Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Foucault Development Kritik - UTNIF 2013
Foucault Development Kritik - UTNIF 2013
Foucault-Development K............................................................................................................................1
1NCs........................................................................................................................................................2
1NC.....................................................................................................................................................3
1NC Link Policy...............................................................................................................................8
1NC Link Labor (Survivors)...........................................................................................................11
1NC Link Cuban Embargo (TRI)...................................................................................................14
1NC Link Cuba Terror....................................................................................................................15
1NC Link Aid (Sophs)....................................................................................................................16
Thesis....................................................................................................................................................18
Thesis Development.......................................................................................................................19
Links Mechanisms..............................................................................................................................20
Link Economic Engagement...........................................................................................................21
Link Economic Liberalization/Free Markets..................................................................................22
Link Cuba Sugar..........................................................................................................................23
Link Cuba Embargo........................................................................................................................24
Link Mexico Economic Liberalization........................................................................................25
Link Aid..........................................................................................................................................26
Link Aid State..............................................................................................................................31
Link Border Infrastructure..............................................................................................................33
Link Border Infrastucture- AT: Not Security...................................................................................35
Link Energy....................................................................................................................................36
Link Labor Unions..........................................................................................................................37
Link Labor Unions NAALC/Solidarity........................................................................................39
Link Microfinance..........................................................................................................................40
Link Privatization...........................................................................................................................42
Link Small Farms...........................................................................................................................43
Links Advantages...............................................................................................................................44
Link China......................................................................................................................................45
Link Competitiveness.....................................................................................................................46
Link Crime......................................................................................................................................47
Link Democracy.............................................................................................................................48
Link Economics..............................................................................................................................49
Link Failed States...........................................................................................................................53
Link Free Trade..............................................................................................................................56
Link Human Rights.........................................................................................................................57
Link Humanitarianism/Poverty.......................................................................................................59
Link ICT.........................................................................................................................................60
Link International Law...................................................................................................................61
Link Iran.........................................................................................................................................62
Link Liberal Internationalism.........................................................................................................63
Link Oil..........................................................................................................................................64
Link Population Control.................................................................................................................66
Link Poverty...................................................................................................................................68
Link Right to Development............................................................................................................71
Link Technology.............................................................................................................................73
Link Terrorism................................................................................................................................75
Link War on Drugs.........................................................................................................................76
Links - Other.........................................................................................................................................78
Link Public Deliberation.................................................................................................................79
Link Security..................................................................................................................................80
Link Third World Suffering............................................................................................................81
Link Western Feminism..................................................................................................................83
Link Western Philosophy................................................................................................................84
Impacts..................................................................................................................................................86
Impact Colonial Violence...............................................................................................................87
Impact Ethics/AT: Util & Extinction...............................................................................................89
Impact State Racism.......................................................................................................................90
Impact Global Fascism...................................................................................................................92
Impact Famines...............................................................................................................................94
Impact Turns Case..........................................................................................................................95
Alt..........................................................................................................................................................97
Alt Border Thinking........................................................................................................................98
Alt Intellectual Solidarity..............................................................................................................100
Alt Latin America.........................................................................................................................102
Alt Uniqueness.............................................................................................................................103
Alt Solvency Aid Affs................................................................................................................104
Alt Solvency Peasants Movements............................................................................................106
Alt Buen Vivir...............................................................................................................................108
Answers to Answers............................................................................................................................109
AT: Perm..........................................................................................................................................110
AT: Framework................................................................................................................................112
AT: State Good/Key.........................................................................................................................114
AT: Reps Focus Bad.........................................................................................................................116
AT: Biopolitics Not Bad...................................................................................................................118
AT: Development Inevitable............................................................................................................120
AT: Underdevelopment Real............................................................................................................121
AT: Our Impacts Are True................................................................................................................122
AT: Cap First....................................................................................................................................123
AT: Alt = Degrowth/Anti-Modern....................................................................................................124
Aff.......................................................................................................................................................126
AFF Development Good...............................................................................................................127
AFF Rejection Fails......................................................................................................................129
AFF Alt Fails No Blueprint........................................................................................................130
AFF Alt Fails Local Bad............................................................................................................131
AFF Labor Aff Cap First............................................................................................................132
AFF AT: Biopolitics Impact..........................................................................................................133
AFF Cuba AT: Biopolitics..........................................................................................................135
AFF AT: Aid K..............................................................................................................................136
AFF AT: Aid K State Link.........................................................................................................138
AFF Nuclear War Outweighs........................................................................................................139
AFF AT: Modernity Bad...............................................................................................................140
AFF Hegemony/Imperialism Good...............................................................................................141
AFF AT: Epistemology.................................................................................................................142
AFF Foucault IR Fails..................................................................................................................144
1NCs
1NC
Thesis: Power, control, and subjugation are not simply exercised through prohibition and
negativity but through the positive production of docile and normalized subjects. The
affirmatives economic olive branch is a ruse for the discursive production of backwards
populations to be developed under the tutelage of US imperial hegemony, a move
destined for failure.
DuBois 91 (Marc, The Governance of the Third World: A Foucauldian Perspective on Power Relations in Development, Alternatives: Global, Local,
Political, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter 1991, [CL])
Foucault's definition of power is one of his most controversial concepts , and perhaps his most difficult to grasp as well.
There is a clash between his notion and accepted notions of power , the latter having in common a certain sensibility: power that
can be seen and felt, examined and seized. In contrast, Foucauldian power appears somewhat esoteric . In spite of greatly different
theoretical approaches, power has always been presented as a negative or repressive force. Foucault's analyses of various historical
phenomena (e.g., psychiatric treatment or penal technology) led him to believe that "the mechanisms that were brought into
operation in these power formations were some~ thing quite other , or in any case something much more, than
repression." The essence of Foucault's challenge , then, is to remove the blind spots created by a
unidimensional notion of power-a task sorely called for in the social sciences . Redefining Power As Foucault understands
it, power-repression in Western society is a sort of anachronism. vestiges of a form of power that used to characterize the societies of the West but, over the past two
hundred years or so, has gradually ceded to more evolved mechanisms of power. Foucault
state is an inappropriate
target of "revolutionary" movements, insofar as it is an effect of and boundary to power relations, not
their source. No matter how powerful the state might seem, it is "far from being able to occupy the whole field of power relations [and] can only operate on the
basis of other, already existing power relations." With statements such as these, Foucault inverts the tenets of many emancipatory strategies. For instance, rather than
considering the power relations within the family to be "a simple reflection or extension of' the power of the State," Foucault avers that "for the State to function in the
way that it does, there must be, between male and female or adult and child, quite specific relations of domination which have their own configuration and relative
autonomy.'5 Foucault
might be an anathema to the revolution, but he is the patron saint of local resistance .
"techniques and procedures" of the exclusion of the
mad, rather than that exclusion itself, were of benefit to the bourgeoisie. The same reasoning is relevant to
Foucault supports his argument with the example of madness." He shows that the
deductions pertaining to the status of development Given the dominant position of the First World vis-avis the Third World, given that the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy creates an opening for
legitimized intervention, and given that many of the grand schemes for national development that have
passed through this aperture at the recommendation of First World experts (e.g., "cash crops" or "white
elephant" industrialization projects) have often benefited First World nations while weakening Third
World economies and have led to enormous debt burdens, one could, in a top-down analysis, deduce that
these development programs were foisted on the Third World with the expressed intent of fortifying
First World hegemony. So it is relatively facile to demonstrate that much of development activity is neocolonialist conspiracy. What is more
difficult to address are the genealogical questions-to discover why certain policies and theories
proliferated and how such diverse practices as building dams, providing educational grants, and
introducing high yield grains were colonized by macrostrategies of power . The Union of Power and Knowledge Foucault
pursues his idea that power produces (among other things) knowledge, and actually bonds the two concepts together in a
single entity: "power-knowledge." This destroys the typical understanding of the relationship between the two in which either (1) knowledge provides a tool or
weapon for those in power or (2) a new form of knowledge propels into power new groups or institutions capable of exploiting it. The power-knowledge
dyad is welded together by causality in both directions: power and knowledge "directly imply" one
another. First, the exercising of power opens new relations of power and creates new objects of understanding or rational inquiry. Second, knowledge immediately
"presupposes and constitutes" power relations. Turning to the Third World, it is frightening to consider the prominent role
played by knowledge of the beneficiaries in development projects , as shown below. The acquisition of
knowledge does not merely justify an intrusion of power, it is an intrusion of power . Parallel to the necessary
relationship between power and knowledge there exists a complex reciprocity between power and truth. In producing
knowledge, power produces truth. For Foucault, truth refers not to some superficial statement of the way things are, such as three plus two equals
five or "apples are fruit," but denotes an abstract "system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements."
One example of this sort of truth is the scientific method, which is of paramount importance in
contemporary Western society. At the discursive level, this "episteme" distinguishes not truths from
falsehoods but 'What may from what may not be characterized as scientific." The episteme , in turn, is
connected to the power relations that define and maintain it and to the grid of power that it gives rise to
and legitimizes, forming a "regime" of truth. Knowledge, then, arrives in consciousness following a
filtering: not only must particular statements submit to the regime of truth, but only they , from a
multiplicity of possible statements, are constructed by it. The institutions and community of social scientists are a major culprit in the dissemination of
these truth discourses. When these discourses conform with the regime of truth-when the latter validates or approves the former-then certain discourses or bodies of
knowledge are admitted into the category of "true knowledge." In
those who in the past were candidates for inclusion are now prevented from being so, the
imposition of norms (free-markets, US-style democracy and cultural notions of consumption, and so forth). The former Third
World is, above all, the theatre of a multiplicity of cruel little wars which, rather than being barbaric
throwbacks, are linked to the current global logic. From Colombia and Central America to Algeria, sub-Saharan Africa and the
Middle East these wars take place within states or regions, without threatening empire but fostering conditions favourable to it. For much of
the former Third World (and of course for the Third World within the core) is reserved the World-chaos, free-market
slavery, and selective genocide.23 In some cases this amounts to a sort of paleo-micro-colonialism within regions,24 in others to
balkanisation, in yet others to brutal internal wars and massive displacement to free up entire regions for transnational capital (particularly in the
case of oil, but also diamonds, timber, water, genetic resources, and agricultural lands). Often these cruel little wars are fuelled by mafia
networks, and intended for macroeconomic globalisation. It is clear that this new Global Empire (the New World Order of the
American imperial monarchy)25 articulates
seems to have
become the subject of a social scientific advertising campaign: the world has been offered "new," "another,"
and "alternative" develop- ments featuring much-heralded "new trends," "new strategies," and "new directions." Most
of these strategies, which fall into the overex- tended category of "alternative development," have resulted not in a rejection of the
basic development paradigm but in merely broadening it beyond the parameters of pure economics. A
minority within this broad alternative movement, however, has gone further than the rest-defying the economistic
essentialism of development thinking and, perhaps most importantly, challenging the preeminence of the
development expert. The core of arguments in this vein is that the theoretical models underlying development efforts stray dramatically far from being as
value-free as they are presented. Critical of a development based upon Western experience, this sort of alternative
program emphasizes self-reliance, local participation , endogenous patterns of development, and satisfying basic needs.
These features out- line an interesting approach to development, but their most important contribution lies elsewhere-in the
establishment of opposition to the venerated external aid/ technical transfer approach to problems of
underdevelopment. In other words, this alternative program gives birth to a competing paradigm of policy
formulation, which in tum weakens the authority of the prevailing paradigm. Unfortunately, there is very little force
behind this competing notion so that the apparent "crisis" notwithstanding, development is doing just fine, even flourishing-not the process of development of Third
World societies, of course, but the business of its promotion. The
is therefore more efficacious to attack development from within. In other words, a certain skepticism
must be injected into the elemental layers of development discourse in an effort to weaken the
pervasive and indisputable appeal of development: people must begin to harbor doubts . To accomplish this
debilitation, I propose to alter the accepted con- ceptualization of development by selecting one of the irreducible build- ing blocks of the development paradigm and
then redefining it, thereby altering the structure of the development of which it is a part. To this end, development
development practices and then into the discourses surrounding those practices and the larger process of
development. Finally, the resulting picture-"another" development-will be discussed briefly. Before departing on this path, however, it is necessary to render
more explicit one of the limits of this investigation: no new (substitute) paradigm is being delineated. One must suppress the urge to seek
out allusions to a scientific "proof" or logical "claim" that the conceptualiza- tion of development
arrived at in this paper is somehow more correct or true than the one currently in use. In any case, such an
impossible proposition is not necessary. This paper aims not to inspire the rejection of one
conceptualization of development in favor of a second, but, through the revelation of another
interpretation of development, to corrupt the self-evidence of development in its masquerade as
natural law.
it. Theirs is not, as Patricia Williams writes referring to the law in ways that are equally applicable to economics, an imposition of an orderthe
ironclad imposition of a world view (1991, 28). At issue, Williams continues, is a structure in which a cultural code has been inscribed
(1991, 19; my emphasis). This inscription of the economic onto the cultural took a long time to develop, as the philosopher Charles Taylor
explains: There are certain regularities which attend our economic behavior, and which change only very
slowly. . . . But it took a vast development of civilization before the culture developed in which people do so behave, in which it became a
cultural possibility to act like this; and in which the discipline involved in so acting became widespread enough for this behaviour to be
generalized. . . . Economics can aspire to the status of a science, and sometimes appear to approach it, because
there has developed a culture in which a certain form of rationality is a (if not the) dominant value.
(Taylor
1985, 103). What is the cultural code that has been inscribed into the structure of economics? What vast development of civilization resulted in
the present conception and practice of the economy? The answer to this question is complex and can only be hinted at here. Indeed, the
development and consolidation of a dominant view and practice of the economy in European history is one of the most fundamental chapters in
the history of modernity. An anthropology of modernity centered on the economy leads us to question the tales
of the market, production, and labor which are at the root of what might be called the Western economy.
These tales are rarely questioned; they are taken as normal and natural ways of seeing life, the way
things are. Yet the notions of economy, market, and production are historical contingencies. Their histories can be traced, their genealogies
demarcated, and their mechanisms of truth and power revealed. In short, the Western economy can be anthropologized and
shown to be made up of a peculiar set of discourses and practices very peculiar at that in the history of cultures. The
Western economy is generally thought of as a production system. From the perspective of the anthropology of modernity, however, the
Western economy must be seen as an institution composed of systems of production, power, and
signication. The three systems, which coalesced at the end of the eighteenth century, are inextricably linked to the
development of capitalism and modernity. They should be seen as cultural forms through which human
beings are made into producing subjects. The economy is not only, or even principally, a material entity. It is above all a cultural
production, a way of producing human subjects and social orders of a certain kind . Although at the level of
production the history of the Western economy is well knownthe rise of the market, changes in the productive forces and the social relations of
production, demographic changes, the transformation of everyday material life, and the commodication of land, labor, and moneyanalyses of
power and signication have been incorporated much less into the cultural history of the Western economy. How does power enter into the
history of the economy? Very briey, the institutionalization of the market system in the eigtheenth and nineteenth
centuries also required a transformation at the level of the individualthe production of what Foucault
(1979) has called docile bodiesand the regulation of populations in ways consistent with the movements
of capital. People did not go into the factories gladly and of their own accord; an entire regime of discipline and
normalization was necessary. Besides the expulsion of peasants and serfs from the land and the creation of a proletarian class, the
modern economy necessitated a profound restructuring of bodies, individuals, and social forms. This
restructuring of the individual and society was achieved through manifold forms of discipline, on the one
hand, and through the set of interventions that made up the domain of the social , to which I have alluded, on the other.
The result of this processHomo oeconomicuswas a normalized subject that produces under
certain physical and cultural conditions. To accumulate capital, spread education and health, and regulate
the movement of people and wealth required no less than the establishment of a disciplinary society
(Foucault 1979).3 At the level of signication, the rst important historical aspect to consider is the invention of the economy as an autonomous
domain. It is well known that one of the quintessential aspects of modernity is the separation of social life into functional spheres (the economy,
the polity, society, culture, and the like), each with laws of its own. This is, strictly speaking, a modern development. As a separate domain, the
economy had to be given expression by a proper science; this science, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, was called political
economy. In its classical formulation by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, political economy was structured around the notions of production and labor.
knowledge, as opposed to the dominant epistemology, which placed truth on the side of the individuals
mind; the contrast between a unilinear conception of history , in which the individual is the all-powerful actor, and a
materialist one, in which social classes appear as the motor of history; a denunciation of the natural character of the
market economy and a conceptualization, instead, of the capitalist mode of production, in which the market
appears as the product of history; and nally the crucial insight of commodity fetishism as a paradigmatic feature
of capitalist society. Marxs philosophy, however, faced limits at the level of the code.4 The hegemony of the code of
signication of political economy is the underside of the hegemony of the market as a social model
and a model of thought. Market culture elicits commitments not only from economists but also from all
those living with prices and commodities. Economic men and women are positioned in civil societes in
ways that are inevitably mediated, at the symbolic level, by the constructs of markets, production, and
commodities. People and nature are separated into parts (individuals and resources), to be recombined into market
commodities and objects of exchange and knowledge. Hence the call by critical analysts of market culture to remove political
economy from the centrality that it has been accorded in the history of modernity and to supersede the market as a generalized frame of reference
by developing a wider frame of reference to which the market itself might be referred (Polanyi 1957b, 270; Procacci 1991, 151; Reddy 1987).5 I
suggest that this wider frame of reference should be the anthropology of modernity. Anthropologists have been complicit with
the rationalization of modern economics, to the extent that they have contributed to naturalizing the
constructs of economy, politics, religion, kinship, and the like as the fundamental building blocks of all
societies. The existence of these domains as presocial and universal must be rejected. Instead, we
must ask what symbolic and social processes make these domains appear self-evident , and perhaps even
natural, elds of activity in any society (Yanagisako and Collier 1989, 41). The analysis of economics as culture must thus start
by subjecting to scrutiny the apparent organization of societies into seemingly natural domains. It must reverse the spontaneous
impulse to look in every society for economic institutions and relations separate from other social
relations, comparable to those of Western capitalist society (Godelier 1986, 18). This task of cultural critique
must begin with the clear recognition that economics is a discourse that constructs a particular picture of
the economy. To use Stephen Gudemans metaphor (1986; Gudeman and Rivera 1990), what we usually recognize as
economics is only one conversation among many regarding the economy; this conversation became
dominant throughout the centuries, thanks to the historical processes already sketched. Gudemans unveiling of the use in
anthropology of allegedly universal economic models is instructive: Those who construct universal models . . . propose that
within ethnographic data there exists an objectively given reality which may be captured and explained by
an observers formal model. They utilize a reconstructive methodology by which observed economic practices and beliefs are rst
restated in the formal language and then deduced or assessed with respect to core criteria such as utility, labor or exploitation. Although the
particular theories used in economic anthropology are quite diverse, they share the assumption that one or another
universal model exists and can be used to explain a given eld data . According to this perspective, a local model usually
is a rationalization, mystication or ideology; at most, it only represents the underlying reality to which the observer has privileged access. (1986,
28) Any model, however, whether local or universal, is a construction of the world and not an indisputable ,
objective truth about it. This is the basic insight guiding the analysis of economics as culture. The coming into dominance of modern
economics meant that many other existing conversations or models were appropriated, suppressed, or overlooked. At the margins of the
capitalist world economy, Gudeman and Rivera insist, there existed and continue to exist other models of the
economy, other conversations, no less scientic because they are not couched in equations or produced by
Nobel laureates. In the Latin American countryside, for instance, these models are still alive, the result of
overlapping conversations that have been carried out for a long time. I will come back to the notion of local models in the last section of the
There is, then, an orientalism in economics that has to be unveiled that is, a hegemonic effect
achieved through representations that enshrine one view of the economy while suppressing others. The
chapter.
critique of economics as culture, nally, must be distinguished from the better-known analysis of economics as rhetoric advocated by
McCloskey (1985). McCloskeys work is intended to show the literary character of economic science and the price economics has paid for its
blind adherence to the scientistic attitude of modernism. This author shows how literary devices systematically and inevitably pervade the science
of economics. His aim is to improve economics by bringing it into the realm of rhetoric. The aim of this chapter is quite different. Although some
rhetorical analysis is used, particularly in the reading of the economic development theories of the 1950s and 1960s, the analysis of
economics as culture goes well beyond the formal aspect of the rethoric of economics . How did particular
constructions of the economy come to exist? How do they operate as cultural forces? What practices do
these constructions create, and what are the resulting cultural orders? What are the consequences of
seeing life in terms of such constructions?
McWilliams appears to recognize that U.S. foreign policy has weaknesses that must be addressed. In this case, he argues that globalization is
doing harm to the worlds workers, that it is a mistake to ignore these escalating problems, that U.S. laborparticularly because of its relations with labor
around the worldis uniquely capable of presenting labors concerns to foreign policy makers, and that labor should be reincorporated
into the governments foreign policy processes: The U.S. would benefit from engaging international labor in the pursuit of shared goals such as democratization, political stability and equitable
economic and social development. An alliance between the U.S. and labor today would focus on worker rights, including ensuring that economic development is not based on the exploitation of
child labor, forced labor or employment that discriminates against women and minorities, and on economic justice, ensuring that globalizations benefits flow to all and not simply to the few best
placed to profit from it. A revitalized labor diplomacy today would foster democratic freedoms by shoring up fragile democracies, just as the U.S. labor alliance of the Cold War era did.
(emphasis added) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recognized the strength of the argument, even before McWilliams published it. After receiving the first report by the ACLDA World of
Decent Work: Labor Diplomacy for the New Centuryand having a couple of months to evaluate its recommendations, Secretary Albright stated at the November 8, 2000, meeting of the
ACLD, I am absolutely convinced after four years of doing this job that we cant have a successful U.S. foreign policy without effective labor diplomacy. She also added: And becoming a part
of the US Government may not have been something you intended in this way, but I do believe it has been a very important partnership. (emphasis added)17 The ACLD, although initially only
interests. (emphasis added) This emphasis can further be seen in the title of the ACLDs second report, Labor Diplomacy: In the Service of Democracy and Security. There is a lot of talk in
necessary components of strategies to prevent and counter terrorist activities. Effective labor diplomacy is important in informing American analysis and shaping its policy to combat the
conditions that breed terrorism around the world. (emphasis added) Further, the 2001 report argues, the promotion of democracy needs to be part of any sustainable U.S.-led effort to combat
countries. (emphases added) So, without beating the issue to death, it is clear that by the second ACLD report, ACLD members are seeing labor diplomacy as a vital part of U.S. foreign policy
and national security efforts, and they are encouraging the Bush administration to address areas of concern that they have identified.18 This certainly includes conditions that they believe
facilitate terrorism, and particularly within the Muslim world. And yet, they state that labor has already been working within the Muslim world, trying to win the hearts and minds of workers in
these countries. But while great concern is expressedagain and again in the reportfor U.S. national security, concern for the well-being of the worlds workers and any possible expressions of
mutually-beneficial solidarity-based actions by the AFL-CIO are all but absent. Now, obviously,
one advanced throughout almost all of the governments foreign policy public documents. The evidence presented in this paper has shown that
was terribly reactionary. It acted against democracy in a number of societies and labor movements as well as internally within the U.S. labor movement
itself as it sought to maintain U.S. hegemony in the world. McWilliams acknowledges and even celebrates the close ties between labor and government during that period, and argues for their
yet he claims that the shared interest of labor and the government is to spread democracy.
reestablishment. And
How can these contradictory claims/realities be resolved? To do this, it is useful to turn to William Robinsons Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony.19 In an
excellent analysis of U.S. foreign policy, Robinson argues that this policy began shifting in the mid-1980s from supporting any dictator who promised fealty and control of his people to
intervening actively in the civil society of targeted nations for the purposes of building support among the more conservative politicians (including labor leaders), and for linking their interests
with the United States. Key to this are democracy-promoting operations. However, while using the rhetoric of popular democracythe one-person, one-vote grassroots-driven version that
we are taught in civics courses and supposedly exists herethe United States is, in fact, promoting polyarchal or top-down, elite-driven, democracy. This polyarchal democracy suggests that
citizens get to choose their leaders when, in fact, they only get to choose between those presented as possible choices by the elites of that country. In addition, viable solutions to social problems
can only emerge from possibilities presented by the elites. In other words, polyarchal democracy only appears to be democratic; in reality it is not. And institutionally, the United States projects
this polyarchal democracy through its democracy-building programs, especially through USAID and the Department of State. State, in turn, channels its money and its efforts through the
National Endowment for Democracy, upon which the 2001 report comments: The National Endowment for Democracy (a government-supported but independent agency) funds its four core
grantee institutions, including the Solidarity Center, as well as a large number of grantee groups around the world. This understanding provides a means to decipher government reports.
When they promote democracy and claim it is one of the four interrelated goals of U.S. foreign policyalong with stability, security, and prosperity in
reality, it is a particular form of democracy, a form of democracy that has no relation to the popular
democracy that most Americans think of when they hear the word. When labor leaders use the term democracy in this manner, they are collaborating with the
government against workers around the world, both in the United States and overseas. Where does all this leave us? The AFL-CIOs unwillingness to clear
the air appears to be not an oversight or a mistake. It seems a conscious decision because foreign policy leaders fear a backlash from union members should their long-lasting perfidy become
The AFL-CIO, through its American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), was actively
involved with both the CTV and FEDECAMARAS in Venezuela before the April 2002 coup, and these organizations both helped lead the coup
widely known, as they should.
attempt. ACILS was given over $700,000 by the National Endowment for Democracy for work in that country between 1997 and 2002. These efforts and receipt of the money were not reported
to AFL-CIO members and, in fact, the AFL-CIO has actively worked to keep these operations from being known, despite a growing number of AFL-CIO affiliated organizations formally
requesting this information. These activities and receipt of this money has not been reported in any labor press, including its own Web site, by the AFL-CIO. And this intentional refusal to
to the U.S. government has been established, there has been no or little benefit to workers either in the United States or in the rest of the world. Again, there has been no transparency by the AFL-
sought. Should this continue to be the case, it is clear that labor activists must consider their own future actions in regards to AFL-CIO foreign policy. The well-being of workers in the United
States and around the worldand our allieswill be deeply affected by the choices made.
Thats particularly true in the context of their mechanism the affirmative repeats the
history of Northern-led unions saving Mexican workers through false and opportunistic
solidarity
Carr 99 (Barry, History Department Professor, La Trobe University, Australia, research concerns the labour and agrarian history of
twentieth-century Latin America, especially Mexico, Globalization from below: labour internationalism under NAFTA, International social
science journal International social science journal, 3-1999)
The contrast between this legacy of relatively symmetrical labour internationalism and the trans-border activism
of the NAFTA era is particularly striking and has attracted academic comment (Carr, 1996). Since 1994, most transborder
worker and union initiatives, whether they involve bureaucratic petitioning under the NAALC or
information exchange and solidarity efforts between unions on the ground in Mexico, the United States and Canada, have
originated in the north either in the United States or Canada. In the discourse of NAFTA labour
internationalism, Mexico is almost invariably constructed as the problem, the weak link in the
chain or a Trojan Horse for multinational capital. The advanced character of Mexican labour
legislation and the breadth of the social wage entitlements which Mexican workers have obtained over the
decades (their poor enforcement and constant violation notwithstanding) are not yet sufciently acknowledged in the
United States and Canada. Understandably, UNESCO 1999. southern actors (both the Mexican government and pro-government
unions) view the asymmetricality present in both the rhetorical construction and the material base of transborder labour cooperation as a cover for narrow FirstWorld labour protectionism and Mexico bashing .
Given that some of the most active transborder labour actors are linked to those northern unions that have been most vulnerable to capital and
labour ight, this is a not entirely inaccurate view. Some US protagonists (the Teamsters are an example) have occasionally
introduced chauvinist language into their presentation of labour solidarity issues. The current Teamster
campaign against the liberalization of access by Mexican truckers to the US market generates caricatures of Mexican truckers as ignorant
amateurs, with claims being made that untrained drivers have been given a licence to kill on US highways. Perhaps it is no surprise
that
US and Canadian unionists and workers have had difculty identifying suitable Mexican counterparts
with whom they can work on transborder issues. The FAT has had to carry most of the burden; yet it is a small and poorly
resourced organization. It is of course possible that Mexican unions and unionists interest in building transnational ties with US and Canadian
unions has been diminished by suspicions that northern unions have only begun talking about labour internationalism
Additionally, their emphasis on public debate and deliberation masks unequal power
relations and produces a disciplined, rational subject.
Tan 11 [Sherman, Ph.B. candidate (Sociology & Linguistics)College of Arts and Social Sciences at The Australian National University,
Contemporary Visions of Power and Resistance: On the relevance of Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Paper presented at the
Inaugural Annual Ph.B. Conference/Student Research Expo, The AustralianNational University, October 26th, 2011]
Consequently, it
is possible to take Foucault's point even further to present a specific critique of Habermas' ideal of
consensus through public debate and deliberation. Perhaps Habermas' ideas do obscure the ways in which power woiks through
language. Take for instance Habermas' idea of a "consensus". For Foucault, this is really another form of "totalisation - that is
"at once abstract and limiting" (Foucault 1984a: 375-6). Habermas' emphasis on reaching a consensus might
actually result in fixing meaning and defining social life in a singular or universal manner (and this could be
complicit with certain power relations in society), ignoring alternative possibilities, meanings or discourses. In fact.
Habermas sometimes speaks of consensus in terms of "achievement-, but what if we push things further and speak of forging a consensus,
mutually imposing an agreement? What if we. like Foucault, tightly juxtapose "consensus" and "discipline"? We then de-naturalize consensus and
open it up to questions and problems to which it was previously impervious. We have to consider what might get left out. (Coles 1992: 8z) In
Foucault's own words: "there is no prediscursive providence which disposes the world in our favor. We must conceive
discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice we impose upon them- (1981:67). Each time we speak, we inevitably
communicate through privileging certain meanings over others. And this is an exclusionary practice, rather than one that is ultimately
inclusionary in Habermas' ideal of a consensus. Foucault's work, indeed, helps us to attend to the possible hegemony of meaning and exclusion
inherent in the Habermasian "consensus". On another level. Foucault's ideas also problematize the apparently apolitical starting
point of communicative process often unquestioned in Habermas political theory. Foucault crucially suggests that "it is necessary to
determine what 'posing a problem' to politics really means (1984b: 385). According to him. the problem is. precisely, to decide if it is actually
suitable to place oneself within a "we- in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts [...] It seems to me that the "we"
must not be previous to the question: it can only be the result - and the necessary temporary result - of the question as it is posed in the new terms
in which one formulates it. (Foucault 1984b: 385) Put in another way, for Foucault, there is no initial social position (or "we") that
is outside the influence of relations of power. This has implications for "what it means to ask a question" in politics, and it
directs our attention to how the agenda and itinerary of public discussions are already shaped even before
the actual debate takes place. For example, if we are discussing the importance of carbon tax, we are already, from the beginning.
situated within other existing political discourses. for instance. one which implicitly acknowledges the importance of environmental protection. or
one which considers taxation to be a legitimate source of government/national income. Indeed, it becomes important to ask: "who
gets to adjudicate and define the issues of concern within public forums ?", instead of accepting the Habermasian
formulation at face value. Foucault's work also demonstrates how a specific definition or characterization of the "self' (or human "subject") in
Western societies comes to be produced and constituted. and this also proffers a critique of Habermas' overall vision of democratic political
practice. and in particular, how his theoretical prescriptions actually reinforces the idea of a specific political "participant-or "subject", and
excludes other (alternative) visions of what a political "subject"- could be. Indeed. Foucault [...] analyzed how [certain] techniques [...] allow for
the self to be created and subjected within relations of power that constitute modern social institutions. [There is also] [...] the production and
marginalization of entire categories of people who do not fit what the foundation posits as "normal". (Blasius 1993: zoo) Power may form
disciplined individuals, who are rational, responsible, productive subjects , yet that is in no way an expression of a
humannature. (Pickett 1996: 458) If we take these ideas more seriously, one does get the sense that within Habermas' own theory of democracy,
what is accorded priority is a specific type of political "subject": these "subjects- are individuals who can offer reasonable
arguments in rational discussion. and who can draw upon convincing (usually scientifically-based) evidence to
support those arguments. From the Foucauldian point of view, one could argue that this narrowly defined political subject
is itself an effect of Habermas' own theoretical discourse, and this taken-forgranted "rational" subject that emerges from Habermas' prescriptions,
to a large extent, excludes other types of participants and forms of participation in the public spher e, and in the
democratic process. What
about participants who do not appeal to rational argumentation, but instead put
forward art forms - such as dance, paintings and sculptures -as political practice? And what about the role
of rhetoric and emotional appeal in political speeches? How can we then accord these participants and their forms of
expression an equal status with that of rationality and logical argumentation?
they
hold that U.S. interests in Cuba are best served by having U.S. corporations inside the country, even while
Castro is still around. They know that U.S. corporations entering Cuba will be a source of U .S. political influence
there. . The bottom line for the bourgeois opponents of the hard-line policy is, well, the bottom line. They see the corporations of other
countries setting up shop in Cuba and reaching trade deals . They worry that the U.S. companies will be
frozen out. This view is expressed, for instance, by Wayne S. Smith, a prominent bourgeois commentator on Cuba who was U.S. ambassador
there from 1958-61. In an article in Foreign Affairs of March/April 1996, Smith concludes that the Cuba embargo "complicates relations with
America's most important trading partners while denying U.S. companies any share of the Cuban market. The latter is not large, but a recent
trade study estimated that the United States and Cuba could quickly be doing some $7 billion a year in
business." (1) In another article in the same publication, Pamela S. Falk, Staff Director of the U.S. House of Representatives Western
Hemisphere Subcommittee, notes that corporate giants such as GM, Bank of Boston, Sears and major hotel chains have been on scouting
expeditions to Cuba. AT&T wants to participate in the multi-billion dollar privatization of the Cuban telecommunications system. The article
quotes the CEO of the Ingersoll-Rand construction corporation stating "The embargo is a waste of taxpayer dollars and time" while his
counterpart at Archer Daniels Midland claims not to "know a corporate CEO who thinks excluding U.S. business is a good idea, particularly
when all of Western Europe is down there." (2) . While it is undoubtedly true that many capitalists do not like the present policy on Cuba, it does
not automatically follow that the embargo will quickly fall. For one thing, the
Cuban market
does not have anywhere near the same importance to overall U.S. imperialist interests as does the China
market. . Of course, the embargo against Cuba is not just opposed by corporations who want to conquer the Cuban market, but by progressive
activists who oppose various hardships imposed on the Cuban masses by the embargo and the efforts of the U.S. to strangle Cuba. But it
would be a big mistake for activists to think that the lifting of the embargo will solve the main problems of
the Cuban masses. This requires not only opposition to U.S. bullying but opposing the Castro regime and the state-capitalist order in
Cuba. Indeed, an end to the U.S. embargo means the beginning of the U.S. multinationals sharing in the
plunder of the Cuban toilers. The anti-embargo section of the U.S. of the U.S. bourgeoisie opposes the proembargo section from the standpoint of what policy best serves imperialism. Activists who want to stand with the Cuban
masses must oppose the embargo as part of a stand against the exploitation of the masses by Cuban state-capitalism and the foreign corporations
it welcomes in.
critique has two sides: domestically, the executive branch is upsetting the balance of powers through sweeping assertions of power, while internationally it disregards
international legitimacy and international law. In both cases, there is a concern about lawlessness, expressed as an arbitrary and destructive willfulness.37 This
analysis, however prescient, is nevertheless inadequate on both counts. Domestically, there is every reason to believe support is widespread (both across the major
political parties as well as the branches of government) for the need to pursue foreign fighters abroad and for at least some of the measures employed to that end.
Internationally, the Bush administrations contemptuous attitude towards international law and institutions should not distract from the fact that cooperation with other
states38 has always been crucial to U.S. anti-terrorism policy, both operationally and in terms of legitimacy.39 GWOT is far too broad an effort to rest solely on one
governments asserted right to do as it pleases anywhere on earth. In order to understand the normative framework justifying the braided logic of exemption and
exclusion, let us return to the emphasis on foreign fighters and analyze not what is said about them, but rather the silence around them. This is where the equal, if not
greater, foreignness of the U.S. and some of its allies in the same sites of intervention stands out. This attitude was vividly demonstrated by Afghan Defense
Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak when he stressed the foreignness and hence, illegitimacy of certain rebels by remarking that [i]n some cases, they have to use
interpreters to talk to the local population, as if that were not the case for NATO forces as well.40 The point of this observation is not to decry or to satirize, but rather
to point out how the concern over foreign fighters tends to go hand-in-hand with a curious silence about the foreignness of others. This blindspot is made possible
our differences with local Muslims are generally legitimate, but the differences between local and certain foreign Muslims are not, therefore the latter are enemies to
us all a universal enemy. The foreign fighter is a universal enemy not because of any alleged enmity towards or from humanity but because he has been declared an
enemy by those who occupy the position of the universal.
1999). While different from liberalism, development is intimately connected with it.
argued, this impoverished experience of life, and its accompanying will to exercise moral tutelage, is an enduring feature of liberal imperialism. It characterizes nineteenth-century British
attitudes towards India, for example, just as it shapes todays post-interventionary terrain in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Since the nineteenth century liberal notions of development have been
based on securing or redeeming surplus life through strengthening its powers of self-reliance and self-management. A recurrent theme of development, well reflected in contemporary notions of
is a concern to maintain the authenticity of local organization and community in the face of
the disruptive and anarchic effects of progress. Then, as now, the foundation of an authentic community-based
political voice is the small-scale ownership of land or property. Apart from experiments involving former slaves, development as
community-based self-reliance emerged in nineteenth-century Europe in response to the
underdevelopment of capitalism (Cowen and Shenton 1996). Underpinned by radical and liberal demands to break up large estates and redistribute land,
selfreliance offered a future for the dangerous masses of unemployed and destitute that were a feature of
the new industrial towns and cities. Until the end of the nineteenth century development was an important part of domestic welfare discourse. By this time, however,
sustainable development,
a different and more effective liberal approach to the problem of surplus population began to emerge in Europe that is, social insurance based on the principle of members making regular
payments into a centrally managed fund that can be drawn on at times of need. Extended and deepened by the societal effects of two world wars, this principle would eventually expand to shape
surplus population based on community self-reliance were eclipsed in Europe. While not disappearing completely, by the beginning of the twentieth century development as a liberal technology
of security based on self-reliance migrated and consolidated its association with the protectorates and colonies. Drawing on Enlightenment views on the self-sufficient nature of natural man,
development as decentralized self-management emerged , for example, in the liberal colonial practice of indirect
rule or Native Administration (Cooke 2003). Following the inability of indirect rule to curb the growth of nationalism, however, by the 1940s it had vectored into the colonial practice of
community development and the encouragement of producer cooperatives (Kelemen 2006). During the contested process of decolonization,
development became an interstate means of differentiating and governing the new world of peoples that
nationalism had called forth. The struggle for independence, however, did not expose the connection between
liberalism and imperialism thus subjecting it to critique. Decolonization was experienced as revealing a
threatening world of poverty that, once again, demanded Western tutelage and trusteeship . In these momentous events,
the global biopolitical divide between a developed or insured life versus an underdeveloped or noninsured life expected to be self-reliant life was sealed. The effect of development as a technology of
security has been to deepen this divide until today it forms the basis of unending war .
Thesis
Thesis Development
The 1ac is a recreation of the Truman Doctrine a dream to advance the so-called
underdeveloped nations out of their state of poverty but this nave dream became a
nightmare; transforming the world in a hegemonic quest for economic power resulting in
the pain, suffering, exploitation, and oppression of any and all who stood in the way
Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies,
UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World
Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologas Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e Historia, Bogot,
Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD 1995, page 3-4]
IN HIS inaugural address as president of the United States on January 20, 1949 ,
Nations with the objective of designing concrete policies and measures for the economic development of underdeveloped countries, put it thus:
There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments . Ancient
Links Mechanisms
Slater 10, David Slater (2010) Rethinking the Imperial Difference: towards an understanding of USLatin American
encounters, Third World Quarterly, 31:2, 185-206, DOI: 10.1080/01436591003711942 p. 189. David is a Professor of Political
Geography at Loughborough University. He is also the editor of the Political geography journal
For example, in
his study of imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century, Hobson argued that in the case
of the US, the American mission of civilisation, and spirit of adventure were clearly less important in
explaining imperialism than the driving force of the economic factor .16 Similarly, Hannah Arendt contended that
economic expansion was the central political idea of imperialism, and that imperialism was born when
the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic
expansion.17 It is certainly the case that economic expansion cannot be ignored, especially if we include the ever-pressing need for
resources, outlets for US goods, sources of direct investment and overall macroeconomic stability. In the late 19th century the Open Door
Policy was the first clear expression of an indirect imperialism of free trade, whereby the USs
preponderant economic strength entered and dominated the underdeveloped areas of the world, a policy
which continued into the 20th century. It still needs to be argued, however, that our understanding of imperial power has to be more
multilayered. Imperial power requires a geopolitical discourse which comes to be rooted in society as a whole, and which is disseminated by
influential sectors of that society. Along these lines, Williams suggests that it is quite possible for people to act on the basis of a broad, inclusive
integration of information and desires, wherein a framing conception of the world interprets data in such a way that political, religious or
cultural values may be held to be key, whereas in other instances economic factors may be central.18 At the beginning of the 19th century the US
was already characterised by an imperial mentality. In 1809, for example, Thomas Jefferson commented that, no constitution was ever before as
well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government (quoted in Williams 2007, p 60). The idea of the United States as a nation with
an imperial destiny was expressed by a host of writers, politicians, and business leaders during the nineteenth century and beyond; Thomas Paine,
for example, remarked that we have it in our power to begin the world over again.19 And in a somewhat more restrained manner Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge declared in 1895 that we must be the leaders in the Western Hemisphere .20 Throughout
and beyond the 19th century the emerging imperial power of the US was codified through, inter alia, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823,
the concept of Manifest Destiny , which surfaced in the 1840s at the time of the USMexico war, the Open Door Policy of the
1890s and the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904. The Monroe Doctrine was a statement of differentiation from
Europe, and of leadership of the Americas, with the newly emerging republics of Latin America
referred to as the southern brethren. The notion of manifest destiny captured the sense in which the US was envisaged as
possessing a geopolitically predestined role of becoming a global power, and the Open Door Policy, as noted above, was designed to open the
worlds and in particular Chinas market to American manufactured goods. The Roosevelt Corollary assigned to the US a role of international
police power; wherever there was considered to be chaos and disorder, or threats to civilisation in the countries to the south of the US,
intervention would be justified. We may want to add to these four signposts of emerging imperial power President Woodrow Wilsons Fourteen
Points speech at the end of the First World War, which emphasised the significance of self-determination, freedom of the seas, economic
openness, non-intervention and disarmament. The result for Wilson would be a world of sovereign states committed to the principles of liberal
democracy and free enterpriseWilson declared, as a clear example of US universalism, that these are American
principles, American policies . . . and they are the principles of mankind and must prevail .21
an ideological distinction between peoples and populations must be introduced . According to Foucault, the
population includes those who conform or adapt to the new economic order; they fall in line with market
regulation, even promoting it as a means to attain greater security. The people, on the other hand, are those who
disrupt the system and throw themselves on the supplies. They reject the new regime of planned scarcity, and therefore
do not really belong to the population (2007, 44). For Foucault the act of letting die is profoundly connected
to the classification of undesirables what Giorgio Agamben (1995) would later term homines sacri who are now represented as
threats, either external or internal, to the population (Foucault 2003, 256). In a liberal biopolitical economy , he
concludes, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political
adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and improvement of the species or
race. (2003, 256; see also Minca 2006)
displaced tobacco as Cuba's principal crop, and comparative advantage soon made
the island the dominant producer in the world market . By 1856 Cuba produced 25 per cent of the world's
sugar - two and half times more than its closest competitor, the British West Indies.1 For over a century sugar brought Cuba prosperity, dulling
the economic conflicts that fuelled the wars of independence in Spain's other New World colonies. The rise of sugar also linked Cuba
to the United States, a thriving market with limited domestic sugar production.2 In 1884, when a collapse in
international sugar prices pushed many Cuban sugar mills into bankruptcy, capital from the United States
poured into the island, consolidating and modernising the sugar sector. In 1898 Washington's desire to protect these new
economic interests contributed to the decision to intervene in Cuba's war of independence. The subsequent US occupation of the island
tied its economy ever closer to the United States as US military governors promulgated laws giving US firms concessionary
access to the Cuban market.3 By the late 1920S US firms controlled 75 per cent of the sugar industry, and most of the
mines, railroads, and public utilities.4 The revolution of 1959 was animated in part by a nationalist desire to
reduce Cuba's dependency on the United States.' By 1960 Cuba's revolutionary leaders had concluded that the path to economic
independence and development was socialism, and before the year was out $I billion of US direct investment had been nationalised. Thus
ended, in one convulsive rupture, a century and a half of US dominance over the Cuban economy. Cuba's revolutionary
government could not have survived Washington's declaration of economic war without external assistance. In the decade before 1959,
69.1 per cent of Cuban trade (representing 38.8 per cent of Cuban Gross National Product, GNP) was with the United States,
and 54.8 per cent of Cuban sugar was sold in the US market." With the help of the Soviet Union Cuba's international
economic relations were radically transformed; by 1962 trade with the United States had fallen to zero, and
trade with the Soviet Union - negligible before 195 9- had jumped to 49.3 per cent of all Cuban trade.7 Having ended
Cuba's dependency on the United States, the revolutionary leadership next took aim at sugar. Their first development strategy, pursued until 1963,
planned for balanced growth based on agricultural diversification and rapid development of both light and heavy industry. This strategy enjoyed
some initial success, but by 196I, bottlenecks associated with the shift from the market to central planning began to appear; the growth rate
faltered, and started to decline (Table 1). Reduced sugar production (as called for in the diversification plan), together with an unanticipated fall
in world sugar prices, cut export earnings drastically and led to a severe balance of payments crisis. By 1963 the government was running a
balance of payments deficit of more than $300 million (Table 2)
they
hold that U.S. interests in Cuba are best served by having U.S. corporations inside the country, even while
Castro is still around. They know that U.S. corporations entering Cuba will be a source of U .S. political influence
there. . The bottom line for the bourgeois opponents of the hard-line policy is, well, the bottom line. They see the corporations of other
countries setting up shop in Cuba and reaching trade deals . They worry that the U.S. companies will be
frozen out. This view is expressed, for instance, by Wayne S. Smith, a prominent bourgeois commentator on Cuba who was U.S. ambassador
there from 1958-61. In an article in Foreign Affairs of March/April 1996, Smith concludes that the Cuba embargo "complicates relations with
America's most important trading partners while denying U.S. companies any share of the Cuban market. The latter is not large, but a recent
trade study estimated that the United States and Cuba could quickly be doing some $7 billion a year in
business." (1) In another article in the same publication, Pamela S. Falk, Staff Director of the U.S. House of Representatives Western
Hemisphere Subcommittee, notes that corporate giants such as GM, Bank of Boston, Sears and major hotel chains have been on scouting
expeditions to Cuba. AT&T wants to participate in the multi-billion dollar privatization of the Cuban telecommunications system. The article
quotes the CEO of the Ingersoll-Rand construction corporation stating "The embargo is a waste of taxpayer dollars and time" while his
counterpart at Archer Daniels Midland claims not to "know a corporate CEO who thinks excluding U.S. business is a good idea, particularly
when all of Western Europe is down there." (2) . While it is undoubtedly true that many capitalists do not like the present policy on Cuba, it does
not automatically follow that the embargo will quickly fall. For one thing, the
Cuban market
does not have anywhere near the same importance to overall U.S. imperialist interests as does the China
market. . Of course, the embargo against Cuba is not just opposed by corporations who want to conquer the Cuban market, but by progressive
activists who oppose various hardships imposed on the Cuban masses by the embargo and the efforts of the U.S. to strangle Cuba. But it
would be a big mistake for activists to think that the lifting of the embargo will solve the main problems of
the Cuban masses. This requires not only opposition to U.S. bullying but opposing the Castro regime and the state-capitalist order in
Cuba. Indeed, an end to the U.S. embargo means the beginning of the U.S. multinationals sharing in the
plunder of the Cuban toilers. The anti-embargo section of the U.S. of the U.S. bourgeoisie opposes the proembargo section from the standpoint of what policy best serves imperialism. Activists who want to stand with the Cuban
masses must oppose the embargo as part of a stand against the exploitation of the masses by Cuban state-capitalism and the foreign corporations
it welcomes in.
region are characterized by a mix of interdependence and assymetricality (see also Herzog, 1990; Martnez, 1994),
with the U.S. the dominant partner that defines in large part the terms of collaboration and integration (see
also Castan eda, 2003), Andreas and Nevins tackle the problem of how U.S. statecraft 186 M. Coleman / Political Geography 24
(2005) 185209 simultaneously nationalizes and internationalizes the gated-yet-global border with Mexico .
Andreas provides a sociological analysis of law enforcement, and proposes that the U.S.Mexico border is a stage and that
border policing is an audience directed performance . The latter, for Andreas, is less about the
instrumental goal of law enforcement and more about the expressive role of law enforcement
(Andreas, 2000: 11), with the symbolic functionality of policing connected to the project of making a
porous trade border in the region. For Andreas, the performance of the border as a blockade ensures that the
larger process of economic integration will not be derailed by domestic and bilateral politicking over drug
trafficking and migration issues: Part of the political project of turning the border into a more expansive
economic bridge has also involved making it at least appear to be a more formidable police barrier (2000:
141; emphasis added). Although not denying the symbolic importance of U.S. geopolitical practice in the border region, Nevins (2002) suggests
that border policing cannot be condensed to a media event. Rather, Nevins counsels that as a real-world militarized practice
responsible for large numbers of migrant deaths (see also Eschbach, Hagan, Rodriguez, Hernandez-Leon, & Bailey, 1999),
border policing tends to complement the neoliberalization of the border in that it concerns a xenophobic
and hypernationalist instatement of borderland law and order against flows of migrants unleashed by the
liberalization of rural and urban Mexico. In this sense, Nevins names the U.S. a gatekeeper state which
manages the migratory fallout of U.S.-led Mexican market restructuring. The gatekeeper state , Nevins argues,
provides extraterritorial opportunities for national territory-based capital (thus intensifying the process
of globalization) while, somewhat paradoxically, providing security against the perceived social costs
unleashed by globalization (2002: 178). Both Andreas and Nevins caution against a theorization of U.S. statecraft as a coherent
phenomenon. However, the tendency in both projects is, generally, to look for the points of coincidence between U.S. geopolitical and
geoeconomic practice in the border region. This tendency is front and center in Andreas analysis, in which border policing is presented
more or less functionally in terms of a larger U.S. project of continental neoliberalization . For example, Andreas
seems to suggest that U.S. geopolitical practice (i.e. customs and immigration policing) exists as a second-order
theatrical foil to U.S. geoeconomic interests (i.e. free trade), such that real U.S. trade interests are
strategically accompanied by parallel security images. In contrast, the incoherences of U.S. policy in the borderlands
specifically, the struggle between the U.S. free trade and border policing agendas, in both local and national contexts are stated much more
forcefully in Nevins work which is concerned to highlight how different boundary regulatory regimes relate to the [contradictory] security and
opportunity components of the modern territorial state (2002: 178). This said, in his specific empirical discussion of U.S. border policing in the
mid- to late-1990s, Nevins argument tends to reconcile U.S. geopolitical practice in the borderlands with U.S. geoeconomic interests. For
Nevins, the U.S.-led NAFTAization of the border region and U.S. border policing go hand in hand as far as
both are corresponding disciplinary practices, the former focused on markets and the latter focused on
bodies disenfranchized by economic M. Coleman / Political Geography 24 (2005) 185209 187 restructuring.
Importantly, Nevins does not suggest that this coincidence is intended, but rather that economic liberalization has compelled the
militarization of the U.S. Southwest border as migrants are pushed northwards. In this sense, Nevins considers the
patterned meeting of U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic policies in the region rather than their intended coherences.
Link Aid
The discourse of Aid is just the liberal alternative to eugenics the demarcation between
biopolitically valuable forms of life, those worth saving and those merely important for the
operations of capital, produce a relationship of disposability toward those the aff targets.
This forms the basis for an unending war.
Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre,
University of Bristol, 7
[Mark, Development, Security and Unending War Governing the World of People, pg. 216218]
liberalism is concerned with the security of people, their well-being, freedom and rights (Dean
Development emerges with the advent of the modern world
as a practical technology for the protection and betterment of life through harnessing its powers of
becoming. The abolition of slavery, the rise of industrial capitalism and imperial expansion called forth developments referent object, that is, modernitys predilection constantly to
produce life that is either politically or economically surplus to requirements. As a way of redeeming and making safe surplus population,
development constitutes a liberal problematic of security. Surplus life is a potentially dangerous life in
need of constant rescue and reintegration as a necessary part of constituting liberal political order itself
(Agamben 1998). Embracing freed slaves, Europes industrial reserve army and the indigenous peoples of Empire,
development appears as a technology of security that brackets together and works across national and
international boundaries. Cowen and Shenton (1996) have argued that development emerges during the nineteenth century as a means of reconciling the need for order with
the necessity of progress. Its key institution is the exercise of an educative and empowering trusteeship over the
surplus life that modernity constantly creates. It is thus a liberal alternative to extermination or eugenics,
modernitys other answers to the problem of surplus population. Development shares with liberalism an
experience of life that is culturally different as always being somehow incomplete or lacking. As Mehta (1999) has
As a design of power,
1999). While different from liberalism, development is intimately connected with it.
argued, this impoverished experience of life, and its accompanying will to exercise moral tutelage, is an enduring feature of liberal imperialism. It characterizes nineteenth-century British
attitudes towards India, for example, just as it shapes todays post-interventionary terrain in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Since the nineteenth century liberal notions of development have been
based on securing or redeeming surplus life through strengthening its powers of self-reliance and self-management. A recurrent theme of development, well reflected in contemporary notions of
is a concern to maintain the authenticity of local organization and community in the face of
the disruptive and anarchic effects of progress. Then, as now, the foundation of an authentic community-based
political voice is the small-scale ownership of land or property. Apart from experiments involving former slaves, development as
community-based self-reliance emerged in nineteenth-century Europe in response to the
underdevelopment of capitalism (Cowen and Shenton 1996). Underpinned by radical and liberal demands to break up large estates and redistribute land,
selfreliance offered a future for the dangerous masses of unemployed and destitute that were a feature of
the new industrial towns and cities. Until the end of the nineteenth century development was an important part of domestic welfare discourse. By this time, however,
sustainable development,
a different and more effective liberal approach to the problem of surplus population began to emerge in Europe that is, social insurance based on the principle of members making regular
payments into a centrally managed fund that can be drawn on at times of need. Extended and deepened by the societal effects of two world wars, this principle would eventually expand to shape
surplus population based on community self-reliance were eclipsed in Europe. While not disappearing completely, by the beginning of the twentieth century development as a liberal technology
of security based on self-reliance migrated and consolidated its association with the protectorates and colonies. Drawing on Enlightenment views on the self-sufficient nature of natural man,
development as decentralized self-management emerged , for example, in the liberal colonial practice of indirect
rule or Native Administration (Cooke 2003). Following the inability of indirect rule to curb the growth of nationalism, however, by the 1940s it had vectored into the colonial practice of
community development and the encouragement of producer cooperatives (Kelemen 2006). During the contested process of decolonization,
development became an interstate means of differentiating and governing the new world of peoples that
nationalism had called forth. The struggle for independence, however, did not expose the connection between
liberalism and imperialism thus subjecting it to critique. Decolonization was experienced as revealing a
threatening world of poverty that, once again, demanded Western tutelage and trusteeship . In these momentous events,
the global biopolitical divide between a developed or insured life versus an underdeveloped or noninsured life expected to be self-reliant life was sealed. The effect of development as a technology of
security has been to deepen this divide until today it forms the basis of unending war .
Aid is global biopolitical regime it is only to make lives live in order to prevent
catastrophe in the first world
Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy at Middlesex University, in 10
[M.G.E., International Biopolitics Foucault, Globalisation and Imperialism, Theoria,
June]
One might argue that there is a countervailing phenomenon to the accumulation of human capital through our selectively permeable borders in
the deployment of medical and technical personnel from the rich countries to poor countries in aid programs, and indeed as volunteers. Of course,
as we have seen, the general trend of such migration of personnel is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, and those from rich countries who
work in poor countries do not typically stay in the latter long term, thus do not enrich the population in the same way that economic migrants to
the rich countries do. However, the flow of aid from the rich to poor countries is increasing, which would seem prima facie to be a contrary
tendency to any parasitism. Yet, the overall effect of aid is, like that of migration controls, in the self-interest of the
richer countries. One should be wary indeed in this regard of what is called aid , since loans, including World Bank
loans, that shackle recipients, are sometimes categorised as aid, and even less conditional aid is typically given in situations where there
is an obvious strategic interest to the donor;13 the largest aid recipients by far today are the oil producers Iraq and Nigeria, for example. Certainly,
there is no question of any serious sacrifice being made by the First World to help the Third in aid donation. The UN has set a benchmark for aid
of 0.7 per cent of donor countries GDP and it is not being met.14 Private donations pale in comparison to the still ultimately insufficient
donations of states. There is moreover a tactical logic to aid. Aid has the general function of security for the donor
country: it keeps the stability of recipient countries within a range of tolerances necessary for geopolitical
security, prevents famine and disorder, which in turn prevents the problems of one area spilling over into
other areas, as well as greasing the wheels of trade (particularly in the case of aid to middle income countries), and serving
a propaganda function. There is no hidden conspiracy here: these functions are all quite explicit, government
spending on aid being justified explicitly on the basis of selfinterest that aid is necessary to geopolitical
stability, good for trade, that it will help our friends and enhance our reputation abroad. Aid is not an optional
extra to the security of the donor populations. It is rather an external projection of domestic policy, like the use of
thanatopolitics. The clearest example of this is aid targeted at (preventing) pandemics: disease can cross borders, so global efforts to combat
such diseases are protective to any given population. In principle, it might be possible simply to quarantine ones population,
but of course this would have far-reaching negative consequences, particularly economic. AIDS is the
prime example of a pandemic today which the rich countries try to control: USAID spent $2.8 billion on fighting
AIDS in 2006. Compare this with the $100 million expenditure fighting malaria in 2005; malaria kills more people, but will not spread to the rich
biopolities. Indeed, one of the main claims now made by campaigners seeking funding for anti-malaria campaigns is that malaria is catalysing the
spread of HIV; this might explain recent increases in funding to anti-malaria programs. There is no question that in the case of AIDS, calls for
funding to fight it in the Third World are routinely couched in terms of securityalthough some have also conversely argued that the AIDS
pandemic has positive security outcomes by controlling population growth, which licenses some level of indifference on the part of governments
(Elbe, 2005). Now, humanitarian and development aid neither kills people nor lets them liverather it makes
them live, which makes it a case of biopolitics. It is an inferior biopolitics, however, applied only to
protect the core population, as Mark Duffield has argued: International development, with its avowed aim of
reducing poverty and strengthening social resilience is a biopolitical technology. It is a biopolitics , however,
that is different from that associated with the massified insurance-based safety-nets of developed society
(Duffield, 2006). The inferior biopolitics of the outside resembles the biopolitics of the inside insofar as it
involves monitoring and intervention. Aid may look like a global biopolitics, then, as Dillon and Reid have claimed:
biopolitical global development and aid policies constitute a complex population that one might call the
global poor; since where there is a population, there is a biopolitics, this implies that there is a form of global biopolitics (Dillon and Reid,
2001: 48). However, the inferior biopolitics is so haphazard that it barely counts as biopolitics, providing no guaranteed minimum: there is of
course no world state, hence no world population; some people in the world are left entirely outside this inferior biopolitics, and the coverage of
billions varies wildly across time and space. International organisations, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Joint United
Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) play a critical role in the inferior biopolitics, particularly in data collection (Elbe, 2005), and also in
coordination of responses to biological problems in the Third World, but they are responsible for a small proportion of aid dispersal; most aid still
comes directly from First World national treasuries, as does most of the budget of these organisations. Aid is not only self-interested,
moreover, but, like the migration regime, tends
with biopolitics in a way that harms aid recipients quite autonomously from any economic dependency;
in this way, our argument is immune to the empirical objections that have largely discredited dependency
theory. Criticisms of aid as unhelpful are made by libertarian economists such as James Shikwati, though the direction of our conclusions is
entirely opposite to theirs: while the libertarian-influenced critique of aid is of a piece with a critique of government intervention, a biopolitical
perspective tells us that government is a necessary element of a social system, and it is the development of the
whole, including of government itself, that is retarded by intervention from outside . Our position has more in
common with that of Yash Tandons critique of aid dependence (2008). The aid system involves flows from without, which
has certain corrupting effects, which vary according to the distribution conduits for aid. Aid distribution can be
either through local agents, or directly by the donor organisation. In the former case, distribution can either be delegated to the
state or to civil society organisations. There is a tendency for donors to try to avoid distribution through
official, state channels because of concerns about corruption. The concerns are well placed: aid is a
powerfully corrupting influence, but on anyone who touches it, not just the state; aids value itself
constitutes an incentive to misdirect it.
practices and more comprehensive contractual arrangements and auditing tools, the petty sovereignty of
the NGO movement was reorchestrated within a thickening web of overlapping aims and mutual interests
connecting donor states, recipient governments, UN agencies and militaries . The govemmentalization of
the aid industry is an essential aspect of contingent sovereignty and the advent of a post-interventionary
political terrain. While presented as a relation of mutual self-interest, this increased penetration is experienced as
essential for the West's own security. Although territorial integrity is respected, populations within
ineffective states are nonetheless being reterritorialized through multiagency programmes aimed at
reconstructing weak and fragile states. Effective states attempt to govern through these anarchic strategic complexes using
technologies of coherence, that is, the search for methodologies, dispositions and administrative arrangements allowing aid and politics
to work together in the interests of peace and stability. While the search for coherence invokes the
centralization of power, it also provokes new sites of resistance on the part of the independent
administrative sovereigns on which aid as governance depends.
Western agencies use humanitarian aid as a shield to access power as well as accomplish
their foreign policy objectives- empirically proven
Duffield 4 [Mark, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre. taught at
the Universities of Khartoum, Aston and Birmingham and held Fellowships and Chairs at Sussex, Leeds
attitudes of others and, in the pro- cess, of ourselves as well (Dean 1999). As such, even lifes bit-players
have the ability to stage independent, innovative and often surprising effects. Power relations are
everywhere in the classroom, the doctors surgery, the family, the NGO project, and so on . Such relations are
productive and shape the comportment of their authoring agents as well as those subject to them.1 Without relations of power, society and the
world would grind to a halt. From this in- clusive and pervasive perspective, power itself is ambivalent and can be either good or bad.
Deciding between them, and checking the latter in favour of the former, is a matter for a practical ethics and politics. It would be a mistake to
regard the realist conception of power (as an exclusive quality amassed by the powerful) as wrong or misconceived. For many actors and nonstate agencies this viewpoint is a convenient construction. It enabled, for example, concentration camp functionaries to
frame their defence in terms of just following orders of an external power. It also enables humanitarian
agencies, in the interests of neutrality, to either remain silent in rela- tion to power so conceived, or else,
through recourse to international law, codes of conduct or technical standards, to erect legalistic barriers
and professional boundaries to distance them- selves from an external power (Leader 1999). An exclusive and
amassed view of power also shapes what humanitarian agencies understand by politics. That is, those various strategies and techniques relating
to the augmentation or deployment of external power (Weiss 1999). 1 Critics of the Foucauldian paradigm have usually concentrated on the
ubiquitous nature of power relations, and hence the difficulty or resisting them, to the detriment of its productive capacities. For a defence see
(Campbell 1998). DIIS WORKING PAPER 2004/23 5 For example, it has often been argued that humanitarian assistance, through
its diversion or theft, can strengthen the position of warring parties (Anderson 1996). At the same time,
recent concern over the politicisation of aid has focused on how Western states are using humanitarian
assistance to accomplish foreign policy objectives (Macrae and Harmer 2003). Silence, the erection of
barriers and a politics of externality are important strategies whereby humanitarian agencies are able to
deny and conceal their own complicity and involvement in the exercise of power (Campbell 1998; Edkins
2003). Understanding the non-governmental or the implications of neutrality in relation to
humanitarianism requires that we move beyond the comforting shield of such conceptions . Like a particular
period of architecture, school of art, music or literary form, power as a design reveals itself through its shape, composition or function. We
recognise a design when we see or experience it. A similar design can exist in a variety of circumstances, contexts or organis- ational
arrangements without being reduced to them: it vitalises contingent assemblages while also existing beyond them. Global governance as a design
of power is able to inscribe itself within and vector across different state/non-state and public/private institutional complexes separated in space as
well as time. Whereas the former constitutes a synchronic diagram of interconnections, complicities and contradictions that define distinct
regimes or eras, the latter reveals itself as a genealogical pattern existing across a range of such discrete regimes: the past illuminates the present
which itself informs the past. In the case of global governance, its genealogy can be traced over two and a half centuries to the birth of modernity
itself. In relation to being able to change behaviour and attitudes, global governance has been de- scribed as a hybrid and contested diagram of
power that brings together technologies of governance and sovereignty (Dillon and Reid 2000). Before analysing these complementary techniques a couple of contemporary examples can be given. Such hybridity can be seen, for example, in the Western civil-political
complex that now exists in the Balkans, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. Here one finds the
governance activities of UN agencies, NGOs and private companies working in humanitarian,
developmental and social reconstruction fields, in a complex and sometimes equivocal relationship with
the sovereign attributes of Western states, military alliances and international financial institutions. Put
another way, this con- nection is a contemporary expression of the relationship between aid and
politics. A similar diagrammatic inscription can also be detected at other levels of international conglomeration; for example, the differences
that have emerged on how to confront the threat of global terror- ism. While 9/11 created a consensus among leading states on the seriousness of
the predica- ment, the invasion of Iraq has forced to the surface clear differences between America and Europe on how it should be tackled
(Coker 2003). The European Union the worlds largest DIIS WORKING PAPER 2004/23 6 integrated regional bloc has been described in
terms of a security community that prefers technologies of international governance based on the inclusionary soft power of diplom- acy,
international law, trade and developmental aid (Nye 2002). In contrast, America the worlds only superpower is
associated with the sovereign hard power of unilateralism and the use of force in defence of its wider
Many bemoan this rift, arguing a necessary complementarity between governance and sov- ereignty, aid and
politics, soft power and hard power or, to use Bobbits terms, law and strategy (Bobbit 2003) in the pursuit of global security (Coker 2003;
Ferguson 2003; Cooper 2002). Indeed, it is felt that the current crisis will continue if not deepen unless governance
and sovereignty are once again brought into alignment. In order to flesh out these attributes, the notion of bio-power has to
be introduced.
non-insured people, groups and communities to forge livelihoods and survival strategies beyond
and outside the state (Keen 1994 and 1998; Duffield 2001: 136-60). The increase in Western interventionism is
occurring at a time when people are actively deserting the state . The vast literature on 'war economies', for example, is
illustrative of an innovative and radical self-reliance. Transborder and shadow economies have expanded at the same
time as a medley of actors - ranging from ethnic associations, clan leaders and religious groups to
warlords, Mafiosi and terrorist organizations - have all learned the biopolitical art of enfranchising the
dispossessed through alternative forms of protection, legitimacy and welfare as a necessary adjunct of
their own political survival (Tishkov 1997; Goldenburg 2001; Kent et al. 2004). Such 'actually existing development'
beyond and outside the state deepens the crisis of containment and gives urgency, for example, to Western
efforts to reconstruct fragile states and reterritorialize the people living within them . Apart from highlighting the
fact that such states have no established or centralized welfare function, the difficulty is that even if successfully reconfigured as governance
states, they can only promise the non-material salvation of sustainable development through social reorganization around basic needs and selfreliance. The success of surplus life in forging patterns of actually existing development beyond states
defines an important area of contestation and recapture within the framework of unending war . In one of the
few attempts to examine global development from a comparative welfare regime perspective, Wood and Gough (2006) identify three generic
types: the welfare state, the informal security regime and the insecurity regime. The last two are systems where self-reliance, in terms of the
familyzand community forms of reciprocity, provides the bulk of public welfare. The insecurity regime, however, corresponds to zones of crisis
and state fragility where these reciprocities have broken down. Whereas welfare states are characterized by the de-commodification of life, for
example, through protection from employment risks, within informal security regimes patron-client relations predominate. Reflecting the absence
of a mass labour market rather than de-commodification, especially within insecure societies, generalizing welfare is argued to require a process
of 'de-clientization' - that is, the practice 'of de-linking client dependants from their personalized, arbitrary and discretionary entrapment to
persons with intimate power over them' (ibid.: 1708). In framing this argument, the authors have unwittingly rearticulated the global 'hearts and
minds' role into which unending war has channelled development assistance (DAC 2003). When nationalists and liberation
movements sought to remake the state during the Cold War, such events were labelled as radical or even
revolutionary. Today, as the West takes on this role directly, it finds itself embroiled in expansive and
totalizing forms of counter-insurgency. The idea that an alternative development lies in the 'insuring' of
the non-insured raises many difficulties. Given the widespread desertion of the borderland state by the
dispossessed, such endeavours easily become means of recapturing and bolstering the West's own
security; in other words, it would have to contend with the governance function of insurance-based technologies of biopower. This
includes the importance of welfare rights as a means of excluding migrants and encoding racial identity
and conflict in mass consumer society. At the same time, through the digitalization of life processes, insurance technologies are
providing increasingly finely textured mechanisms for the monitoring and modulation of conduct more generally (Ericson and Doyle 2003).
These difficulties suggest that, in attempting to rescue the emancipatory urge embedded in development, we
should consider following the lead of the dispossessed and global justice movements and also desert the
state (Patel and McMichael 2004). Or at least, in the process, the power of an already monstrously powerful state should
not be further extended or deepened. Freeing the impulse to protect and better should avoid measures that
further privilege the state or, like human security, invoke the state as central to its own existence. This
concern underlines the tragedy of the N GO movement and its hopeless enmeshment. That a distancing is required is also suggested from a
different but related quarter. During the course of the twentieth century, invoking a state of emergency has become a normal
and
accepted paradigm of government (Agamben 2005). Following Foucault, Agamben has argued that security can be
distinguished from disciplinary power in that the latter seeks to isolate and close territories in the pursuit
of order, while security 'wants to regulate disorder' (Agamben 2001: 1). A dangerous contemporary development is the thought
of security itself (Homqvist 2004). As security becomes the basic task of the state, politics is progressively
neutralized. The thought of security 'bears with it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole
task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become
itself terroristic' (Agamben 2001). Between terrorism and counter-terrorism a curious complicity exists in
which each needs the other for its own existence, whether as a legitimation of its own violence or a
justification for the draconian methods it requires in defending society. Both share a common ground in
the acceptance of a design of war that privileges the state. During the Cold War the geopolitical stand-off between nucleararmed superpowers was underpinned by the threat of 'mutually assured destruction' or MAD. Today we have acquired a sort of
biopolitical MADness that interconnects the survival and various fundamentalisms of insurgents and
counter-insurgents alike in the fateful and mutually conditioning embrace of unending war. In this
encounter the inevitable victor is the state and the unavoidable victim is politics itself. Like actually
existing development, the pursuit of emancipation involves working beyond and outside the state,
ignoring rather than confronting it, as part of the rediscovery of politics in the practical solidarity of the
governed.
wall, discipline the bodies of those who cross, and make a profit from deporting the rest. Crossing the
physical border wall marks an incorporeal criminal transformation of the migrant . It marks the migrants
exit from one set of institutions (the system of poverty, vio- lence, exploitative labor conditions, and other results of N.A.F.T.A in
Mexico) into a network of other institutions (the detention camps, work place and school raids, and the racism of the US).40 The
wall, the prison, and the workplace thus function as part of a single carceral series intensifying the
criminality of that one brief misdemeanor, unlawful entry, that now requires their infinite retraining
through detention, surveillance, and disciplined behavior in the precarious shadows of US institutions.
Migrants cross the wall one or more times. This has two effects: it creates a criminalization in both material and discursive senses41
and it produces subjects who are persistent and can endure hardship. As criminalized, migrants enter a work-place system where
their daily movements and actions are surveilled and orchestrated by their bosses, but they also endure the
additional disciplinary condition of institutionalized precarity: their perpetual deportability .42 The constant
threat of deportation creates a fear, docility, and psychic instability that aids in the effective management of bodily labor. Every minor labor
infraction or deviant behavior could result in detention and deportation. Consequently, migrants also fill detention centers,
prisons, and deportation facilities. In these facilities their daily movements are con- trolled (meals, commissary,
exercise, lights out, etc.); they are under constant surveillance; they often wait months or years in jail without conviction, and they often have
difficulty communicating with legal representatives or with immigration officials due to both language differences and access. This whole
group of technologies creates a distinct kind of subjectification. Although the initial journey to the wall
itself does not in every way follow the close temporal articulation of bodily movements that Foucault
discusses in nineteenth century pris- ons, the actual process of crossing the wall does to some degree. The
way one must dress, look, speak, etc. when presenting a false I.D. is extremely precise, one must become normal
and legal. Even when one crosses the wall outside of town or in the desert there is a very carefully orchestrated activity of waiting in
silence for the time in the middle of the night be- tween when the coyotes have dug a new hole in the wall and when the border guards have
patched it.49 Disciplinary power in the case of the border wall-prison-work system enforces aconformity to
the following normalized model of subjectivity: you will be prepared to be deported at any time, you will
be potentially watched under lights and cameras 24hrs a day, you will be hardworking enough to cross the wall multiple times,
endure detention and abuse, and be silent in your endurance. These are the signs of a successful nation of migrants conduct- ed by the wallprison-work system. After the US government had waived environmental laws and built the border wall, they went back in 2009 with $50 million
to assesses, restore, and mitigate the environmental damages of the wall. The Army Corps of Engineers detained, tagged, replanted, and monitored, various species of life. The presence alone of Army Corps, border patrol, and migrants, prepares the ecology of the desert and the behaviors
of the animals to be continually damaged, monitored, and then restored to a new normal. The most notable physical behavior is
restricted movement, decreased food and water sources, but the wildlife is also being trained to ad- just to
humans that bring food as well as food that is dead human bodies. Where there is vir- tual fence the animals, and even
rain, often set off the motion detectors that bring border pa- trol from miles away to verify the unlawful entry. Without actually being
arrested animals are performatively criminalized in their daily movements across the border . While
criminal- ized animals at the border are not arrested and put before a court of law, they are captured,
detained, transported, relocated, surveyed, and perhaps even shot at. Thus, strategically there are many similarities
between human an animal migrants in relation to disciplinary power. Criminalization is not merely a legal determination
made by a judge or human court of law, criminalization also includes a set of disciplinary and carceral
strategies. Insofar as many of these strategies also affect animals and other ecological entities, they are criminalized mi- grants.50 Every
motion in the desert is now being trained to deal with border patrol, constant surveillance, and intervention: the body of the desert is being
disciplined.
would in fact destroy the security market. Thus, the question is not how to stop migration but how to
optimally (a.k.a. profitably) manage the security environment through the circulation of what is structurally
an unpredictable and unstoppable flow of migrants.The chosen placement of the wall along the border is another
biopolitical strategy. It cuts through precarious wildlife habitat, and the private property of residents without the fi- nances to legally fight it,
while carefully building around well financed golf courses. It cuts through public parks, schools, low-income housing areas, industrial parks, and
urban and ru- ral watersheds causing flooding. This is not merely a matter of environmental devastation, classism, or racism, etc. it is a
productive investment opportunity for new real-estate and the gentrification of the built environment to , as
Foucault says, break up crowds and ensure hy- giene, ventilation, and commerce .58 Without direct punishment, or
disciplinary action, the wall is an environmental technology that shapes the natural conditions under which
water, plants, animals, and people are allowed to circulate and gather. One way to deter dissent is to break
up public areas and privatize them. These are some of the biopolitical strategies that make up the US/Mexico border wall. But these
strategies do not simply exist in parallel with sovereign and disciplinary strategies; they also form points of conflict as well as confluence
between them.
Link Energy
Their mindless production and securitization of energy is a weapon of neoliberal
population control and the enclosure of the commons.
Hildyard et al 12 Nicholas, The Corner House, Larry Lohmann and Sarah Sexton.12 Energy Security
For Whom? For What? February 2012
Commons regimes tend to enshrine both a common right to human survival and respect for nonhuman
agents. In 19th century England, John Clare, the poet of the commons, saw the human suffering that resulted from enclosure of fields, woods
and streams as indivisible from the degradation of the nonhuman world as it was partly converted into resources and its nurture abandoned. In the
Andes today, movements for buen vivir and against water and land privatisation and mineral extraction are closely tied to agitation in support of
the rights of nature. Historically, the development of the concept of Energy with a capital E deriving as it
does from the developments of the fossil fuel era constitutes a threat to this right to live of both
humans and nonhumans. As geographer Matthew Huber notes: with the development of large scale fossilized
industry, provisioning the right to live did not suit the needs of the emerging industrial capitalist class41
as steam engines were clamoring for freedom and machines were crying out for human hands . In England,
the Poor Law reforms of 1834 did away with the right to live and established a national waged labour market, complete with a reserve army of
unemployed whose existence helped limit worker power over wages and conditions. Fossil fuels also helped make possible national and then
global prices for the necessities of life, rendering local, survival-ensuring fair prices a thing of the past. Profits from the massively increased
production of the fossil fuel era needed massively extended trade in order to be realised, as well as for all the raw materials involved. The long
distances involved necessitated competition to reduce turnover time between investment and payoff. Transport time had to be quickened (and thus
fossilised) too.42 Fossilintensive transportation networks were locked in, becoming the basis for yet further expansions. While little price
convergence had occurred prior to 1800,43 prices steadily became less responsive to local circumstances as global commodity markets began to
emerge. Railways ensured that the price spread between wheat sold in the United States grainproducing heartland of Iowa and that in New York
dropped from 69 per cent to 19 per cent between 1870 and 1914.44 Transatlantic voyages dropped from five weeks in the 1840s to 12 days by
1913; today, oil-powered containerships continue to shave transit times.45 By 2007 international trade flows were 30 times greater than in 1950,
although output was only 8 times greater. As the right to survival of individual humans has been undermined by the fossil-fuelled expansion of
commodity relations, so, too, has respect for nonhuman nature. The record of fossil fuel extraction from the
contamination of the Ecuadorean Amazon and the Niger Delta to the removal of mountaintops in the coal
fields of Appalachia to the Torrey Canyon and Exxon Valdez oil tanker wrecks to the gigantic BP oil spill
in the Gulf of Mexico has consistently been one of disregard for water, air, land and living things. This
disregard has once again undermined the bases of survival for innumerable human communities. Securing
supplies of fossil fuels in the name of Energy has tended everywhere to threaten the diverse forms of livelihoods associated with the commons.
Nowadays, upper-case Energy itself has taken on the aura of a survival good. In the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon: universal
energy access . . . is a foundation for all the Millennium Development Goals, particularly for more than 1.3 billion people worldwide who have
no electricity. 46 And new struggles for the commons are being waged around modern energy forms, as well as around oil itself. For example,
under the banner of the right of all to survive regardless of their income or social status, movements to decommodify electricity are springing up
in the deprived urban areas of South Africa, insisting that it should be accessible to all, and making links with movements against privatisation of
basic pharmaceutical drugs and other goods. But in an age in which movements that link the right to live of humans
and nonhumans constitute what Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek calls the cutting edge of progressive politics, it is
crucial to remember the destructive role played by the emergence of abstract Energy in struggles against
enclosure and privatisation. Among those who lack access to modern energy, ironically, are many who have been displaced to make
way for hydroelectric dams, coal mines and power plants, many of whom are excluded from access to other subsistence necessities as well. If
security has anything to do with survival, any discussion of energy security needs to confront the implications.47
McWilliams appears to recognize that U.S. foreign policy has weaknesses that must be addressed. In this case, he argues that globalization is
doing harm to the worlds workers, that it is a mistake to ignore these escalating problems, that U.S. laborparticularly because of its relations with labor
around the worldis uniquely capable of presenting labors concerns to foreign policy makers, and that labor should be reincorporated
into the governments foreign policy processes: The U.S. would benefit from engaging international labor in the pursuit of shared goals such as democratization, political stability and equitable
economic and social development. An alliance between the U.S. and labor today would focus on worker rights, including ensuring that economic development is not based on the exploitation of
child labor, forced labor or employment that discriminates against women and minorities, and on economic justice, ensuring that globalizations benefits flow to all and not simply to the few best
placed to profit from it. A revitalized labor diplomacy today would foster democratic freedoms by shoring up fragile democracies, just as the U.S. labor alliance of the Cold War era did.
(emphasis added) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recognized the strength of the argument, even before McWilliams published it. After receiving the first report by the ACLDA World of
Decent Work: Labor Diplomacy for the New Centuryand having a couple of months to evaluate its recommendations, Secretary Albright stated at the November 8, 2000, meeting of the
ACLD, I am absolutely convinced after four years of doing this job that we cant have a successful U.S. foreign policy without effective labor diplomacy. She also added: And becoming a part
of the US Government may not have been something you intended in this way, but I do believe it has been a very important partnership. (emphasis added)17 The ACLD, although initially only
interests. (emphasis added) This emphasis can further be seen in the title of the ACLDs second report, Labor Diplomacy: In the Service of Democracy and Security. There is a lot of talk in
necessary components of strategies to prevent and counter terrorist activities. Effective labor diplomacy is important in informing American analysis and shaping its policy to combat the
conditions that breed terrorism around the world. (emphasis added) Further, the 2001 report argues, the promotion of democracy needs to be part of any sustainable U.S.-led effort to combat
countries. (emphases added) So, without beating the issue to death, it is clear that by the second ACLD report, ACLD members are seeing labor diplomacy as a vital part of U.S. foreign policy
and national security efforts, and they are encouraging the Bush administration to address areas of concern that they have identified.18 This certainly includes conditions that they believe
facilitate terrorism, and particularly within the Muslim world. And yet, they state that labor has already been working within the Muslim world, trying to win the hearts and minds of workers in
these countries. But while great concern is expressedagain and again in the reportfor U.S. national security, concern for the well-being of the worlds workers and any possible expressions of
mutually-beneficial solidarity-based actions by the AFL-CIO are all but absent. Now, obviously,
one advanced throughout almost all of the governments foreign policy public documents. The evidence presented in this paper has shown that
was terribly reactionary. It acted against democracy in a number of societies and labor movements as well as internally within the U.S. labor movement
itself as it sought to maintain U.S. hegemony in the world. McWilliams acknowledges and even celebrates the close ties between labor and government during that period, and argues for their
yet he claims that the shared interest of labor and the government is to spread democracy.
reestablishment. And
How can these contradictory claims/realities be resolved? To do this, it is useful to turn to William Robinsons Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony.19 In an
excellent analysis of U.S. foreign policy, Robinson argues that this policy began shifting in the mid-1980s from supporting any dictator who promised fealty and control of his people to
intervening actively in the civil society of targeted nations for the purposes of building support among the more conservative politicians (including labor leaders), and for linking their interests
with the United States. Key to this are democracy-promoting operations. However, while using the rhetoric of popular democracythe one-person, one-vote grassroots-driven version that
we are taught in civics courses and supposedly exists herethe United States is, in fact, promoting polyarchal or top-down, elite-driven, democracy. This polyarchal democracy suggests that
citizens get to choose their leaders when, in fact, they only get to choose between those presented as possible choices by the elites of that country. In addition, viable solutions to social problems
can only emerge from possibilities presented by the elites. In other words, polyarchal democracy only appears to be democratic; in reality it is not. And institutionally, the United States projects
this polyarchal democracy through its democracy-building programs, especially through USAID and the Department of State. State, in turn, channels its money and its efforts through the
National Endowment for Democracy, upon which the 2001 report comments: The National Endowment for Democracy (a government-supported but independent agency) funds its four core
grantee institutions, including the Solidarity Center, as well as a large number of grantee groups around the world. This understanding provides a means to decipher government reports.
When they promote democracy and claim it is one of the four interrelated goals of U.S. foreign policyalong with stability, security, and prosperity in
reality, it is a particular form of democracy, a form of democracy that has no relation to the popular
democracy that most Americans think of when they hear the word. When labor leaders use the term democracy in this manner, they are collaborating with the
government against workers around the world, both in the United States and overseas. Where does all this leave us? The AFL-CIOs unwillingness to clear
the air appears to be not an oversight or a mistake. It seems a conscious decision because foreign policy leaders fear a backlash from union members should their long-lasting perfidy become
The AFL-CIO, through its American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), was actively
involved with both the CTV and FEDECAMARAS in Venezuela before the April 2002 coup, and these organizations both helped lead the coup
widely known, as they should.
attempt. ACILS was given over $700,000 by the National Endowment for Democracy for work in that country between 1997 and 2002. These efforts and receipt of the money were not reported
to AFL-CIO members and, in fact, the AFL-CIO has actively worked to keep these operations from being known, despite a growing number of AFL-CIO affiliated organizations formally
requesting this information. These activities and receipt of this money has not been reported in any labor press, including its own Web site, by the AFL-CIO. And this intentional refusal to
to the U.S. government has been established, there has been no or little benefit to workers either in the United States or in the rest of the world. Again, there has been no transparency by the AFL-
sought. Should this continue to be the case, it is clear that labor activists must consider their own future actions in regards to AFL-CIO foreign policy. The well-being of workers in the United
States and around the worldand our allieswill be deeply affected by the choices made.
The contrast between this legacy of relatively symmetrical labour internationalism and the trans-border activism
of the NAFTA era is particularly striking and has attracted academic comment (Carr, 1996). Since 1994, most transborder
worker and union initiatives, whether they involve bureaucratic petitioning under the NAALC or
information exchange and solidarity efforts between unions on the ground in Mexico, the United States and Canada, have
originated in the north either in the United States or Canada. In the discourse of NAFTA labour
internationalism, Mexico is almost invariably constructed as the problem, the weak link in the
chain or a Trojan Horse for multinational capital. The advanced character of Mexican labour
legislation and the breadth of the social wage entitlements which Mexican workers have obtained over the
decades (their poor enforcement and constant violation notwithstanding) are not yet sufciently acknowledged in the
United States and Canada. Understandably, UNESCO 1999. southern actors (both the Mexican government and pro-government
unions) view the asymmetricality present in both the rhetorical construction and the material base of transborder labour cooperation as a cover for narrow FirstWorld labour protectionism and Mexico bashing .
Given that some of the most active transborder labour actors are linked to those northern unions that have been most vulnerable to capital and
labour ight, this is a not entirely inaccurate view. Some US protagonists (the Teamsters are an example) have occasionally
introduced chauvinist language into their presentation of labour solidarity issues. The current Teamster
campaign against the liberalization of access by Mexican truckers to the US market generates caricatures of Mexican truckers as ignorant
amateurs, with claims being made that untrained drivers have been given a licence to kill on US highways. Perhaps it is no surprise
that
US and Canadian unionists and workers have had difculty identifying suitable Mexican counterparts
with whom they can work on transborder issues. The FAT has had to carry most of the burden; yet it is a small and poorly
resourced organization. It is of course possible that Mexican unions and unionists interest in building transnational ties with US and Canadian
unions has been diminished by suspicions that northern unions have only begun talking about labour internationalism
Link Microfinance
Microfinance doesnt address the biopolitics of need, it only diffuses power from large
corporations
Bateman 10 (Milford, a professor of economics, Why Doesnt Microfinance Work?: The Destructive
rise of Neoliberalism)
Another core assumption built into the microfinance model is that the poor are empowered through microenterprises.
Indeed, microenterprises are said to open the way towards a qualitative transformation in the life of the poor. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has lauded the way that a microenterprise can
apparently empower an individual and release the heroic entrepreneur that supposedly lies within us all.13 Freed from bureaucratic structures and the boss, microenterprises are also said to
represent a new form of personal and business freedom. Perhaps most of all, microfinance is supposed to represent a magnificent chance to promote gender empowerment within society. This
impact of the microfinance concept, however, it is a wrong assumption to make. While historical experience is generally not always directly transferable, there are nevertheless some very
Reform of 1834 in England. As the economic historian Karl Polanyi shows in his classic study of economic history,14 this was the crucial intervention that introduced the modern institution of
the labour market Prior to this, the right to live, if necessary with the help of local charitable support for those unable to find gainful employment (the so-called Speenhamland system), was
guaranteed by society. The Poor Law Reform did away with this albeit minimal security. From then on, poor individuals would have to confront labour market forces on their own and survive
in any way they could. For the majority in the 1830s and 1840s, as intended, this meant quickly adapting to the rigours of wage employment within Englands rapidly expanding industries and
factories. For those unable to manage either wage labour in the new factories, or else continue to live as they had done before (for example, as home-based weavers or peasant farmers), the only
remaining option to avoid complete penury was to move into a range of survivalist individual activities what we would now call microenterprises. This new world of survivalist
microenterprises was exhaustively documented at the time by Henry Mayhew in his classic work London Labour and the London Poor. 15 Mayhew showed in graphic detail how midnineteenth-century England had very rapidly become a cornucopia of informal microenterprise survivalist activity. Both the old established aristocracy and the new industrial capitalist elites,
as well as Henry Mayhew himself,16 were very supportive of the rapid rise of these new informal survivalist activities. The proliferation of such activities would, for a start, justify reducing
the charitable burden then placed on the rich. Also, with more family members contributing to the family income through such activity, including any young children, there was likely to be
much less upward pressure on factory wages. Perhaps the most important survival aspect so far as business elites in nineteenth-century England were concerned, however, was their own.
Supporting the expansion of petty survivalist activities helped to steer the poor away from more transformational activities that risked upsetting the social order. Wrapped up in the act of merely
surviving from one day to the next, the poor tended to have very little time, energy or knowledge to get involved in anything else. They therefore offered very little participation in the great
number of popular movements getting under way at that time trade unionism, cooperativism, communism-socialism, anarcho-syndicalism and those seeking the universal franchise (the
Chartists) even though these movements held up the very real prospect of an eventual exit from extreme poverty and degradation. The poor were thus contained thanks to microenterprise
activity: that is, they were disempowered. Life was made a lot safer both for the new industrial capitalists and the old aristocracy they were in the process of displacing. One individual who
very quickly recognized the significance of this disempowerment was Karl Marx. The lumpenproletariat, Marx regretfully intoned the term he coined for this class of desperately poor
individuals17 were so docile and downtrodden, so self-absorbed in their own immediate survival, and so thoroughly lacking in hope for the longer term, that they could not be counted upon to
play a major role in the revolutionary dismantling of capitalism. Largely thanks to the many new social movements just mentioned, which led to the growing collective capability to bring
about the required changes of most benefit to the poor, things did begin to change for the better; but through successful evolution, not revolution. But perhaps history has turned a corner. If not
in the past, then maybe today microenterprises are instruments leading to the empowerment of the poor? This proposition, however, does not seem to be backed up by any evidence either.
As
nineteenth-century economic liberalism was famously reborn in the 1980s under the contemporary
rubric of neoliberalism, important elements of this disempowerment approach quickly resurfaced in the
developed countries. As David Harvey sums up in his 2006 book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, even neoliberals are in pretty much full agreement on what was the
central aim of the UK and US governments labour market policy thrust in the 1980s and 1990s: to promote self-employment as a way of
disempowering organized labour in particular, and the lower classes in general, thereby to (re-)empower
the narrow business class.18 And such policies were very successful too, as many noted labour economists reported.19 Moreover, the US and UK governments naturally
took steps to ensure that such favoured neoliberal labour market policies were also projected into the developing and transition countries too. Given the US governments effective control over
policy development in the key international development agencies, notably with regard to the World Bank and the IMF, this was not too difficult. It should come as no surprise to find that
similar disempowering outcomes as in the US and UK economies have thus been the overwhelming result in almost every developing and transition country.20 So there would appear to be very
incrementally provided with a few privileges as a way of controlling any possible intention to reject the entire experience of prison life (say, by escaping or by suicide), even if the average poor
micro-entrepreneur is afforded some minimal control over a few trivial matters concerning her working life when to start work, what clothes to wear, when to take lunch, and so on this
rules and modes of operation, serves to enroll subjects into Grameen entrepreneurialism and associated subjective modalities. In the
second stage, this first operation is linked to the simultaneous discipline of both individuals and peers .
Here the linking of provision of a loan to one member with the behavior of other members of the group,
initially through the mechanism of a time delay, is a particularly innovative and important part of this
technique since it establishes a direct relation between personal desire or need and the imperative to
discipline others. Through the disciplinary technique of the loan committee, examination is deployed continuously. This
extends from the initial oral examination regarding rules and procedures of Grameen to the supervision by the bank officer of the initial
repayments and then to the peer supervision enacted by members. It is in this disciplinary context that stringent loan
conditions can be met and that the very poor are judged a good credit risk .[88] Disciplinary rituals carried
out at the loan centers complement the peer accountability engendered through the structure and
operation of the loan committee. While the operation of power is more diffuse as microcredit recipients
go about their daily lives, the loan center is the site where the lines of force of the disciplinary technology
of Grameen microcredit are gathered together and are most dense . Before the weekly meetings with the bank officer,
recipients gather at the loan center and assemble in a matrix according to their loancommittee groups.[89] When the bank officer is present and
all members are assembled, the members rise, salute, and recite the Grameen Bank credo: "Discipline, Unity, Courage, and Hard Work." This
ritual precedes physical exercises and collection of payments from members.[90] In his observation of Grameen loan-center operations, David
Bornstein notes that the "rules [of Grameen] act as a tight web ... ensuring that villagers are brought together frequently in a setting where they
are forced to answer for their actions before all eyes."[91] As the meeting closes, members recite Grameen's sixteen disciplinary imperatives-injunctions such as: Prosperity we shall bring to our families. We shall grow vegetables all year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the
surplus. We shall always keep our children and the environment clean. For higher income we shall collectively undertake bigger investments.If
we come to know of any breach of discipline in any center, we shall all go there and help restore discipline.[92] While Grameen's practice of
targeting poor women is broadly seen as commendable by outside donors and lenders, closer scrutiny reveals a different story, and in fact, in
accounting for the high percentage of women members, it is found that the Grameen disciplinary imperatives extend beyond the
techniques of the loan committee and the operation of the procedures at center meetings . Rahman shows that
while the official line is that targeting women provides faster improvements in family conditions and solidarity for women, the bank practice of
actually excluding men from the program and focusing on women has much more to do with women being more
This local operation of discipline systematically integrates microcredit recipients into the financial
and economic networks of the microcredit organization and the development dispositif on a long-term
basis. The MCS reports that one of the characteristics of successful microcredit programs is "the incentive of access to larger loans following
successful repayment of first loans."[96] The result is that people may be recipients of microcredit for many years .
[95]
In reporting favorably on the operation of Grameen, Matthews states that after ten years of borrowing, 48 percent of borrowers had crossed the
poverty line.[97] Slightly more optimistic is Yunus's quoting of figures that after eight to ten years, 57 percent of Grameen borrowers had
escaped poverty.[98] That it should take such a number of years to significantly improve the situation of approximately one-half of Grameen
Bank recipients signals the high repayment rates, lack of concessionality, and linkage of local branches with the rest of the lending organization
and its broader imperatives. In the case of Grameen, branches borrow from headquarters at 12 percent and lend at 20 percent.[99] The margin is,
of course, extracted from the recipients in the microcredit programs. In the spirit of entrepreneurialism, this allows the branches to become
profitable and Grameen to expand its operations.
Link Privatization
The hidden side-effects of privatization prove the diffuse and tricky nature of power
Baer and Birch 1994(Werner Baer and Melissa H. Birch, is an American economist at the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Jorge Lemann Professor of Economics. He received his Bachelor's
degree from Queen's College and a Master's and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Associate Professor.
Summerfield Education. PhD University of Illinois Masters University of Illinois. Privitization in Latin
America: New Roles for the Public and Private Sectors pg 33-34.)
From the standpoint of employment, the disincorporation process has had a devastating effect on workers in those industries in which major sales, liquidations, and/or
mergers have occurred, such as mining, steel, truck and auto parts, fertilizers, sugar, and secondary petrochemicals. A study conducted by the Treasury Secretariat of
Privatizations between 1983 and 1989 revealed that privatizations resulted in the direct loss of more than 200,000 jobs in the
aforementioned industries.20 Workers' syndicates affiliated with the CTM also reported job losses of up to 200,000 distributed in industries such as steel (40,000),
petroleum (20,000 to 135,000), mining (15,000 to 20,000), truck and auto parts (5,000), fertilizers (3,000), and sugar (2,000).21 Moreover, this
management. It is imperialism in a hurry, to spend money, to get results, to turn the place back to locals
and get out (ibid.). For Ignatieff, if there is a problem with this new interventionism, it is that it does not practise the partnership and
empowerment that it preaches and is dogged by short-termism and promises betrayed. There is also another and broader
conception of trusteeship. Although connected, it lacks the spectacle and immediacy of Ignatieffs territorial laboratories of postinterventionary society (ibid.: 20). Since it is more pervasive and subtle, however, it is arguably more significant. While also having a
liberal genealogy, it is about securing freedom by supporting households and community organizations, based
on the small-scale ownership of land or property, in their search for economic autonomy and the
possibilities for political existence that this affords. It is a trusteeship that encourages local level selfreliance and self-realization both through and against the state (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 5). Such a trusteeship
operates today in the ideas and institutions of sustainable development. It can be seen in the moral, educative and
financial tutelage that aid agencies exert over the attitudes and behaviour of those subject to such development (Pupavac 2005). Although a
relation of governance, it nonetheless speaks in terms of empowerment and partnership (Cooke and Kothari 2001). While Western politicians
currently argue that enlightened self-interest interconnects development and security, for those insecure humans living within
ineffective states the reality of this virtuous circle is, once again, an educative trusteeship that aims to
change behaviour and social organization according to a curriculum decided elsewhere .
Links Advantages
Link China
The affirmatives China advantage proves our link they produce China as a threat, which
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and turns case
Al-Rodhan 7 [Khalid, A Critique of the China Threat Theory: A Systemic Analysis, Asian
Perspective Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2007 62-64]
the United States have
sensationalized their claims by painting an all-powerful, threatening China bent on the destruction of the
United States. These claims, as was shown in the previous sections, are speculative at best. With the exception of a few China and
international relations specialists, it must be stressed that most scholars have been more nuanced about analyzing the
China threat. The problem, however, is that these scholars are not always listened to; recent history provides us with many
There is no easy way to analyze the China threat theory. Journalists, strategic thinkers, and pundits in
examples of nuance being replaced by exaggeration and irrational threat assessments. The rise of China is certainly an important topic to study
and analyze by lay people and academics alike, and the scholarship on this subject is diverse. Analyzing the threat posed by China to East Asia
and the United States is certainly an important factor in understanding the policy implications of the rise of China. However, the China
threat theory is, on balance, as misleading as it is counterproductive. Methodologically, the China threat is a
hypothesis about the future. Its supporting examples are imperfect analogies (e.g., to Kaiser Wilhelms Germany). Each
nations experience is different and so are the circumstances of the international order . Projecting from these
assumptions tends to skew predictions. The forecast that China will be a threat to U.S. national security is a worstcase estimate. It assumes that Chinas economy and military will continue to grow at the same rates, that
its social cohesion will not be disrupted, and that political stability will not be seriously challenged. These
assumptions may hold, but they also may not. The theoretical foundations of the China threat suffer from two
contradictions. First, it is based on an assumption about Chinese grand strategic intentions. Guessing
intentions is often a fruitless exercise. It leads to nothing more than guesstimates about possible futures.
The China threat theory, simply put, chooses the worst-case scenario of those possible futures ; proponents of the
theory often use language that reflects certainty and inevitability. Second, as with many theories, there are exceptions to Mearsheimers
offensive realism; the most recent example is the rise of the U nited States without war during the early 20th
century. Neorealists would argue that the United States and Great Britain, the dominant powers at that time, had shared values, which made
a war unlikely. This is, however, a unit-level explanation that would not pass the test of systemic theories under neorealism. In either case, the
important point to highlight here is that if internal factors matter, then there are many indicators that would point to a different future from the one
envisioned by offensive realists. Strategically, the China threat thesis is as dangerous as it is misleadin g. Arm waving by
policy makers in Washington can force China to militarize its intentions, even if they were benign, which
could lead to enhancing the tensions and making the China threat a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overestimating
the threat posed by any nation can lead to the wrong policies to contain the threat, which could hurt the United States strategically in the long run.
It is not at all clear what Chinas exact intentions are. Assuming the worst may be a wise strategy, if one discounts the threats China faces and its
security concerns, including instability in Central Asia, North Koreas nuclear weapons, maritime security in the Pacific, and the potential
militarization of Japan. To many, the combination of uncertain intentions and unverified capabilities tends to push the threat posed by China to a
new and uncomfortable level of insecurity. Nevertheless, the SinoAmerican relationship has benefited from the strategic ambiguity that has
prevailed since the 1970s. The United States and China have avoided conflicts, despite domestic pressures (whether
on Taiwan or on economic manipulations); they
Link Competitiveness
Competitiveness rhetoric is used to construct an economic population to be defended
through neoliberal warfare
Bristow, 5 ( Gillian, BA (Hons) First Class: Economics, Cardiff University (1991). PhD, Cardiff University, Everyones a
winner: problematising the discourse of regional competitivenessPg 299-300
Evolutionary, survival of the ttest basis of the regional competitiveness discourse clearly resonates with
this evaluative culture. The discourse of competitiveness strongly appeals to the stratum of policy makers
and analysts who can use it to justify what they are doing and/or to nd out how well they are doing it
relative to their rivals. This helps explain the interest in trying to measure regional competitiveness and the development of composite
indices and league tables. It also helps explain why particular elements of the discourse have assumed particular signicanceoutput indicators
of rm performance are much easier to compare and rank on a single axis than are indicators relating to institutional behaviour, for example. This
in turn points to a central paradox in measures of regional competitiveness. The key ingredients of rm competitiveness and regional prosperity
are increasingly perceived as lying with assets such as knowledge and information which are, by denition, intangible or at least difcult to
measure with any degree of accuracy. The obsession with performance measurement and the tendency to reduce
complex variables to one, easily digestible number brings a kind of blindness with it as to what is really
important (Boyle, 2001, 60)in this case, how to improve regional prosperity. Thus while a composite index number of
regional competitiveness will attract widespread attention in the media and amongst policymakers and development agencies, the difculty
presented by such a measure is in knowing what exactly needs to be targeted for appropriate remedial action. All of this suggests that
regional competitiveness is more than simply the linguistic expression of powerful exogenous interests. It
has also become rhetoric. In other words, regional competitiveness is deployed in a strategic and
persuasive way, often in conjunction with other discourses (notably globalisation) to legitimate specic
policy initiatives and courses of action. The rhetoric of regional competitiveness serves a useful political
purpose in that it is easier to justify change or the adoption of a particular course of policy action by
reference to some external threat that makes change seem inevitable. It is much easier for example, for politicians to
argue for the removal of supply-side rigidities and exible hire-and-re workplace rules by suggesting that there is no alternative and that jobs
would be lost anyway if productivity improvement was not achieved. Thus, the language of external
competitiveness...provides a rosy glow of shared endeavour and shared enemies which can unite captains
of industry and representatives of the shop oor in the same big tent (Turner, 2001, 40). In this sense it is a
discourse which provides some shared sense of meaning and a means of legitimising neo-liberalism rather
than a material focus on the actual improvement of economic welfare .
Link Crime
The invocation of the spectacle of crime is a tool to expand neoliberal governmentality and
discipline abnormal bodies marked as criminal.
Corva, 07 (Dominic, BS, Economics, University of Houston. BA, Creative Writing, University of
Arizona. MA and PhD, Geography, University of Washington. Neoliberal globalization and the war on
drugs: Transnationalizing illiberal governance in the Americas print)
The welfarist state logic saw criminal behavior as connected to root social causes such as poverty and
racism, and sought to reintegrate its subjects as productive members of society (Beckett&Sasson, 2000).This
medicalization of criminal justice practices characterizes a liberal approach in which the deviant
behavior of individuals is correctable, both through professional management within the carceral systemand through the expansion
of social entitlement programs. The logic of the penal state emphasizes a neoliberal, risk-management approach
through its emphasis on deterrence, but also requires a complementary intensification of the states power
to incapacitate: juridically contracteded threats against the freedom of bad citizens. The latter is underwritten by a distinctly
(neo)conservative3 ideology. OMalley (2000: 92) critiques 1990s literatures that focus on the neoliberalism of crime control rationalities by
distinguishing from them a conservative response that emphasizes the duty of the state to act strongly in a
sovereign capacity to uphold the rule of law, to intervene purposefully and to punish and exclude
transgressors. OMalley reminds us of Foucaults classic formulation of governmentality as the articulation of
sovereign, disciplinary, and economic rationality e not the total eclipse of the pre-liberal first by the other two (Foucault, 1991).
In the contemporary context, the sovereign power to punish criminals is illiberal (instead of pre-liberal or nonliberal) through its historically and geographically particular articulation with liberal ideas and practices that
define the rule of law as the defense of political and economic freedom. In the U.S., the turn to penal state criminal
justice practices emphasizing incapacitation and deterrence began in the 1970s. The new criminal justice subject changed from the individual
with behaviors that can be corrected to abnormal behaviors attached to bodies that must be excluded from the population. The abstraction
of behaviors from the bodies which perform them responsibilizes individuals to distinguish morally
right behavior from wrong and self-govern accordingly. The logic of the punitive deterrence is to
make crime pay so people will avoid costly criminal behaviors (Beckett, 1997). In this formulation, the penal
state is the power-effect of risk-management techniques, and the rise of mass incarceration is the result of
the application of neoliberal rationality to an increasingly large population of disorderly, dispossessed
urban subjects (Garland, 2001). This formulation raises two empirical questions: is there an increasingly large population of disorderly
urban subjects, and if not, then why the prison population explosion? Beckett and Sasson (2000: 16) answer the first question in the negative,
noting that the rate of violent crime in the U.S. has remained relatively stable since 1973, while the rate of property crime has fallen dramatically.
What has increased, they argue, is spectacle-oriented media coverage of violent crime , which feeds into
widespread popular and bipartisan support for tough on crime measures characteristic of penal state
restructuring. As geographer Ruth Gilmore (1998: 270) puts it, it is the greater propensity to lock people up, as
opposed to peoples greater propensity to do old or new illegal things, that accounts for 90% of U.S.
prison growth since 1980. The greater propensity to lock people up, according to Beckett and Sasson, comes from the confluence of late
20th century capitalist media practices oriented towards producing social spectacles for profit, and the depoliticization of social relations that
produce crime and criminals by their transformation into bipartisan electoral capital. The logic of federal tough on crime politics can best
be understood as part of an attempt by U.S. Democrats to wrest the Senate and the presidency from Republicans, by outflanking them on
neoconservative planks of morality and social order. This strategy mirrored the Democratic move to outflank Republicans on questions of
economic neoliberalism (Reaganomics), as the welfare state was restructured into the workfare state under the Clinton administration (Peck,
2001).
Link Democracy
Promotion of democracy puts a benevolent face on US domination its a tool to draw
developing countries under the umbrella of US imperialism
Ayers 6, Allsion J. Ayers, D.Phil in International Relations/International Political Economy from the
University of Sussex and assistant professor of political science at Simon Frase University,
Demystifying Democratisation: The Global Constitution of (Neo)Liberal Polities in Africa, Thirld
World Quarterly, p. 334-335
The dominant social agents of the democratisation project are clearly intent on constituting (neo)liberal polities
and establishing the (neo)liberal, procedural notion of democracy as hegemonic . The impetus to constitute
African social relations in its own image may be partially attributable to liberalism's universalist pretensions :
not compelling for only certain peoples at certain times, but for all human beings at all times in all places.84 Such claims are highly problematic.
Social foundations to justify liberalism as universally valid have proved elusive. Indeed, as Margaret Canovan has argued, liberalism has never
constituted an account of the world, but rather 'a project to be realised'. Liberal thought and practice historically (currently manifest in the form of
democracy and government interventions) when faced with 'difference', 'does indeed have its own broad conception of the good... which it is
engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially and culturally wherever it has the power to do so'.85 But an understanding of why the major
players in the international system are intent on pursuing the internationalisation of (neo)liberal
democracy can not be restricted to the realm of ideas (broadly construed). Ideas have materiality: the ruling
ideas of an epoch constitute the dominant material relations grasped as ideas .86 Liberal democracy
maintains an organic relation with capitalism. It is in this relation, this article contends, that we may begin to understand the greatpower-defined agenda of 'democratisation'. Western accounts of democratic thought and practice habitually invoke the ancient concept of
Athenian democracy as their starting point.87 However, the modern liberal notion of democracy originates not in Athenian democracy but in
European feudalism and culminates in liberal capitalism. In this historical trajectory the struggle for the 'rights' and 'liberties' of
individuals, characteristic of liberal democracy, arose in large part from the interests of the nascent capitalist
class in England concerned by arbitrary and unlimited state power. It was only later that these principles were appropriated and
associated with the idea of 'democracy'.88 It was with the emergence of capitalist social property relations that it became possible to conflate or to
reduce democracy to liberalism. With the separation of the 'economic' and the 'political' domains, intrinsic to capitalism, there emerged a separate
'economic' sphere constituted by its own power relations not dependent on juridical or political privilege. Liberal democracy 'leaves untouched
[this] whole new sphere of domination and coercion created by capitalism'. Much recent commentary on the global nature of capitalism has
argued that its economic realm has expanded. beyond the capabilities of liberal-democratic politics, but liberal democracy, whether in its
institutional or ideational form, was never intended to extend its reach into the 'economic' realm: The very condition that makes it
possible to define democracy as we do in modern liberal capitalist societies is the separation and enclosure of the
economic sphere and its invulnerability to democratic power. Protecting that invulnerability has ... become
an essential criterion of democracy. This definition allows us to invoke democracy against the empowerment
of the people in the economic sphere.
Link Economics
Economic engagement relies on the orientalist subjugation of Latin American alternatives
to economic modernity. Economics is cultural, not universal their implicit belief in
economic rationality produces normalized subjects amenable to the dictates of biopolitical
neoliberalism.
Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies,
UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World
Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologas Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e Historia, Bogot,
Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD 1995, page
ECONOMICS AS CULTURE Needless to say, economists
illustrious realist tradition,
it. Theirs is not, as Patricia Williams writes referring to the law in ways that are equally applicable to economics, an imposition of an orderthe
ironclad imposition of a world view (1991, 28). At issue, Williams continues, is a structure in which a cultural code has been inscribed
(1991, 19; my emphasis). This inscription of the economic onto the cultural took a long time to develop, as the philosopher Charles Taylor
explains: There are certain regularities which attend our economic behavior, and which change only very
slowly. . . . But it took a vast development of civilization before the culture developed in which people do so behave, in which it became a
cultural possibility to act like this; and in which the discipline involved in so acting became widespread enough for this behaviour to be
generalized. . . . Economics can aspire to the status of a science, and sometimes appear to approach it, because
there has developed a culture in which a certain form of rationality is a (if not the) dominant value.
(Taylor
1985, 103). What is the cultural code that has been inscribed into the structure of economics? What vast development of civilization resulted in
the present conception and practice of the economy? The answer to this question is complex and can only be hinted at here. Indeed, the
development and consolidation of a dominant view and practice of the economy in European history is one of the most fundamental chapters in
the history of modernity. An anthropology of modernity centered on the economy leads us to question the tales
of the market, production, and labor which are at the root of what might be called the Western economy.
These tales are rarely questioned; they are taken as normal and natural ways of seeing life, the way
things are. Yet the notions of economy, market, and production are historical contingencies. Their histories can be traced, their genealogies
demarcated, and their mechanisms of truth and power revealed. In short, the Western economy can be anthropologized and
shown to be made up of a peculiar set of discourses and practices very peculiar at that in the history of cultures. The
Western economy is generally thought of as a production system. From the perspective of the anthropology of modernity, however, the
Western economy must be seen as an institution composed of systems of production, power, and
signication. The three systems, which coalesced at the end of the eighteenth century, are inextricably linked to the
development of capitalism and modernity. They should be seen as cultural forms through which human
beings are made into producing subjects. The economy is not only, or even principally, a material entity. It is above all a cultural
production, a way of producing human subjects and social orders of a certain kind . Although at the level of
production the history of the Western economy is well knownthe rise of the market, changes in the productive forces and the social relations of
production, demographic changes, the transformation of everyday material life, and the commodication of land, labor, and moneyanalyses of
power and signication have been incorporated much less into the cultural history of the Western economy. How does power enter into the
history of the economy? Very briey, the institutionalization of the market system in the eigtheenth and nineteenth
centuries also required a transformation at the level of the individualthe production of what Foucault
(1979) has called docile bodiesand the regulation of populations in ways consistent with the movements
of capital. People did not go into the factories gladly and of their own accord; an entire regime of discipline and
normalization was necessary. Besides the expulsion of peasants and serfs from the land and the creation of a proletarian class, the
modern economy necessitated a profound restructuring of bodies, individuals, and social forms. This
restructuring of the individual and society was achieved through manifold forms of discipline, on the one
hand, and through the set of interventions that made up the domain of the social , to which I have alluded, on the other.
The result of this processHomo oeconomicuswas a normalized subject that produces under
certain physical and cultural conditions. To accumulate capital, spread education and health, and regulate
the movement of people and wealth required no less than the establishment of a disciplinary society
(Foucault 1979).3 At the level of signication, the rst important historical aspect to consider is the invention of the economy as an autonomous
domain. It is well known that one of the quintessential aspects of modernity is the separation of social life into functional spheres (the economy,
the polity, society, culture, and the like), each with laws of its own. This is, strictly speaking, a modern development. As a separate domain, the
economy had to be given expression by a proper science; this science, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, was called political
economy. In its classical formulation by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, political economy was structured around the notions of production and labor.
knowledge, as opposed to the dominant epistemology, which placed truth on the side of the individuals
mind; the contrast between a unilinear conception of history , in which the individual is the all-powerful actor, and a
materialist one, in which social classes appear as the motor of history; a denunciation of the natural character of the
market economy and a conceptualization, instead, of the capitalist mode of production, in which the market
appears as the product of history; and nally the crucial insight of commodity fetishism as a paradigmatic feature
of capitalist society. Marxs philosophy, however, faced limits at the level of the code.4 The hegemony of the code of
signication of political economy is the underside of the hegemony of the market as a social model
and a model of thought. Market culture elicits commitments not only from economists but also from all
those living with prices and commodities. Economic men and women are positioned in civil societes in
ways that are inevitably mediated, at the symbolic level, by the constructs of markets, production, and
commodities. People and nature are separated into parts (individuals and resources), to be recombined into market
commodities and objects of exchange and knowledge. Hence the call by critical analysts of market culture to remove political
economy from the centrality that it has been accorded in the history of modernity and to supersede the market as a generalized frame of reference
by developing a wider frame of reference to which the market itself might be referred (Polanyi 1957b, 270; Procacci 1991, 151; Reddy 1987).5 I
suggest that this wider frame of reference should be the anthropology of modernity. Anthropologists have been complicit with
the rationalization of modern economics, to the extent that they have contributed to naturalizing the
constructs of economy, politics, religion, kinship, and the like as the fundamental building blocks of all
societies. The existence of these domains as presocial and universal must be rejected. Instead, we
must ask what symbolic and social processes make these domains appear self-evident , and perhaps even
natural, elds of activity in any society (Yanagisako and Collier 1989, 41). The analysis of economics as culture must thus start
by subjecting to scrutiny the apparent organization of societies into seemingly natural domains. It must reverse the spontaneous
impulse to look in every society for economic institutions and relations separate from other social
relations, comparable to those of Western capitalist society (Godelier 1986, 18). This task of cultural critique
must begin with the clear recognition that economics is a discourse that constructs a particular picture of
the economy. To use Stephen Gudemans metaphor (1986; Gudeman and Rivera 1990), what we usually recognize as
economics is only one conversation among many regarding the economy; this conversation became
dominant throughout the centuries, thanks to the historical processes already sketched. Gudemans unveiling of the use in
anthropology of allegedly universal economic models is instructive: Those who construct universal models . . . propose that
within ethnographic data there exists an objectively given reality which may be captured and explained by
an observers formal model. They utilize a reconstructive methodology by which observed economic practices and beliefs are rst
restated in the formal language and then deduced or assessed with respect to core criteria such as utility, labor or exploitation. Although the
particular theories used in economic anthropology are quite diverse, they share the assumption that one or another
universal model exists and can be used to explain a given eld data . According to this perspective, a local model usually
is a rationalization, mystication or ideology; at most, it only represents the underlying reality to which the observer has privileged access. (1986,
28) Any model, however, whether local or universal, is a construction of the world and not an indisputable ,
objective truth about it. This is the basic insight guiding the analysis of economics as culture. The coming into dominance of modern
economics meant that many other existing conversations or models were appropriated, suppressed, or overlooked. At the margins of the
capitalist world economy, Gudeman and Rivera insist, there existed and continue to exist other models of the
economy, other conversations, no less scientic because they are not couched in equations or produced by
Nobel laureates. In the Latin American countryside, for instance, these models are still alive, the result of
overlapping conversations that have been carried out for a long time. I will come back to the notion of local models in the last section of the
There is, then, an orientalism in economics that has to be unveiled that is, a hegemonic effect
achieved through representations that enshrine one view of the economy while suppressing others. The
chapter.
critique of economics as culture, nally, must be distinguished from the better-known analysis of economics as rhetoric advocated by
McCloskey (1985). McCloskeys work is intended to show the literary character of economic science and the price economics has paid for its
blind adherence to the scientistic attitude of modernism. This author shows how literary devices systematically and inevitably pervade the science
of economics. His aim is to improve economics by bringing it into the realm of rhetoric. The aim of this chapter is quite different. Although some
rhetorical analysis is used, particularly in the reading of the economic development theories of the 1950s and 1960s, the analysis of
economics as culture goes well beyond the formal aspect of the rethoric of economics . How did particular
constructions of the economy come to exist? How do they operate as cultural forces? What practices do
these constructions create, and what are the resulting cultural orders? What are the consequences of
seeing life in terms of such constructions?
It was an extremely harmonious view of the economy, without politics, power, or history; an utterly
rational world, made even more abstract with the passing of time by the increasing use of mathematical
tools. Why did the neoclassical economists abandon classical concerns such as growth and distribution? A commonsense explanation is usually
put forward: Because capitalism became consolidated in the second half of the nineteenth century having
achieved remarkable rates of economic growth, elevated the living standards of the masses, and dispelled
the old fears of getting to a point where growth would no longer be possiblethe analytical
preoccupation with growth seemed superuous. The turn in analysis toward static and short-term
theoretical interests, such as the optimization of resource allocation and the decision behavior of
individuals and rms, was a logical step to follow .11 Once capitalism was decidedly working, the interest
of economists shifted to the ne-tuning of the operations of the system, including the rationalization of
decisions and the coordinated performance of markets toward an optimum equilibrium. The dynamic aspects of
the economy thus gave way to static considerations. It was what a development economist aptly called the static interlude (Meier 1984, 12528).
Progress had not been without vicissitudes, especially toward the end of the century (falling prices,
unemployment, business losses, class struggles, and workers organizations); but these problems would
fade away as the process of continued growth was not in doubt. And in spite of the fact that by the end of the century the
faith in the virtues of laissez-faire had been shaken (especially in relation to the need to control business monopoly), in 1870 most observers
believed that universal and perfect trade would reign unhindered. It was as if, the economy having achieved some degree of
apparent stability, economists busied themselves with the more mundane but theoretically exciting realm
of the quotidian. This condence was to be torn to pieces with the Great Depression. But by the time this happened, the great neoclassical
edice, built in the 1870s and furnished with impeccable precision in the next one hundred years, was rmly in place, shaping the discursive
rmament of the discipline. For Schumpeter (1954, 891909), however, the neoclassical revolution left untouched many of the elements of the
classical theory, including its sociological framework. The general vision of the economic process was still pretty much the same as in Mills
time. In short, despite its rejection of the labor theory of value, neoclassical economics inherited, and functioned within, the basic discursive
organization laid down during the classical period. The emphasis on individual satisfaction reinforced the atomistic bias
of the discipline; more than in classical thought, the economic system was irremediably identied with
the market, and economic inquiry with market conditions (especially prices) under which exchange takes place. The
problem of distribution was removed completely from the sphere of politics and social relations and
reduced to the pricing of inputs and outputs (the marginal productivity theory of distribution). By further isolating the economic
system, questions of class and property relations fell outside the scope of economic analysis ; analytical efforts
were directed instead to the question of optimization (Dobb 1973, 17283). The focus on particular static equilibriums, nally,
militated against the analysis of macro relations and questions of economic development from a more
holistic (for example, Marxist or Schumpeterian) perspective. The great neoclassical edice rested on two basic
assumptions: perfect competition and perfect rationality. Perfect and universal knowledge ensured that
existing resources would be optimally utilized, guaranteeing full employment. Economic man could go
about his business in peace because he could be condent that there was a corpus of theory , namely, marginal
utility and general equilibrium, which, because it had recourse to a perfect knowledge of things, would provide
him with the information he needed to maximize the use of his scarce resources . The underlying picture
of the neoclassical world was that of order and tranquillity, of a self-regulating, self-optimizing
economic system, a view undoubtedly related to the pomposity of the Pax Britannica then prevailing. This was, then, the neoclassical
world at the turn of the century. A world, it was believed, where theory resembled the real economy as a clock
resembles time; where the fundamental niggardliness of nature was held at bay by those rugged individuals who were able to extract from
nature the most precious products; where the invisible hand that ensured the smooth operation of the economy and
the welfare of the majority had not yet been burdened with the cumbersome strings of protectionism . The
crisis that hit the capitalist world economy from 1914 to about 1948 was to add a number of important components to that edice. Among them
was a new interest in growth. It might be worth recalling these events in some detail, because it was this situation that development economists
found at their doorstep when, with great excitement, they decided to build a home for themselves.
most serious problem with the concept of failed states is the problem of definition, and more specifically of superaggregation of very diverse sorts of states and their problems. Despite having made the most serious attempt to develop criteria to
distinguish failing, failed and collapsed states, Zartman, Rotberg, and some policy-oriented projects have had difficulties developing
indicators that are intuitively logical or widely shared. Rotbergs list of indicators of a failed state (which he defines succinctly as
broadly, a state in anarchy12) provides the clearest example of the agglomeration of extremely diverse institutional and social conditions. The list includes: . civil
wars characterised by enduring violence; . disharmony between communities; . loss of control over peripheral regions to out-groups; . growth of criminal violence,
including gangs, and trafficking of arms and guns; . cessation of functioning legislatures and judiciaries; . informal privatisation of education, health and other social
services; . corruption; . loss of legitimacy; . declining per capita GDP, with associated soaring smuggling and the supplanting of the national currency with external
money.13 Presumably a state fails when it experiences all of these conditions. Rotberg does not explicitly define what a failing state is, but it is presumably a state
that exhibits some, but not all, of the above indicators of state failure. The main problem is that these
social realities, and thus require diverse policy responses. Consider Rotbergs failing states in 2003: Colombia, Cote dIvoire, Iraq,
North Korea and Indonesia. These countries represent a tremendous range of states and societies. The idea that these states have more shared traits than distinguishing
traits seems specious. Colombian state institutions have provided goods and services on a qualitatively different level from those provided by the Nepalese or Ivoirian
state, though not throughout the territory. The nature of armed conflicts differs tremendously, and the sorts of policies that one might adopt should presumably reflect
these different realities. Similarly, consider the annual Failed States Index (FSI) produced by the Fund for Peace in Foreign Policy magazine for the first time in 2005.
That index included 41 sub-indicators of state failure (grouped into 12 categories) as diverse as: . pressures deriving from high population density; . history of
aggrieved communal groups based on recent or past injustices; . brain drain; . institutionalised political exclusion; . a drop in GNP; . the appearance of private
militias or guerrillas; . increased corruption; . higher poverty rates for some ethnic groups; . human rights violations; . fragmentation of ruling elites based on group
lines, etc.14 The
consequence of such agglomeration of diverse criteria is to throw a monolithic cloak over disparate
problems that require tailored solutions. The top 10 states on the Failed State Index included those as diverse as Iraq, Cote dIvoire, North
Korea, Yemen, Sudan and Haiti. The FSI project specifies not only that state strengthening is the medicine for the malady of state failure, but also recommends which
parts of the body politic should receive the medicine, without more detailed diagnosis. Given that the symptoms range from poverty to civil war to ethnic diversity to
displacement, the idea that a single remedy applied to the same state institutions will cure all problems would be amusing were it not so dangerous. To apply a policy
of security sector reform to a country like North Korea, for instance, would make little sense. Likewise a policy of strong support for Ivoirian state institutions might
aggravate grievances and violence. Similar thinking led to the universal application of standardised neoliberal structural adjustment packages to all poor countries in
the 1990s. We now know that these
policies worked against peace processes in places like Central America and Cambodia,
and contributed to warfare in Bosnia and Central Africa.15 The failed state concept has led the Western policy community to apply a blunt instrument to
states with three million persons (eg Liberia) or 200 million (Indonesia), to strong states with limited areas out of control (Colombia) as much as to weak and
legitimate states with low capacity but high legitimacy (East Timor) or predatory states deliberately looting the state for personal or corrupt ends (Liberia). Cookiecutter prescriptions for stronger states Just as the
failed state concept cobbles together diverse states, it tends to lead to a single
prescription for diverse maladies: more order. Although those who advance the failed state concept prescribe diverse and tailored solutions
to the problems of failing and failed states, they privilege policies that will reinforce order and stability, even when the
prevailing order is unjust.16 This emphasis on order and stability clearly serves the interests of Western
powers concerned about international insecurities stemming from drug trafficking, terrorism, or internal armed conflicts abroad. It also reflects learning from
post-conflict societies that, without security, nothing else is possible. However, the multiple and context-specific needs of a war-torn,
abusive, weak or other problem-plagued states tend to be lost, rather than better assured , in the explicit and implicit
emphasis on creating states that are foremost strong security providers. The Fund for Peaces FSI, for instance, suggests that policy makers pursue many remedies and
treatments for the political pathology of failed states. The Index also suggests, however, thLink Policymakers also must pay more attention
to building
particularly the core five institutions: military, police, civil service, the system of justice and
leadership.17 Three of these core fivenamely, the military, the police and the justice systemdirectly reflect a concern for order and
stability. These core five institutions are seen as the solution for all failed states, despite the vastly disparate 41 indicators of failure described earlier. It is not
state institutions,
clear how a stronger military or police capacity (or any of the five core functions) will ensure a rise in GNP, less corruption, more equity among ethnic groups, less
subordination to ruling elites, or improved human rights performance. The specious connection between stronger state institutions in these areas and the various
problems reflected in the diversity of problemridden states points to the need for more contextualisation, and perhaps categories, to capture these problems with more
nuance. As noted earlier, deficient aspects of state performance and state institutions represent genuine problems that have been overlooked. The main challenge for
addressing these problems is to go beyond the need to simply build states, with the implication that external actors should target their assistance first and foremost
towards state strength. The one-size-fits-all state-building answer to failed states misses important tensions and tradeoffs in pursuing state strength. Most salient,
enhancing the capacity of military and police and judiciaries when these are instruments of repression, corruption, ethnic discrimination, and/or organised crime will
only worsen these problems. The
central challenge for state buildinghow to strengthen state legitimacy and effectiveness when the state is
predatory, corrupt, authoritarian or otherwise badis swept under the rug by the discourse of failed states and state
building. Dodging democracy and democratisation The focus on failed states and building states obscures another important issue: regimes and their nature.
For those concerned primarily with order, the discourse of states and state building helps avoid thorny issues
of democratisation, representation, horizontal accountability and transparency. An increasing concern with states and state building coincided with a period
in the late 1990s of disillusion with the ability of international actors whether the UN, international financial institutions, international NGOs (INGOs) or bilateral
statesto instil democracy in war-torn countries. The cases of post-war democratisation in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia and Liberia weakened the optimism (and
resolve) of liberal interventionists about the ability of democracy to take root in heavily internationalised operations after war. In fact, the focus on states and state
institutions in most cases provided a refreshing and needed corrective to concepts, policies and programmes that did not deliver on the promise of democracy.
However, by
focusing on state institutions in an apolitical and technical manner, issues of the rules of
governance are neglected or relegated to a backseat . The response to state failureenhanced states and state institutions tends to
prioritise state agencies like the military, the police, the judiciary, public finance agencies, as well as health, education, and other executive agencies that deliver social
services. This discourse is a marked departure from the institutions that the democratisation sub-field has emphasised over the past decade: political parties, civil
society organisations, legislatures and the organisations that mediate between citizens and various governmental bodies.18 In societies where state strength is not so
much an issue as the degree to which the state serves all the territory equally, or where only certain social groups have access to effective state services, then issues of
regime are likely to be more important than issues about the state.19 In countries like Croatia, Macedonia, Colombia and Indonesia, for instance, the strength of state
institutions is far less weighty than how state institutions reflect and respond to popular aspirations, needs and identity. And in societies where ethnic groups exist in
tension or hold disproportionate economic and political power, or where elites have long exploited the populace without any accountability, strengthening state
institutions without attention to how society will relate to the state is perilous. In such states (eg Liberia, Afghanistan, Burundi), state building inevitably must reckon
not solely with the nature of the state (federal, autonomous, etc) but also with the regimes rules of governance. Although recent scholarship has brought needed
attention to the state, current concepts of state failure and state building threaten to throw the baby out with the bathwater. State
building has
marginalised questions like what sort of democratic regime is appropriate for a given country, how
oppressed groups will receive representation, how social groups interests will be mediated, what forms of
accountability over state authorities should be adopted, and to what extent liberal rights will be enshrined and enforced, and by what sort of judicial system.20 These
issues of governance, electoral rules, justice and group rights (among many others) will not resolve themselves solely through effective state strengthening. They
require deliberate and thoughtful attention. Conflation of peace and stateness One aspect of the growing attention to state failure is the new attention to states and state
institutions among those concerned with peace building and peacekeeping. Although state building is not a term often used by donors or the United Nations, these
organisations have increasingly come to see fostering sustainable state institutions as the core task of peacebuilding. States are seen as necessary for peace, and
successful peace building becomes virtually synonymous with state building. A report by a UN-appointed High- Level Panel making recommendations for UN reform
flatly says, Along with establishing security, the core task of peacebuilding is to build effective public institutions that, through negotiations with civil society, can
establish a consensual framework for governance within the rule of law.21 A 2004 UN study found that numerous UN officials indicated that the creation of effective
and legitimate states is now the central marker of success of a peace operation.22 Yet state-building
to insecurity and group tensions.23 Where external donors provide resources to corrupt, predatory central governments in the name of strengthening their
institutions, state building only advances abusive authority and fuels resentment and armed resistance. Where postconflict state building creates institutions that serve only an ethnic or other minority, peace is threatened. Conversely, by accepting peace deals which enshrine the
power of military faction leaders, enabling them to divide and capture state resources, then peace building undermines state building. Just as it glosses over tricky
issues of democratisation, the failed state concept allows decision makers to avoid some of the tensions between the strengthening of a central state and the delicate
process of ensuring that armed groups do not topple or threaten one another or the state. Peace building may require avoiding state building for a time, just as
enhancing state capacities may sometimes foster instability. Paternalism: teleological assumption and Western bias The
the obfuscation of the Wests role in the contemporary condition of these states. This ahistoric scoring of a
state as failing or fragile omits the long history of colonialism and exploitation in the impoverishment and
poor governance of many societies presently considered fragile or failing.27 European states (and later North
American countries) created the system of nation-states, often drawing the borders of states themselves, as well
as extracting resources, fostering colonial institutions with powerful legacies, propping up postcolonial
leaders, providing them with arms, and undermining the emergence of plural and civil societies that might have diminished poverty, warfare and weak
institutions.28
decentring of political thought, let me emphasise that the dominant socio-economic order in modern times
is one that, even when things are going relatively well, even when the economy is 'booming', crushes
people's dreams and hopes for a better life on a regular basi s. It is neither 'nature' nor 'cultural backwardness' that does it;
rather, it seems to be just the normal workings of the capitalist system. These, at any rate, are the sorts of considerations that, in my opinion,
should lead one to avoid construing Foucault's conception of power relations as 'capillary' and/or 'productive', as offering insights that are
somehow being covered up by Marxian theory. Rather, it makes more sense to be more Gramscian here, to see Foucault as making a point,
perhaps unwittingly, about just how pervasive power relations are in a class-divided society. What Foucault really draws attention
to
is the ongoing discipline, coercion, manipulation, and divisiveness that functions to keep those at the top
comfortable - even though this often requires more subtle methods of social control than strictly
repressive methods. It makes more sense, that is, to see Foucault's conception of power as 'capillary' and 'productive' as 19 cohering nicely
with what Marxists for a long time have been saying about the nature and functioning of social institutions in class-divided societies, especially
where the dominant class is a small minority of the population; and especially in modern societies where 'the masses' have achieved some level of
political influence and, as a result, the powerful must at least pay lip service to democratic ideals. In this situation, productive
power has, surely, acquired a central role in the maintenance of the social order. It
structure of the "world state', in which all men are present as citizens (Wendt 2003. Ci Prozorov 2006b.
chapter 7). Anything short of that. e.g. "regime change' military operations that seek to establish
democratic structures of citizenship in target societies, only serves to subject these populations to the
sovereignty of another state, establishing what. irrespectively of all emancipatory rhetoric. is a
relationship of domination. Alternatively. the extension of these rights to all men qua men in the absence
of the corresponding structures of citizenship would merely entail their subjection to the biopolitics of
another state without their participation in the democratic sovereignty of this state. As a number of critical
studies have indicated (see e.g. Brlkins 2000: Cooke and Kothari 200l; Brig; 200l: Bryant 2002), the
beneficiaries of "humanitarian` interventions of Western powers actually become the object of
governmental practices ol' discipline and surveillance, containment and confinement that deprive them of
human dignity in the name of their final endowment with "human rights. As non-citizens, these human
beings figure in the 'humanitarian' governmentality solely as the objects of the a priori asymmetrical
"shepherd-t1oclt` relationship. in which the very idea of rights is ipso facto meaningless. The idea of
global promotion of human rights is therefore fraught with contradictions that are unfortunately not
merely conceptual. Indeed. killing in the name of human rights that we observe today in the murderous
crusades of rampant "anti-terrorism' and "regime change' is possible precisely because the discourse ol`
human rights insistently seeks to introduce human life into the domain of global politics. Rather than do
anything to resist biopolitical investment, the discourse of human rights replicates exactly the monstrous
conflation of sovereignty and biopolitics that permits the state to kill in the name of the care of the living.
Thus, we may concur with Agnmben's blunt assertion that every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of man is in vain' (Agamben
I998. l8l).
Rights are ineffective and reproduce liberal violence the normalization of the rightsbearing subject is the condition of possibility for the destruction of deviance.
Pickett, 05 (Brent, Ph.D. @ University of Colorado, On The Use And Abuse Of Foucault For Politics, Lexington Books Inc.,
pg. 79-80)
A defender of the traditional, liberal conception of rights could respond that Foucault's critique
erroneously assumes that rights will only be used against the state. ln fact, of course, rights are also
deployed against private individuals and corporations. Yet Foucault's point is that such deployments are
still in the legal terms set by the state, and it is those formal restrictions that have been surmounted . So for
example, firms establish dress codes, set standards of productivity, and regulate how persons interact with
one another, and still remain well within the bounds of the law. Persons are evaluated against a standard
of the ideally industrious and normal self; backed by an ever-present threat of sanction or dismissal. For
Foucault, much of the normalization that occurs is in these areas of legally permissible action by
individuals and corporations. Rights are therefore, according to Foucault, incapable of restricting the most
important sites of normalization and production of docile bodies. While formal, equal rights were
gradually extended to larger sections of the population, they were in fact becoming irrelevant: in the
principal institutions of society, persons were not equal but instead always subject to hierarchies and
disciplinary punishment, and the rights they held did nothing to combat the spread of modem power.
Furthermore, precisely because traditional rights are obsolete, since they are focused upon a premodern
form of power and view society in terms of contractual relations, they direct attention away from the
actual functioning of modem power. Rights have therefore become "a system _ . . superimposed upon the
mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to conceal its actual procedures, the element of domination
inherent in its techniques . . _ "H While philosophers and jurists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dreamt of a contractual
society which established fundamental rights, there was a second dream, originating in the military but spreading well beyond it, which imagined
"meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine . . . pennanent coercions . . _ automatic docility."'2 The dark underside of the dream of the social
contract philosophers, and its partial realization, is the nightmare of the diffusion of the techniques for the coercion of bodies. The critique
of liberal rights goes beyond the charge of ineffectiveness and misdirection. Foucault also argues that
liberal rights help to support modern power, that they are integral to a system of "brutality." '3 There are two
reasons for this. The first is that the set of institutions that rights help to legitimate, the laws, courts, police, and
prisons charged with protecting citizens' rights, function as a system of domination. Although these govemmental
bodies can only exist upon a more fundamental level of disciplines, Foucault argues that they in tum reinforce those basic
tactics of power. A rights-based legal order then works through the systematic application of violence
through the police and prisons, and perhaps more importantly, it helps to reinforce the larger web of
modem power which has colonized rights and the law over the past two and half centuries. The second
way in which traditional rights contribute to this system of domination is that they aid in the
"normalization' of persons. The modern, rights-bearing individual is himself a product of power. Rights have
typically been justified by an account of what man is supposed to be by nature. For example, the Lockean rights-bearing self is, by nature,
rational, industrious, and under universal duties to be sociable and have a friendly disposition. " Alan Gewirth relies upon a view of the self as
motivated by reason and universal principles derived from that reason." Charles Taylor gives a qualified defense of rights as offering protection
for important human capacities such as reason, moral agency, and autonomy.'6 ln contrast, Foucault, at least in his works from the 19605 and
1970s, considers any and every account of human nature to be deeply misguided. We are not anything by nature; even those "good" capacities
of reason and moral agency have to be forced upon us through meticulous rituals of power. As Nietzsche expressed this idea, "how much blood
and cruelty lie at the bottom of all "good things'!"'7 Those selves and parts of self that do not live up to this definition
can therefore be slandered, marginalized, and disciplined. They are insane, perverts, criminals, or
deviants. Or when they are parts of an otherwise "normal' self, they are neuroses, passions, and
addictions. Traditional rights, in Foucault's view, are part of the problem due to their reliance upon a ln
the powerful piece "Two Lectures," Foucault lays out his critique of traditional rights, yet he also speaks
of his desire to use rights to oppose the disciplines. At this point Foucault, and he thinks everyone else,
are caught in a "blind alley": what appears to be a way of opposing disciplinary power is itself caught up
in that power. Appeals to rights would be worse than ineffective; they would likely be self-defeating. The
very sort of normalization, misdirection from actual power, and covert defense of a system of brutality
that one is trying to avoid is intertwined with rights. How can one appeal to rights while avoiding these
pitfalls?
Link Humanitarianism/Poverty
Their humanitarianism a smokescreen for controlling underdeveloped populations based
on a disciplinary fear of the poor.
Naz 6. Farzana Naz.[MSS (Dhaka), M.Phil in Gender and Development (Norway), is associated with the Centre for Development Governance
(CDG) Bangladesh as its Research Associate] Arturo Escobar and the Development Discourse: An Overview. Asian Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 3, 6484, July - September 2006.
The order of discourse is telling. Underdeveloped
obligation on behalf of the rich to help and care for those less fortunate. But behind this aura of
humanitarianism lurks a certain fear of poverty and the poor. In the words of President Truman, Their poverty is ...
a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. The association of poverty with danger can be traced
back at least to the eighteenth century, when rapid industrial improvements made the existence of
widespread poverty appear as a threat to the wealth and civilised way of life of the upper sections of the
population. The dangerous classes (Gordon, 1991) therefore needed to be controlled, and in the West, the poor
gradual1y appeared as a social problem, requiring new forms of intervention and management. Assisting
the poor, Proccacci reminds us, is a means of government, a potent way of containing the most difficult
sections of the population and improving all other sections (1991: 151). This observation can be explained to
include not only domestic welfare arrangements, but also international development aid. In the post-war period, poor
countries were associated with unrest and instability, and increasingly appeared as a threat to the liberal
world order. This was particularly the case after the rise of Communism, as material deprivation was perceived to make people prone to
irrational and extremist politics that could potentially upset the global balance of power. Poverty, at both the domestic and international levels,
therefore needed to be managed. In the words of Proccacci, poverty constitutes a development area for techniques
designed to structure an organic social order which, whatever the concrete localization of the human
subjects it deals with, is hitherto remained formless (1991: 164). Through the various techniques to combat
poverty, the poor become observed and classified, managed and surveilled they become visible objects of
disciplinary power (Foucault, 1991). In relations between North and South, development has facilitated such control and
management of the third world and its formless population of poor and destitute (Doty, 1996).
Development allowed the North to gather facts in order to define and improve the situation of the poor
peoples of the South, and the third world became a category of poor peoples of the South, and the third
world became a category of intervention, a place to be managed and reformed. New forms of power and
control that could be justified with reference to a humanitarian concern for development came into being,
and in the process poor peoples ability to define and take care of their own lives was eroded in a deeper
manner than perhaps ever before (Escobar, 1995: 39). Another central feature of development discourse, visible
already in President Trumans speech, is the narration of underdevelopment as a series Of absences. The third world
is defined primarily by what it is not, rather than by what it is. Its central characteristics become what it
lacks, not what it possesses. The essence of the third world is accordingly its lack of development , the
absence of technical knowledge, scientific advances, prosperity, progress and so on. As development discourse has changed and adapted to the
changing circumstances of both donor and recipient countries, the specific nature of these absences has varied. Underdevelopment has
been variously described as the absence of growth, basic needs, integrated rural development,
structural adjustment, sustainable development and so forth, but the focus has remained firmly on what
is wanting.
Link ICT
Their attempt to link increased flows of information to democratic practice is a ruse for the
extension of biopolitical governmentality power operates through the reduction of life to
information
Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on
security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian,
Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics,
Security and War Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41]
In contemporary liberal societies the net-like circulation of power locally as well as globally has generalised this concern for
knowledge. Biopower has become informational. This does not simply mean that it operates through digitised and integrated
computer-mediated communication and surveillance technologies .35 Information is now regarded as the
principle of formation of life itself. That move has been both cybernetic and molecular , a function of the way the
information and the life sciences now install information at the centre of the organisation and functioning of
life. The Changing Bios of Biopolitics As the life sciences went through a dramatic transformation during the course of the last century, so the bios, or very conception of
life informing biopower, began to be conceived differently, and thereby opened up strategically to new
governing technologies. These changes can be followed in Lily Kays magisterial genealogical studies, The Molecular Vision of Life and Who Wrote the Book of Life?36
Here Kay documented the detailed capillary workings of the power/knowledge nexus that led to the triumph of the molecular vision in the second half of the twentieth century and the current
domination of genetic science by the metaphor of language and code.37 The disciplinary power of molecular biology, especially its expanding sphere of influence through the various human
centred on the gene. In the 1940s Erwin Schrodinger suggested a code script for the gene. The idea crystallised during the summer of 1953 and by 1965 the representation of heterocatalysis in
terms of a genetic code had been completed.40 However, it is in the convergence of digital and the molecular revolutions that the scope of the commonality between these sciences has been
concerned with identifying and manipulating the generative principles of formation and the codified ways in which selforchestrating informationally ordered networks come into existence and
Architecture, in the form of the design of networked information systems, becomes a strategic
science. It comes as little surprise, therefore, to discover that key aspects of the US strategic doctrine have recently come to be
formulated in terms of network-centric warfare .42 Before exploring these developments, we will outline the problematisation of security that we use to
operate.
analyse them.
technical juridico-political level, the foundations of the new international law are being laid through a
complex mosaic of the individ-ual and collective right to pre-emptive self-defence, justifications for
the use of United Nations unsanctioned use of force for the violent achievement of regime change, and
the equally violent disregard for the hitherto relatively settled norms of international humanitarian law
(Baxi 2005:35). New international law, argues Baxi, is characterized by the surveillance, discipline and
punishment of rogue or outlaw states, the redundancy of earlier hard and soft law, and rank
self-justifying conse-quentialism. In Huntingtons odious construction, in the clash of civilizations the Schmittian friend-enemy
dichotomy (Mutua, 2002) is resurrected (George W. Bush: youre ei-ther with us or against us) in a vain attempt to legitimate draconian
legislation, xeno-phobia, and violations of human rights law, humanitarian law and the laws of war. As Judith Butler puts it: [I]f the self-
preserving and self-augmenting aims of the state are once more linked with sovereignty [it] can be
mobilized as one of the tactics of gov-ernmentality both to manage populations, to preserve the national
state, and to do both while suspending the question of legitimacy. Sovereignty becomes the means by
which claims to legitimacy function tautologically. (Butler 2004:96-97). Butler argues that biopower
constitutes people as less than human without entitle-ment to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable. This
is different from producing a sub-ject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the
production of the sub-ject who takes the norm of humanness to be its constitutive principle. The subject
who is no subject is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in
death (Butler 2004:98).
Link Iran
Iranian threat construction is based in Orientalism, Islamophobia, and racist double
standards
Izadi & Biria 7 [Foad Izadi & Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, Comm & Public Affairs @ LSU Baton Rouge, 2007 Journal of Communication Inquiry 31.2, A Discourse Analysis of
Elite American Newspaper Editorials,]
The focus of all the editorials revolved around the United Statess responsibility to fight the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran. The editorials
attempted to show that Iran had violated its international obligations under the NPT. The two themes of Oriental untrustworthiness
and Islam as threat appear to function as the ideological underpinning of this construction of us versus
them. Whereas it downplays or denies Irans right to all nuclear technology applicable to peaceful purposes, a most central tenet of the NPT was
left outside the editorialsdiscourse:nuclear disarmament. Under the terms of the NPT, the five original nuclear powers, who are parties to the
NPT, were permitted to keep their nuclear arsenal but pledged to negotiate in good faiththe end of the nuclear arms race and the elimination of
their nuclear arsenals in return for other nations not seeking nuclear weapons (IAEA, n.d., pp. 1, 4). As stated by the Washington-based
Institute for Public Accuracy (2005b), 35 years after the adoption of the NPT, the nuclear weapon states have failed to live up to their
part of the treaty: [They] cynically [interpret] the NPT as a mechanism for the permanent maintenance of an
international system of nuclear apartheid in which only they can possess nuclear weapons....Now the Bush
administration wants to add a second tier to its nuclear double standard by denying uranium enrichmentneeded for both nuclear power and
weaponsto countries which dont already have it. Today, the United States is spending about $40 billion annually on nuclear weapons. U.S.
nuclear weapons spending has grown by 84% since 1995. The United States was to spend about $7 billion in 2005 to maintain and modernize
nuclear war- heads, excluding the billions of dollars it will spend to operate and modernize its delivery and command and control systems. The
U.S. arsenal has 10,000 nuclear warheads, and some 2,000 on hair-trigger alert,each one many times more powerful than the atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Institute for Public Accuracy, 2005a) The New York Times reported on February 7,2005,that the Bush
administration has begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives(Broad,
2005, p. A1). Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn criticized the administrations decision,saying that the United States has not set a good example for
nuclear nonproliferation (Agence France-Presse, 2005). El Baradei has also criticized the U.S. nuclear policy (Giacomo, 2003). The U.S.
government demands that other nations not possess nuclear weapons; meanwhile, it is arming itself....In
truth there are no good or bad nuclear weapons. If we do not stop applying double standards, we will end
up with more nuclear weapons,El Baradei said. Writing in the editorial section of The Washington Post, former President Jimmy
Carter (2005) criticized the nuclear powers for refusing to meet their NPT nuclear disarmament commitments. He argues, The United States is
the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North
Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons,
including anti-ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating bunker busterand perhaps some new smallbombs. They also have abandoned past
pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. (p. A17) Whereas Irans alleged violation of its
commitments under the NPT is important, the failure of the United States and the other nuclear weapon
states to follow through on their promise to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons is not
deemed worthy of discussion. Conclusion This study supports Karim (2000) and McAlisters (2001) findings that, today,
Orientalist depictions of Muslim countries and their political issues concentrate around the idea that Islam
is a source of threat. This study also finds that in the case of Irans nuclear program, the issue of trust plays a more central
role than the actual existence of evidence for Irans possession of a clandestine nuclear weapons program. The present
critical discourse analysis also reveals how the three elite newspaperseditorials selectively framed the issues
surrounding the Iranian nuclear dispute by employing linguistic, stylistic, and argumentative maneuvers .
Despite their differences in their policy recommendations, none challenged the underlying assumptions that Iran has a
clandestine nuclear weapons program,that the Islamic nature of its government is a threat, and that it
should not be trusted with sensitive nuclear technology. Their inattention to the inconsistent nonproliferation policies of the
United States and other European nuclear powers shows the limits of media criticism of official policies
are two faces to contemporary liberal internationalism. Traditionally liberals have aspired
to the ideal of world government that would replace the power and war-like rivalry of sovereign states.
However their conception of political subjectivity was precisely responsible for the very system that their
ideals sought to supersede in federative and other ways. Therefore the project of liberal internationalism was, and
continues to be, both propelled and frustrated by discourses of juridical power, contract, rights and civil
society that were themselves developed in the course of the evolution of the sovereign state form and its
associated interstate system. However, where liberal internationalism once aspired to some ideal of world government, today global liberal
governance pursues the administration of life and the management of populations through the deployment
of biopolitical techniques of power. This is not to argue that one face of liberal power has overcome the other. On the contrary, there is a
confluence rather than a supercession of powers here. The resultant mixture is a complex one precisely because it represents the convergence of different
forms of power and increasingly also different conceptions of knowledge.16 Foucault noted that this confluence went back to the origins of the European international
system, arguing that the reason of state, apart from the theories that formulated and justified it, takes shape in two great ensembles of political knowledge and
technology.17 The former were those that came to constitute the traditional discourses of international relations: diplomacy, statecraft, alliances and war. The latter
were first formulated in terms of policy, Polizeiwissenschaft, or police, in the sense given to the word then: that is, the
Link Oil
The pursuit of new sources of oil is a biopolitical endeavor to secure American empire
Campbell 2005 [David, Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at Durham University, The
Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle, American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3]
Network is, therefore, the prevailing metaphor for social organization in the era of biopolitical power, and it is a conception that permits us to under- stand how the
effects of our actions, choices, and life are propagated beyond the boundaries of our time-space location.20 It is also a conception that allows us to appreciate how war
has come to have a special prominence in producing the political order of liberal societies. Networks, through their extensive con- nectivity, function in terms of their
strategic interactions. This means that "social relations become suffused with considerations of power, calculation, security and threat."21 As a result, " global
biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and
warp of the socio-economic and cultural networks of biopolitical relations ."22 This theoretical concern with biopolitical
relations of power in the context of networked societies is consistent with an analytical shift to the problematic of subjectivity as central to understanding the
relationship between foreign policy and identity. That is because both are concerned with "a shift from a preoccupation with physical and isolated entities, whose
relations are described largely in terms of interactive exchange, to beings-in-relation, whose struc- tures [are] decisively influenced by patterns of connectivity."23 At
the same time, while conceptual approaches are moving away from understandings pre- mised on the existence of physical and isolated entities, the social and political
structures that are produced by network patterns of connectivity often appear to be physical and isolated. As Lieven de Cauter argues, we don't live in net- works; we
live in capsules. Capsules are enclaves and envelopes that function as nodes, hubs, and termini in the various networks
and contain a multitude of spaces and scales. These enclaves can include states, gated communities, or vehicles - with the
latter two manifesting the "SUV model of citizenship " Mitchell has provocatively described.24 Nonetheless, though capsules like these
appear physical and isolated, there is "no network without capsules. The more networking, the more capsules. Ergo: the degree of capsularisation is directly
proportional to the growth of networks."25 The result is that biopolitical
accounts of the role of oil in U.S. foreign policy embody economistic assumptions,
rendering oil in materialistic terms as an independent variable that causes states to behave in particular ways. In the prelude to the
invasion of Iraq, even the best commentaries represented oil as the real reason motivat- ing the buildup to war.28 In this vein, a Greenpeace campaign pictured the
(oil) "drums of war" and invited people to read about "what s really behind the war on Iraq."29 In addition to manifesting specific epistemological assump- tions, these
views regard resource geopolitics as primarily a question of supply. Before we move beyond this frame of reference to explore what goes unex- plained by this focus,
we need to appreciate the infrastructure of oil resource geopolitics that makes this issue so important. Securing
The
drive for diversification is now a major security objective . In the 2001 review of energy policy chaired by Vice President Dick
Cheney, the final chapter of the report focused exclusively on strengthening global alliances with energy producers to achieve that goal.35 However, the
geopolitical pursuit of energy security is likely to produce new and intensive forms of insecurity for those
in the new resource zones, which are located in some of the most strategically unstable global
locations.36 As a result, the United States has been providing increased military support to governments
in the Caspian Basin area, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa - regardless of their ideological complexion or human rights record.37
demonstrated how the internalization of a cleavage between business and environmental interests is sustained through an association with external threat.34
The magnitude of the link is enormous oil is central to the entire system of biopol;itics
Mcwhorter 5, Ladelle Mcwhorter, The Technology of Biopower A Response to Todd Mays Foucault Now?,
James Thomas Professor in Philosophy, Professor of Environmental Studies, Professor of Women, Gender, and
Sexualities Studies , Department of Philosophy
We should not forget that biopower in all its glory emerged at just about the same time as the oil industry
emerged in the US (at the end of the 1860s) and made enormous, leaping gains in momentum as the nationstates of
the industrialized world converted to a petroleum economy based on ubiquitous petroleum derived and
dependent technologies. Basic techniques of normalizationfor example, extensive recordkeeping and surveillance were possible
without petroleum and natural gas (as Benthams plan for the Panopticon demonstrates), but they were not possible on anything like the massive
scale that they are with the inventive development and extensive use of petroleum products over the last one hundred and forty years. On first
glance one might think that much of modern technology such as surveillance cameras or computersare not petroleum products and do not
use oil in their operation. We tend to think of electricity, largely generated world wide by hydroelectric and coal
power, as independent of the oil industry, but the fact is that it is not; most of the machinery in power
plants that produce electricity from moving water and fuels other than petroleum and natural gas are built
and transported, as well as maintained, with the aid of oil . Without oil, none of those technologies would be
viable. And without plastics made from petroleum, we would have no cell phones, no laptops, no lightweight
cameras, recording devices, or vehicles. Virtually all of the surveillance and recordkeeping technology
currently in use depends on the availability of oil. To realize the almost incredible degree to which our
biopolitical world is dependent on petroleum, one only has to look around the room in which one is
sitting at any given moment and ask what would not be there if there were no petroleumderived synthetic materials, no gasoline or
diesel or jet fuel, and no petroleumbased lubricants or coolants. And what would happen if the oil from which those things
and their replacements are made or transported were to stop flowing? What exercises of power would no
longer be possible? My suspicion is that without oil, biopower as a vast network of interlocking and
overlapping practices would soon break down. One simply cannot manage entire populations of
hundreds of thousands of people without satellites and micro chips, and one cannot launch satellites or
build microchips without oil. First, large interlocking networks would fragment into smaller normalizing
units. Eventually, unable to profit from the large scale reinforcement of a huge biopolitical network, even
those smaller units might break down. The end of oil may well come in this century, perhaps even long before this
centurys end. Will that moment also bring the death of biopower?
concerns himself with a subterranean realm of nondiscursive practices (e.g., techniques of examination, architectures of surveillance) that are supported, justified, and imbued with meaning
by discourse; a realm of practices that comprises the sites or points of activity of the microphysical
relations of power-knowledge. These practices can be roughly divided into "disciplines" and "regulatory controls," the former defined as an
"anatamo-politics of the human body" and the latter as a "bio-politics of the population." 'Together, these two poles of power-knowledge
relations compose "bio-power," a set of strategies of power-knowledge that produce a supply of docile
human bodies that may be "subjected, used, transformed, and improved."" The aim of disciplinary power is to
increase, in terms of economic utility, the forces of the body and diminish these same forces in reference
to rebellion or nonconformity.'2 Discipline progresses from a direct coercion or control to an indirect, omnipresent form of control, which is able to
be colonized by other relations of domination. The key to discipline is normalization, and the keymakers are the members
of the various disciplines (pedagogists, penologists, demographists, psychiatrists). In disciplinary power, control exists
not in the form of an act of law or a set of legal codes, but in the guise of natural rules or norms, born by
the discourse of the social sciences. Foucault shows how disciplinary institutions-schools, hospitals, bar- racks-were invaded
by legions of technical experts and observers who began to produce studies that delineated such norms as
the correct posture (the precise placement of each part of the body) to be assumed by a pupil while writing or the correct set of
movements to be followed by a soldier in moving his gun from his shoulder to a firing position. Below, it will be made quite clear that in the interest of
promoting development the Third World has been subjected to a similar invasion of economists, political
scientists, health workers, agricultural experts, and so on . The appearance of such norms as isolated is merely a reassuring illusion.
They instill in the individual a certain malleability or instructability; a certain susceptibility to the discourses of the
disciplines that is colonized by other relations of power . Unimportant or peripheral disciplining of individuals was but the beginning;
the disciplines (the human sciences) and their practitioners expanded throughout the social body, creating a network of "teacher-judges "doctor-judges and "socialworker-judges," to name a few." As Foucault laments, "in the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of
living or dying, as a function of the true discourses which are the bearers of the specific effects of power."" Power Over the Social Body The second component of
biopower- bio-politics -finds its origins in the coeval demographic growth (in Europe) and economic growth of the productive apparatus during the eighteenth century.
Bio-politics coincides with the "emergence of "population` as an economic and political problem" that
forces governments to think of citizens not as subjects but as resources. " A new technology of the population- demographic
surveys of various traits of the populous and economic analyses of the relationships between wealth, production, and population-is built upon the fact that " the
accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital . . . cannot be separated. ""' In order to maintain production and
growth, capitalism needs a sufficient supply of labor, in terms of both numbers and health (actually, a surplus is required in order to preserve low wages). However,
men cannot be "accumulated" in the absence of a system that maintains and engages them. In the name of public welfare, then, the entire population was positioned
as the object of power relations surrounding and affecting the conditions that largely determine biological processes such as reproduction, nutrition, mortality, and
hygiene. This twofold constitution-on one level, of individuals through disciplines, and on another level, of populations through bio-politics- together engenders biopower, the power that "brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.
"IB The Subjection of the Third World It might seem that the preceding discussion of power has digressed quite far from development. A close inspection, however,
shows that many
relations of power, which have accompanied and opened the door for new penetrations of power. These new cultural, religious, economic, and political relations of
power can all, in various degrees, be linked with t.he penetration of the process of development. Why? Because development
Link Poverty
Their poverty discourse produces neoliberal subjects and shifts the lines of exclusion
towards other structural faultiness like gender and race
Best 13,Jacqueline Best (2013) Redefining Poverty as Risk and Vulnerability: shifting strategies of liberal economic
governance, Third World Quarterly, 34:1, 109-12, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.755356
The kinds of governance technique required for reducing poverty by managing risk and vulnerability rely
on what Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, drawing on Michel Foucault, call productive power. 77 This is a kind of power seeks not simply
to constrain but to actively constitute practices and subjectivities . Thus, the goal of this kind of policy is not
just to reduce poverty, but to constitute a new kind of low-income individual more capable of managing
risk and thus able to attain a better quality of life. 78 Bank staff are themselves very keen on the productive and proactive aspects of this
new poverty-reduction framework. 79 In their 2009 review of social protection, staff note, The productive, as opposed to the redistributive, role of safety nets is
becoming more recognized. 80 Moreover, the concept note and the consultations for the new 201222 Social Protection Strategy emphasise the importance of
promoting more resilient communities and individuals. 81 Risk is a category rather than a thingit is a way that we make the world calculable in particular kinds of
ways. 82 Risks are beyond our control and yet also very much subject to our understanding: a risk by definition is something that can be understood through a logic of
probability (as opposed to uncertainty, ambiguity and other kinds of indeterminacy). 83 As such, risk-based policies are particularly suited to this kind of productive
application of power. This is particularly the case in the context of a market economy, in which risk is never viewed as an entirely bad thing. According to the Bank,
risk is an essential tool for understanding poverty, not only because shocks can wreak havoc with efforts to raise incomes (risk as a bad thing), but also because, as
poor people find themselves with fewer tools for managing risks, they are less likely to undertake riskier activities, and thus they forgo the potential gains that they
might make (risk as a good thing). 84 Risk is thus understood as a double-edged problem: it is not universally bad, but instead needs to be both mitigated and
exploited through particular kinds of interventions. The
more productive forms of power deployed today are also less direct
than the more coercive techniques deployed by the Bank and other international nan- cial institutions in the past. There is less
emphasis on formal conditionality and more focus on constituting the right kinds of risk-bearing
individuals and creating the conditions necessary for them take on governance tasks themselves. Yet the
fact that these forms of power are productive does not make them any less exclu- sionary.85 As a number of
social policy analysts have pointed out, even as the social risk framework seeks to engage a wider range of poor people
more actively in the process of managing risks, it also tends to neglect those less capable of such active
forms of self-governance. The frameworks emphasis on the dynamic character of poverty leads it to downplay the problems of the chronically poor.86
Its advocates emphasis on shocks leads them to de-emphasise subtler sources of vulnerability, such as
those associated with gender, class, ethnicity or other structural fault-lines. More fundamentally the tendency
of advocates of the social risk framework to dene poverty in absolute rather than relative terms, and to emphasise poverty reduction as a
win-win policy means that more difcult, structural solutions to poverty tend to get short-shrift.
The 1ac uses the promise of poverty alleviation to legitimize market control over
populations turning the poor into objects of knowledge to be biopolitically managed. This
has NEVER solved and uses flawed epistemology to further American hegemony.
Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies,
UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World
Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologas Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e Historia, Bogot,
Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD 1995, page 21-22]
ONE OF THE many changes that occurred in the early postWorld War II period was the discovery of
mass poverty in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Relatively inconspicuous and seemingly logical, this discovery was to
provide the anchor for an important restructuring of global culture and political economy . The
discourse of war was displaced onto the social domain and to a new geographical terrain: the Third World.
Left behind was the struggle against fascism. In the rapid globalization of U.S. domination as a world power, the war on poverty in the Third
World began to occupy a prominent place. Eloquent facts were adduced to justify this new war: Over 1,500,000 million people, something like
two-thirds of the world population, are living in conditions of acute hunger, dened in terms of identiable nutritional disease. This hunger is at
the same time the cause and effect of poverty, squalor, and misery in which they live (Wilson 1953, 11). Statements of this nature were uttered
profusely throughout the late 1940s and 1950s (Orr 1953; Shoneld 1950; United Nations 1951). The new emphasis was spurred by the
recognition of the chronic conditions of poverty and social unrest existing in poor countries and the threat they posed for more developed
countries. The problems of the poor areas irrupted into the international arena. The United Nations estimated that per capita income in the United
States was $1,453 in 1949, whereas in Indonesia it barely reached $25. This led to the realization that something had to be done before the levels
of instability in the world as a whole became intolerable. The destinies of the rich and poor parts of the world were seen to be closely linked.
Genuine world prosperity is indivisible, stated a panel of experts in l948. It cannot last in one part of the world if the other parts live under
conditions of poverty and ill health (Milbank Memorial Fund 1948, 7; see also Lasswell 1945). Poverty on a global scale was a discovery of the
postWorld War II period. As Sachs (1990) and Rahnema (1991) have maintained, the conceptions and treatment of poverty
were quite different before 1940. In colonial times the concern with poverty was conditioned by the belief
that even if the natives could be somewhat enlightened by the presence of the colonizer, not much could
be done about their poverty because their economic development was pointless . The natives capacity for science
and technology, the basis for economic progress, was seen as nil (Adas 1989). As the same authors point out, however, within Asian,
African, and Latin or Native American societiesas well as throughout most of European history vernacular societies had
developed ways of dening and treating poverty that accommodated visions of community, frugality, and
sufciency. Whatever these traditional ways might have been, and without idealizing them, it is true that massive poverty in the
modern sense appeared only when the spread of the market economy broke down community ties
and deprived millions of people from access to land, water, and other resources. With the
consolidation of capitalism, systemic pauperization became inevitable. Without attempting to undertake an archaeology
of poverty, as Rahnema (1991) proposes, it is important to emphasize the break that occurred in the conceptions and management of poverty rst
with the emergence of capitalism in Europe and subsequently with the advent of development in the Third World. Rahnema describes the rst
break in terms of the advent in the nineteenth century of systems for dealing with the poor based on assistance provided by
impersonal institutions. Philanthropy occupied an important place in this transition (Donzelot 1979). The transformation of the poor into
the assisted had profound consequences. This modernization of poverty signied not only the rupture of
vernacular relations but also the setting in place of new mechanisms of control . The poor increasingly
appeared as a social problem requiring new ways of intervention in society . It was, indeed, in relation to poverty that
the modern ways of thinking about the meaning of life, the economy, rights, and social management came into place. Pauperism, political
economy, and the discovery of society were closely interwoven (Polanyi 1957a, 84). The treatment of poverty allowed society
to conquer new domains. More perhaps than on industrial and technological might, the nascent order of capitalism and
modernity relied on a politics of poverty the aim of which was not only to create consumers but to
transform society by turning the poor into objects of knowledge and management. What was involved in this
operation was a techno-discursive instrument that made possible the conquest of pauperism and the invention
of a politics of poverty (Procacci 1991, 157). Pauperism, Procacci explains, was associated, rightly or wrongly, with features such as
mobility, vagrancy, independence, frugality, promiscuity, ignorance, and the refusal to accept social duties, to work, and to submit to the logic of
the expansion of needs. Concomitantly, the management of poverty called for interventions in education, health, hygiene,
morality, and employment and the instillment of good habits of association, savings, child rearing, and so on. The result was a panoply of
interventions that accounted for the creation of a domain that several researchers have termed the social (Donzelot
techniques encompassed under the rubric of social work. Not only poverty but health, education, hygiene, employment, and the poor quality of
life in towns and cities were constructed as social problems, requiring extensive knowledge about the population and appropriate modes of social
planning (Escobar 1992a). The government of the social took on a status that, as the conceptualization of the
economy, was soon taken for granted. A separate class of the poor (Williams 1973, 104) was created. Yet the
most signicant aspect of this phenomenon was the setting into place of apparatuses of knowledge and power that
took it upon themselves to optimize life by producing it under modern, scientic conditions. The
history of modernity, in this way, is not only the history of knowledge and the economy, it is also, more revealingly,
the history of the social.1 As we will see, the history of development implies the continuation in other places of
this history of the social. This is the second break in the archaeology of poverty proposed by Rahnema: the globalization of poverty
entailed by the construction of two-thirds of the world as poor after 1945. If within market societies the poor were dened as lacking what the
rich had in terms of money and material possessions, poor countries came to be similarly dened in relation to the standards of wealth of the
more economically advantaged nations. This economic conception of poverty found an ideal yardstick in the annual
per capita income. The perception of poverty on a global scale was nothing more than the result of a
comparative statistical operation, the rst of which was carried out only in 1940 (Sachs 1990, 9). Almost by at, twothirds of the worlds peoples were transformed into poor subjects in 1948 when the World Bank dened as poor those
countries with an annual per capita income below $100. And if the problem was one of insufcient income, the solution was clearly
economic growth. Thus poverty became an organizing concept and the object of a new problematization .
As in the case of any problematization (Foucault 1986), that of poverty brought into existence new discourses and practices
that shaped the reality to which they referred . That the essential trait of the Third World was its
poverty and that the solution was economic growth and development became self-evident,
necessary, and universal truths. This chapter analyzes the multiple processes that made possible this particular historical event. It
accounts for the developmentalization of the Third World, its progressive insertion into a regime of thought and practice in which certain
interventions for the eradication of poverty became central to the world order. This chapter can also be seen as an account of the production of the
tale of three worlds and the contest over the development of the third. The tale of three worlds was, and continues to be
despite the demise of the second, a way of bringing about a political order that works by the negotiation
of boundaries achieved through ordering differences (Haraway 1989a, 10). It was and is a narrative in which
culture, race, gender, nation, and class are deeply and inextricably intertwined. The political and
economic order coded by the tale of three worlds and development rests on a trafc of meanings that
mapped new domains of being and understanding, the same domains that are increasingly being
challenged and displaced by people in the Third World today.
reveals is the inherently aporetic character of development. At the global level, the
interests and ends of states, and their agencies and the actions of employers and individual workers in the processes of economic
development and labor migration constitute and are in turn conditioned by the larger structural mechanisms of
capitalist accumulation. Obviously, these actors are free consensual agents who make conscious choices. But they are placed in
a position to make choices because they inhabit a dynamic field of imperatives and strategies that have as their
ultimate end the articulation of a hierarchical division of economic development and labor. In the first place,
exportoriented industrialization is premised on a hierarchy of capital, skills, technology, and labor. 121 Moreover, while it is possible for
a country to upgrade itself and ascend the international division of labor in a given sector, its success limits the
opportunities for similar upgrading by other countries unless it upgrades further and vacates its slot in
the economic hierarchy. Each state desires to ascend the hierarchy, and the success or failure of its policies determines the slot it will
take up. Hence, the pervasive economic vocabulary about the importance of carving a niche. A countrys position will shape its
society, and this will in turn condition the actions of individual citizens, such as a workers decision to seek overseas employment. In all
this, one senses most acutely the competitive anxiety driving capitalist development. If even advanced
Singapore feels that its future survival depends on trying to ascend the hierarchy, less developed countries must feel this anxiety more intensely.
The theoretical issue raised here is whether the right to development can be fully human/humanized in an
uneven world. Since this right is the basis for the human rights of migrant workers, we can also put it this way: Can the migrant worker fully
achieve humanity? The sad prosaic answer to these related questions has to be no. Aggressive competition in the name
of development legitimates the mistreatment of migrant workers . Labor-importing parties stress that however poor the
working conditions of FDWs, they receive higher remuneration and are economically better off than they would have been if they had not left
their home countries. Labor-exporting states stress the contributions of migrant workers to their home economies, the fact that it is better to be
employed overseas than not employed at all, and the value of the skills they will learn abroad. We can offer more salutary answers to
these questions if
we associate the competitiveness of development with the inhuman totality of global capital as a determinate Gestalt and
argue that the right to development can be humanized and the migrant worker can achieve full humanity with the
transcendence of global capitalism. This axiom of post-Marxist, progressive leftist thought shares the motif of
human transcendence with the doctrine of human rights notwithstanding Marxs critique of the abstract nature of civil and
political rights. The basic structure of righting inhuman wrongs is juridical and presupposes the originality
or primacy of the free human subject. The idea that one is free to pursue ones interests provided one
does not constrain the freedom of others to do the same presupposes the liberal subject with freedom of
choice. In post-Marxism, the concrete human being as subject of labor and basic needs possesses the capacity for transcendence. The
functioning of bio-power, however, puts into question the human capacity for freedom, namely, the ability to
transcend the instrumental-technical use of human beings through regulation . For the free subject itself is
a product of technologies of bio-power and is constitutively imbricated within an inhuman field of means
and ends. It is subjectified as a member of a hierarchical system of means and ends through disciplinary techniques. The interests and
basic needs that supply the content of specific human rights are products of governmental techniques. It is
important to stress that although biopolitical technai have inhumane consequences, they also enable humanizing efforts at both the national and
international levels. We have focused on the bio-power of labor-receiving states, but the sending state also cultivates and enhances the capacities
of migrant workers through the exercise of bio-power so that they can achieve their full humanity. OWWA runs programs abroad and within the
Philippines to assist in reintegrating returning workers into the Philippine economy by teaching them new skills, fostering entrepreneurship, and
planting in them the idea of self-employment. In this way the remittances are diverted from consumption to investments and capital formation
that will benefit them and the national economy in the long run. 122 National development is a necessary means to achiev-
ing humanity, for instance, the full protection of the migrant workers human rights. The more difficult
thing to grasp is that because these humanizing endeavors are part of a biopolitical complex, they also
dehumanize OCWs by regarding them as means to development. A radical equivocation thus marks the
human right to development. This right links the economic rights of individuals to the economic wellbeing
of their nations, conceived in analogy with an autonomous organic body striving for self-fulfillment. But development is
competitive and requires an active opening-up of the national body to the global capitalist system .
Hence, a developing nation-state such as the Philippines needs to attach itself to inhuman prostheses in order to protect, augment, and cultivate
the humanity of its citizens. The state claims that it needs to export labor so that it can develop. It needs to
bind itself to global capital in the hopes that the Philippines can replicate the success stories of Taiwan and South Korea. Its purported
hope is that economic growth and foreign investment will, in due time, create jobs that will absorb returning migrants and make further labor
emigration unnecessary. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that this humane future will come to pass. Meanwhile, the Philippines has
ironically exported so much of its skilled labor that it has to import workers in certain sectors, such as
welders and metalworkers, to cope with internal demand. 123 And far from enabling migrant workers to upgrade their skills, when
skilled women are forced to work as domestic helpers overseas, they find that their skills become eroded because they are not utilized. It is
unlikely that FDWs will acquire new and more valuable skills abroad because they do not work in positions that will expose them to new
technologies. In many cases, the hard-earned foreign exchange is not wisely invested but fuels wasteful consumption of imported luxury goods
that leads to inflation. The very real danger of a chronic dependency on the part of society (as opposed to the state) on
remittances from OCWs can also lead to decreased agricultural production for both domestic use and export. Indeed, one can even say
that the inhuman has possessed society or the people, stunting the possibility of social and political
transformation. As Arnel de Guzman notes, in the 1970s, revolution used to be an option [an alternative to the dire
economic situation]. Now, its foreign work.
Link Technology
The technological solution to Latin American poverty is not neutral it requires the
creation of an economic knowledge, which reorganizes power on a global scale, resulting in
the loss of Latin American autonomy
Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies,
UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World
Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologas Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e Historia, Bogot,
Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD 1995, page 35-36]
The Promise of Science and Technology The
and technology
had been the markers of civilization par excellence since the nineteenth century, when machines became
the index of civilization, the measure of men (Adas 1989). This modern trait was rekindled with the advent of the
development age. By l949, the Marshall Plan was showing great success in the restoration of the European economy, and increasingly attention was shifted
to the longer-range problems of assistance for economic development in underdeveloped areas. Out of this shift of attention came the famous Point Four Program of
President Truman, with which I opened this book. The
Point Four Program involved the application to the poor areas of the
world what were considered to be two vital forces: modern technology and capital. However, it relied much more
heavily on technical assistance than on capital, in the belief that the former would provide progress at a lower price. An Act for International Development was
approved by Congress in May 1950, which provided authority to nance and carry out a variety of international technical cooperation activities. In October of the
same year, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) was established within the Department of State with the task of implementing the new policies. By l952,
these agencies were conducting operations in nearly every country in Latin America, as well as in several countries in Asia and Africa (Brown and Opie 1953).
Technology, it was believed, would not only amplify material progress, it would also confer upon it a
sense of direction and signicance. In the vast literature on the sociology of modernization, technology was theorized as a sort
of moral force that would operate by creating an ethics of innovation, yield, and result. Technology thus
contributed to the planetary extension of modernist ideals. The concept of the transfer of technology in
time would become an important component of development projects . It was never realized that such a transfer would depend
not merely on technical elements but on social and cultural factors as well. Technology was seen as neutral and inevitably benecial,
not as an instrument for the creation of cultural and social orders (Morand 1984; Garca de la Huerta 1992). The new awareness
of the importance of the Third World in global economy and politics, coupled with the beginning of eld activities in the Third World, brought with it a recognition of
the need to obtain more accurate knowledge about the Third World. Nowhere was this need perceived more acutely than in the case of Latin America .
As a prominent Latin Americanist put it, The war years witnessed a remarkable growth of interest in Latin America. What once had been an area which only
diplomats and pioneering scholars ventured to explore, became almost overnight the center of attraction to government ofcials, as well as to scholars and teachers
(Burgin [1947] 1967, 466). This called
quick to join this wave of enthusiasm. Latin America was suddenly discovered to be a tabula rasa to the economic historian (Burgin [1947] 1967, 474), and
economic thinking in Latin America was found to be devoid of any connection with local conditions, a mere appendage of European classical economics. The new
scholars realized that the starting point of research must be the area itself, for it is only in terms of its historical development and objectives that the organization and
functioning of the economy can be fully understood (469). The terrain was prepared for the emergence of economic development as a legitimate theoretical endeavor.
The better and more widespread understanding of the workings of the economic system strengthened the hope of bringing material prosperity to the rest of the world.
The unquestioned desirability of economic growth was, in this way, closely linked to the revitalized faith
in science and technology. Economic growth presupposed the existence of a continuum stretching from
poor to rich countries, which would allow for the replication in the poor countries of those conditions
characteristic of mature capitalist ones (including industrialization, urbanization, agricultural modernization, infrastructure, increased provision
of social services, and high levels of literacy). Development was seen as the process of transition from one situation to the other. This notion conferred upon the
processes of accumulation and development a progressive, orderly, and stable character that would culminate, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in modernization and
stages of economic growth theories (Rostow 1960).18 Finally, there was another factor that inuenced the formation of the new strategy of development: the
increased experience with public intervention in the economy. Although the desirability of this intervention, as opposed to a more laissez-faire approach, was still a
matter of controversy,19 the
recognition of the need for some sort of planning or government action was becoming
generalized. The experience of social planning during the New Deal, legitimized by Keynesianism, as
well as the planned communities envisaged and partly implemented in Native American communities and Japanese American internment camps
in the United States (James 1984), represented signicant approaches to social intervention in this regard; so were the statutory
corporations and public utility companies established in industrialized countries by government enterprisefor instance, the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC)
and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Following the TVA model, a number of regional development corporations were set up in Latin America and other parts of
the Third World.20 Models
for national, regional, and sectoral planning became essential for the spread and
functioning of development. These, very broadly stated, were the most important conditions that made possible
and shaped the new discourse of development. There was a reorganization of power at the world level, the
nal result of which was still far from clear; important changes had occurred in the structure of production, which had to
be brought to t the requirements of expansion of a capitalist system in which the underdeveloped
countries played an increasingly important role , if yet not thoroughly dened. These countries could forge alliances with any pole of power.
In the light of expanding communism, the steady deterioration of living conditions, and the alarming increase in their
populations, the direction in which they would decide to go would largely depend on a type of action of
an urgent nature and unprecedented level. Rich countries, however, were believed to have the nancial and
technological capacity to secure progress the world over . A look at their own past instilled in them the rm conviction that this was not
only possiblelet alone desirablebut perhaps even inevitable. Sooner or later the poor countries would become rich, and the underdeveloped world would be
developed. A
new type of economic knowledge and an enriched experience with the design and
management of social systems made this goal look even more plausible. Now it was a matter of an appropriate strategy
to do it, of setting in motion the right forces to ensure progress and world happiness. Behind the humanitarian concern and the positive
outlook of the new strategy, new forms of power and control, more subtle and rened, were put in
operation. Poor peoples ability to dene and take care of their own lives was eroded in a deeper manner
than perhaps ever before. The poor became the target of more sophisticated practices, of a variety of
programs that seemed inescapable. From the new institutions of power in the United States and Europe; from the ofces of the International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development and the United Nations; from North American and European campuses, research centers, and foundations; and from the new
planning ofces in the big capitals of the underdeveloped world, this was the type of development that was actively promoted and that in a few years was to extend its
reach to all aspects of society. Let us now see how this set of historical factors resulted in the new
Link Terrorism
The terrorist threat is a tool of fascist coloniality
Escobar 04 (Arturo, Ph.D Development Philosophy, Policy, and Planning UC Berkeley, Beyond the
Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality, and anti-globalisation social movements, 2004)
The new coloniality regime is still difficult to discern. Race, class and ethnicity will continue to be important, but new, or newly prominent, areas
of articulation come into existence, such as religion (and gender linked to it, especially in the case of Islamic societies, as we saw in the war on
Afghanistan). However, the single most prominent vehicle of coloniality today seems to be the ambiguously
drawn figure of the terrorist. Linked most forcefully to the Middle East, and thus to the immediate US oil and strategic interests in
the region (vis a` vis the European Union and Russia, on the one hand, and China and India in particular on the other, as the most formidable
potential challengers), the imaginary of the terrorist can have a wide field of application (it has already been applied to
Basque militants and Colombian guerrillas, for instance). Indeed,
excluded populations, and the spaces they inhabit, as criminal. This is how Captain Steven Brown of the Seattle Police
department, responding to charges of racial disparity in narcotics policing, can say: Thats nonsense .. Were going where the crime is (Francis,
2006). The Majors Certification process is an example of this discourse on a global scale. On
geography that explores the relationship between the scalar politics of crime control and socioeconomic
exclusion across scales, and maps out geographically particular and historically continuous ways in which
neoliberal and illiberal governance articulate to produce excluded populations as subjects that
need to be governed in other ways.
Criminalization of the drug trade is a form of racialized biopolitics that otherizes Latin
American states, forcing US intervention to return their society to the proper globalized
world
Corva, 07 (Dominic, BS, Economics, University of Houston. BA, Creative Writing, University of
Arizona. MA and PhD, Geography, University of Washington. Neoliberal globalization and the war on
drugs: Transnationalizing illiberal governance in the Americas print)
Coutin et al. describe illiberal
subjects as taking the form of nonsovereign beings whose coerced actions are
defined as active choices (2002: 826). Coercion, in this formulation, is structural, reflecting highly
constricted conditions of possibility for human choosing. Sovereignty is also a matter of degree, related to the formal
inclusion of individuals with full citizenship rights wherever they live. Coutin et al.s analysis of clandestine spaces of social reproduction in the
lives of undocumented immigrants can be usefully applied to those who are excluded from the liberal order via the politics of criminalization.
The enactment of criminal law is crucial to the liberal production of illiberal subjects, because it constructs them as free choice-having, free
choice-making individuals, rather than as embedded in social relations of domination that already restrict their possibilities for social, political,
and economic inclusion. Their bad decisions to break the law justify their formal exclusion from the liberal order, making them subject to the
application of the penal apparatus of the state. Narco-delinquency, neoliberalization, and the production of criminal subjects Foucault (1984:
231) describes the illegalities that activate the penal apparatus as delinquencies: forms of illegality that seem to sum up
symbolically all the others, but whichmake it possible to leave in the shade those that one wishes to e or must e tolerate. Delinquencies
are juridical constructions, but they are produced at the nexus of society state relationships, and are
associated primarily with forms of conduct which threaten, or are seen to threaten, the normative social
order. The enactment of criminal law is a key moment for the consolidation of delinquencies as categories
of behavior which must be regulated through state-sponsored coercion . This juridical moment emerges from
historically and geographically specific modes of political, economic, and cultural domination e antebellum Southern discourses of cocaineinduced miscegenation by newly freed black labor, for example. The moment of criminalization mutes public discourse that might critically link
the historical construction of a particular delinquency to historical and contemporary modes of domination. But the construction of delinquency
should not be reduced to the historical moment of criminalization: delinquent populations must be located in shifting geo-historical social
contexts. The production of narco-delinquency, for example, is a dynamic transnational process that targets
specific populations, dispersed by local criminal justice practices that shape where, when, and against
whom to apply the force of the law (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993). This process is fed by biopolitical practices
which continuously script and rescript illegal drugs as a dangerous threat to the individual and
social bodies, rather than as embedded in relations of domination and resistance . The state
consolidates and disperses discourses of narco-danger that emanate from elite insecurity and hysteria
about the scourge of drug addiction,7 creating the category of narco-delinquency that justifies the
application of the criminal justice function, especially against marginalized populations . One of the ways
this occurs domestically is through practices of policing target rich areas such as poor neighborhoods
and public space (Herbert, 2006). This accounts for much of the racial disparity in urban drug policing (see for
example Beckett, 2004), where revanchist gentrification policies seek to make cities attractive for global capital (Smith, 1996). The
criminalization of illicit drugs makes their economic viability dependent on a willingness to assume risk, especially as entry-level narco-labor.
This willingness is a condition clearly associated with the socioeconomically marginalized e those who
have little to lose but their freedom. Neoliberalization produces social and economic vulnerability; criminalization produces
ways to capitalize on that vulnerability. The combination produces, among many other things, a steady flow of pre-trial detainees, prisoners,
parolees, and families disrupted by harshly punitive sanctions. The expansion of the prison-industrial complex, and the competition for prisons as
development strategies (Bonds, 2005), are marketized ways to capitalize on, not causes of, drug war policies which produce criminals e
populations that must be governed in other ways. The race to build new prisons and lower the cost of prison management for the government is a
response to drug war policies that have stressed the capacity of the criminal justice system. The biopolitical production of narco-
delinquency overdetermines the racial state (Omi & Winant, 1995), as well as its marketization via the prisonindustrial complex. The incarceration of racialized, classed and gendered subjects in the U.S. happens
primarily through the production of narco-delinquency to be addressed by the state through the coercive
penal apparatus. But the drug war is not just here, and the expansion of punitivegovernance in locally
specific and often more intensely illiberal forms has occurred throughout the Americas . It includes both practices
of incarceration and militarization. Diaz-Cotto (2005: 137) describes the multiscalar politics of narco-governance as follows: whereas Latin
American governments criminalize particular groups of people in their own countries, the United
States criminalizes entire Latin American nations while pursuing the war on drugs. This process
has required locating narco-delinquency to determine where, in the world, the drug war should be
exported, and which populations should be subjected to its associated illiberal modes of governance.
Links - Other
is possible to take Foucault's point even further to present a specific critique of Habermas' ideal of
consensus through public debate and deliberation. Perhaps Habermas' ideas do obscure the ways in which power woiks through
language. Take for instance Habermas' idea of a "consensus". For Foucault, this is really another form of "totalisation - that is
"at once abstract and limiting" (Foucault 1984a: 375-6). Habermas' emphasis on reaching a consensus might
actually result in fixing meaning and defining social life in a singular or universal manner (and this could be
complicit with certain power relations in society), ignoring alternative possibilities, meanings or discourses. In fact.
Habermas sometimes speaks of consensus in terms of "achievement-, but what if we push things further and speak of forging a consensus,
mutually imposing an agreement? What if we. like Foucault, tightly juxtapose "consensus" and "discipline"? We then de-naturalize consensus and
open it up to questions and problems to which it was previously impervious. We have to consider what might get left out. (Coles 1992: 8z) In
Foucault's own words: "there is no prediscursive providence which disposes the world in our favor. We must conceive
discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice we impose upon them- (1981:67). Each time we speak, we inevitably
communicate through privileging certain meanings over others. And this is an exclusionary practice, rather than one that is ultimately
inclusionary in Habermas' ideal of a consensus. Foucault's work, indeed, helps us to attend to the possible hegemony of meaning and exclusion
inherent in the Habermasian "consensus". On another level. Foucault's ideas also problematize the apparently apolitical starting
point of communicative process often unquestioned in Habermas political theory. Foucault crucially suggests that "it is necessary to
determine what 'posing a problem' to politics really means (1984b: 385). According to him. the problem is. precisely, to decide if it is actually
suitable to place oneself within a "we- in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts [...] It seems to me that the "we"
must not be previous to the question: it can only be the result - and the necessary temporary result - of the question as it is posed in the new terms
in which one formulates it. (Foucault 1984b: 385) Put in another way, for Foucault, there is no initial social position (or "we") that
is outside the influence of relations of power. This has implications for "what it means to ask a question" in politics, and it
directs our attention to how the agenda and itinerary of public discussions are already shaped even before
the actual debate takes place. For example, if we are discussing the importance of carbon tax, we are already, from the beginning.
situated within other existing political discourses. for instance. one which implicitly acknowledges the importance of environmental protection. or
one which considers taxation to be a legitimate source of government/national income. Indeed, it becomes important to ask: "who
gets to adjudicate and define the issues of concern within public forums ?", instead of accepting the Habermasian
formulation at face value. Foucault's work also demonstrates how a specific definition or characterization of the "self' (or human "subject") in
Western societies comes to be produced and constituted. and this also proffers a critique of Habermas' overall vision of democratic political
practice. and in particular, how his theoretical prescriptions actually reinforces the idea of a specific political "participant-or "subject", and
excludes other (alternative) visions of what a political "subject"- could be. Indeed. Foucault [...] analyzed how [certain] techniques [...] allow for
the self to be created and subjected within relations of power that constitute modern social institutions. [There is also] [...] the production and
marginalization of entire categories of people who do not fit what the foundation posits as "normal". (Blasius 1993: zoo) Power may form
disciplined individuals, who are rational, responsible, productive subjects , yet that is in no way an expression of a
humannature. (Pickett 1996: 458) If we take these ideas more seriously, one does get the sense that within Habermas' own theory of democracy,
what is accorded priority is a specific type of political "subject": these "subjects- are individuals who can offer reasonable
arguments in rational discussion. and who can draw upon convincing (usually scientifically-based) evidence to
support those arguments. From the Foucauldian point of view, one could argue that this narrowly defined political subject
is itself an effect of Habermas' own theoretical discourse, and this taken-forgranted "rational" subject that emerges from Habermas' prescriptions,
to a large extent, excludes other types of participants and forms of participation in the public spher e, and in the
democratic process. What
about participants who do not appeal to rational argumentation, but instead put
forward art forms - such as dance, paintings and sculptures -as political practice? And what about the role
of rhetoric and emotional appeal in political speeches? How can we then accord these participants and their forms of
expression an equal status with that of rationality and logical argumentation?
Link Security
Securitization biopolitically instrumentalizes fear to render raw normalized life that must
be protected at any cost
Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on
security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian,
Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics,
Security and War Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41]
The history of security is not the pursuit of a universal value by pre-formed subjects, individual or
collective.43 Given the foundational significance of security to all established formulations of politics,
throughout the political tradition of the West, the history of security is a history of the changing
problematisation of what it is to be a political subject and to be politically subject. Thus it is always deeply implicated in the
ways in which the task of government itself is problematised and political order conceived.44 Although the security problematic is ordinarily examined in terms of state
sovereignty, it has in fact always been a biopolitical as much as a geopolitical problematic.45 Thus conceived security analysis takes the form of the
genealogy of dynasties of power relations and the critical analysis of the discursive conditions of
emergence of contemporary security regimes. Furthermore, the changing problematisations of security
have always been comprised of complex terrains of practices involving deeply embedded discourses of
danger said to be foundational to individual welfare, social formation and political order. Said to be
foundational to life, individual welfare, social formation and political order, these problematisations of
danger, together with their allied discourses of fear are, however, the very means by which specific
programmes of life, individual, welfare, social formation and political order are introduced, circulated,
reproduced and enacted. The project of securitising , to steal but refashion a term coined elsewhere, is concerned with making
life accessible to different social technologies : where technology refers broadly to complex techniques and relations of power established in the course of
conceiving government as the administration and ordering of life rather than the politics of free peoples. Thus understood, technology is the process by which life
is rendered into some kind of determinate material, raw life, in need of being secured from the threats
and fears to which discourses of danger say it is prey .46 The emergence of a new, politically valent, security problematic is necessarily a
complex phenomenon. It is not simply determined by the recognition of new needs by established political subjects whose structures and attributes are presumed to pre-exist the relations of force,
through which social reality comes into beingif it is the articulation of knowledge and power, of the
visible and the expressiblehow can the development discourse be individualized and related to ongoing
technical, political, and economic events? How did development become a space for the systematic creation of concepts, theories,
and practices? An entry point for this inquiry on the nature of development as discourse is its basic premises as they were formulated in the 1940s
and 1950s. The organizing premise was the belief in the role of modernization as the only force capable of
destroying archaic superstitions and relations, at whatever social, cultural, and political cost .
Industrialization and urbanization were seen as the inevitable and necessarily progressive routes to
modernization. Only through material advancement could social, cultural, and political progress be achieved. This view determined
the belief that capital investment was the most important ingredient in economic growth and development .
The advance of poor countries was thus seen from the outset as depending on ample supplies of capital to
provide for infrastructure, industrialization, and the overall modernization of society. Where was this capital to come from? One
possible answer was domestic savings. But these countries were seen as trapped in a vicious circle of poverty and
lack of capital, so that a good part of the badly needed capital would have to come from abroad (see chapter
3). Moreover, it was absolutely necessary that governments and international organizations take an active role in promoting and orchestrating the
necessary efforts to overcome general backwardness and economic underdevelopment. What, then, were the most important elements that went
into the formulation of development theory, as gleaned from the earlier description? There was the process of capital formation, and the various
factors associated with it: technology, population and resources, monetary and scal policies, industrialization and agricultural development,
commerce and trade. There were also a series of factors linked to cultural considerations, such as education and the need to foster modern cultural
values. Finally, there was the need to create adequate institutions for carrying out the complex task ahead: international organizations (such as the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, created in 1944, and most of the United Nations technical agencies, also a product of the mid1940s); national planning agencies (which proliferated in Latin America, especially after the inauguration of the Alliance for Progress in the early
1960s); and technical agencies of various kinds. Development was not merely the result of the combination, study, or gradual elaboration
of these elements (some of these topics had existed for some time); nor the product of the introduction of new ideas (some of which were already
appearing or perhaps were bound to appear); nor the effect of the new international organizations or nancial institutions (which had some
predecessors, such as the League of Nations). It was rather the result of the establishment of a set of relations among these
elements, institutions, and practices and of the systematization of these relations to form a whole . The
development discourse was constituted not by the array of possible objects under its domain but by
the way in which, thanks to this set of relations, it was able to form systematically the objects of
which it spoke, to group them and arrange them in certain ways, and to give them a unity of their
own.21 To understand development as a discourse, one must look not at the elements themselves but at the system of relations established
among them. It is this system that allows the systematic creation of objects, concepts, and strategies; it determines what can be thought and said.
or ethnic factors believed to be associated with backwardness). These elements emerged from a multiplicity of points: the newly formed
international organizations, government ofces in distant capitals, old and new institutions, universities and research centers in developed
countries, and, increasingly with the passing of time, institutions in the Third World. Everything was subjected to the eye of the
new experts: the poor dwellings of the rural masses, the vast agricultural elds, cities, households,
factories, hospitals, schools, public ofces, towns and regions, and, in the last instance, the world as a
whole. The vast surface over which the discourse moved at ease practically covered the entire cultural,
economic, and political geography of the Third World . However, not all the actors distributed throughout this surface could
identify objects to be studied and have their problems considered. Some clear principles of authority were in operation. They concerned the role
of experts, from whom certain criteria of knowledge and competence were asked; institutions such as the United Nations, which had the moral,
professional, and legal authority to name subjects and dene strategies; and the international lending organizations, which carried the symbols of
capital and power. These principles of authority also concerned the governments of poor countries , which
commanded the legal political authority over the lives of their subjects, and the position of leadership of
the rich countries, who had the power, knowledge, and experience to decide on what was to be done .
Economists, demographers, educators, and experts in agriculture, public health, and nutrition elaborated their theories, made their assessments
and observations, and designed their programs from these institutional sites. Problems were continually identied, and client categories brought
into existence. Development proceeded by creating abnormalities (such as the illiterate, the
underdeveloped, the malnourished, small farmers, or landless peasants), which it would later
treat and reform. Approaches that could have had positive effects in terms of easing material
constraints became, linked to this type of rationality, instruments of power and control. As time went by, new
problems were progressively and selectively incorporated; once a problem was incorporated into the discourse, it had to be categorized and
further specied. Some problems were specied at a given level (such as local or regional), or at various of these levels (for instance, a nutritional
deciency identied at the level of the household could be further specied as a regional production shortage or as affecting a given population
group), or in relation to a particular institution. But these rened specications did not seek so much to illuminate possible solutions as to give
problems a visible reality amenable to particular treatments. This seemingly endless specication of problems required detailed observations in
villages, regions, and countries in the Third World. Complete dossiers of countries were elaborated, and techniques of
information were designed and constantly rened. This feature of the discurse allowed for the mapping of
the economic and social life of countries, constituting a true political anatomy of the Third World .22 The
end result was the creation of a space of thought and action the expansion of which was dictated in
advance by the very same rules introduced during its formative stages . The development discourse dened a perceptual
eld structured by grids of observation, modes of inquiry and registration of problems, and forms of intervention; in short, it brought into
existence a space dened not so much by the ensemble of objects with which it dealt but by a set of relations and a discursive practice that
systematically produced interrelated objects, concepts, theories, strategies, and the like.
when raising
the questions of who produces knowledge about Third World women and from what spaces; she discovered that
women in the ThirdWorld are represented in most feminist literature on development as having needs
and problems but few choices and no freedom to act . What emerges from such modes of analysis is the image of
an average Third World woman, constructed through the use of statistics and certain categories: This average third
world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her
being third world (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in
contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own
bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. (1991b, 56) These representations implicitly assume
Western standards as the benchmark against which to measure the situation of Third World women . The
result, Mohanty believes, is a paternalistic attitude on the part of Western women toward their Third
World counterparts and, more generally, the perpetuation of the hegemonic idea of the West's superiority .
Within this discursive regime, works about Third World women develop a certain coherence of effects that reinforces that hegemony. It is in
this process of discursive homogenization and systematization of the oppression of women in the third world,
Mohanty concludes, that power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse, and this power needs to be
dened and named (54).4 Needless to say, Mohanty's critique applies with greater pertinence to mainstream development literature, in
which there exists a veritable underdeveloped subjectivity endowed with features such as powerlessness,
passivity, poverty, and ignorance, usually dark and lacking in historical agency, as if waiting for the
(white) Western hand to help subjects along and not infrequently hungry, illiterate, needy, and oppressed by its own stubbornness,
lack of initiative, and traditions. This image also universalizes and homogenizes Third World cultures in an
ahistorical fashion. Only from a certain Western perspective does this description make sense; that it exists at all is more a sign of power
The consequences of this feature of modernity have been enormous. Chandra Mohanty, for example, refers to the same feature
over the Third World than a truth about it. It is important to highlight for now that the deployment of this discourse in a world system in which the
West has a certain dominance over the Third World has profound political, economic, and cultural effects that have to be explored.
be sure, China and Brazil (and Australia, which is also a European extension) are cited as the location of
other philosophers worthy of the designation, but none of them evidently merits a specific name to be sitting
next to these eminent European philosophers. The question of course is not the globality of philosophical visions that all
these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the
deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and
Muslim world ("deep and far", that is, from a fictive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives . That goes
without saying, for without that confidence and self-consciousness these philosophers and the philosophical traditions they represent can scarce lay any universal
These are
indeed not only eminent philosophers, but the philosophy they practice has the globality of certain
degrees of self-conscious confidence without which no thinking can presume universality . The question is rather
something else: What about other thinkers who operate outside this European philosophical pedigree , whether they
claim on our epistemic credulities, nor would they be able to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and write a sentence. Thinkers outside Europe
practice their thinking in the European languages they have colonially inherited or else in their own mother tongues - in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, thinkers that
have actually earned the dignity of a name, and perhaps even the pedigree of a "public intellectual" not too dissimilar to Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel
Foucault that in this piece on Al Jazeera are offered as predecessors of Zizek? What about thinkers outside the purview of these European philosophers; how are we to
name and designate and honour and learn from them with the epithet of "public intellectual" in the age of globalised media? Do
the constellation of
thinkers from South Asia, exemplified by leading figures like Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit
Guha, Sudipta Kaviraj, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, or Akeel Bilgrami, come together to form a nucleus of thinking that is
conscious of itself? Would that constellation perhaps merit the word "thinking" in a manner that would qualify one of them - as a South Asian - to the term
"philosopher" or "public intellectuals"? Are they "South Asian thinkers" or "thinkers", the way these European thinkers
are? Why is it that if Mozart sneezes it is "music" (and I am quite sure the great genius even sneezed melodiously) but the most
sophisticated Indian music ragas are the subject of "ethnomusicology" ? Is that "ethnos" not also applicable to the
philosophical thinking that Indian philosophers practice - so much so that their thinking is more the subject of Western European and North American anthropological
fieldwork and investigation? We can turn around and look at Africa. What about thinkers like Henry Odera Oruka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe,
Okot p'Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, V.Y. Mudimbe: Would they qualify for the term
"philosopher" or "public intellectuals" perhaps, or is that also "ethnophilosophy"? Why
consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at large, but
for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived
experiences of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America - counties and climes once under the spell of the thing that calls itself "the West" but
happily no more. The trajectory of contemporary thinking around the globe is not spontaneously conditioned in our own immediate time and disparate locations, but
has a much deeper and wider spectrum that goes back to earlier generations of thinkers ranging from Jos Marti to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, to Aime Cesaire, W.E.B.
DuBois, Liang Qichao, Frantz Fanon, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. So the question remains why not the dignity of "philosophy" and whence the
anthropological curiosity of "ethnophilosophy"? Let's seek the answer from Europe itself - but from the subaltern of Europe. 'The Intellectuals as a Cosmopolitan
Stratum' In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci has a short discussion about Kant's famous phrase inGroundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) that is quite
critical in our understanding of what it takes for a philosopher to become universally self-conscious, to think of himself as the measure and yardstick of globality.
Gramsci's stipulation is critical here - and here is how he begins: Kant's maxim "act in such a way that your conduct
can become a norm for all men in similar conditions" is less simple and obvious than it appears at first
sight. What is meant by 'similar conditions'? To be sure, and as Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (the editors and translators of the
English translation of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks) note, Gramsci here in fact misquotes Kant, and that "similar conditions" does not appear in the original text, where
the German philosopher says: "I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law." This principle, called "the
categorical imperative", is in fact the very foundation of Kantian ethics. So where
is, he "must" act according to a "model" which he would like to see diffused among
all mankind, according to a type of civilisation for whose coming he is working-or for whose preservation he is "resisting" the forces that threaten its
disintegration. It is precisely that self-confidence, that self-consciousness, that audacity to think yourself the
agent of history that enables a thinker to think his particular thinking is "Thinking" in universal terms , and
his philosophy "Philosophy" and his city square "The Public Space", and thus he a globally recognised Public Intellectual. There is thus a direct and
unmitigated structural link between an empire, or an imperial frame of reference, and the presumed
universality of a thinker thinking in the bosoms of that empire . As all other people, Europeans are perfectly entitled to their own
self-centrism.The imperial hubris that once enabled that Eurocentricism and still produces the infomercials of the sort we read in Al Jazeera for Zizek are the phantom
memories of the time that "the West" had assured confidence and a sense of its own universalism and globality, or as Gramsci put it, "to a type of civilisation for
whose coming he is working". But that globality is no more - people from every clime and continent are up and about claiming their own cosmopolitan worldliness
and with it their innate ability to think beyond the confinements of that Eurocentricism, which to be sure is still entitled to its phantom pleasures of thinking itself the
centre of the universe. The Gramscian superimposed "similar conditions" are now emerging in multiple cites of the liberated humanity. The world at large, and the
Arab and Muslim world in particular, is going through world historic changes - these changes have produced thinkers, poets, artists, and public intellectuals at the
centre of their moral and politcial imagination - all thinking and acting in terms at once domestic to their immediate geography and yet global in its consequences.
Compared to those liberating tsunamis now turning the world upside down, cliche-ridden assumption about Europe and its increasingly provincialised philosophical
pedigree is a tempest in the cup. Reduced
to its own fair share of the humanity at large, and like all other continents
and climes, Europe has much to teach the world, but now on a far more leveled and democratic playing
field, where its philosophy is European philosophy not "Philosophy" , its music European music not "Music", and no
infomercial would be necessary to sell its public intellectuals as "Public Intellectuals".
Impacts
There are many ways in which violence and development are intertwined. And there is nothing innocent
or objective about the idea of development itself. In fact, 'development' - understood for the most part as
modern (economic) development - is one of the most contentious terms in the social sciences . Orthodox views
perceive the process as a sustainable increase in the economic wealth of countries or regions for the well-being of their inhabitants, particularly an
increase in living standards through higher per capita income and better education and health services. There have, of course, always been debates
about how to achieve such an increase in living standards. Yet with the discursive binary construction of the world into
developed and developing (or less developed) countries after the end of World War II, the stage was set
for ferocious debates, many of which exposed the inherently violent process in which 'development' was
conceived and enacted. And to the fore came the many 'uns' of devel opment: underdevelopment, unequal
development, and uneven development.. This issue of Development in Practice addresses the impact of
violence or aggressive action on the process of development in Central and South America . The understanding
of development is here considered in terms broader than the economic context alone, in order to assess wider social, cultural, and political
aspects. Five articles consider violence that ranges from direct physical harm and bodily attack to the often more
subtle aggression of racialised abuse, or the pressures on community-centred production to conform to the
'rules of the market'. The critique of economic development was particularly strong in Latin America,
which saw the emergence of Dependency Theory as an influential, complex body of theoretical concepts
with structuralist and Marxist roots that explained Latin America's historical and continued
underdevelopment in terms of a structural logic inherent in the development of global capitalism. (See also
the Review Essay by Carlos Mallorquin, in this issue.) As argued by Andre Gunder Frank (1969a), one of its principal
exponents, the metropolis (or the core) creates and exploits peripheral satellites, from which it
expropriates economic surplus for its own economic development. The satellites thus remain
underdeveloped for lack of access to their own surplus and as a consequence of the exploitative
contradictions that the metropolis introduces and maintains in the satellite's domestic structure. Such an
appropriation of surplus value from the periphery was always a violent process, and Frank (1969b) would
continue to outline the structural logic that underlies such a 'develop ment of underdevelopment' .1 The
insights of dependency theory, originally 'developed' in Latin America, have also been used to speak to
the specificities of Africa and to explain the violent global processes that underlie the constitution of
unequal development there (Amin 1976). Of course, dependency theory has been challenged for its excessively structuralist explana tory
approach to uneven development. The borders between centre and periphery are certainly less spatially stable than suggested. Globalisation has
also meant that there is a periphery in the centre (think about the thousands of homeless in Los Angeles), as well as a centre in the per iphery
(think about el norte in Bogota, the 'nice' part of town, where the rich live). Moreover, the post-modern angst in the 1980s about saying anything
'essential' at all and its unease over such dramatically determined statements of the dependency school certainly contributed to the latter's loss of
influence. Yet it is hard not to agree with its principal insights into the highly structured unevenness of global economic development and its
underlying capitalist logic in the production of space (Smith 1991). The period of the late 1980s and 1990s witnessed a renewed critical interest in
development debates (although these had, of course, never stopped). The emerging global concern over the critical state of the environment unchecked deforestation; pollution of air, soil, and water ways; increasing desertification, etc. - was linked to human activity and a blind belief in
economic development at the expense of global ecosystems. In other words, nature fell victim to the violence of development. From an
ecofeminist perspective, such a violation of nature was compared to the violation of women within a patriarchal reductionist model of modern
science and development (Shiva 1989). Such violence against the environment was to be stalled by a new perception in the development process.
And so the notion of 'sustainable development' was born in the 1987 Brundtland Report, which aimed to promote economic activity and growth,
while preserving the environment. This attempt to reconcile two old enemies - growth and environment - while drawing on economism and
developmentalism seemed to be contradictory (Redclift 1989). Yet, as Ulrich Oslender's article shows, in the case of Colombia's black
communities living in the Pacific coast region, the global concern over environmental destruction found its expression for a short period in the
early 1990s in the promotion of sustainable development projects that empowered local communities to protect their tropical rainforest and its
biodiversity. Certainly in this region, the protection of the environment and regional growth seemed to be compatible and a real option (see also
Oslender 2004). Others, however, have criticised 'Mrs Brundtland's disenchanted cosmos' and the fact that sustainable development is still based
on the capitalisation of nature, expressed through global views on nature and environment by those who rule, instead of through local respect for
surrounding landscapes (Visvanathan 1991). And Sachs (1992) argues in his widely read Development Dictionary that notions of ecology are
merely reduced to higher efficiency, while a development framework is still accepted as the norm. Visvanathan (1991: 384) calls for an 'explosion
of imaginations' as a form of resistance to this dominant economism and essentially violent development framework: a call echoed by Peet and
Watts (1996: 263-8) in their edited collection on 'liberation ecologies', which envisages 'environmental imagin aries' as primary sites of
contestation, which are then articulated by social movements that contest normative visions and the 'imperialism of the imaginary'. In many
ways, the very notion of development has been radically called into question, as the concept has been
linked to neo-colonial intentions of the Global North to intervene in and keep control of the countries in
the Global South. For Escobar (1995: 159), dominant development discourse portrays the so-called 'third world'
as a space devoid of knowledge, a 'chronic pathological condition', so that the Western scientist Tike a
good doctor, has the moral obligation to intervene in order to cure the diseased (social) body'. This
intervention is always a violent one: one that ruptures the cultural fabric, penetrates the colonised body,
and inserts a homogeneous developmental reasoning, often extirpating resistant cultural difference. To break
this cycle of violent developmentalism, Escobar (1995) calls for an era of 'post-development' as a necessary step for national projects of
decolonisation and for the affirmation of truly emancipatory political projects of self-affirmation.
What is the necessity of these new relations? What are the stakes? The crucial but overlooked final section of Foucault's
first volume on the history of sexuality, "Right of Death and Power over Life, reveals how high the stakes are: "wars were never as
bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century and all things being equal, never did regimes visit such
holocausts on their own populations " The motivating force behind Foucaults attempt to subvert the Freudian linkage of truthsexuality-subjectivity is the prevalence of the corresponding Freudian tendency to understand human existence as a smuggle of life against death,
eros against thanatos. Our souls have been fashioned as mirrors of our modem political terrain in which
massacres are vital, in which there is a right to kill those who are perceived as representing a biological
danger; in which political choice was governed by the sole option between survival or suicide. Ethics for
Foucault is a stylization, a mode of self-formation, that struggles against this perverse relation between
life and death. In praise of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, Foucault calls their work "a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to he
written in France in quite a long time," and by ethics he means a stylization, a life style, a way of thinking and living " The distinctiveness of
Deleuze and Guattari's ethics of stylization at our peculiar junction in history is to incite us to struggle against fascism - certainly fascism of the
historical variety which so successfully moved so many, "but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism
that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us " As the Christian was provoked to drive sin from the soul,
our distinctive task, our modem ethical task, is to ferret out the fascism." lf Discipline and Punish shows that philosophical thought must struggle
with the power-knowledge relations that would transform the human soul and existence into a mechanism, Foucault's history of sexuality
points to the ethical task of detaching ourselves from those forces that would subordinate human
existence (the Greek bios which Foucault employs) to biological life (the Greek "zoe"). An "esthetics of existence" resists a "science of
life." To think human existence in esthetic categories releases it from the realm of scientific knowledge. It
liberates us from endless self-decipherment and from subjecting ourselves to psychological norms. If
psychology obliges human beings to decipher our truth in our sexuality, it is because psychology is rooted in biology and its identification of
sexuality with life itself, thus binding us to the struggle with death. Modern biologys articulation of life in terms of the
murderous laws of evolution engages our identity with our destiny of death. Human existence and
civilization, since Freud, is essentially the contest of life against death (Eros und Tod, Lebenstrieb und
Destruktionstrieb) Foucaults genealogy of the desiring subject is an act of transgression against the life and death struggle that bio-power has
made the horizon of human existence. Foucault's ethics, then, is not Nietzsches "beyond good and evil" bur is beyond life and
death. Nor does it constitute a Nietzschean leap beyond common morality into a splendid isolation cut of from ethical and political solidarity.
Foucault committed himself to the cause of human rights, to the transformation of the plight of prisoners, mental patients, and other victims in
both his theory and his practice. He identified with Pierre Riviere and Herculine Barbin, in whose memoirs "one feels, under wards polished like
stone, the relentlessness and the ruin. His thought moved toward an ever-expanding embrace of otherness, the
condition for any community or moral action. Foucaults last writings put forward an ethical
interrogation, an impatience for liberty, for a freedom that does not surrender to the pursuit of some
messianic future but is an engagement with the numberless potential transgressions of those forces that
war against our self-creation. The commitment to that task will inaugurate new experiences of self and
human solidarity, experiences that will renounce any ambition of any abstract principle to name itself the
human essence.
campaigns to control birthrates and prolong life: This was the power to make live (FDS, 21920). The
extreme form of this is the power to make life, to make the monster, to make uncontrollable and
universally destructive viruses (FDS, 226). The reverse side is the power to allow death. State racism is a
recoding of the old mechanisms of blood through the new procedures of regulation. Racism , as biologizing, as
tied to a state, takes shape where the procedures of intervention at the level of the body, conduct, health,
and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting
the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race (VS, 197; WK, 149).37 For example, the old anti-Semitism
based on religion is reused under the new rubric of state racism. The integrity and purity of the race is threatened, and the
state apparatuses are introduced against the race that has infiltrated and introduced noxious elements into
the body. The Jews are characterized as the race present in the middle of all races (FDS, 76).38 The use of medical language is important.
Because certain groups in society are conceived of in medical terms, society is no longer in need of being defended from the outsider but from the
insider: the abnormal in behavior, species, or race. What is novel is not the mentality of power but the technology of power (FDS, 230). The
recoding of old problems is made possible through new techniques. A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a division
or incision between those who must live and those who must die. The biological continuum of the human
species is fragmented by the apparition of races, which are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified
as good or inferior, and so forth. The species is subdivided into subgroups that are thought of as races. In a sense, then, just as the
continuum of geometry becomes divisible in Descartes,39 the human continuum is divided, that is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries
later. As Anderson has persuasively argued, to suggest that racism has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that the dreams of
racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to blue or
white blood and breeding among aristocracies.40 As Stoler has noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around: A discourse of class derives
from an earlier discourse of races.41 But it is a more subtle distinction than that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of class have their
roots in the war of races, but so, too, does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin put on the concepts.42 But as well as
emphasizing the biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live, one must be prepared to
massacre ones enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different from the earlier war of
races that Foucault has spent so much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the mechanisms of mathematics and
medicine in bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways. Bio-power is able to establish,
between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is not warlike or confrontational but biological:
The more inferior species tend to disappear , the more abnormal individuals can be eliminated, the less the species will be
degenerated, the more I not as an individual but as a specieswill live, will be strong, will be vigorous, will be able to
proliferate. The death of the other does not just make me safer personally, but the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the
degenerate or abnormal, makes life in general healthier and purer (FDS, 22728). The existence in question is no
longer of sovereignty, juridical; but that of the population, biological. If genocide is truly the dream of modern powers,
this is not because of a return today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of
life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population (VS, 180; WK, 136). If the power of
normalization wishes to exercise the ancient sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And
if, inversely, a sovereign power, that is to say a power with the right of life and death, wishes to function
with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it must also pass through racism
(FDS, 228). This holds for indirect deaththe exposure to deathas much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism, this biological
sense of power is based on evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial relations, the necessity of
wars, criminality, phenomena of madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to
colonialism is central: This form of modern state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The theme of the
political enemy is extrapolated biologically. But what is important in the shift at the end of the nineteenth century is that war is no longer simply a
way of securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that race (FDS, 22830). As Foucault puts it in La volont de savoir :
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of all;
entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity.
Massacres have become vital [vitaux understood in a dual sense, both as essential and biological]. It is as managers of life
and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing
so many men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK, 136) The shift Foucault thinks is interesting is what might be called a shift from sanguinity to
sexuality: sanguinity, in that it had an instrumental role (the shedding of blood) and a symbolic role (purity of blood, differences of blood);
sexuality, when mechanisms of power are directed to the body, to life. The theme of race is present in both, but in a different form (VS, 194; WK,
147). We have moved from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law, death,
transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines
and regulations (VS, 195; WK, 148). In Nazism, the two are combined. Eugenics and medical/mathematical techniques are coupled with the
fantasy of blood and the ideal of the purity of the race. Foucault notes that there was immediate control of procreation and genetics in the
Nazi regime, and that regulation, security, and assurance were imposed over the disciplined, ordered society;
but at the same time, the old sovereign power of killing traversed the entire society. This was not simply confined
to the state, nor simply to the SA or the SS, but ultimately to everyone, as, through denunciation, everyone could have this power over their
neighbor (FDS, 231). While destruction of other races was central to Nazism, the other side of it was the exposure of the
German race itself to death, an absolute and universal risk of death. The entire German population was exposed to death, and Foucault suggests
that this was one of the fundamental duties of Nazi obedience. Only this exposure of the entire population to the universal risk of death could
constitute the Germans as the superior race, regenerated in the face of those races either totally exterminated or completely subjugated. We
have, therefore, in Nazism, both the absolute generalization of bio-power and the generalization of the
sovereign right of death. Two mechanisms one classical, archaic; one newcoincide exactly. A racist state, a
murdering state, a suicidal state. Accompanying the final solution was the order of April 1945 that called for the destruction of the
conditions of life of the German people themselves. A final solution for other races, an absolute suicide for the German
race (FDS, 23132).
fascism, as a form of ruthless (for want of a better qualifier) biopolitics, has always been
a world-historical phenomenon. This is not to say that fascism qua fascism is, and always has been, smeared across the world. We do,
however, suggest that its component forces, in coming together under colonialism, have informed the project of
development, albeit in attenuated form. We have only to think of the colonial project-beginning with the
cultural genocide in Iberian America, through slavery to forced/contract labour in the late colonial period, and
perhaps including the forced expropriation and starvation of Indians, Chinese and Brazilians, among others, documented in
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niaio Famines and The Making of the Third World by Mike Davis.'" Indeed, we see our project as allied to Davis.
He extends the notion of 'holocausts', which had previously been applied to a European phenomenon, into the colonial past.'2 We go one step
further, pushing the historical boundaries of global fascism back into colonial time and space, and then
drawing it forward, into the colonised present. We conjecture that fascist relations are immanent in global
capitalism, intensify state biopolitics at moments of crisis, and may be sustained post-crisis for
hegemonic purposes. Consider the 1930s, when a rogue state (Germany) was forced to structurally adjust by the League of Nations
powers as a consequence of the collapse of the gold-sterling regime. The result was what has come to be known as fascism: a manoeuvring of
elites and a populist appeal by the Nazi party to regenerate an idealised national culture through selective mobilization based on ethnic and racial
intolerance, and dedicated to reconstructing modernity via state technologies of control. Culture is, of course, always part of
capitalism. Stuart Hall's work informs our use of culture as synonymous with 'ideology'. The relation between
culture and capital that informs our use of 'global fascism' is one that invokes particular relations of
control between the state, media, the military, and tropes such as 'family', 'homeland', 'nation', 'God' and
the market. Our use of 'global fascism' is also an attempt to represent today's transformed international
conjuncture, where the crisis of market rule is premised on the defeat of Third World utopianism, and on a
definitive 'globalisation' of the commodity form: the combined assault on organised labour (global labour
market casualisation), on peasant cultures, and public goods. As early 20th century fascism was premised on the defeat of anticapitalist forces, so global fascism now targets forces with collective claims that stand in the way of commodification. The increasingly
unaccountable institutions of market rule (including the 'market state') provide a mechanism for one of the key
forces of 'global fascism' and, while this is a universal process, it is so contingently, because it continues the racist
project begun under colonialism. In this sense we submit that fascism has foundational roots in
European-centred development. The capitalist cultural technologies, with their origins in Europe, have
now, under a US aegis, been extended under multilateral developmental institutions. This is very much in keeping
with the idea of development-an idea with distinct cultural roots and heritage, but an idea that must, of
necessity disavow these roots if it is successfully to claim its goal of disinterested and normalised
universality.
Impact Famines
Biopolitics legitimizes famines in the name of social and economic modernity
Nally 11 Department of Geography at Cambridge University (David, The Biopolitics of food
provisioning, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2011,
Wiley Online Library
Finally, to
legitimise this new biopolitics of provision an ideological distinction between peoples and
populations must be introduced. According to Foucault, the population includes those who conform or adapt to
the new economic order; they fall in line with market regulation, even promoting it as a means to attain
greater security. The people, on the other hand, are those who disrupt the system and throw themselves on the
supplies. They reject the new regime of planned scarcity, and therefore do not really belong to the population (2007, 44). For
Foucault the act of letting die is profoundly connected to the classification of undesirables what Giorgio
Agamben (1995) would later term homines sacri who are now represented as threats, either external or internal, to the population
(Foucault 2003, 256). In a liberal biopolitical economy , he concludes, killing or the imperative to kill is
acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the
biological threat to and improvement of the species or race . (2003, 256; see also Minca 2006)Thus in addition to the
identication of articial forms of food provisioning and aberrant modes of economic management, there appears a regime of human
classication that disaggregates populations according to their conduct and perceived threat to the social order (Dean 2002). Under
biopolitical conditions, therefore, scarcity and hunger are permissible in so far as their presence
provokes a desirable social or economic change (Raulff 2004, 611). To paraphrase David Keen (1994, 77), famines
now have functions as well as causes (Nally 2008). In this unique genealogy of the modern food system,
Foucault does not discuss the political situation in Britain. If he had, he would have found a clear analogue to the birth of liberalism and
the biopower of the state that he readily detects in the political and economic discourse of 18th century France. In
Thoughts and details on scarcity (1800), for instance, Edmund Burke (17291797) relates food supply (one of the nest problems in legislation)
to the issue of responsible government. For Burke, public provision was both naive and dangerous: Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the
trade of provisions is the most dangerous, and it is always worst in the time when men are most disposed to it: that is, in the time of scarcity. (nd,
2678) According to Adam Smith (17231790) restricting by the violence of government the freedoms of the market was the most certain
method of prolonging famine (Smith 1998, 597). Similarly David Ricardos (17721823) views on comparative advantage suggesting that
regions and states should specialise in a single niche product to gain a competitive edge reinforced the case for interdependent global markets,
unrestricted private enterprise and food trade liberalisation (Abraham 1991). Referring to the Irish emergency of 1847, the liberal economist J.S.
Mill (18061873) also endorsed market mechanisms as the optimal scheme for addressing food scarcity. In his acclaimed Principles of political
economy, Mill warned against direct measures at the cost of the state, to procure food, favouring instead private speculation (1871, 549). The
British promoters of free-trade (Grifn 2009) also dispensed theories about the effective regulation of social behaviour. Although Burke attacked
government intervention in the provisions trade, he nevertheless felt that principled administrations should guide our judgment and regulate our
tempers, particularly in times of scarcity when multitudes are thrust upon the government for support (nd, 251). Such sentiments reinforce
Foucaults point that the people those aberrant elements that do not really belong to the population need
moral guidance and reformatory discipline to correct their individual and collective behaviour . In England the
preventive measures that formed the bedrock of the anti-scarcity system made way for novel remedial practices designed not to mitigate
distress the conventional euphemism for starvation but to stigmatise and discipline the poor (Himmelfarb 1985). This concern with social
regulation received its clearest expression in the revision of the English Poor Law of 1834 (Dean 1991; Driver 1993). The new laws established
for the rst time an epistemological separation and legal distinction between poverty and indigence. This distinction between the pauper (a
social delinquent) and the labouring poor (those who struggled to make ends meet) codied in law and spatialised in the workhouse
correlates precisely with the caesura distinguishing the people from the population. The Poor Law was therefore a techne for separating the
normal from the pathological in such a way as to naturalise the violence of incarceration and correction. Clearly, market regulation would
require certain procedures for disciplining bodies, and in some cases, whole populations (Nally forthcoming).
erase it from the face of the Earth but that ended up, instead, multiplying it to innity . Development
fostered a way of conceiving of social life as a technical problem, as a matter of rational decision and
management to be entrusted to that group of peoplethe development professionals whose specialized
knowledge allegedly qualied them for the task . Instead of seeing change as a process rooted in the
interpretation of each societys history and cultural tradition as a number of intellectuals in various parts of the Third
World had attempted to do in the 1920s and 1930s (Gandhi being the best known of them) these professionals sought to devise
mechanisms and procedures to make societies t a preexisting model that embodied the structures and
functions of modernity. Like sorcerers apprentices, the development professionals awakened once again the dream of reason that, in
their hands, as in earlier instances, produced a troubling reality. At times, development grew to be so important for Third
World countries that it became acceptable for their rulers to subject their populations to an innite variety
of interventions, to more encompassing forms of power and systems of control; so important that First and
Third World elites accepted the price of massive impoverishment , of selling Third World resources to the
most convenient bidder, of degrading their physical and human ecologies, of killing and torturing , of
condemning their indigenous populations to near extinction; so important that many in the Third
World began to think of themselves as inferior, underdeveloped, and ignorant and to doubt the
value of their own culture, deciding instead to pledge allegiance to the banners of reason and progress;
so important, nally, that the achievement of development clouded the awareness of the impossibility of
fullling the promises that development seemed to be making . After four decades of this discourse, most forms of
understanding and representing the Third World are still dictated by the same basic tenets. The forms of
power that have appeared act not so much by repression but by normalization; not by ignorance but by
controlled knowledge; not by humanitarian concern but by the bureaucratization of social action. As the conditions that gave rise to
development became more pressing, it could only increase its hold, rene its methods, and extend its reach even further. That the materiality
of these conditions is not conjured up by an objective body of knowledge but is charted out by the
rational discourses of economists, politicians, and development experts of all types should already be clear. What
has been achieved is a specic conguration of factors and forces in which the new language of development nds support. As a discourse,
development is thus a very real historical formation, albeit articulated around an articial construct
(underdevelopment)
subjects, based on the privilege of the representers; the exercise of power over the Third World made
possible by this discursive homogenization (which entails the erasure of the complexity and diversity of Third World peoples, so
that a squatter in Mexico City, a Nepalese peasant, and a Tuareg nomad become equivalent to each other as poor and underdeveloped); and the
colonization and domination of the natural and human ecologies and economies of the Third World.26 Development assumes a
teleology to the extent that it proposes that the natives will sooner or later be reformed; at the same time,
however, it reproduces endlessly the separation between reformers and those to be reformed by keeping alive the
premise of the Third World as different and inferior, as having a limited humanity in relation to the accomplished European. Development
relies on this perpetual recognition and disavowal of difference, a feature identied by Bhabha (1990) as inherent to
discrimination. The signiers of poverty, illiteracy, hunger, and so forth have already achieved a xity
as signieds of underdevelopment which seems impossible to sunder . Perhaps no other factor has contributed to
cementing the association of poverty with underdevelopment as the discourse of economists. To them I dedicate the coming chapter.
Alt
the need for a kind of thinking that moves along the diversity of historical processes (Mignolo 2001: 9). There are, to be sure, no original
thinking traditions to which one can go back. Rather than reproducing Western abstract universals, however, the alternative is a kind of
border thinking that engages the colonialism of Western epistemology (from the left and from the right)
from the perspective of epistemic forces that have been turned into subaltern (traditional, folkloric,
religious, emotional, etc.) forms of knowledge (2001: 11). Resituating Anzaldas metaphor of the border into the domain of
coloniality, Mignolo adumbrates the possibility of `thinking otherwise, from the interior exteriority of the border. That is, to engage in
border thinking is to move beyond the categories created an imposed by Western epistemology (p. 11). This
is not just a question of changing the contents but the very terms of the conversation. It is not a question of
replacing existing epistemologies either; these will certainly continue to exist and as such will remain viable as spaces of, and for, critique.
Instead, what he claims is the space for an epistemology that comes from the border and aims toward political and ethical transformations (p.
11). Finally, while Mignolo acknowledges the continued importance of the monotopic critique of modernity by Western critical
discourse (critique from a single, unified space), he suggests that this has to be put into dialogue with the critique(s)
arising from the colonial difference, which constitutes border thinking. The result is a pluritopic hermeneutics
(a term he seemingly adapts from Pannikars diatopic hermeneutics), a possibility of thinking from different spaces which
finally breaks away from eurocentrism as sole epistemological perspective. This is the double critique of modernity
from the perspective of coloniality, from the exterior of the modern/colonial world system. Let it be clear, however, that border thinking
entails both displacement and departure (2000: 308), double critique and positive affirmation of an
alternative ordering of the real. Border thinking points towards a different kind of hegemony, a multiple
one. As a universal project, diversity allows us to imagine alternatives to universalism (we could say that the
alternative to universalism in this view is not particularism but multiplicity). The `West and the rest in Huntingtons
phrase provides the model to overcome, as the `rest becomes the sites where border thinking emerges in
its diversity, where `mundializacin creates new local histories remaking and readapting Western global
designs .and transforming local (European) histories from where such designs emerged.
`Interdependence may be the word that summarizes the break away from the idea of totality and brings
about the idea of networks whose articulation will require epistemological principles I called in this book `border
thinking and `border gnosis, as a rearticulation of the colonial difference : `diversality as a universal project, which means
that people
310, 311).
and communities have the right to be different precisely because `we are all equals (2000:
now, each of our 17 or 18 constitutions has just tried to copy the latest institutional fashionFrench,
U.S., European. And it was clear that it didnt fit us, because these institutions correspond to other
societies. We are indigenous and nonindigenous, we are liberal and communitarians, we are a profoundly
diverse society regionally and a hybrid in terms of social classes. So we have to have institutions that
allow us to recognize that pluralism. (Laura Carlsen, 16 November 2007; http://americas.irconline. org/am/4735). Some academics
and intellectuals similarly speak about un nuevo ciclo histrico (a new historical cycle), potentially leading to a significant renewal of democracy
and development (e.g., Caldern 2007). In other words, if most revolutionary processes of the past still operated
within the modern liberal model, what might be at stake in the transformations in Ecuador, Bolivia, and
Venezuela in particular is the end of coloniality. This implies the construction of another societal project,
free once and for all of its moorings in modernity/coloniality: in short, un giro decolonial (a decolonial
turn; see CastroGmez and Grosfogel (2007) and the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality group, MCD). Or, as Mario Blaser
(2007) argues, if it is true that the left governments constitute attempts to recompose the project of modernity
through a modernizing model that to a greater or lesser extent presents an alternative to the neoliberal
model, the culturalpolitical projects of many of the regions social movements seem to overflow modernist criteria. According to Marisol de la
unreflectively the problems of the Centre in its effort to submit and dominate the region. Thus, we see the
Centres constant effort to impose on us its idea of modernization as the only available option, but just as with any
sort of loan, the interest rates have always been enormous. This useless dependency on the knowledge of the
Centre (useless because the problems modernization set out to resolve are still with us, and aggravated) emphasizes the urgency of
moving from translation and imitation to original creation as emancipated creation. Only then will we be able to
break our silence and start a real transformation . A different organizational knowledge is needed,
constructed from the perspective of otherness . It must be original insofar as it relates to its origins and is
not the result of translation, imitation or falsification. It must analyse the organizational realities of Latin
America from the standpoint of the specific history of its economic and political formation and from its vast
cultural heritage. These realities function under modes of rationality that differ significantly from the instrumental mode of the Centre.
These are, in short, the orienting ideas of this meditation, which I develop in following three sections: The first one establishes
the main characteristic of the development of Organization Studies in Latin America as its tendency towards falsification and imitation of the
knowledge generated in the Centre. The second section recognizes the role played by the term organization as an artifice that facilitates the
comparison of different realities through their structural variables, but also the inability of this term to recognize any reality that escapes
instrumental rationality and the logic of the market. It also articulates the increasing importance of such concepts in the context of neo-liberalism.
The third section concludes by renewing the urgency of appreciating the organizational problems of Latin America from the outside by proposing
a preliminary research agenda built from original approaches that recognize otherness. Organization Studies has had little
relevance in Latin America although the situation is beginning to change. This lack of substance in Latin
American social research is explained, among other reasons, by the colonial condition that gave form to the
region. That is, the plundering of Latin American natural wealth, that provided an engine for the
development of the Centre, caused structural poverty and exclusion for the countries of this region . For a
long time, the debate focused on the functionality of the State as promoter of economic wealth and modernization. Consequently, while
national governments ushered industrialization with the promise of progress , Latin American researchers analysed
why these policies failed repeatedly, reproducing and worsening the problems of the region. The debates surrounding the Latin American
situation acquired great strength in the 1960s and 1970s partly due to positions taken by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean (CEPAL in Spanish) concerning the conditions of the Latin American Periphery (Bielschowsky, 1998), and partly due to insights of
Latin American researchers that confronted developmentalist postures with dependentista explanations, thus revealing conditions that
encourage asymmetrical exchanges (Grosfoguel, 2000; Kahl, 1976). Hence, Latin American ideology was occupied with a wide
ranging discussion
concerning essential economic, social and political issues, while leaving aside issues
concerned with organizational structuring, its functioning and its development. Most social science research
focused on structural development difficulties, poverty, political conflicts, social movements and the
authoritarian governments that made democratization difficult.
Alt Uniqueness
Latin America is at a crossroads that points the way towards a post-development future
alternative modernities are emerging
Escobar 08 Arturo Escobar, Department of Anthropology, UNC, Chapel Hill. Latin America at a
Crossroads: Alternative Modernizations, Postliberalism, or Postdevelopment? p.3-4
Despite the contradictory and diverse forms it has taken in the present decade, the
things in many of the continents regions, from Southern Mexico to the Patagonia, and especially in large
parts of South America, is strong. How one thinks about these processes is itself an object of struggle and
debate, and it is at this juncture that this paper is situated. Is it possible to suggest ways of thinking about the ongoing transformations that
neither shortcut their potential by interpreting them through worn out categories, nor that aggrandize their scope by imputing to them utopias that
might be far from the desires and actions of the main actors involved? What perspectives might be most fruitful to think through, and about, the
transformations? Is it enough to think from the space of the modern social sciences, or must one incorporate other forms of knowledge, such as
those of the activist-intellectuals that inhabit the worlds of many of todays social movements? In other words, the questions of
where one thinks from, with whom, and for what purpose become themselves important elements of the
investigation; this also means that the investigation, more than ever, is simultaneously theoretical and
political. This specificity also has to do with the multiplicity of histories and trajectories that underlie the diverse cultural and political projects
at play. As I will suggest in the first part of the paper, the transformations are most fruitfully seen in terms of the crisis of both neo-liberalism and
modernity. Seen in this way, it can plausibly be argued that the region could be moving at the very least beyond
the idea of a single, universal modernity and towards a more plural set of modernities . Whether it is also moving
beyond the dominance of one set of modernities (Euro-modernities), or not, remains to be seen. The answer to this question will depend on the
degree to which national, sub-national, and regional projects might be able to go beyond modernization projects and into postcapitalist, postliberal, and post-statist formations. Although moving to a post-liberal society does not seem to be the project of the
progressive governments, some social movements could be seen as pointing in this direction. This also
means that the relation between the socio-economic and political transformations going on at the level of
the State, on the one hand, and the actions and cultural-political demands of social movements, on the
other, need to be kept in mind. A third layer to which attention needs to be paid is, of course, the reactions by, and projects from, the
right. State, social movements, and the right thus appear as three inter-related but distinct spheres of cultural-political intervention. Said
differently, this paper seeks to understand the current conjuncture, in the sense of a description of a social formation as fractured and conflictual,
along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and
processes of struggle and negotiation (Grossberg 2006: 4). Latin America can be fruitfully seen as a crossroads: a
regional formation where critical theories arising from many trajectories (from Marxist political economy
to postructuralisms and their many combinations); a multiplicity of histories and futures; and very diverse
cultural and political projects all find a convergence space. As we shall see, the current conjuncture can be said
to be defined by two processes: the crisis of the neoliberal model of the past three decades; and the crisis
of the project of bringing about modernity in the continent since the Conquest.
governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity' (ibid.). The sentiment that 'we are all governed and
therefore in solidarity is present in different ways and degrees in today's anti-globalization campaigns,
such as global justice movements, the World Social Forum, the Zapatistas in Mexico or the
international peasant farmers' movement Via Campesina. It disturbs and questions earlier forms of
Third World solidarity coalescing around politics, rights and aid (Olesen 2004). Rights and aid solidarity in
particular, including humanitarian and development assistance, imply a one-way process between the
provider and beneficiary of solidarity. It is a process that emphasizes differences in power and distance,
with providers in places of safety and beneficiaries in zones of crisis. It is also apolitical and does 'not
fundamentally challenge the underlying causes of grievances that inspire the solidarity effort' (ibid.: 258). In
contrast, global solidarity emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity between provider and beneficiary while
blurring the differences between them. It involves a 'more extensive global consciousness that constructs
the grievances of physically, socially and culturally distant people as deeply intertwined' (ibid.: 259). While
difference is acknowledged, it is the similarities that are important. Global solidarity is also political: distant struggles are
common points of departure that collectively problematize the overarching, anti-democratic and
marginalizing effects of global neoliberalism, whether as struggles against hospital closures in mass consumer society or the
ruination of pastoralist livelihoods beyond its borders. In this respect, it minimizes attempts to divide and
striate humankind either according to measures of development and underdevelopment or those of culture .
Today the fear of radical interconnection, with its ability to threaten the stability of mass consumer
society, dominates Western political imagination. For an international citizenship , however, it offers
possibilities for new encounters, mutual recognition, reciprocity and hope: it represents the magic of life
itself. The principles of mutuality and interconnectedness provide a chance to rediscover politics as a
practical interrogation of power. If biopolitics and its technologies of security have absorbed the political,
the task is not so much to reinvent it as to reclaim it. It involves questioning the assumptions and practices
that support life while at the same time disallowing it to the point of death. Called into question are those
acts of administrative or petty sovereignty that, acting through the lens of race, class and gender, order the
way we live and dictate how we develop the rest of the world in our own interests . We are all governed by
these practices - providers and beneficiaries alike - which themselves are directly or indirectly the result of states.
Through interconnectedness, mutuality and conversations among the governed, they can be compared,
reconnected and interrogated. Such mutuality, however, demands a change of comportment. In a reversal of the
Schumachian paradigm of knowledge, instead of educating the poor and marginalized, it is more a question of
learning from their struggles for existence, identity and dignity and together challenging the world we live
in. As a precondition, the liberal inclination to prejudge those who are culturally different as somehow
incomplete and requiring external betterment has to be abandoned . It requires a willingness to engage in
unscripted conversations and accept the risks involved, including the inability to predict or control
outcomes - a situation that a security mentality continually tries to avoid. Through a practical politics
based on the solidarity of the governed we can aspire to opening ourselves to the spontaneity of
unpredictable encounters. It also entails a willingness to help without expecting anything in return, that is,
abandoning the security prescription which argues that in helping others we should also help ourselves.
While mandatory for donor and NGO assistance, offers of support from and between international citizens would not insist that beneficiaries
change their beliefs, attitudes or forms of social organization. If development encloses an emancipatory urge, it does not
lie in the formulation of endless 'new and improved' technologies of betterment nor the search for more
authentic forms of community - it is found in the solidarity of the governed made possible by a radically
interconnected world and the insatiable will to life that flows and circulates through it.
One way to detect and investigate local constructions is to focus on popular groups forms of resistance to
the introduction of capitalist practices . This was the route followed by the ethnographies of resistance of the 1980s, such as those
by Nash (1979), Taussig (1980), Scott (1985), and Ong (1987). One of the most unambiguous expressions of the cultural basis of resistance was
given by Taussig in his analysis of the spread of capitalist agriculture in the Cauca River Valley in southwest Colombia. The spread of sugarcane
was met by erce opposition by the mostly Afro-Colombian peasants of the region. There was much more at stake than material resistance. In
Taussigs words, Peasants represent as vividly unnatural, even as evil, practices that most of us in commodity-
based societies have come to accept as natural in the everyday workings of our economy, and therefore of
the world in general. This representation occurs only when they are proletarianized and refers only
to the way of life that is organized by capitalist relations of production . It neither occurs nor refers to
peasant ways of life. (1980, 3). Taussig invites us to see in this type of resistance a response by people to what they see as an evil and
destructive way of ordering economic life (17). Other authors in disparate contexts derive similar lessonsfor instance, Fals Borda (1984) in his
analysis of the introduction of barbed wire and other technologies in northern Colombia at the turn of the century; and Scott (1985) in his study of
the fate of green revolution technologies in Malaysia. The works of the 1980s, however, used resistance to illuminate practices of power more
than the logic of the subaltern. Several authors have paid more attention to this latter aspect in recent years, introducing new ways of thinking
about it (Guha 1988; Scott 1990; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). In their discussion of the colonial encounter in southern Africa, for example,
Comaroff and Comaroff emphatically assert that the colonized did not equate exchange with incorporation, or the learning of new techniques
with subordination (1991, 309); instead, they read their own signicance into the colonizers practices and sought to neutralize their disciplines.
Although Africans were certainly transformed by the encounter, the lesson derived by this more subaltern actororiented view of resistance is that
hegemony is more unstable, vulnerable, and contested than previously thought. Ranajit Guha has also called on historians to see the history of the
subaltern from another and historicaly antagonistic universe (1989, 220). There is a counterappropriation of history by the
subaltern that cannot be reduced to something else, such as the logic of capital or modernity. It has to be
explained in its own terms . Turning back to local models of the economy, do they exist in another and
historically antagonistic universe? One thing is certain in this regard: local models exist not in a pure state but in
complex hybridizations with dominant models . This is not to deny, however, that people do model their realities in specic
ways; local models are constitutive of a peoples world , which means that they cannot be readily observed by
objectifying positivist science. I already introduced Gudeman and Riveras (1990) notion of local models as conversations that take
place in the context of dominant conversations. Indeed, what counts most from the perspective of these authors is to
investigate the articulation of local and centric (dominant) conversations, including the relationship
between inscriptions from the past and practices of the present, between centric text and marginal voices,
between the corporation in the center and the house in the margins. Center and periphery thus emerge
not as xed points in space, external to each other, but as a continuously moving zone in which practices
of doing conversations and economies get intermingled, always shifting their relative position . Marginality
becomes an effect of this dynamic. Gudemans earlier work (see especially 1986) provides a view of the importance and coherence of local
models of the economy in Panama, a view further rened through work in Colombia. For these anthropologists, the peasant model that
exists today in the Colombian Andes is the outcome of an extensive conversationfrom Aristotle to Smith and
Marxthat occurred over several thousand years and continues to take place in many lands (1990, 14).
These conversations are incorporated into local social practice , producing a local model of the economy.32
At the basis of the peasant model is the notion that the Earth gives based on its strength. Humans, however, must help the land to give its
products through work. There is a relation of give and take between humans and the earth, modeled in terms of reciprocity and ultimately
validated by Providence (God). The land may produce abundance or scarcity; most people agree that the land gives less now, and that there is
more scarcity. Scarcity is thus not given a metaphysical character (the way things are) but linked to what happens to the land, the house, and the
market. If scarcity persists, it is because the Earth needs more help, although peasants know that chemical
productsas opposed to organic manureburn the earth and take away its force. Food crops draw
their strength from the land; humans, in turn, gain their energy and force from food crops and animal
products, and this strength, when applied as work on the land, yields more force. Work, construed as
concrete physical activity, is the nal using up of the lands strength. This construction brings the model
full circle. There is a ow of strength from the land to crops to food to humans to work that helps the land
give more force. Strength is secured from the earth and used up as humans gather more. Control over this process is established through the
house, for by using resources of the house to sustain their work the people gain control over the results of their efforts. (Gudeman and Rivera
1990, 30) The house has two main purposes: to reproduce itself and to increase its base (its stock of land, savings,
can be seen as closer to the land-based model of the Physiocrats, and the use of force can be related to the Marxist notion of labor force,
although force is applied equally to work, land, and food. Beyond these differences, there is a crucial distinction between
both models, arising from the fact that the house model is based on daily practice . Local models are experiments
in living; the house model is developed through use . . . it has to do with land, foodstuffs, and everyday
life (Gudeman and Rivera 1990, 14, 15). This does not contradict the assertion that the peasant model is the product of past and present
conversations and their adaptation through practice. More than the house model, in Latin America what one increasingly
nds is the house business. As the site of conjunction of forms, dynamic and multicultural yet fragile and
unstable in identity (Gudeman 1992, 144), the house business can be interpreted in terms of metaphors of bricolage (de Certeau 1984;
Comaroff and Comaroff 1991) or hybridization (Garca Canclini 1990). It is composed of partly overlapping domains of practices that must be
studied ethnographically. Gudeman and Rivera believe that this general dynamic also marked the development of modern economics, even if the
latter became more and more technical with the development of capitalism.34 The implications of this view are enormous. Not only does
the idea of a universal model of the economy have to be abandoned, it becomes necessary to recognize
that forms of production are not independent from the representations (the models) of social life in
which they exist. The remaking of development must thus start by examining local constructions , to
the extent that they are the life and history of a people, that is, the conditions of and for change . This brings into
consideration the relation between models and power. Gudeman and Rivera advocate a process based on communities of modelers, in which
local and dominant models are accorded a say. But who is to belong to and organize these communities of modelers? Again, what we have here is
a confrontation of local and global power, popular and scientic knowledge. At issue is the distribution of global power and its
is the search for a different way of thinking about development and pushed by indigenous
peoples and to some extent by peasants, by African descendents, and in collaboration with ecologists, sometimes
feminists, sometimes activists from different social movements. They started to say that for this model of development, this is the moment
to change our development model, from a growth-oriented and extraction of natural resources oriented
model to something that is more holistic, something that really speaks to the indigenous cosmo-visions of the
people in which this notion of prosperity based on material well-being only and material consumption
does not exist. What has been traditionally cultivated among indigenous communities, is not even a notion of development, that is the key, because people are
saying Buen Vivir is the new theory of development. No, its not a theory of development. Its a theory of something else that
is not development. People translate it as the good life. I prefer to translate it as collective well-being. But its a collective
well-being of both humans and non-humans. Humans, human communities and the natural world, all living beings. And
what does that look like in practice? What are the elements of it? Thats the key question, the practice, the implementation of the Buen
Vivir. Thats the struggle, especially in Ecuador and Bolivia that have governments that have been put in power mostly by coalitions of social
movements, especially indigenous movements, which over the past 6 years since they were elected in 2006, and they were elected with the promise that they were
going to carry out this mandate of the Buen Vivir in the constitutions of both Bolivia and Ecuador, with different notions of Buen Vivir in both constitutions. That said,
the goal of state policies should be to promote Buen Vivir which involves social justice, a new notion of rights that includes the rights of nature, ecological
sustainability, the elimination of poverty or the reduction of poverty. The reduction of poverty and the protection of nature are the two main dimensions of that. So
there are two sides to the Buen Vivir, which is the social and economic political side, and the rights of nature which is the ecological side. So the aims of the
constitutions and development plans, Ive looked at the development plans of both governments and they are very contradictory, because they say we have to
carry out this mandate. But they keep
falling back to the old ideas about growth and extraction of natural resources
and planning as a top-down exercise, and we the experts have decided the plan for the Buen Vivir, but
communities feel excluded. So they clash now in both countries. This is like, so in southern Colombia, southern
Mexico, Chiapas and Oaxaca is between indigenous, and peasant, and black movements on the one hand,
movements that are for the Buen Vivir, that are for a different vision of development, and the state approach
which still is what Gudynas and Acosta in particular call neo-extractivists. They are neo-extractivist because they are still based on the extraction of
natural resources: oil, natural gas, lithium, soy beans, sugar cane, agro-fuels of all kinds, gold, minerals. They are Left regimes that are transacting with corporations,
Canadian, American, European, South African, Chinese, corporations to take out natural resources. They are not traditional extractivism because, like the older
Venezuelan regimes for instance, where there was so much oil, but the oil benefited only a small elite. Now the idea of these Left regimes, which is a very good idea
They are
going to use the revenues for social redistribution, to reduce poverty and to reduce inequality and to some
extent they are doing it. But in the process, they have become this neo-developmentalist development models, pretty
much the same as in the past but with a better social policy. Its interesting that the starting point was the
idea of social justice and linked to environmental protection whereas in England at the moment, for example, the British
government there are basically saying we have to go for economic growth at all costs , and environmental protection is
optional. Its interesting to see how with Buen Vivir, thats been there from the beginning. Exactly, and that is happening in the US as well , with
obviously, is they are going to be using the revenues which are far larger than in the previous regimes that basically gave everything to the corporations.
policies like hydro-fracking which has been given carte blanche all over the place
Answers to Answers
AT: Perm
Perm fails challenging development requires not a surface level critique but a thorough
change in perspective. Starting from the position of subalternity requires rejecting their
top-down method.
Escobar 02 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Ecology at University of North
Carolina, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality Research
Program Tercer Congreso Internacional de Latinoamericanistas en Europa July 3-6, 2002]
There is no question, writes Mignolo (2000: 59), that Quijano, Dussel and I are reacting not only to the force of a historical imaginary but also
to the actuality of this imaginary today. The corollary is the need to build narratives from the perspective of
modernity/coloniality geared towards the search for a different logic (22). This project has to do with the
rearticulation of global designs by and from local histories ; with the articulation between subaltern and
hegemonic knowledge from the perspective of the subaltern; and with the remapping of colonial
difference towards a worldly culture such as in the Zapatista project, that remaps Marxism, thirdworldism, and indigenism, without
being either of them, in an excellent example of border thinking. While there is nothing outside of totality ... totality is always projected from a
given local history, it becomes possible to think of other local histories producing either alternative totalities
or an alternative to totality (329). These alternatives would not play on the globalization/civilization
couplet inherent to modernity/coloniality; they would rather build on a mundializacin/culture relation
centered on the local histories in which colonial global designs are necessarily transformed, thus
transforming also the local histories that created them. Unlike globalization, mundializacin brings to the
fore the manifold local histories that, in questioning global designs (e.g., neo-liberal globalization), aim
at forms of globality that arise out of cultures of transience that go against the cultural homogeneity
fostered by such designs. The diversity of mundializacin is contrasted here with the homogeneity of globalization, aiming at multiple
and diverse social orders. In short, the perspective of modernity/coloniality provides an alternative framework
for debates on modernity, globalization and development; it is not just a change in the description of
events, it is an epistemic change of perspective. By speaking of the colonial difference, this framework brings to
the fore the power dimension that is often lost in relativistic discussions of cultural difference . More recent
debates on interculturality, for instance in Ecuadors current political and cultural scene, deepens some of these insights (Walsh 2003). In short,
the MC research program is a framework constructed from the Latin American periphery of the modern colonial world system; it helps
explain the dynamics of eurocentrism in the making of modernity and attempts to transcend it. If it
reveals the dark sides of modernity, it does not do it from an intra-epistemic perspective, as in the critical European
discourses, but from the perspective of the receivers of the alleged benefits of the modern world .
Modernity/coloniality also shows that the perspective of modernity is limited and exhausted in its
pretended universality. By the same token, it shows the shortcomings of the language of alternative modernities in that this latter
incorporates the projects of the nonmoderns into a single project, losing the subaltern perspectives and subordinating them, for even in their
hybridity subaltern perspectives are not about being only modern but are heteroglossic, networked, plural. In highlighting the developmentalist
fallacy, lastly, modernity/coloniality not only re-focuses our attention on the overall fact of development, it
provides a context for interpreting the various challenges to development and modernity as so many
projects that are potentially complementary and mutually reinforcing. Beyond Latin America, one may say, with
Mignolo (2000: 309), that this approach is certainly a theory from/of the Third World, but not only for the Third World ..... Third World
theorizing is also for the First World in the sense that critical theory is subsumed and incorporated in a new geocultural and epistemological
location.7
Modernity, however we define it, is part and parcel of the tradition that needs to be reoriented if different
understandings of development are to be crafted, or even made visible. Discourses of globalization and
development are, themselves, subsidiary to visions of modernity; modernity thus remains a key political
and cultural question. For most analysts, globalization iscan only bethe universalization of modernity: in
short, modernity writ large (Blaser, forthcoming). It seems impossible to imagine it otherwise. Schematically, there could be
said to be three main positions regarding modernity: (1) modernity as universal process of European origin (intraEuro/American discourses); (2)
alternative modernities (locally specific variations of the same universal modernity); and (3) multiple modernities, that is, modernity as
multiplicity without a single origin or cultural home. In this latter view, modernity emerged from multiple intersecting processes, did not have a
single origin, and has followed multiple trajectories. The modern, in this way, is an always ongoing struggle to define the real in terms of
articulations of time and space, presence and change, lasting structures and the experience of the everyday. In other words, not every
modernity is Euro-modernity, and multiple modernities can thus be reclaimed as an ontological and
political project. By deessentializing modernity more radically than in most other works, this
positionmost cogently articulated currently by my colleague at Chapel Hill, Lawrence Grossberg (2007)opens up new
possibilities for rethinking the modern. This is another way of delinking modernity from the tight embrace by the West and
locating possibilities for remaking it everywhere.3
the production of discourses that command the power of truth, and the specic mode of articulation of
these discourses upon a given historical situation.
AT: Framework
Their framework is ethically and politically bankrupt actual change does not come from
the prescriptive demands their framework requires but from the very process of critique
that challenges and paralyzes old modes of thought.
Foucault 1991 [Michel, chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collge de France, Questions of Method, in
The Foucault effect by Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, pg. 83-85]
We have known at least since the nineteenth century the difference between anaesthesis and paralysis. Let's talk about paralysis first. Who has been paralyzed? Do you
think what I wrote on the history of psychiatry paralyzed those people who had already been concerned for some time about what was happening in psychiatric
institutions? And, seeing what has been happening in and around prisons, I don't think the effect of paralysis is very evident there either. As far as the people in prison
are concerned, things aren't doing too badly. On the other hand, it's
true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the
not likely to find advice or instructions in my books that tell them
'what is to be done'. But my project is precisely to bring it about that they 'no longer know what to
do', so that the acts, gestures, discourses which up until then had seemed to go without saying
become problematic, difficult, dangerous. This effect is intentional. And then I have some news for you: for me the problem of the prisons
prisonwhich is not quite the same as being in prisonare
isn't one for the 'social workers' but one for the prisoners. And on that side, I'm not so sure what's been said over the last fifteen years has been quite sohow shall I
put it?demobilizing.
But paralysis isn't the same thing as anaesthesison the contrary. It's in so far as there's been an awakening to a whole series of
problems that the difficulty of doing anything comes to be felt. Not that this effect is an end in itself. But it seems to me that 'what is to be done'
ought not to be determined from above by reformers, be they prophetic or legislative, but by a long
work of comings and goings, of exchanges, reflections, trials, different analyses. If the social workers you
are talking about don't know which way to turn, this just goes to show that they're looking, and hence are not
anaesthetized or sterilized at allon the contrary. And it's because of the need not to tie them down or immobilize them that there can be no question for me of
trying to tell 'what is to be done'. If the questions posed by the social workers you spoke of are going to assume their full amplitude, the most important
thing is not to bury them under the weight of prescriptive, prophetic discourse. The necessity of
reform mustn't be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce or halt the
exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: 'Don't
criticize, since you're not capable of carrying out a reform.' That's ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn't
have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who
fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation,
essays in refusal. It doesn't have to lay down the law for the law. It isn't a stage in a programming. It is
a challenge directed to what is.
The problem, you see, is one for the subject who actsthe subject of action through which the real is transformed. If prisons and punitive
mechanisms are transformed, it won't be because a plan of reform has found its way into the heads of the social
workers; it will be when those who have to do with that penal reality, all those people, have come into collision with
each other and with themselves, run into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities, been through conflicts and confrontations; when critique
has been played out in the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas.
Development is not simply the result of certain policies but a broader system of discursive
relations their framework argument is an attempt to normalize the debate space through
false neutrality
DuBois 91
(Marc, The Governance of the Third World: A Foucauldian Perspective on Power Relations in Development, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 16, No. 1,
Winter 1991, [CL])
Several commonly used approaches to criticizing development can be identified as starting points for the lines
of criticism traced out in this paper. It is a relatively easy affair , given the domination of the Third World by the First World, to situate
development at the center of this unequal relationship. Certainly there is some founding to the notion that
development is being employed as a neocolonialist tool. What I have tried to demonstrate is that it is much more of a tool than even
hard-line neocolonialists would have dreamed. It is not simply misguided policies, resulting in, for example, soaring debts or
dependence upon a single export, which liken the process of development to a modified continuation of colonial rule, but the
establishment of subtle power relations and profound hierarchizations . A second tack of criticism aims at the (Western) values
underlying our conceptualization of development, which are carried into foreign cultures by development activities. I have endeavored to deepen
this attack by passing beyond the level of Western strategic goals (e.g., modernization or lowering infant mortality rates) and
question the very value of development. Finally, many attacks on development are based' on an analysis of what development does. It is with
this critical perspective that the bulk of this paper is concerned, adding to it a Foucauldian twist. ' Most efforts to understand what
development does produce somewhat superficial results. Development activities are criticized for not
accomplishing their objectives (e.g., irrigation projects that do not pro- vide enough water to meet the needs of the area irrigated) or for
causing unwanted side effects (e.g., industrialization projects that hasten the rural exodus). In both cases, only the execution or
results, not the goals, are questioned. The shortcomings in these criticisms can be attributed to an
incomplete conceptualization of power, which precludes seeing the full effects of development. It is
through a Foucauldian conceptualization of power that another side of development has been revealed , one
much less technical or scientific and much more political and ethical-in fact, one much less desirable. Even the best of development projects ,
irrespective of their content, engender power relations and help constitute strategies of domination. The paper really
goes no further than offering this second interpretation of development. It does not aim at supplanting
more accepted notions of development, but merely jostling their self-evidence a bit. It certainly does not
intend to address the issue of political practice, but merely to expose a tool that enables those involved to
denaturalize external claims bearing down upon them (and their behavior, truths, and so on) or to
understand the workings of power in such a way as to open new avenues of struggle. By revealing and
thereby weakening power at the ongoing level of subjugation, one lightens the pressure of "truths" upon the
shoulders of the oppressed, allowing their own truths to emerge. This disclosure is a limit of the role of
the intellectual. To go further, to prescribe (all too close, both phonetically and functionally, to
"proscribe") or outline a path of resistance would be to contribute to the constant sequence of failure/
reform, which reinforces the development paradigm. Playing the role of advisor entails once again substituting (from afar) a "more
acceptable" or "more effective" course of action for the present one, precisely what this paper argues against Let there be no doubt, however, that this
paper favors the notion of local resistance. To the extent that strategies of domination are constructed from
the bottom-up, real changes can be achieved only if these strategies are dismantled in that same direction
by the people affected, not outsiders. Resistance must begin at the ongoing level of subjugation-the level at which one finds domination of
everyday life being practiced. Resistance must target certain unequal relations of power; it must target, among other things, the process of development. One of the
many ways that
Foucault characterizes modern society is as a "carceral archipelago" What he had in mind was
an extensive set of islands of power relations-family, school, workplace-which became colonized by dominant
forces such as the state, trapping the individual in order to render him/her more docile. Foucault does not imply a
program of societal stages, but he does suggest a distinction between modern and traditional societies. In traditional societies, the exercising of power, conforming
largely to negative or restrictive power, is clumsy, inefficient, and overtly repressive. Modern society is characterized by the "circulation of effects of power through
progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures, and all their daily actions." '7 In other words, there
has
been a significant increase in domination accompanying what is normally considered progress . The push to
modernity warrants cautious consideration, not enthusiastic participation. Clearly, most Third World nations have not yet been modernized with respect to the
prevailing form of power relations. Systemic
populations that they are in accordance with a principle of concern or enquiry. Indeed one of the distinguishing characteristics of
global liberal governance is the variety of ways in which populations are defined as the subject/objects of all kinds of global biopolitical power/knowledge concerns.
Thus they are not merely defined by national features, but also by markets, consumption, production
or rights. More generally, biopolitical global development and aid policies constitute a complex population
that one might call the global poor. Just as the government of governance does not emanate from the actions of a pre-formed, individual or
collective, state or non-state, subject but from a whole conglomerate set of biopolitical discourses neither is there a centre to it. Power must be analysed
as something, which circulates, or rather something, which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or
there, never in anybodys hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net like
organisation.31 Biopolitics operates then as a pervasive, complex and heterogeneous network of practices.
Structuring the desires, proprieties and possibilities that shape the operation of life, working on and
through subjective freedoms, governmental rationalities typically develop around specific problematics,
such as those of health, wealth, security, poverty, esteem, culture, sexuality or migration . These in turn
constitute the principles of formation around which populations may be defined and networks developed.32 Extending
Althusser and others, like Judith Butler, we might say that such problematisations interpellate and mobilise people individually and collectively. Biopower is a
positive and productive form of power that conceives the task of government in terms of the management of
populations by systematically assaying their needs, composition, properties and dynamics in order
to promote their welfare.33 Central to biopolitics is the intent to govern by investing life through and
through, by defining, analysing, knowing and promoting it. What is at stake is not simply the normative and material
production and reproduction of specific orders of social relations, but the continuous production and reproduction of life itself .34
Biopolitics is less scientifically universal than it is omniversal, preoccupied with all aspects of the life
process down to and including its definition and composition.
We must cut off the head of the king the state is only one element in a circuit of power and
governmentality
Mackinnon 2000, March, Dr. Danny MacKinnon is a political and economic geographer at the
University of Glasglow School of Geographical and Earth Sciences; Political Geography, Managerialism,
governmentality and the state: a neo-Foucauldian approach to local economic governance
Notions of governmentality support a focus on the how of government , on the specific mechanisms, techniques and
procedures which political authorities deploy to realise and enact their programmes (Rose, 1996a). This section sets out the basic premises of
the neo-Foucauldian approach and considers their implications for our understandings of the state and its role in local economic governance
before going on to assess how the notion of managerial technologies can be deployed to interpret local state restructuring. 2.1. Governmentality
and the state The origins of current debates on governmentality lie in Foucault's reflections on the nature of modern government in the late 1970s
(Foucault, 1991). Foucault interpreted the term as referring to the conduct of conduct the techniques and practices evolved for governing
the conduct of others (Burchell, 1996: 19). From this perspective, political programmes are defined in terms of the underlying rationalities
the
techniques employed by the state as it represents and intervenes in the specific domains it seeks to govern
that shape their development (O'Malley, Weir & Shearing, 1997). The concept of governmentality also draws attention to
(Murdoch & Ward, 1997). This neo-Foucauldian emphasis on the specific mechanisms, procedures and tactics that are assembled and
deployed as particular programmes are materialised contrasts with political theory's traditional focus on abstract principles of rule. Recent studies
have developed this approach by tracing a shift from welfarism to advanced (neo)liberalism and examining how the latter frames interventions
in particular policy fields (see Barry et al., 1996, Rose, 1996a, Rose, 1996b and Rose, 1999). Characteristically, Rose and Miller
(Rose & Miller, 1992: 175). For neo-Foucauldians, what makes particular techniques and practices governmental is their capacity to be made
practical, to be transformed into concrete devices for managing and directing reality (Rose, 1996a: 41). As an inherently problematising
activity which frames the obligations of authorities in terms of the problems they address, government depends upon knowledge (Rose &
Miller, 1992 and Rose & Valverde, 1998). The disciplinary knowledges of the social sciences play an important role here in providing an
intellectual machinery of ordering procedures and explanations which construct and frame reality in ways that allow government to act upon it
(Rose & Miller, 1992: 182).2 Yet expertise can also pose problems for government given the tendency of specialist knowledge to form
enclosures: tightly-bounded sites within which the authority of experts is concentrated and defended against external interference ( Rose &
Miller, 1992: 190). Ruling strategies are characteristically formulated and articulated through specific programmes of
government (Miller & Rose, 1990: 67). These consist of efforts to address identified problems through more or less coherent plans or
strategies that specify intended outcomes consistent with the principles of underlying political rationalities. Rose & Miller (1992: 185) refer
and procedures through which programmes are activated and put into practice as technologies of
government. Following Latour (1987), inscription and calculation are identified as key technologies, enabling
enclosures to be breached by responsibilising and disciplining actors to the claims of central authority (Rose, 1996a).
These technologies work to make reality stable , mobile, comparable, combinable, thereby enabling government
to act upon it (Rose & Miller, 1992: 185). Through successive cycles of accumulation, information is gathered and transferred back to
to the set of mechanisms, techniques
distant centres (Latour, 1987). By bringing traces of distant objects of government back to centres of calculation in this way, government is
able to act at a distance on these same objects ( Latour, 1987, Miller & Rose, 1990 and Rose & Miller, 1992). Centres of calculation
are the key nodes where information is compared, combined and aggregated through the deployment of statistical and mathematical techniques
(Latour, 1987: 237240). Neo-Foucauldian analyses of government have been prompted by dissatisfaction with the tendency to locate
political power within the institutional structures of a centralised state (Rose & Miller, 1992 and Miller & Rose,
1995). As Miller and Rose (1995: 594) argue, much of this work accords the state a quite illusory necessity,
functionality and territorialisation (cf. Foucault, 1991: 103104). Their alternative approach draws on Foucault's notion of power as a
ubiquitous feature of modern societies, one that is not confined to any particular set of institutional sites (Foucault, 1980: 9699). For Rose
(1999: 5), the effect is to re-locate the state is an element within wider circuits of power . This is often conceptualised in
terms of Foucault's notion of the governmentalisation of the state, referring to the tendency for state power to be exercised and realised through
a heterogeneous array of regulatory practices and technologies (see Foucault, 1991). To the extent that neo-Foucauldians
recognise the state at all, it is conceptualised as a set of capacities and forces which must be instrumentalised
within wider strategies of government (Hindess, 1996: 108109). The crucial underlying point is that the state cannot be used to
explain events but must itself be explained through empirical analysis (cf. Latour, 1986).
and knowledge are intimately connected and directly imply one another , so that there is no power
relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not
presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations (1991: 27). This close relationship between
power and knowledge alerts us to the fact that the problematization of a particular aspect of human life is
not natural or inevitable, but historically contingent and dependent on power relations that have already
rendered a particular topic a legitimate object of investigation. Underdevelopment and poverty, in other words, do
not exist as Platonic forms; they are discursive constructs an d their constitution as objects of scientific
enquiry can be understood only in the context of the prevailing balance of forces at the time of their
formation. An analysis informed by such insights does not accept at face value any particular categorisation of
the world, but seeks instead to establish how certain representations became dominant and acquired the position
to shape the ways in which an aspect of social reality is imagined and acted upon. As Escobar (1995) argues, thinking about
development in terms of discourse enables us to maintain a focus on power and domination, while at the
same time exploring the discourses conditions of possibility as well as its effects. It allows us to stand detached
from [development], bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyse the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated
(Foucault, 1986: 3). In other words, development emerges as culturally and historically contingen t, and the
focus shifts from what is to how subjects are formed within this discourse as developed and
underdeveloped. This conception of the relationship between power and knowledge enables us to expose
the political and strategic nature of discourse previously regarded as existing independently of power
relations by virtue of their presumed scientific nature, and to ask instead whom does discourse serve?
Development discourse colonizes the very reality we live in, forcing us to accept it as truth
or get crushed only an analysis of the underlying discourse behind the 1ac can solve
Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies,
UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World
Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologas Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e Historia, Bogot,
Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD 1995, page 5-6]
Indeed, it seemed impossible to conceptualize social reality in other terms.
The fact that most people's conditions not only did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time
did not seem to bother most experts. Reality, in sum, had been colonized by the development discourse,
those who were dissatisfied with this state of affairs had to struggle for bits and pieces of freedom
within it, in the hope that in the process a different reality could be constructed.2 More recently, however, the development of new
tools of analysis, in gestation since the late 1960s but the application of which became widespread only during the 1980s, has made
possible analyses of this type of colonization of reality which seek to account for this very fact: how certain
representations become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and acted
upon. Foucault's work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality, in
particular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by which a certain order of discourse
produces permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others
impossible. Extensions of Foucault's insights to colonial and postcolonial situations by authors such as Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, Chandra
and
Mohanty, and Homi Bhabha, among others, have opened up new ways of thinking about representations of the Third World. Anthropology's selfcritique and renewal during the 1980s have also been important in this regard. Thinking of development in terms of discourse
makes it possible to maintain the focus on domination -as earlier Marxist analyses, for instance, Did-and at the same time to
explore more fruitfully the conditions of possibility and the most pervasive effects of development. Discourse analysis creates the
possibility of stand[ing] detached from [the development discourse], bracketing its familiarity, in order to
analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated (Foucault 1986, 3). It gives us
the possibility of singling out development as an encompassing cultural space and at the same time of
separating ourselves from it by perceiving it in a totally new form. This is the task the present book sets out to
accomplish.
much by pointing to the quasinatural processes of the market or of the exchanges of commercial society that are external to
government. To govern economically means to govern through economic and other social processes external to government and also to
govern in an efficient, cost-effective way. Liberalism also invokes the freedom and rights of a new subject the sovereign
individual. By governing through freedom and in relation to freedom, advanced liberal democracies are able to differentiate their bio-politics
from that of modern totalitarian states and older police states. This thesis overcomes the successionist view of forms of power connected with our
first thesis, even if it tends to reproduce its bipolar structure. The problem with the latter however it that somehow the source and point of
articulation of sovereign and bio-politics seems to escape intelligibility. Why should our societies become really demonic when they combine
within themselves the powers over life with rights of death, or Hebraic understandings of the duties of the shepherd towards his flock with the
virile and agonistic relationships between free citizens found within the Greek polis, as Foucault maintained?18 Can one simply make a virtue out
of an absence of intelligibility of the articulationis it the very heterogeneity of these forms of power that accounts for their devilish potential?
Can we democratise sovereignty and use notions of rights to check the totalitarian impulses of bio-politics? Can we redress such despotic
potentialities by an appeal to an outside of the sphere of limited government? At times Foucault appears to endorse such possibilities. At
others, he
seems to suggest that liberalism and democracy are flawed means for this task and that we should
not become complacent. Perhaps, in this case, sovereignty can always return to an atavistic form as in
Nazism, or liberalism can reveal its horribly illiberal side . Perhaps, to try another suggestion, bio-politics simply
puts incredible technological means (the atomic, the biological and the chemical weapons and the organization of the modern
military, and the applications of bio-science and biomedicine) in the service of sovereign powersa kind of
biotechnological account of genocide. IfbutperhapsFoucault has identified a problem and a language to investigate the
problem without identifying how and why these elements form the problem. Before moving to a new thesis, let us note that there is one
problem with the view that liberalism can act to check totalitarian administration of life. Both of the
means by which it hopes to do so refer principally to nothing but simple existence. On the one hand, the
economic rationality that provides a limit to government refers before all else to the means of the sustenance of life.
On the other, the sovereign individual has rights, especially in the era of international human rights, simply by virtue of
merely living itself. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights reads the first article of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. If there is optimism in Foucaults approach, it is one that cannot rely on a movement that checks the
powers over life. The more liberalism and modern rights movements seek to defend us from the dangers
of bio-powers, it would seem, the more they make possible its extension. A third thesis then needs to be tried.
Benevolent biopolitical action is a faade for uglier violent truths they hide relations of
war but do not get rid of them
Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on
security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian,
Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics,
Security and War Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41]
Intimately allied with the globalisation of capital, but not entirely to be conflated with it, has emerged a new and diverse ensemble of power
known as global liberal governance. This term of art refers to a varied and complex regime of power , whose
founding principle lies in the administration and production of life, rather than in threatening death.
Global liberal governance is substantially comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties
and dynamics of populations so that they can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life
chances. In this great plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable intensification and extension, via liberal
forms of power, of what Michel Foucault called the great economy of power whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once
the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged.3 Foucault called this kind of powerthe kind of power/knowledge that seeks to
foster and promote life rather than the juridical sovereign kind of power that threatens death biopower, and its politics biopolitics. This paper forms part of our
continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal governance as a form of global biopolitics.4 We are concerned, like Foucault, to draw attention to the
deploys force and violence, not least because biopower hides its violent face
and, gives to the power to inflict legal punishment a context in which it appears to be free of all excess
and violence.5 Second, we draw attention, as Foucault consistently does, to the ways in which global biopolitics operates as a strategic
game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic
and cultural networks of biopolitical relations. Here Foucault reverses the old Clausewitzean adage concerning the relation between
politics and war. Biopolitics is the pursuit of war by other means . We are also concerned, however, to note how the conceptualisation and
practice of war itself changes via the very process of its assimilation into, and dialogical relation with, the heart of biopolitical order; and we concentrate on that point
in this essay. There is, in addition, a further way in which we seek to extend Foucaults project.
is now everywhere, an
ubiquitous and ineluctable social fact.2 Could it be, however, that the power of Eurocentered modernity as a
particular local history lies in the fact that is has produced particular global designs in such a way that it has
subalternized other local histories and their corresponding designs? If this is the case, could one posit the hypothesis that radical
alternatives to modernity are not a historically foreclosed possibility? If so, how can we articulate a project around this
possibility? Could it be that it is possible to think about, and to think differently from, an exteriority to the modern world system? That on e may envision
alternatives to the totality imputed to modernity, and adumbrate not a different totality leading to different
global designs, but as network of local/global histories constructed from the perspective of a politically
enriched alterity? This is precisely the possibility that may be gleaned from the work of a group of Latin
American theorists that in refracting modernity through the lens of coloniality engage in a questioning of
the spatial and temporal origins of modernity, thus unfreezing the radical potential for thinking from difference and towards the constitution
of alternative local and regional worlds. In what follows, I present succinctly some of the main arguments of these works.3 The modernity/coloniality research
program The conceptualization of modernity/coloniality is grounded in a series of operations that distinguish it from established theories of modernity. Succinctly put,
these include the following: 1) an emphasis on locating the origins of modernity with the Conquest of America and the control of the Atlantic after 1492, rather than in
the most commonly accepted landmarks such as the Enlightenment or the end of the eighteenth century;4 2) a persistent attention to colonialism and the making of the
capitalist world system as constitutive of modernity; this includes a determination not to overlook the economy and its concomitant forms of exploitation; 3)
consequently, the adoption of a world perspective in the explanation of modernity, in lieu of a view of modernity as an intra-European phenomenon; 4) the
identification of the domination of others outside the European core as a necessary dimension of modernity, with the concomitant subalternization of the knowledge
and cultures of these other groups; 5) a conception of eurocentrism as the knowledge form of modernity/coloniality a hegemonic representation and mode of
knowing that claims universality for itself, and that relies on a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europes
position as center (Dussel 2000 471; Quijano 2000: 549). A number
internal conflicts (conflicts within powers with the same world view), those that take place at the exterior borders of the modern/colonial system i.e., the conflicts
with other cultures and world views.5
A fundamental assumption that persisted in all of these proposals was that there is a reality of
underdevelopment that a carefully conducted economic science can grasp progressively , pretty much
following the model of the natural sciences . In this view, economic theory was built out of a vast bloc of
preexisting reality that is independent of the theorists observations . This assumption has fueled the sense
of progression and growth of economic theory in general and of development economics in particular. In
economic theory, this sense has been further legitimized by the canonization of the most important
developmentssuch as the innovations of the 1870s and 1930sas veritable scientic revolutions. As a prominent economic
historian put it, Appeal to paradigmatic reasoning has quickly become a regular feature in controversies in economics and paradigm is now the
by-word of every historian of economic thought (Blaug 1976, 149; see Hunt 1986 for paradigms in development economics).30 In Latin
America and most of the Third World (as in the United States and the United Kingdom), a mixture of approaches under the
overall label neoliberal economics became dominant at the level of the elite as the 1980s unfolded. Statist and
redistributive approaches gave way to the liberalization of trade and investment regimes , the privatization of
state-owned enterprises, and policies of restructuring and stabilizing under the control of the ominous International Monetary Fund (IMF). There
was, indeed, a noticeable policy reversal. Reagans magic of the market speech, delivered at the North-South conference in Cancn in 1981,
publicly announced this turn. A certain reading of the experience of the newly industrializing countries of East Asia in terms of the advantages
of liberal exchange regimes (opening up to the world economy), as well as the inuential Berg Report for Africa (World Bank 1981), plus rational
choice critiques of the distortional effects of government intervention, all contributed to the dismantling of the economic development approaches
that prevailed until the 1970s (Biersteker 1991). The World Banks market friendly development (1991), the
institutions strategy for the 1990s, was the nal crystallization of the return of neoliberalism . Most economists
see these changes as a return to realism.
social life to some really real force, namely, the laws of motion of capital, encoded in the main
contradiction between production and circulation , the concomitant tendency for the rate of prot to fall, and repeated
realization crises. From a poststructuralist perspective, however, there cannot be a materialist analysis that is not at the
same time a discursive analysis. Everything I have said so far in this book suggests that representations are not a
reection of reality but constitutive of it. There is no materiality that is not mediated by discourse , as
there is no discourse that is unrelated to materialities. From this perspective, the making of food and labor and the making of
narratives about them must be seen in the same light. To put it simply, the attempt at articulating a political economy of food
and health must start with the construction of objects such as nature, peasants, food, and the body as an
epistemological, cultural, and political process. The discursive nature of capital is evident in various waysfor
instance, in the resignication of nature as resources ; in the construction of poverty as lack of development , of
peasants as merely food producers, and of hunger as lack of food requiring rural development ; and in the
representation of capital and technology as agents of transformation . As we will see shortly and in the next chapter, the
requirements that political economists discovered rest upon the ability of the development apparatus to
create discourses that allow institutions to distribute individuals and populations in ways consistent with
capitalist relations. The logic of capital, whatever it is, cannot explain fully why a given group of rural people
were made the targets of the interventions we are discussing . Such a logic could equally have dictated
another fate for the same group, including its total disappearance in order to give way to triumphant
capital, which has not occurred. Analyses in terms of political economy, nally, are too quick to impute purely economic functions to
development projects; they reduce the reason for these projects to sets of interests to be unveiled by analysis. They also believe that the discourses
(such as integrated rural development) are just ideologies or misrepresentations of what developers are really up to (Ferguson 1990). Without
denying their value, this amounts to a simplication that is no longer satisfactory.
So in Transition we get asked about what Transition should look like in the Global South, and we say its
about building resilience in both places, that the process of globalising food production has reduced food resilience in the Global North because
weve become so dependent on imports and moving stuff around, and in the Global South its about the destruction of small farming and so on and so on. Whats your
sense of that balance of how we build resilience in both places? Also what Transition groups who are working in the Global North can do through their actions to
support whats happening in the South? I think the
concept of resilience is very good and I know that you emphasise it from the very first book, the
concept of resilience. I think it is a concept that could cut across Global North and Global South. I would have to go and look more
carefully to see if it is being used now in Latin America, but it is a very fruitful concept, and actually that would be a very good question for Eduardo Gudynas who is
a very good friend of mine, so I am going to ask him the question. There
doesnt mean that we shouldnt do it thinking about the Global South as well , and how the Global South
might be cases in which particular groups in the Global South might be hurt by practices
that emerge in the Global North around Transition initiatives, for instance one of the speakers this morning, Antonella Picchio, a
feminist economist, who says we should always think from the perspective of women. In principle thats very good. How do we ask the question
how might our activities in Transition initiatives in the Global North benefit, or hurt, particular vulnerable
groups in the Global South. Women, indigenous peoples, black peoples, ethnic minorities and peasants in particular. I think thats always a very good
is affected. There
question to ask. Its not such a huge question to answer, you sort of follow the threads of the actions. But as a whole I would tend to think Transition activities in the
Global North would tend to contribute if not immediately, at least at some point, to alternatives to development and local autonomies in the Global South to the extent
that they continue to erode corporate power, which is what unites and which is really screwing up everybody, including people in the Global North. My Finnish and
Canadian friends tell me that the same corporations that have been screwing up the Global South for so many decades are now doing the same in northern Canada and
Finland. So its not even going to be the north thats going to be spared anymore. In that sense I think the alliances
on local actions, local solutions, but there has to be also some degree of thinking and policy implementation at the regional level and at the national level.
The state has to become more part of the solution than part of the problem that it is now. Now it is much more of the
problem. With some of these progressive regimes it has tried to become part of the solution as well in terms of connecting with social movements, but the give and
take between social movements that are pushing more for the local autonomy, the protection of territories, the preservation of cultural and biological diversity on the
one hand, and the state, who has the national or transnational level in mind, is going again really tight, and ruptures are beginning to happen, even in countries like
Bolivia and Ecuador where there has been more closeness between the state and the movements. Whats the role of technology here? There are some people who
would say if we could do open-source genetic modification then that would have a role. There are all these technologies like nuclear power, these kinds of things. In
your take on alternatives to development what constitutes good technology and what constitutes a technology that doesnt have a place? I think technology is super
important. I think Buen
Vivir indigenous communities, Afro-descendant communities, peasant communities, they are not opposed to
technology per se. If they can be connected to the internet, if they can have technologies that improve the productivity of the land, if they can have
technologies that improve their living standards, thats all great. What they are opposed to is having those technologies coming in
at the expense of their autonomy, at the expense of their territories, at the expense of their cultural traditions, at the expense of
their world-views and ways of living. But when you read and I think this is a misconception that the Buen Vivir, because it has been promoted mostly by
indigenous movements and intellectuals is something about going back to the past its not at all. Its not about going back. Someone said that here today too, that
Degrowth is not about going back, its about moving forwards. The same with indigenous communities, its about moving
forwards, but how? The difference is how? The way in which were moving forwards today on the basis of
growth and instructivism and profit and the dominance of one particular model which is capitalism and
modernity, for many communities and in the movements, that is the end and that has to stop. But its not antitechnology and its not anti-modern. For me the criteria is to weaken or lessen the dominance of the growth model ,
the hi-tech model, the conventional economic neo-liberal model and the dominance of one particular cultural
framework which is the cultural framework of modernity, and to allow for many different world-views
and frameworks.
Aff
The motivation of internal conflict is related to grievances associated with a variety of factors: unequal
patterns of distribution of wealth, lack of political rights, ideology, religion and social exclusion. International
conditions such as influence and intervention of foreign powers can also affect the risk of internal conflict. The economic literature on the effects
of inequality on economic growth stresses the 9 Political violence and economic development in Latin America: issues and evidence fact that
inequality generates conflict and social polarization inviting greater taxation and discouraging capital
formation and growth. In the case of domestic armed conflict, the degree of social conflict is more acute as the conflicting parties pursue
their objectives by armed means. Conflict seems to be the result of a combination of (1) inequality that leads to
polarization and (2) the failure of formal and informal institutions in channeling conflict through the
political system. 1 Historically, dictatorship, weak democracies and unequal societies have provided the background conditions for conflict
to develop in Latin America.2 In fact, the agenda of rebel groups, from the Cuban revolution of the late 1950s, the rural guerrilla movements of
the 1960s in various Latin American countries, the Southern Cone urban guerrillas in the early 1970s, the Central American rebel groups in the
1980s and others, often included the redistribution of land and wealth in addition to specific political demands.3 These rebel movements usually
had a political base in the peasantry and poor urban groups4 although typically their leaders often came from the middle class and many were
radicalized intellectuals with a university education. The relation between poverty, inequality, unemployment and the emergence and duration of
armed conflict (civil wars) has been the subject of new studies done by economists and political scientists. Collier and Hoffler (2002) investigated
52 armed conflicts around the world between 1960 and 1999 and identified three economic factors as having a significant effect
on the probability (risk) of a country having a civil war: the level of GDP (the incidence of armed conflict in poor
countries is much higher than in richer countries), the rate of growth of GDP and its composition (dependence on primary commodity
exports)5. The level of per capita income was found to be a main determinant of the risk of armed conflict .
Doubling per capita income reduces approximately by half the risk of conflict. Economic growth reduces the risk of conflict
as it contributes to increase per capita income, thereby making society less risky to conflict . The
World Bank, (2003) study indicates that armed conflict has developed and persisted the most
marginalized countries that is countries where the average growth rate per capita has been negative in the
last 20 years. As marginalized countries often combine poor economic performance, a weak state, social exclusion and in many cases illegal
activities, conflict tends to flourish. However, the existence of poverty, inequality and exclusion may not be sufficient
for rebel and revolutionary groups to strive and for armed conflict to develop. Armed groups need to
recruit people and obtain financing for their activities. The work of Collier and associates (see World Bank, 2003) shows that
access to natural resources can be an important source of funding for rebel groups. This evidence may be more applicable to conflict in Africa
where abundance of diamonds, oil and other resources has been associated with domestic strife. Also certain export crops such as coca and
poppies are the raw material for illegal drugs over which insurgent groups can levy informal (or revolutionary) taxes. The cases of Colombia and
Afghanistan are an example of this. Rebel groups also receive financial contributions from Diasporas of nationals living abroad that sustain the
armed conflict and from supporters at home. Foreign governments may find it convenient to provide funding to rebel
groups in other countries for their own geopolitical interests. The recourse to kidnapping, ransom, assaults
to banks is another source of revenue for rebel groups . In general, the propagation of conflict and its duration depends on the
capacity of the rebel groups to have a steady financial base supporting their struggle, the fighting capacity of the regular army, the support of the
population and the international context. Political violence retards economic development as it destroys human lives
and economic assets and penalizes the accumulation of capital and wealth creation. In turn, the classical
problems of underdevelopment -poverty, inequality, and social exclusion along with institutions that have
failed at conflict management- breed political violence . Latin America has not been absent from conflict and terrorism in
recent decades. However, the causes of its nature and development may differ from those of other regions of the world. Latin America has
high inequality, persistent poverty, and erratic growth. Religion has played a very small role in explaining conflict. Most
social movements, left-wing political parties and rebel groups in the region have been motivated by an active social agenda that includes income
and asset redistribution as a reaction to prevailing inequality and exclusion. A similar agenda is shared by active indigenous movements in the
region. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s several rebel groups in Latin America were inspired by the Cuban revolution; the corresponding reaction
was framed in the logic of the cold war. As the cold war disappeared, several prominent armed conflicts such as those in El Salvador, Nicaragua,
and Guatemala ceased to exist. The Colombian conflict, however, proved resilient, fueled by ample resources linked to illegal drug trade .
Politically motivated terror has also been present in Latin America for decades instigated both by rebel
groups to advance their political causes and by the states challenged by these groups. Latin America has had a
traumatic history of state-led violence following the instauration of military regimes in the 1970s. Policies to reduce political violence call for
institutional reforms, improved democracies and reduced poverty and inequality. Currently, in Latin America there is a clear lack
of both public and private insurance mechanisms and social protection for facing the contingencies
associated with 23 Political violence and economic development in Latin America: issues and evidence
political violence, conflict and terrorism. For humanitarian reasons there is a need to structure public insurance
and compensation schemes for victims and their families in countries that have suffered protracted and
costly internal conflicts. At the same time, there is a potential scope for developing market insurance for
terrorism and conflict related losses, provided there is proper management of incentives, risk and moral
hazard issues.
the local level. The celebration of local knowledge and local resistance leads to a romantization and an
unquestioned believe in tradition. The Local is set equally with authenticity and emancipation. But power structures are,
especially in application of the work of Foucault, ever-present (Jakinow 2008: 313). Why then are grassroots movements
guarantors for being inclusive, non-hierarchic and democratic ? Local forms of oppression are overlooked
(Engel 2001:140). Nederveen Pieterse comments: while the shift towards cultural sensibilities that accompanies this perspective is a welcome
move, the plea for peoples culture', indigenous culture, local knowledge and culture, can lead if not to ethnochauvinism, to reification of both
culture and locality or people. It also envices a one-dimensional view of globalization which is equated with
homogenization (Nederveen Pieterse 1998: 366). Additionally, the exclusive validity of local knowledge precludes the
view on multiple knowledge. In consequence the fundamental criticism on modernity and modern science implicates a
rejection of the benefits: for example, the rights of the individual as well as the techniques of modern medicine are dismissed,
although they brought health security and a higher life-expectancy (Ziai 2007: 102). Nederveen Pieterse even classifies
Post- Development to belong to the neo-traditionalist reaction to modernity (Nederveen Pieterse 1998: 366?). In his opinion, PostDevelopment is struck into a paradox: not showing any regard for progressive implications and dialectics
of modernity but at the same time dealing with issues like anti-authoritarianism, democratization,
emancipation, that all clearly arose out of the Enlightenment and the modern age, is highly inconsistent
(ebd. 1998: 365). global structures of inequality are not taken into concern. Storey asks for example how local actors are supposed to find
solutions at the global level (Storey 2000). in emphasizing cultural diversity and in rejecting universalism, Post- Development is criticized of
being cultural-relativist. Therefore Post- Development stands in suspicion to accept oppression and violence and
to
be indifferent towards the violation of human rights. Post- Development is accused to feel an affinity for
neoliberalism. According to Nederveen Pieterse, it is argued that both approaches reject state intervention and agree on
state failure: Escobar is skeptical towards state planning, he questions social engineering and the faith in
progress lead by the state. The neoliberal thinker Deepak Lal condemns state-centered development economies (Nedeveen Pieterse
1998: 364). Further, also advocates of a neoliberal capitalism favor a strong civil society and the liberty of all
citizens to choose their possibilities. The final criticism is that Post-Development, instead of offering a solution,
sticks on the classical development paradigm by being in position of permanent critique. According to Tanja
Jakimow Post- Development is in danger of having to constantly re-manoeuvre to retain its alternative
status as elements of its critique are incorporated into the mainstream (Jakimow 2008: 313). There is no vision of how PostDevelopment can look like in practice: Post- Development parallels postmodernism both in its acute institutions and in
being directionless in the end, as a consequence of the refusal to, or lack of interest in translating critique
into construction (Nederveen Pieterse: 361).
as
some kind of monolithic structure (Ziai, 2004), The heterogeneity of 40 years of development theory and
policy and especially the originality of alternative approaches is not adequately taken into account (Ziai,
2004: 1047). This critique is echoed by Nederveen Pieterse who criticises post-developments association of
Development with Westernisation, which, he claims, denies the agency of Southern actors themselves, as
well as ignoring the heterogeneity of the West, the differences between Europe and the United States for
example, as well as Japan and what happened with the East Asian miracle (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000, 2001). Crush notes
that it is the actual call for banishment that essentialises Development, this very act assumes there is an unequivocal definition (Nederveen
Pieterse, 2000, Ziai, 2004). Another criticism of post-development is its reification of local cultures and
communities; the last refuge of the noble savage as noted by Kiely (Ziai, 2004). There is what amounts to a
romanticisation of non-Western communities. Also the complete rejection of modernity ignores many of
its positive achievements, for example in medicine, such as increases in life expectancy (Ziai, 2004, Storey,
2000). Again this is a criticism that Nederveen Pieterse agrees upon, although he emphasises the drive for modernisation in the
South itself, for example, the high-tech drives in India and parts of Latin America; or India and Pakistans nuclear race (Nederveen
Pieterse, 2000), not to mention recent events in Iran. It can be argued that symbols of modernity such as nuclear power
are precisely what is wrong with modernity, yet, it is also useful when asking particularly for who is modernity bad for.
Surely it is too much of a generalisation to suggest that such icons of modernity are not desired by those
in the South, and at least patronising to suggest that it is bad for them. Ziai also notes that the rejection of
universalism, for example, human rights (Rahnema, 1997c, Esteva and Prakesh, 1997), and the celebration of cultural difference, conceals or, Ziai
suggests, even willingly accepts, many traditional forms of oppression and cruelty, such as female genital
mutilation (Ziai, 2004). Finally, there is the argument that post-development is purely critique and offers no
solutions, it is all critique but no construction; they fall on Pontius Pilate politics (Ziai, 2004). Nederveen Pieterse believes
the line between alternative and post-development is quite thin and all that separates them is post-developments rejection
of development as discourse, he believes alternative development shares with post-development the radical critiques of mainstream
development but it retains belief in, and accordingly, redefines development (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000: 181). If this is the case, what then is the
point to post-development?
analysis of biopolitics not be separated from a critique of political economy of life (146). As Lemke points out,
the vast majority of contemporary works dedicated to biopolitics separate the politicization of life from its economization.ix Coopers book bucks
this trend as it attempts to show how the connection between life and surplus, to which I alluded at the start as being fundamental for biopolitics,
in fact owes its reason to the political economy of biological life in neoliberal forms of capitalism. Coopers book treats the relation
between biological (re)production and capital accumulation in the United States during the last thirty
years. Her analysis takes off from two themes found in Foucaults work. The first, in The Order of Things,
is that biology and political economy develop in parallel because (once value is rooted in labor force, as with Ricardo and
Marx) then value also is rooted in the sphere of biological life and its reproduction, since the latter is
presupposed by labor force. The second theme emerges from Foucaults later hypothesis that liberalism
should be understood as the framework within which biopower develops . Coopers investigations bring together and
radicalize the implications of these two themes: on her account, neoliberal economics attempts to efface the boundaries
between the spheres of production and reproduction, labor and life, the market and living tissues (9). The
main thesis of Life as Surplus is that neoliberalism and the biotech industry share a common ambition to
overcome the ecological and economical limits to growth associated with the end of industrial production,
through a speculative reinvention of the future (11). The neoliberal development of capitalism, starting in the decade of the
70s, targeted biological life as the novel source of extraction of surplus value. In this sense, the neoliberal economy is essentially a
bioeconomy. This is the first sense in which Cooper speaks of life as surplus. Adopting a Marxist notion of social contradictions, she also
argues that every attempt of capital to overcome limits to its own expansion ends up creating other limits or contradictions. In the case of
the bioeconomy, the extraction of surplus value from biological life requires that life be manipulated,
controlled, and ultimately pushed beyond its natural limits so to generate an excess or surplus of
biological life. Examples range from microbial life that thrives in extreme conditions, to new immunitary devices and self-assembling
artificial life forms, to technologies of in-vitro fertilization and embryonic stem cell lines. Coopers thesis is that all this creation
of biological life in excess of its limits is paid at the price of a deepening devaluation of human lives: the
second main sense in which life functions as surplus. The third dimension also has a Marxist inspiration. Just as, for Marx,
social contradictions express themselves symptomatically in religious beliefs, so too for Cooper the creation of life beyond the limits of nature
in contemporary bioscience is strictly correlated to a shift in the global political economy toward financial or speculative capital. Todays debtform relies on faith in the other-worldly understood as faith in the promise of an after-life in this life, a life beyond the limits of human
biographical lives. The Evangelical Right and its cults of the unborn and the born-again represent one religious symptom of this fundamental
change in the economic basis.
testament to the fact that no one has a market incentive to pay the costs of keeping them alive from day to
day, or from one generation to the next. Yet I am not convinced that their chronic under-reproduction is, as Araghi
(2009:119) has argued, a strategy of global capital. I see their perilous condition, rather, as a sign of their very
limited relevance to capital at any scale. If the population rendered surplus to capitals requirements is to
live decently, it will be because of the activation of a biopolitics that places the intrinsic value of life
rather than the value of people as workers or consumersat its core . But what are the social forces that would activate
such a politics? And why would they do so? I return to these questions later in this essay. First, however, I want to consider more fully the
implications of the concept of surplus population.
continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the
welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of biopolitical, regulatory,
social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist
Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become
superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics
of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite
different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic
that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic
population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive
policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create
compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a
structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic
biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally
incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a
regime of democratic
the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics,
the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of
Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than
early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of
organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be
read as a universal sti ing night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders
are grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups
have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent.
Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite
different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place
in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create multiple
modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91
expectations about the provision of public services, especially state-mediated social security for people
facing hard times. As Janet Newman and John Clarke (2009) argue, announcements of the death of the social have been premature.
Nevertheless, under increasingly globalized conditions, it is less obvious that nation states provide containers
for crossclass settlements, or command the resources to engage in projects of productivity or protection, as
contradictory pressures operate at multiple scales (Swyngedouw 2000). Echoing the left-hand/right-hand split at a transnational
scale, the UN system, with its Declaration on Economic and Social Rights, including a right to food, and a rights-based approach to
development, sits awkwardly alongside the IFIs, convinced that sacrifice is necessary in order to promote growth, from which the poor will
eventually benefit (Kanbur 2001; United Nations 2007). The IFIs, unable to admit that their own policies are implicated in dispossession and
abandonment, attempt to pass the responsibility on to national governments, obliged to prepare poverty reduction strategies as a condition of
receiving funds. Many national regimes, in turn, have been radically reconfigured by decentralization measures, making it difficult for them to
deliver on national commitments, and devolving responsibilities downwards to districts, communities, groups of stakeholders and other
weakly territorialized units with uncertain mandates and capacities (Craig and Porter 2006). To the left-hand/right-handmix, then, is added the
problem of territorial jurisdiction and scale, and the further problem of population mobility. As a result, it is often very unclear who is responsible
for the fate of which ensemble of population, and what resources they could command to make the dispossessed live better. The attempt to govern
through communities, and make them responsible for their own fate, has been prominent in the era of neoliberalism, especially in the form of
micro-credit schemes that require the poor to supply their own employment as entrepreneurs (Elyachar 2005). Variations on the theme of
community self-reliance have reappeared with regularity in Indonesia for 200 years, and appeared again in the 19971998 economic crisis, when
some experts argued that there was no need to supply a safety net for displaced urban workers since they could be reabsorbed into the village
economy. There was a program to supply them with one-way tickets home (Breman and Wiradi 2002:24, 306; Li 2007b). The World Bank
subsequently glorified this event with a label, farm financed social welfare, heralded as a remedy for urban shocks (World Bank 2008:3). The
same discourse arose in 2009, as global recession set in. A news report about job losses in Thailand anticipated an exodus of workers back to the
family farm, waxed lyrical on the bright green rice terraces, coconut groves, and fishponds dotting an exceedingly fertile countryside, and
quoted the country director of the Asian Development Bank on the virtues of the Thai countryside as a social safety net (International Herald
Tribune 2009). A critical flaw in these observations, however, is that a large number of thosewho exit rural areas have no farms, and some of them
have been landless for multiple generations. If farm-financed social welfare works at all, it works for prosperous landowners. For the poor it is
a mirage, with potentially lethal effects. In his recent book, Mark Duffield (2007:19) draws a stark contrast between insured
life in the global North, and non-insured surplus life in the global South. The goal of transnational
development intervention, he argues, is not to extend northern-style social protections to the population of
the global South, but to keep the latter in their placeensconced in their nations, communities and
families, where they must be self-sufficient, and not make demands. I think the distinction between
insured and uninsured life is accurate enough as a description of the status quo, but it is not the end of
history. As I noted earlier, some parts of the development apparatus talk in terms of rights and entitlements,
even though they do not have the means to secure them. More significantly, Duffields NorthSouth division
underestimates the aspiration for broader forms of social justice that exists within some nations of the
global South, is nurtured in unions, social movements, left-leaning political parties and the left hand of
the state apparatus, and can sometimes assemble a protective biopolitics, despite the odds. In the next section, I
examine one such assemblage in India, that aspires to secure the right to food on a national scale, and contrast it with the situation in Indonesia,
where movements for social justice are truncated, and the myth of village self-sufficiency leaves the dispossessed seriously exposed.
Do not dismiss the aff as just the same old politics its demand to make live Mexicos
surplus population is a pragmatic policy that opens critical possibility for a wider critique
of neoliberalism
Li, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada, 10
[Tania Murray, To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of
Surplus Populations, Antipode, Vol. 42 No.S1, Jan]
Whose responsibility is it to attend to the welfare of surplus populations? No purely selfish class, wrote Karl Polanyi,
can maintain itself in the lead (1944:156). I fear this is not true, at the extreme. Burmas military junta is utterly selfish, and has maintained
itself for more than four decades. Most regimes, however, wrestle with a more complex sense of leadership that
involves some degree of balance between contradictory agendas (productivity, equity), and an obligation to
make live that has become integral to the modern sense of what it means to govern. Transnational
agencies, charitable foundations, activists, experts, and social reformers of many kinds share in this sense
of obligation. How the obligation is met, and for which sectors of the population, is a matter that is
worked out in specific sites and conjunctures through means that are sometimes grandiose, and
occasionally revolutionary, but just as often pragmatic, and unannounced. These conjunctures are worth
attending to, however, because as Gillian Hart (2004:95) observes, the ongoing tension between pressures for
economic freedom and the imperatives of welfare arising from their destructive tendencies opens up a
rich vein of critical possibilities. These possibilities are both analytical and political, and my essay has offered but
a small glimpse of them.
people have a relation to those organisations, not to their own state, or even their own civil society: they have less
reason to care about their own state, to engage with it politically, to pay taxes, since their limited
biopolitical provision comes from elsewhere, but of course they cannot enter into the same sorts of relationship of political
involvement with foreign states or NGOs as they can with local stakeholders, since these states and NGOs do not get funds directly from aid
recipients. Direct aid thus effectively undermines biopolitics. Clearly, we cannot address the empirical case for aid here in the required detail: this
work remains to be done; what we say here amounts only to a hypothesis about the relation of aid to biopolitical society. We hence cannot state
that aid is an utterly decisive factor in biopolitical development, such that aid will always prevent such development, or in the absence of aid such
development will always occur. We cannot thus simply point to examples of countries that have or have not developed as conclusive cases: only
detailed studies on the operation of aid in specific cases can shed light here. We moreover cannot assert that it is impossible to give aid that
strengthens biopolities as such: a possible example of such aid is the Marshall Plan by which the U.S. funded European reconstruction after
World War II. Reasons for any success of this plan in contrast with aid include: the achievement of a careful administration of funds (funds were
managed by joint committees of representatives of the donor, local governments, and civil society, and used to buy either consumables or to
invest in industry); the fact that the aid was not ongoing, so did not allow for the development of patterns of dependency or corruption; and the
fact that it was in response to a specific situation of devastation (caused by the war) which was not itself a stable, ongoing state of affairs. One
type of payment that might be implemented similarly are reparations for past injustices. Duffield suggests there has been a retrograde shift, from
the Cold War situation in which Third World nations were built up by either side, as in the Marshall Plan, to a situation in which states are not
built up at all, only civil societyDuffield sees this as a return to the colonial policy of Native Administration, albeit within a different and more
diffuse institutional framework (Duffield, 2005). Certainly, aid policy today is very similar in key respects to the colonial policy: colonialism was
the same as aid in biopolitical terms, casting itself as philanthropic, while having consequences that are rather different. The pure building up of
states though is of dubious merit: many states supported by either side during the Cold War were disastrously
unsuccessful; as we have indicated, the supply of aid to states is a powerful corrupting force that might
enable the rulers to buy support, or might build resentment against them, but either way is unlikely to lead
by itself to development per se. What is clearly the case is that aid is sometimes given explicitly with the aim of undermining
government, as in the case of USAIDs budget of $15 million for 2006, designated specifically for undermining the Cuban government by
building up civil society.15 What is astonishing indeed is that where the United States government gives aid to Cubans precisely to undermine
their government, it gives it elsewhere apparently oblivious to its potential to do exactly the same thing. It is not that philanthropy and
government assistance in general cleave the state and population apart: when they originate within the
same polity, philanthropy and welfare are elements of a biopolitical whole, which incorporates both
governmental and non-governmental organisations. It is true that domestic philanthropy may assuage the
development of demands for the state intervention necessary to constitute a biopolitics, but once a
coherent control of population has developed, philanthropy slots in as an adjunct.
Galtung is very legitimately interested in problems of world poverty and the failure of development of the really poor. He tried to amalga- mate this interest with
the peace research interest in the more narrow sense. Unfortunately, he did this by downgrading the study of inter- national peace, labeling it "negative peace"
(it should really have been labeled "negative war") and then developing the concept of "structural violence ," which initially meant all those social
structures and histories which produced an expectation of life less than that of the richest and longest-lived societies. He argued by analogy that if people died before the age, say, of 70 from
avoidable causes, that this was a death in "war"' which could only be remedied by something called "positive peace." Unfortunately, the concept of structural violence was broadened, in the word
Another factor in this situation was the feeling, certainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, that
that the problem of nuclear war had receded into the background. This it seems to me is a
most dangerous illusion and diverted conflict and peace research for ten years or more away from problems of disarmament and stable
peace toward a grand, vague study of world developments, for which most of the peace researchers are
not particularly well qualified. To my mind, at least, the quality of the research has suffered severely as a result.' The complex nature
of one slightly unfriendly critic, to include anything that Galtung did not like.
nuclear deterrence was actually succeeding as deterrence and
of the split within the peace research community is reflected in two international peace research organizations. The official one, the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), tends to be
dominated by Europeans somewhat to the political left, is rather, hostile to the United States and to the multinational cor- porations, sympathetic to the New International Economic Order and
thinks of itself as being interested in justice rather than in peace. The Peace Science Society (International), which used to be called the Peace Research Society (International), is mainly the
creation of Walter Isard of the University of Pennsylvania. It conducts meetings all around the world and represents a more peace-oriented, quantitative, science- based enterprise, without much
interest in ideology. COPRED, while officially the North American representative of IPRA, has very little active connection with it and contains within itself the same ideological split which,
divides the peace research community in general. It has, however, been able to hold together and at least promote a certain amount of interaction between the two points of view. Again
representing the "scientific" rather than the "ideological" point of view, we have SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, very generously (by the usual peace research standards) financed by the Swedish government, which has performed an enormously useful service in the collection and publishing of data on such things as the war industry, technological
developments, arma- ments, and the arms trade. The Institute is very largely the creation of Alva Myrdal. In spite of the remarkable work which it has done, how- ever, her last book on
disarmament (1976) is almost a cry of despair over the folly and hypocrisy of international policies, the overwhelming power of the military, and the inability of mere information, however good,
go change the course of events as we head toward ultimate ca- tastrophe. I do not wholly share her pessimism, but it is hard not to be a little disappointed with the results of this first generation of
the peace research movement. Myrdal called attention very dramatically to the appalling danger in which Europe stands, as the major battleground between Europe, the United States, and the
Soviet Union if war ever should break out. It may perhaps be a subconscious recognition-and psychological denial-of the sword of Damocles hanging over Europe that has made the European
peace research movement retreat from the realities of the international system into what I must unkindly describe as fantasies of justice. But the American peace research community, likewise,
has retreated into a somewhat niggling scientism, with sophisticated meth- odologies and not very many new ideas. I must confess that when I first became involved with the peace research
enterprise 25 years ago I had hopes that it might produce some- thing like the Keynesian revolution in economics, which was the result of some rather simple ideas that had never really been
thought out clearly before (though they had been anticipated by Malthus and others), coupled with a substantial improvement in the information system with the development of national income
statistics which rein- forced this new theoretical framework. As a result, we have had in a single generation a very massive change in what might be called the "conventional wisdom" of
economic policy, and even though this conventional wisdom is not wholly wise, there is a world of difference between Herbert Hoover and his total failure to deal with the Great Depression,
simply because of everybody's ignorance, and the moder- ately skillful handling of the depression which followed the change in oil prices in 1-974, which, compared with the period 1929 to
1932, was little more than a bad cold compared with a galloping pneumonia. In the international system, however, there has been only glacial change in the conventional wisdom. There has been
some improvement. Kissinger was an improvement on John Foster Dulles. We have had the beginnings of detente, and at least the possibility on the horizon of stable peace between the United
States and the Soviet Union, indeed in the whole temperate zone-even though the tropics still remain uneasy and beset with arms races, wars, and revolutions which we cannot really afford. Nor
can we pretend that peace around the temper- ate zone is stable enough so that we do not have to worry about it. The qualitative arms race goes on and could easily take us over the cliff. The
record of peace research in the last generation, therefore, is one of very partial success. It has created a discipline and that is something of long-run consequence, most certainly for the good. It
has made very little dent on the conventional wisdom of the policy makers anywhere in the world. It has not been able to prevent an arms race, any more, I suppose we might say, than the
Keynesian economics has been able to prevent inflation. But whereas inflation is an inconvenience, the arms race may well be another catastrophe. Where, then, do we go from here? Can we see
war,
the breakdown of Galtung's "negative peace," remains the greatest clear and present danger to the human
race, a danger to human survival far greater than poverty, or injustice, or oppression, desirable and
necessary as it is to eliminate these things. Up to the present generation, war has been a cost and an inconven- ience to the human race, but it has rarely been
new horizons for peace and conflict research to get it out of the doldrums in which it has been now for almost ten years? The challenge is surely great enough. It still remains true that
fatal to the process of evolutionary development as a whole. It has probably not absorbed more than 5% of human time, effort, and resources. Even in the twenti- eth century, with its two world
advancing
technology is creating a situation where in the first place we are developing a single world system that
does not have the redundancy of the many isolated systems of the past and in which therefore if any- thing
goes wrong everything goes wrong. The Mayan civilization could collapse in 900 A.D., and collapse almost irretrievably without Europe or China even being aware
of the fact. When we had a number of iso- lated systems, the catastrophe in one was ultimately recoverable by migration from the surviving systems. The one-world system, therefore,
which science, transportation, and communication are rapidly giving us, is inherently more precarious than the many-world system of the past. It is all
the more important, therefore, to make it internally robust and capable only of recoverable catastrophes. The
necessity for stable peace, therefore, increases with every improvement in technology, either of war or of
peace.
wars and innumerable smaller ones, it has probably not acounted for more than 5% of deaths, though of course a larger proportion of premature deaths. Now, however,
bureaucracy is not intrinsically capable of genocidal action (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state coercion
has no natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play the
greatest part, whether in effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science and
technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalins USSR have shown ,
furthermore, those chosen policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards modernity.
The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history of each case plays an
important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions and structures also helps
towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in the way of
another Holocaust in modern society. Modern societies have not only pluralist democratic political systems but also
economic pluralism where workers are free to change jobs and bargain wages and where independent
firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist in competition with state-controlled enterprise s. In modern
societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific method. By ignoring competition and the capacity for people
to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks crucial but also very ordinary and common
attributes of truly modern societies. It is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the
Hegemony in international terms without some kind of competing force, such as the Soviets, can clearly lead to the abuse of power and a
unilateralist flaunting of international institutions that do not serve at the imperium's whim. But this should not mean that hegemony itself is a
negative concept. Although empire is something rightfully reviled, hegemony may not be as bad as everyone thinks. We need to consider what is
progressive and transformative in the ideas and values of the western republican and liberal traditions. We
need to advocate not an anti-hegemonic stance in form, but an anti-hegemonic and anti-imperialist stance in content, one that advocates the particular interests of
capital of the market in more broad terms rather than the universal political interests of others. Rather
it the case that hegemony is in itself inherently bad? Or, is it possible to consider that, because it can, at least in theory, consist of the
used as a progressive force in transforming those nations and
regions that have been unable to deal politically with the problems of economic development, political disintegration and
ethnic strife? It is time that we begin to consider the reality that western political thought provides us with unique answers to
the political, economic and social problems of the world and this includes reversing the perverse legacies of western imperialism itself.
And it is time that the left begins to embrace the ideas of the Enlightenment and its ethical impulse for freedom,
democracy, social progress and human dignity on an international scale. This is rhetorically embraced by neoconservatives, but it
turns out to be more of a mask for narrower economic motives and international realpolitik, and hence their policies and values
run counter to the radical impulses of Enlightenment thought. Western ideas and institutions can find affinities in the rational strains
diffusion of western political ideas, values and institutions, it could be
of thought in almost every culture in the world, from 12th century rationalist Islamic philosophers like Alfarabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sinna) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) to
India's King Akbar and China's Mencius. The key is to find these intellectual affinities and push them to their concrete, political conclusions. Clearly, the left's
problem with the idea of the spread of western political ideas and institutions is not entirely wrong. There
empire. And it is precisely for this reason why, in institutional terms, the UN needs to be brought back in. Although there are clearly larger political and symbolic
reasons for this, such as the erosion of a unilateralist framework for the transition from Hussein's regime, there is also the so-called "effect of empire" where Iraq is
being transformed into an instrument of ideological economics. The current U.S. plan for Iraq, one strongly supported by Bremer as well as the Bush administration,
will remake its economy into one of the most open to trade, capital flows and foreign investment in the world as well as being the lowest taxed. Iraq is being
transformed into an neo-liberal utopia where American industries hooked up to the infamous "military-industrial complex" will be able to gorge themselves on
contracts for the development of everything from infrastructure to urban police forces. As time moves on, we are seeing that Iraq provides us with a stunning example
of how hegemony becomes empire. It is an example of how the nave intention of "nation building" is unmasked and laid bare, seen for what it truly is: the forceful
transformation of a sovereign state into a new form suited to narrow western (specifically American) interests. Attempts to build a constitution have failed not from the
lack of will, but from the lack of any political discourse about what form the state should take and about what values should be enshrined in law. Ruling bodies have
become illegitimate almost immediately upon their appointment because there exists almost complete social fragmentation, and the costs of knitting it together are too
great for America to assume. In the end, America has become, with its occupation of Iraq and its unilateralist and militaristic posture, an empire in the most modern
sense of the term. But we
should be careful about distinguishing empire from a hegemon and the implications of
each. And since, as Hegel put it, we are defined by what we oppose, the knee-jerk and ineffectual response from the modern left
has been to produce almost no alternative at all to the imperatives that drive American empire as seen in places
such as Iraq. To neglect the military, economic and cultural aspects of American power is to ignore the extent to which it provokes violent reaction and counterreaction. But at the same time, to
ignore the important contributions of western political ideas and institutions and their power
in achieving peace and mutual cooperation, whether it be between ethnic communities or whole nations themselves, is to ignore
the very source of political solutions for places where poverty, oppression and dictatorships are the norm
and remain stubbornly intact.
and efficacy
policy, which shows how the threats posed by the Soviets, immigration, drugs, and so on, were constructed out of US national security
discourse.29 The book clearly shows that material things in the world did not force US decision-makers to have particular representations of them - the picture theory
of reference does not hold. In so doing it highlights the discursive aspects of truth and reference, the sense in which objects are relationally "constructed."30 On
the other hand, while emphasizing several times that he is not denying the reality of, for example, Soviet
actions, he specifically eschews (p. 4) any attempt to assess the extent to which they caused US
representations. Thus he cannot address the extent to which US representations of the Soviet threat
were accurate or true (questions of correspondence). He can only focus on the nature and consequences of the
representations.31 Of course, there is nothing in the social science rule book which requires an interest in causal questions, and the nature and consequences
of representations are important questions. In the terms discussed below he is engaging in a constitutive rather than causal
inquiry. However, I suspect Campbell thinks that any attempt to assess the correspondence of
discourse to reality is inherently pointless. According to the relational theory of reference we simply have no access to
what the Soviet threat "really" was, and as such its truth is established entirely within discourse , not
by the latter's correspondence to an extra-discursive reality 32 The main problem with the relational theory of reference is that it cannot
account for the resistance of the world to certain representations, and thus for representational
failures or m/'sinterpretations. Worldly resistance is most obvious in nature: whether our discourse says so or not, pigs can't fly. But examples
abound in society too. In 1519 Montezuma faced the same kind of epistemological problem facing social scientists today: how to refer to people who, in his case,
called themselves Spaniards. Many representations were conceivable, and no doubt the one he chose - that they were gods - drew on the discursive materials available
to him. So why was he killed and his empire destroyed by an army hundreds of times smaller than his own? The realist answer is that Montezuma was simply wrong:
the Spaniards were not gods, and had come instead to conquer his empire. Had Montezuma adopted this alternative representation of what the Spanish were, he might
have prevented this outcome because that representation would have corresponded more to reality. The reality of the conquistadores did not force him to have a true
The external
world to which we ostensibly lack access, in other words. often frustrates or penalizes representations .
Postmodernism gives us no insight into why this is so, and indeed, rejects the question altogether.33
The description theory of reference favored by empiricists focuses on sense-data in the mind while the relational theory of the postmoderns emphasizes
relations among words, but they are similar in at least one crucial respect: neither grounds meaning and
truth in an external world that regulates their content.34 Both privilege epistemology over ontology. What
is needed is a theory of reference that takes account of the contribution of mind and language yet is
anchored to external reality. The realist answer is the causal theory of reference. According to the causal
theory the meaning of terms is determined by a two-stage process.35 First there is a "baptism/' in which
some new referent in the environment (say, a previously unknown animal) is given a name; then this
connection of thing-to-term is handed down a chain of speakers to contemporary speakers. Both stages
are causal, the first because the referent impressed itself upon someone's senses in such a way that they
were induced to give it a name, the second because the handing down of meanings is a causal process of
imitation and social learning. Both stages allow discourse to affect meaning, and as such do not preclude
a role for "difference" as posited by the relational theory. Theory is underdetermined by reality, and as
such the causal theory is not a picture theory of reference. However, conceding these points does not
mean that meaning is entirely socially or mentally constructed. In the realist view beliefs are determined
by discourse and nature.36 This solves the key problems of the description and relational theories: our ability to refer to the same object even if
our descriptions are different or change, and the resistance of the world to certain representations. Mind and language help determine
meaning, but meaning is also regulated by a mind-independent, extra-linguistic world .
representation, as the picture theory of reference would claim, but it did have certain effects - whether his discourse allowed them or not.
recriminations that International Relations is "a para-digmatically masculinist discipline" whose theory
"reifies and reflects the interests of the already powerful" and whose boundaries need to be disturbed .11
Offense is in the eye of the beholder, and in International Relations almost everyone is offended. As Holsti warns, we are traveling down a road toward uncivil war,
where the scenery is likely not very pretty and where scholarly discourse threatens to be nasty and brutish.12
course police actions against the underdeveloped, or against those engaged in resistance, these actions are within
the interstices of Empire rather than against a (no-longer existent) outside. What is signi cant here is
that, for all the delicate spatial metaphors, no sense is given of just how variable across the world biopolitical administrative systems really are (or how much the practices of government and the constitution of subjects differ
between, say, New York and New Guinea), or, even more important, of why these vast differences exist. Equally, within Dillon and Reids work
we nd wide-ranging accounts of the changing practices of global bio-politics, as it evolves in the face of scienti c and organisational
developments (the growing importance of networked forms of organisation, the emergence of digital and molecular technologies, and so on), but
only a marginal acknowledgement of the uneven distribution of these evolving changes, and no analysis at all of why they happen to be so
unevenly distributed. None of this would be problematic if the aim was merely to identify the tactics and
techniques of global liberal governance; but as a theorisation of the postmodern world order, or of the
logic of power under a regime of global liberal governance, it is far from satisfactory . Foucauldian tools
can be used to theorise the how of power, as Foucault put it,81 but they cannot help us in understanding
the when, the where or (most signi cantly) the why of power . The notion of governmentality, for example, while
it can shed light on how populations are administered and subjects are constituted in, say, modern Turkey, or can point us towards the novel
mechanisms by which the New Partnership for African Development is attempting to self-discipline African states into
good governance, cannot itself be used to explain why the Turkish state is more governmentalised than
the Syrian one, why there is so much bad governance in Africa speci cally, or indeed what the purposes
and objectives of governmentality are. Equally, while Foucauldian perspectives can be used to illuminate how new techniques of
surveillance and organisation are transforming the practices of liberal warfare, they cannot tell us why the US state re-invaded Iraq in 2003, or
why the British state participated in that invasion but the French state did not. Yet these are the sorts of phenomena, amongst
others, that a theorisation of global power relations would need to provide resources to explain. Foucault,
standing alone, cannot be convincingly internationalised to provide a theoretical account of the
contemporary world order.