out of this. I have a whole chapter in the book about how the legal system
has been reworked so as to justify things like indefinite detention, things like torture, things
like deportation. And, frankly, the infiltration of agents into our schools, into my school, into colleges, and so forth. So, you
know, it's truly horrific the extent to which Muslim Americans and people who look Muslim
have been demonized since 9/11. DESVARIEUX: How do you sort of categorize or interpret these votes by different
states to ban sharia law? What's your take on that? KUMAR: Yes. This is actually the work of a far right wing Islamophobic network.
These people have been active for the last two decades, and they get, you know, funding to the tune of $45-$50 billion over the last
seven, eight years. These people hold the view that there are no moderate Muslims, all Muslims are somehow connected to Islamist
organizations--Hamas or the Muslim brotherhood and so on. And even though they pretend to be moderate, right--this is the
language some of these people use--in fact they are involved in a conspiracy to take over the United States and to replace the
Constitution with sharia law. Of course, this is nonsense, this is complete conspiracy theory. But these are the people .
They are
lawyers, they are academics, they are people in the military, they are people in the security
establishment. They are responsible for this campaign where, you know, about half a dozen to
a dozen states across the U.S. have adopted these laws. It's a process of fearmongering, and it
enables the right wing to actually grow in their ranks and promote this kind of hate
This causes war, genocide, and racism based off of orientalist fears of potential
threats
Batur 7
[Pinar Batur, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, 2007, “The Heart of Violence: Global Racism,
War, and Genocide,” in Handbook of the The Soiology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin,
p. 446-7]

At the turn of the 20th century, the “Terrible Turk” was the image that summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire,
American foreign policy exhibited how

stretching from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation of this imagery in
capitalism met with orientalist constructs in the white racial frame of the western mind (Vander Lippe 1999).
Orientalism is based on the conceptualization of the “Oriental” other —Eastern, Islamic societies as
static, irrational, savage, fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific “Occidental” Europe and the West (Said 1978). This is as an
elastic construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as the latest threat to Western economic expansion, political and cultural hegemony, and global domination
for exploitation and absorption.
later America used this iconography to define basic racist assumptions regarding
Post-Enlightenment Europe and
their uncontestable right to impose political and economic dominance globally. When the Soviet Union
existed as an opposing power, the orientalist vision of the 20th century shifted from the image of the
“Terrible Turk” to that of the “Barbaric Russian Bear.” In this context, orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms
of exclusion. It racialized exclusion to define the terms of racial privilege and superiority . By focusing on ideology,
orientalism recreated the superior race, even though there was no “race.” It equated the hegemony of Western
civilization with the “right ideological and cultural framework.” It segued into war and annihilation and
genocide and continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial hatred of others with the collapse of the Soviet “other.” Orientalism’s
global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and Islamic culture as to the “inferior other.” Seeing Muslims
as opponents of Christian civilization is not new, going back to the Crusades, but the elasticity and reframing of this exclusion is evident in recent debates regarding Islam in the
West, one raised by the Pope and the other by the President of the United States.
Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, and detention of Muslims without trial
in secret prisons, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany. He quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said, “show me
just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” In
addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as Islamic “holy war,” and said, “violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to
reason.” He also called for dialogue between cultures and religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims found the Pope’s speech “regrettable,” it also caused a spark of angry
protests against the Pope’s “ill informed and bigoted” comments, and voices raised to demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new
crusade, for Christian civilization to conquer terrible and savage Islam. When Benedict apologized, organizations and parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the
Pope and the Vatican (Lee 2006). Yet, when the Pope apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said, “I’m deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries
to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims” (Reuters 2006). In other words, he is sorry that
Muslims are intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Pope’s apology came as an effort to show justification for his speech—he was not apologizing for
being insulting, but rather saying that he was sorry that “Muslim” violence had proved his point.
Through orientalist and the white racial frame, those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion
themselves become agents of racist legitimization. Like Huntington, Bernard Lewis was looking for Armageddon in his Wall Street Journal
article warning that August 22, 2006, was the 27th day of the month of Rajab in the Islamic calendar and is considered a holy day, when Muhammad was taken to heaven and
returned. For Muslims this day is a day of rejoicing and celebration. But for Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the
apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world” (Lewis 2006). He cautions that “it is far from certain that [the President of Iran] Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such
cataclysmic events for August 22, but it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.” Lewis argues that Muslims, unlike others, seek self-destruction in order to reach heaven
faster. For Lewis, Muslims in this mindset don’t see the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a constraint but rather as “an inducement” (Lewis 2006). In 1993, Huntington
Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views Islam

pleaded that “in a world of different civilizations, each . . . will have to learn to coexist with the others” (Huntington 1993:49).
as the apocalyptic destroyer of civilization and claims that reactions against orientalist, racist visions such as his actually prove the validity of his
position. Lewis’s assertions run parallel with George Bush’s claims. In response to the alleged plot to blow up British airliners, Bush claimed, “This nation is
at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt
our nation” (TurkishPress.com. 2006; Beck 2006). Bush argued that “the fight against terrorism is the ideological struggle of the 21st century” and he compared it to the
20th century’s fight against fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though “Islamo-fascist” has for some time been a buzzword for Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean
Hannity on the talk-show circuit, for the president of the United States it drew reactions worldwide. M uslim Americans found this phrase
“contributing to the rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim community” (Raum 2006). Considering that since 2001, Bush
has had a tendency to equate “war on terrorism” with “crusade,” this new rhetoric equates ideology with religion and reinforces the worldview of a war of civilizations. As Bush
said, “ . . .we still aren’t completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in” (CNN 2006).
Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion in the imagination, and racialized exclusion has
an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the excluded. Annihilation , in this sense, is not only designed to
maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is institutionalized with the vocabulary of
self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never complete, genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary
racial ideology, and such is the logic of the outcome of the exclusionary process, that it can conclude
only in ultimate domination. War and genocide take place with compliant efficiency to serve the global
racist ideology with dizzying frequency. The 21st century opened up with genocide, in Darfur.
Link – Lone Wolf
The perception of lone wolf attacks is used solely to justify the surveillance
state
Lennard 2014 [Natasha Lennard, 10-27-2014, "'Lone Wolf' Terrorist Acts Will Be Used to
Justify the Surveillance State," VICE News, https://news.vice.com/article/lone-wolf-terrorist-
acts-will-be-used-to-justify-the-surveillance-state jf]
California Senator Dianne Feinstein, speaking on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, suggested that "the Internet, as well as certain
specific Muslim extremists, are really firing up this lone-wolf phenomenon." Whether intentionally or not, the Senate Intelligence
Committee chair performed a lot of political work with that one comment. Crystallizing "lone wolves" as a key
threat domestically helps legitimize the US's current military operation against the Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria. With or without established connections, the Islamic State's far-reaching tentacles of online
influence encouraging individuals worldwide cement the group as a threat to the homeland — which is always useful for
politicians struggling to legally justify another protracted war. In this way, attributing attacks
to homegrown "lone wolves" is more useful for current US political interests than attributing
them to madness alone.
The assumption that terror acts were always borne of connected networks problematically
buoyed domestic counter-terror efforts that saw entire communities profiled as potential
threats.
Which is not to say that "lone wolf terrorist" is a flawed designation for attacks by ideologically motivated individuals. In many ways
it seems apt, and any challenge is welcome to the all too basic distinction that imbues group terror with motive while dismissing
individual acts as madness. The "lone wolf" straddles the ill-conceived gap between madman and
terrorist node. It's an intersection all too complicated for the inexpert punditry of Fox News: "They are terrorist acts, to be
sure," Megyn Kelly said about Canadian gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, adding "but this guy was also a nutcase."
Furthermore, the assumption that terror acts were always borne of connected networks problematically buoyed domestic counter-
terror efforts that saw entire communities profiled as potential threats. Under
the premise that terror networks
ran like arteries through US Muslim communities enabled an era of profile-driven preemptive
policing that has been nothing short of racist. Entire mosques in New York were designated terrorist organizations to enable
police surveillance. The NSA's meta-data collections claim justifiability on the premise that terror was locatable by tracing networks
of communication.
The "lone wolf" phenomenon should at least prompt the questioning of the sort of profile-based
counter-terror efforts that assumed terror lurked in any network of Muslims, and that the
mass hoarding of communications data was vital to national security. However, the rhetoric
surrounding this type of domestic threat already bodes ill for civil liberties. If the hunt for
terrorist networks has been plagued by ethnic profiling and overreaching spycraft, an
established threat of "lone wolf" attacks gives a defensive imprimatur for unbounded NSA-
style surveillance — anyone can wield a hatchet with ideological ire.
As Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Michael McCaul said on This Week, finding such lone actors in advance of
attacks is like "finding a needle in a haystack." And as Feinstein said the same day, "You have to be able to watch it, and you have to
be able to disrupt them."
As such, theera of the "lone wolf" terrorist does not only spell the end of the bunk distinction
between motivated group and deranged individual. It ushers in the dawn of a new era of
justification for our totalized state of surveillance and national security paranoia.
Link – Neoliberalism
The war on terror and fear of Islam are rhetorical strategies to preclude critique
of neoliberalism – their representations shut down movements while ensuring
error replication
Fasenfest 11
(David Fasenfest, American sociologist and an Associate Professor at Wayne State University,
“Terrorism, Neo-Liberalism and Political Rhetoric,” Critical Sociology 37 (4) 2011)
The second observation is over the ambivalence shown by Western governments and political parties in the USA. Democracy is
good, the mantra goes, but we also desire stability and so we are concerned about succession
and chaos that may accompany the deposition of Mubarak in Egypt. Conservatives, long the champions of
‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ around the world (but perhaps not in Florida!), find themselves critical of
Obama’s stance calling for change and respect for the wishes of ‘the people’ of Egypt. Even these
calls for change by the Administration are tempered by concerns over the transition. After all, Mubarak was a valued
ally (translate: a willing instrument of our foreign policy) and Egypt a recipient of our foreign aid (translate: we fund their military)
– they should not be abandoned so quickly. Other absolute rulers in the region are watching us to see how we respond to this
‘democratic’ threat. Similar themes emerge: what is this movement for change and who will assume the mantle of leadership. After
all, we cannot just legitimize the aspirations of the dispossessed and the claims against tyrants we have put into place and propped
up for many years, even decades – that would describe so many countries around the world and potentially herald a Jacobin
moment in each.We only wish to demonize and overthrow our enemies, not our allies. How best
to do that if not to invoke images of Taliban-like governments in waiting eager to seize control, thereby worrying
about the rising role of what we call Islamists in the region. Images of another Iran are offered us to caution for calm
and patience regarding Egypt. Nationalist forces and national liberation movements during the period from the end of World War II
through the Vietnam War era and beyond were either supported by the USA if that movement called for deposing a government
unfriendly to US interests – for example, funding the Contra war against Sandinista Nicaragua, or were vilified as ‘communist’ or
worse if they opposed dictators friendly towards the USA – fostering rebellion in the Congo and the overthrow and assassination of
Lumumba, and the overthrow of Mosaddeq in Iran followed by the installation of Mohammad Reza Shah come to mind (see
Berberoglu, 2000 on the politics of national liberation struggles).¶ The case of the successful coup in Iran in 1953, which served as a
blueprint for a successful coup in Guatemala in 1954 and the failed Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba in 1961, is instructive in the
current situation for two reasons. First, the harsh rule of the USA-supported Shah left an animosity among the Iranian people that
culminated in an Islamic revolution in 1979 steeped in the hatred of the USA. So long as we were pre-occupied by our Cold War
against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, and so long as Iran was kept in check by our ally Saddam Hussein in Iraq,
that country was not a primary concern of the USA. Second, our memory of the Iranian situation and hostage taking after the
overthrow of the Shah informs our political response and assessment of any post-Mubarak Egypt. Our government fails to see how
this popular anti- American rhetoric is born out of an association with a hated regime propped up by American guns and money. The
image of a group like the Moslem Brotherhood taking part in discussions of a post-Mubarak Egypt and visions of the Ayatollah led
revolution in Iran and the unenlightened rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan (Langman, 2005) fuel our fears.¶ Since the events of
9/11 the West in general and the USA in particular have used the specter of Islam as our
excuse and justification for our foreign (and domestic) policies. That cataclysmic event vaulted
a neo-conservative world view front and center, which lead to a willingness to use military power unilaterally
and without regard to international norms in order to rectify and restore American and European interests as the US Government
has defined them. Our official understanding of anti-western terrorism is that it is a direct result of Islam’s rejection of western
liberalism and a rejection of the freedom and conspicuous consumption of non-Islamic nations. By
framing the response
as a ‘war on terrorism’ the US Government obscures the anti-communal nature of its position.
By anti-communal, I mean that neo-liberalism rejects the rights of those who embody
difference even as it purports to defend a system of democracy rooted in difference. Clearly, there
is no uniform definition of Arab (David, 2007) but it is clear that there has been an attempt to both create a
singular Muslim identity and then strip it of its symbols (Byng, 2010) in the creation and
embodiment of this external threat. Only by raising the specter of an Islamic regime, with all its implied hostility to
the West, can our current political leaders rationalize a measured and hesitant response to the opposition movement in Egypt, and
in so doing urge that the transition from Mubarak does not leave a power vacuum.¶ Once again we fail to recognize or choose to
ignore the fact that legitimate grievances against despotic regimes will lead, in turn, to legitimate grievances against states and
governments that support and maintain those regimes in power. The anger of the Iranian people amid the memory of US
involvement in installing and supporting the Shah is ignored, and in its place we identify the Islamic nature of the revolution as the
We now seem to ignore the poverty and repression
root cause of the animosity against this country.
sustained by US aid for a leader whose main value was to be a powerful instrument of our
foreign policy and a proxy in an important region (not to mention a willing partner through rendition and the application of
torture illegal in the USA). The signals are clear. The overthrow of the government in Tunisia, the
responses to popular protest in Jordan and Yemen, and current events in Egypt all point to a
growing willingness by citizens to challenge the existing order that ensures widespread
poverty, aggregates wealth and power among a very few, and in this way to resist the forces of social control in demonstrating
and demanding real change. By labeling this opposition as ‘Islamist’ and demonizing its goals western
governments can ignore legitimate claims and dismiss popular protest .¶ And so we return to the
situation in the USA. We face persistent unemployment that promises to be devastating for a generation of workers too old to
retrain and too young to partake of years of retirement – especially as the conservatives in Congress mean to strip bear the
underpinning of the social supports making that retirement possible. On some level the willingness and eagerness of
these same conservative forces to advocate for the continuation of the Mubarak regime
reveals the true nature of their domestic social political agenda. There are no appeals to
poverty alleviation, no sense that there is a social responsibility of society to all citizens, and no
compassion for those dealt a harsh blow by the policies of its government and the working of its economy. This is true in
their response to events in Egypt, and apparently true as these politicians contemplate
policies and budget cuts to social spending in the USA.
Impacts
Democracy
Security depoliticizes issues – preventing democratic debate and deliberation
Jayasuriya 1 (Senior Research Fellow, Southeast Asia Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong)
(Kanishka, 9/11 and the New 'Anti-politics' of 'Security', Social Science Research Council,
http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/jayasuriya.htm)
The dramatic events of September 11, 2001 have ramifications for the nature of global governance
as well as the institutions of liberal democracy. The most serious danger these events pose is their
potential to usher in, under the appealing cloak of 'security', a debilitating a form of
'anti politics' that marginalises the constructive conflicts- the debate and discussion -
that animate the public sphere in liberal polities. Some of these effects are already apparent in the US, where self-
censorship in the media has made discussion of the politics of terrorism all but impossible. Perhaps more seriously, the language of security serves to frame facets of
transnational governance in terms of 'risk', thereby occluding important issues of conflict and power. Take, for example, the pressure on the Canadian government by
the United States to impose 'perimeter continental security', with the objective of establishing common entry and exit policies for visitors, immigrants, and refugees.
Posing the movement of people as primarily a security risk submerges the significant questions of power and distribution raised by the proposed policy of continental
integration, and constrains serious discussion of the proposal. It could well be argued that these developments presage the emergence of a new security state. Indeed,
an analogy for the present crisis can be found in the anti-Communist and cold war rhetoric that dominated US domestic and international politics in the decades after
1945. The obvious parallels are to be found in the increasing importance attached to issues of 'security' in both domestic and international politics. The decisive shift in
the political climate initiated by Truman, and consolidated by Eisenhower, lay not in the increasing salience of security to public policy and political language, but in how
the US state apparatus came to be dominated by cold war imperatives. The pursuit of these imperatives was often at the expense of broader civil liberties, as
exemplified by the infectious spread of McCarthyism. Like the cold war, the present crisis has also exposed the precarious position of civil liberty as this 'new war'
gathers steam. The US Attorney General has proposed far reaching changes - including the preventive detention of immigrants on suspicion of terrorism - which would
severely curtail civil liberties. Further, the US President has signed an order for special military tribunals to try those charged with terrorism. These tribunals have lower
standards of proof and admissibility of evidence than ordinary judicial processes. Yet other actions such as increasing surveillance and wire-tapping powers pose serious
problems for those concerned with basic rights. Similarly the British Home Secretary has proposed tough anti-terrorist legislation that includes extending the already
substantial powers to detain suspected terrorists, and the extensive use of surveillance powers. In Australia, the ruling Liberal and National Coalition, with the support
of the opposition Labor Party, has enacted draconian laws on border security that effectively curtail judicial review for asylum seekers and give wide discretionary
powers to Ministers. In surprisingly short order, a broad set of emergency powers based on the concept of 'exceptions' has emerged to offer political leaders and other
public officials a legislative framework for acting outside normal constitutional and representative institutions. Carl Schmitt, the deeply conservative jurist who was a
critic of the Weimar Republic, is perhaps the most pre-eminent theorist of the exception: 'exception' is the capacity of the sovereign to make decisions in terms of its
political will rather than be constrained by normative 'law'. Schmitt suggests the exception as something that is '… codified in the existing legal order, can at best be
characterised as a state of peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to preformed law'
(1985: 6). In this context, the emergence of certain aspects of a 'state of exception' (to use a phrase of the outstanding Weimar jurist Franz Neumann) should be a cause
for concern for those interested in the protection of fundamental political rights. One of Neumann's (1986) central arguments is that the development of capitalism
leads to the development of non-formal instruments of law. The last century has seen a gradual acceleration of legal fragmentation and dissolution. Legal
deformalization Neumann argued is rooted in a fundamental transformation of capitalist economies over the greater part of the twentieth century. It could be argued
that the new language of security reflects the fact that globalisation has changed the internal architecture of the state and this is markedly apparent in the increasing
emphasis placed on aspects of 'risk' and 'security' across social life. It leads both at the international and domestic level to the kind of legal deformalisation so astutely
analyzed by Neumann. This process has been accelerated by the events of September 11. At this point the analogy with the cold war 'national security state' is
misleading because it obscures how globalisation has transformed the very notion of security in recent years, so that it is increasingly understood in terms broader than
merely as a matter of 'guns and bombs'. The language of security now permeates every sphere of life - ranging from finance to the environment. International relations
boffins like to talk about 'securitisation' to describe this expansive notion of security. For example, one of the most striking elements of the policy response to this crisis
is that many ethnic and minority groups are now deemed to pose a threat to national security. Many cold war warriors in the United States have given extraordinarily
generous airplay to Sam Huntington's thesis of a clash of civilisation. Unlike during the cold war, these threats to national security are framed in terms of 'ethnicity'
rather than 'ideology', but the outcome poses the same challenge to basic rights. Further, this shift towards a 'security state' is not confined to the US and Britain, but is
evident in a number of European countries as well as Australia where members of the ruling Coalition government have implied that Afghan refugees and Muslim
immigrants were 'terrorists'. But this language of security is not just confined to mainstream security agencies. It has also become an intrinsic rationale of the program
of development agencies like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). For these international agencies and many other non-governmental organisations, the
vacuous notion of 'human security' now includes such areas as poverty and the environment; it is the transnational analogue of 'community policing'. This new
perspective embodies the more expansive understanding of security employed by establishment security agencies. The expansive definition of security - whether used
by the UNDP or the Pentagon - has disturbing consequences. Security in this conception takes over the idea of risk management from penology and other related
disciplines. Indeed, this is what is most striking about the new security debate: the extension of the US 'law and order state' to the transnational arena. In this respect,
one of the most interesting and worrying developments is likely to be the internationalisation of the 'state of exception'. New forms of risk management apply risk
profiles to a set of relationships, institutions, and even geographic sites, rather than endeavouring to manage or transform the behaviour of individuals. This emphasis
on the management of risk at the level of population rather than individuals is critical. It is reflected in the high priority given to issues of border control and the use of
identity documents. This approach to risk control and management strips away the social and legal context of individual behaviour as governments and other
organisations seek to manage the 'sites' of criminal activity such as terrorism, international drug trafficking, or the current panic over so-called 'people smuggling'.
The effect is depoliticisation of complex problems and issues, as transnational

problems are disembedded from the politics of power and interests and situated
within the anti-political framework of security and risk . Within the framework of the
new security language - whether it is the 'hard' security of Bush's National Security Council or
the 'soft' security of some international development agencies - the conflict and debate that
are raw material of politics get submerged in the search for policies of risk
management. This 'politics of anti-politics' is deeply inimical to the institutions and
values that sustain and animate politics in liberal democracies.
Fear
Security fears create debilitating fear
Masco 6 (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago)
(Joseph, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, pg. 229)
A core project for many activists is thus to register the psychosocial and cultural
effects of the bomb on their lives, replacing a discourse of national security with a
quotidian experience of nuclear terror. One laboratory critic, for example, declared herself to be the
“potential mother of a mutant child. n She narrated to DOE officials what it was like to be six months pregnant living beside a
nuclear facility and worrying if her unborn fetus was mutating inside her. Imagining a future life caring for a deformed child,
she decried the DOE for allowing “nuclear projects,” “toxic dumps,” and “bomb tests” to be performed in northern New
Mexico, concluding that “maybe a country who planned to bomb and destroy whole countries deserves to bear monsters, a
karma fitting to so monstrous a mentality. Maybe I deserve to have a mutant because once I was so casually uncaring about
what these bombs were made for.” As her womb is made foreign and dangerous to her, she is colonized by the
psychosocial consequences of the nuclear security state. This activist articulates the
proliferating anxiety felt by some in Santa Fe at the end of the Cold War, as news of environmental damage around
the nuclear complex changed not only how they viewed Los Alamos but also their own lived spaces. The inability
here to escape nuclear terror-in either the form of radioactive contamination or
nuclear war---destabilizes a self that can no longer locate the boundaries between
body and bomb. When pursued through a discourse of citizenship this process also
illustrates one of the core effects of radioactive nation-building, a toxic public
sphere where official statements are by definition suspect and discounted as
conspiracy.
Neoliberalism à Inequality & Oppression
Security discourse reproduces neoliberalism – its cover for consolidating access
to resources in periphery countries – reproduces inequality and oppression
Girdner 5
[Eddie J. Girdner PhD in PoliSci from University of California, taught PoliSci for 25+ years in
Cyprus, Turkey, Mississippi, and Alabama] [THE GREATER MİDDLE EAST INITIATIVE: REGİME
CHANGE, NEOLIBERALISM AND US GLOBAL HEGEMONY*] (http://tinyurl.com/qcj46n7)
(accessed 7-16-15) //MC
Consequently, under this rubric, the

US carried out the cold war, conducted counterinsurgency against
potential social democratic governments , supported authoritarian governments in Latin American
and elsewhere, or supported more democratic states as well, depending upon whether this was deemed to
serve its interests. National interests were calculated primarily in terms of the needs and
benefits to the corporate class in the pursuit of global capitalist accumulation.3
Within this framework, the US approach to the Middle East was relatively simple and straight forward, having been essentially
settled at the end of the Second World War. Democracy was not considered to be on the charts , under the
rubric of Middle Eastern exceptionalism, and the Unites States would support the autocratic and
dictatorial regimes which were in place as long as the oil flowed through the US corporate
structure. The US would be the regional hegemon with ostensibly independent states. This arrangement was referred to as the
"Arab façade." The US would sponsor local "cops on the beat," Israel and Turkey, to help keep
order in the region. This was part of the deal which was struck at the end of World War II. "Security" referred to the
preservation of the system of capitalist accumulation in the interests of the ruling classes of the
US. This "security" arrangement would be enforced by regional arrangements with Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and so on. This often
precluded democracy, as with the overthro w of Mohamad Mossadegh in Iran , and put the US
at odds with more democratic states, such as India.
Consequently, while lip service was often paid to "democratization," in actual practice, democratic
regimes were
supported only in cases in which it was clear that it would protect capital and serve the US
corporate class. In practice, US foreign policy was generally one of "deterring democracy," in which scores
of regimes were overthrown by the CIA, which held the promise of the emergence of local democratic autonomy,
which was deemed to militate against the needs of the US corporate ruling class .4
The history of US foreign policy since World War II has been fairly consistent and significant shifts in
the policy of support for authoritarian regimes , such as in Latin America in the 1970s, have been consistent
with the bottom line of a rational calculus about what served the domestic ruling class, rather
than any abstract ideals about freedom and democracy . There is no reason why one should
expect any radical shift in this historical approach in the near future trajectory of US foreign policy.
Prior to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, and following the destruction of the Twin Towers in New Yor, some of
the neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration declared that the US policy of appeasement of authoritarian regimes in the Middle
East had failed and that the US must move quickly to remove these regimes and establish democracy across the region.5 Regime
change emerged as a new buzz word.
Nevertheless, the Iraq war was not launched upon the rationale of establishment of democracy, but rather upon the rationale that
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had established links with al-Qaeda. When the Iraq War
began to go badly and encounter stiff resistance from indigenous forces, in the fail of 2003, it became clear that the US was in for a
long hard slog. The Bush Administration fell back upon the position of presenting "democratization" as the center plank in the "War
on Terrorism." George W. Bush made his famous November 6, 2003 speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is located, announcing a US "forward strategy of freedom." Bush called for $40 million for
the NED budget to be targeted for the Middle East alone.6
The idea of Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI), developed by the US State Department was to be another tool of
imperialist control which could be used to secure the resources, labor and markets of the region to
beef up US global hegemony and secure corporate profıts in the region , while theoretically, ending any
incentives for terrorism. It is not clear if the neo-conservative ideologues took this argument seriously, but the rational of
"democratization" went forward under the same rubric as the invasion of Iraq , that of the "War
on Terrorism." In fact, as will be argued below, both enterprises were of a piece with pushing forward
the logic of serving the US ruling class in consolidation the global rule of neoliberalism and
increasing global power and corporate profıts. Under sleight of hand, the same mechanisms developed and used
in Latin American would be brought in, opening the channels and floodgates for a massive flow of new CIA money into the region on
behalf of US capital.
Value to Life
Security destroys the value to life
Der Derian 93
(James, “The value of security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard,” in The Political Subject of
Violence, pp. 102-105)
The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference that which is not us, not certain,
not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike
the positive will to power which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a
truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science
Nietzsche asks of the reader: Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover
everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us
to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?"
The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life , in
which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against
contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true reasonable. In
short, the security imperative produces and is sustained by the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche
elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols: A safe life requires safe truths. The strange
and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility - recycling
the desire for security. The 'influence of timidity,' as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to
subordinate affirmative values to the 'necessities' of security: 'they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a
straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences'." The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show the perilous
conditions which created the security imperative - and the western metaphysics which perpetuate it - have diminished if not
disappeared; yet the fear of life persists: 'Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a good conscience: and yet it
continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation."
Nietzsche's worry is that the collective reaction against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger: the
tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which controls through conformity and rules through
passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty,
paradox - all that makes life worthwhile. Nietzsche's lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a
series of rhetorical questions:
War
Security politics makes escalation of war inevitable
Burke 7 (Prof on Int’l Relations, University of New South Wales)
(Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Theory and Event, 10:2, MUSE)
This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the
emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply
because the world is conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and
enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable
threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted
of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility
from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of
the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an
instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal
chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from
the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort
to military violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the
alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by
portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable
or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the
Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action.
This relation to the world creates war and violence as a natural and mechanistic
part of all life
Burke 7 (Prof on Int’l Relations, University of New South Wales)
(Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Theory and Event, 10:2, MUSE)
By itself, such an account of the nationalist ontology of war and security provides
only a general insight into the perseverance of military violence as a core element
of politics. It does not explain why so many policymakers think military violence works. As I argued
earlier, such an ontology is married to a more rationalistic form of strategic thought
that claims to link violent means to political ends predictably and controllably, and
which, by doing so, combines military action and national purposes into a common -- and thoroughly
modern -- horizon of certainty. Given Hegel's desire to decisively distil and control the dynamic
potentials of modernity in thought, it is helpful to focus on the modernity of this ontology
-- one that is modern in its adherence to modern scientific models of truth, reality
and technological progress, and in its insistence on imposing images of scientific
truth from the physical sciences (such as mathematics and physics) onto human
behaviour, politics and society. For example, the military theorist and historian Martin van
Creveld has argued that one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that his 'ideas seemed
to have chimed in with the rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook associated with the
industrial revolution'.54 Set into this epistemological matrix, modern politics and
government engages in a sweeping project of mastery and control in which all of
the world's resources -- mineral, animal, physical, human -- are made part of a
machinic process of which war and violence are viewed as normal features .
War/Structural Violence
Their mode of security politics makes both escalation and global structural
violence inevitable
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, ‘7 [Beyond
Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 231-2]
Yet the first act in America's 'forward strategy of freedom' was to invade and attempt to
subjugate Iraq, suggesting that, if 'peace' is its object, its means is war: the engine of
history is violence, on an enormous and tragic scale, and violence is ultimately its only meaning.
This we can glimpse in 'Toward a Pacific Union', a deeply disingenuous chapter of Fukuyama's
The End of History and the Last Man. This text divides the earth between a 'post-historical'
world of affluent developed democracies where 'the old rules of power-politics have decreasing
relevance', and a world still 'stuck in history' and 'riven with a variety of religious, national and
ideological conflicts'. The two worlds will maintain 'parallel but separate existences' and
interact only along axes of threat, disturbance and crucial strategic interest: oil, immigration,
terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Because 'the relationship
between democracies and nondemocracies will still be characterised by mutual distrust and
fear', writes Fukuyama, the 'post-historical half must still make use of realist methods when
dealing with the part still in history ... force will still be the ultima ratio in their relations'. For
all the book's Kantian pretensions, Fukuyama naturalises war and coercion as the
dominant mode of dealing with billions of people defined only through their lack of
'development' and 'freedom'. Furthermore, in his advocacy of the 'traditional moralism of
American foreign policy' and his dismissal of the United Nations in favour of a NATO-style
'league of truly free states ... capable of much more forceful action to protect its collective
security against threats arising from the non-democratic part of the world' we can see an early
premonition of the historicist unilateralism of the Bush administration. 72 In this light, we can
see the invasion of Iraq as continuing a long process of 'world-historical' violence
that stretches back to Columbus' discovery of the Americas, and the subsequent politics
of genocide, warfare and dispossession through which the modem United States
was created and then expanded - initially with the colonisation of the Philippines and
coercive trade relationships with China and Japan, and eventually to the self-declared role
Luce had argued so forcefully for: guarantor of global economic and strategic order
after 1945. This role involved the hideous destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia,
'interventions' in Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua and Afghanistan (or an
ever more destructive 'strategic' involvement in the Persian Gulf that saw the United States
first building up Iraq as a formidable regional military power, and then punishing its people
with a 14-year sanctions regime that caused the deaths of at least 200,000 people), all of which
we are meant to accept as proof of America's benign intentions , of America putting its 'power
at the service of principle'. They are merely history working itself out, the 'design of
nature' writing its bliss on the world.73 The bliss 'freedom' offers us, however, is the
bliss of the graveyard, stretching endlessly into a world marked not by
historical perfection or democratic peace, but by the eternal recurrence of
tragedy, as ends endlessly disappear in the means of permanent war and
permanent terror. This is how we must understand both the prolonged trauma visited on
the people of Iraq since 1990, and the inflammatory impact the US invasion will have on the
new phenomenon of global antiWestern terrorism. American exceptionalism has deluded US
policymakers into believing that they are the only actors who write history, who know where it
is heading, and how it will play out, and that in its service it is they (and no-one else) who
assume an unlimited freedom to act. As a senior adviser to Bush told a journalist in 2002:
'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality . . We're history's actors."

Crisis Rhetoric Relies on Unquestioned Assumptions

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K – Security

Joe Fenner//Teddy Hill-Weld

we observe how academic and nonacademic

All seek to demonstrate deviations from the proper

instead of financial crisis due to irrational speculation,

missed forecasting, or systemic failure and underlying contradictions,

critique and crisis are

Such vocabulary insinuates a reality governed by the

there are no examples of cyber attacks that resulted in actual

Cyber war remains unlikely

the world’s big powers have an overall strategic interest in

uncertain benefits to be gained from cyber war activities .

cyber war should not receive too much attention at the

Europe is not the US

The limits of analogies

possibilities for countermeasures.

hacker tools are not really like physical weapons.

would be rendered useless.

Cybersecurity is an important policy issue, but the alarmist

Neocleous addressed police as a form

The sociologist Lee Clarke noted how institutions

A risk technique, once rationalized and used

systematically by actors, can also be understood as a style of reasoning regarding the

risk outlines a problematic situation like a surprise, a crisis, or a

my concern with habits is in continuous

all such habitual phenomena, as I claim and

Infrastructural development to avert catastrophe is a key securitizing move – it

The securitization of critical infrastructure is pre-eminently about the protection of objects .

US economic liberalism damages other countries sense of security – causes a

two authorized responses to otherness.60

This is also a narrative about race. The

The word homeland has many connotations." It

Overall, then, the diabolical incantations of presidential

Moreover, no US administration has really been committed to genuinely democratic principles of

Advocates of democracy should see something wrong with the idea of a

Democratic peace theory contructs enemies that provoke conflict

Democratic peace theory necessarily constructs non-democratic nations as

Pursuing security through democracy causes militarization and prompts new

Democracy creates fear of authoritarianism sparking conflict

Pinker’s “Long Peace” and “New Peace” and their alleged

American foreign policy exhibited how

Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views Islam

flawed, myopic, and blinkered.

burdened with minding others' businesses.

the exercise of sovereign power tends to subsume the secular principle of

and the United States in particular, is ontologically incapable of particular kinds

nationalized through this heady cocktail of religious freedom and American

American foreign policy exhibited how

Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views Islam

The effect is depoliticisation of complex problems and issues, as transnational

Consequently, under this rubric, the

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