K Answer Updates---BFHMRS

General Answers
Impact Turns
 Arms Control Good – Top
Arms control is good – illicit transfers and poor regulations are responsible
for a thousand deaths a day – their rejection of progress altogether
cements existing hierarchies by providing the world’s imperialist
governments with tools for repression
Benowitz and Kellman 13 (Brittany, chief counsel of the American Bar Association Center for
Human Rights, previously served as defense adviser to Senator Russell Feingold and Barry, professor of
international law and director of the International Weapons Control Center at the DePaul University
College of Law. “Rethink Plans to Loosen U.S. Controls on Arms Exports”
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2013_04/Rethink-Plans-to-Loosen-US-Controls-on-Arms-
Exports%20)NFleming
In light of the human rights implications of weapons transfers, the administration should reconsider the proposal to shift
licensing authority to the more lenient Commerce Department system for any items that could be used to commit

atrocities or violate human rights . The State Department’s more-rigorous oversight is more likely to prevent the
illicit transfer of small arms and other equipment and services to individuals and governments that would misuse them. Indeed , the
administration should ensure that the State Department does not approve the export of
such equipment and services to countries with a consistent track record of committing
atrocities. Proposed Reforms The Obama administration has proposed wide-ranging reforms of the export control regime, the
centerpiece of which is the movement of a large number of items from the list of equipment controlled by the State Department, the
U.S. Munitions List, to the list controlled by the Commerce Department, the Commerce Control List. Although the administration
must notify Congress of such proposed shifts in licensing authority, it does not need congressional permission to implement the
proposed reforms. Over the last few years, the
administration has reviewed several categories of
equipment and proposed regulations that would transfer control of export approval for
certain equipment to the Commerce Department. It plans to finalize the review process this year. A full review
of these proposals is outside the scope of this article. Instead, the discussion below will focus on the statutory distinctions between
the departments’ oversight regimes that cannot be changed by regulations, including those that make the State Department’s
Export control policy has a simply stated
oversight regime inherently stronger. Small Arms and Human Rights
objective: protecting the United States from the security risks associated with technology
transfer. Exports are to be encouraged, but some technologies could contribute to an adversary’s capability to threaten U.S.
national security now or in the future. Much of U.S. export control policy focuses, therefore, on
technologies for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; delivery systems for such
weapons; and other specialized technologies, such as lasers, satellites, and
cybersystems. Exports of less-sophisticated military equipment, including semiautomatic and automatic weapons, are
controlled for altogether different reasons. These small arms are plentiful and cannot seriously be considered sensitive technology.
Such exports are
Illicit traffic in firearms and small weapons does not threaten a technological edge of the United States.
controlled because a significant amount of violence that actually occurs, including against U.S.
military and law enforcement personnel, is inflicted by small arms. By one estimate, 1,000 people are
killed every day around the world by terrorists, insurgents, and criminal gangs using
such weapons.[3] Thus, controlling small arms exports is uniquely concerned with
diminishing the role of firearms and related small weapons in inflaming global conflict,
tyranny, terrorism, and crime . Various items and services that may not threaten a U.S.
military advantage may be used to engage in atrocities, repression, or other forms of
mass violence . For example, surveillance technology or training in security operations, both of which
historically have been subject to State Department licensing requirements, have been
used by oppressive governments to undermine calls for democratic reforms . Export by
the United States of such sensitive equipment to oppressive regimes can inflame anti-
U.S. sentiment . As the Department of Defense stated in the 2010 “Quadrennial Defense Review Report,” well-trained
and -equipped defense forces that are not accountable to the rule of law can be
“counterproductive” to U.S. interests.[4] Yet, administration officials have already relaxed
restrictions on certain military training and considered easing restrictions on exports of some small arms,
including semiautomatic firearms and related munitions. Protecting Human Rights Congress has crafted an
elaborate statutory regime to prevent the export of U.S. weapons that would threaten U.S. interests. That regime includes
restrictions on the export of defense items and services to individuals engaged in human rights abuses. Items having “substantial
military utility” are subject to special controls[5] by law, including registration requirements, rigorous licensing requirements, re-
export restrictions, end-use monitoring, reporting requirements to Congress, and criminal penalties and disbarment from federal
contracts for violators. Administration officials have asserted authority to transfer jurisdiction over exports of military equipment,
including items such as semiautomatic firearms that clearly have substantial military utility, to the Commerce Department. Such a
transfer of jurisdiction would mean that the export of such items would no longer be subject to the special controls established for
significant military equipment, thus creating a greater risk of illicit transfers. Several questions warrant closer review: Will items that
are placed under the authority of the Commerce Department still be subject to the national security and human rights provisions of
the Foreign Assistance Act, and if so, how will officials know which items are covered? Will the loss of special controls for the export
of military equipment placed under the control of the Commerce Department undermine efforts to prevent arms trafficking? How can
the U.S. government best ensure effective review of items once they have been exported? Does the Commerce Department have
the
the requisite expertise and statutory authority to ensure effective detection and prosecution of violators? At a minimum,
impacts of the proposed transfer of export control authority on the United States’ ability
to suppress global traffic in atrocity-enabling arms must be thoroughly assessed, including
the potential financial implications of hiring more Commerce Department oversight officials to deal with the increased workload. Yet,
evidence of such careful assessment is scant. According to U.S. government auditors, “U.S. agencies have not fully assessed the
potential impact that export control reform of control lists might pose for the resource needs of the range of compliance activities
agencies undertake, as suggested by federal internal control standards and executive branch requirements.”[6] This question is
especially important because some State Department enforcement officials are funded through registration fees collected from
those engaged in exporting items regulated by that department. The shift of items to Commerce Department control could therefore
lead to a reduction in fees used to fund existing enforcement activity.
 Arms Control Good – Africa
Poorly regulated arms sales disproportionately impact marginalized
nations – their sweeping indicts of arms control ignore the global demand
by developing nations for increased regulations
Lamb 12 (Guy, senior research fellow at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in South
Africa. He has been working with various African governments for nearly a decade to improve
arms control and disarmament systems and measures. “African States and the ATT
Negotiations” https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2012_09/African-States-And-the-ATT-
Negotiations#lamb)NFleming

Africa is arguably the continent that has experienced the most destructive
consequences of the largely unregulated global arms trade . This point was pertinently emphasized by
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who, in a video address to the arms trade treaty (ATT) negotiating conference this July,
reminded government delegations that the “Liberian experience and other experiences in Africa and
other parts of the world show that, without such a treaty , armed violence and wars will
continue to be fueled by irresponsible arms transfers.” Nonetheless, African states did not
have a shared vision for an ATT during the period from the 2006 establishment of the ATT consultations at the United
Nations until the start of the actual treaty negotiating conference this past July. In fact, t he majority of African states
played a relatively minor role in shaping the outcome of the ATT preparatory meetings,
overshadowed by states that are major arms producers and states that devoted considerable diplomatic capital to securing a robust
ATT. The principal exceptions were Algeria, Egypt, and Kenya. Kenya was one of the co-authors of the key 2006 UN General
Assembly resolution on the ATT and remained a major proponent of a robust treaty to govern the arms trade. Algeria and Egypt
actively engaged in the ATT consultations and raised repeated concerns about the content of an ATT and manner in which it would
be negotiated. In the 2012 ATT negotiation conference, however, sub-Saharan African states became more active, which led to
them having a relatively influential role in the negotiations. Prior to the 2012 negotiating conference, the absence of African unity on
the content of a future ATT was evident in the formal statements prepared by the African Group. These statements typically included
uncontroversial commitments to an ATT, but were short on detail.[1] The fault lines between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa
were particularly prominent. Some North African states, concerned that a treaty regulating arms transfers might undermine their
ability to defend themselves in the context of the precarious Middle East dynamics, particularly relations between Israel and its
A large majority of sub-
neighbors and issues related to the ongoing Arab Spring, were apprehensive about an ATT.
Saharan African states were supportive of the ATT process, largely because sub-Saharan
Africa is the region most undermined by armed violence. In that region, there have been concerted
efforts to combat the illicit proliferation of small arms and light weapons, along with ammunition. Zimbabwe was one of the
exceptions, as it voted against the UN General Assembly resolutions in 2008 and 2009 to initiate and sustain formal discussions that
would be the basis for ATT negotiations. Zimbabwe’s decision might have been due to internal political developments and
diplomatic squabbles at the time. According to a 2011 report,[2] 28 sub-Saharan African states were ranked in the top 58 countries
In many of these African countries, small arms and light weapons
experiencing lethal violence.
and ammunition were among the main instruments of violence. In most cases, such weapons and
ammunition would have originally been transferred from foreign countries to these African states, either legally or illegally. The
high levels of violence have seriously undermined poverty reduction efforts . More than three-
quarters of African states have existing legal obligations that are directly relevant to an ATT, particularly subregional conventions
and protocols to regulate and monitor the trade in small arms and light weapons and ammunition. This is especially the case in the
Great Lakes region, the Horn of Africa, southern Africa, and West Africa. For example, all of the African subregional instruments
dealing with small arms and light weapons require member states of the relevant subregional organization to cooperate in and share
information on the implementation of these instruments, establish national controls to implement the provisions of these instruments,
sub-
and adhere to UN Security Council arms embargoes. There were a variety of general statements by more than half of the
Saharan African states during the four ATT preparatory committee meetings that took place in New York between July
2010 and February 2012. These states particularly highlighted the need for international standards to

regulate the conventional arms trade, for the future treaty to include small arms and light
weapons and ammunition, for humanitarian and human rights law to be taken into
account in decisions on arms transfer authorizations, and for adequate international
cooperation and assistance with regard to treaty implementation . Despite the firm normative
commitments, however, the majority of statements lacked sufficient technical detail to have a sustained and noticeable impact on
the outcome of the preparatory discussions. There are two main reasons for this state of affairs. First, only a handful of sub-Saharan
African states have industries that manufacture conventional arms and related technology, with even fewer states consistently
exporting these weapons. South Africa, which is the most prominent arms exporter on the African continent, was the 16th-largest
global exporter of conventional arms between 2007 and 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Given the concentration of arms exports in the hands a small number of states, however, South Africa’s actual annual contribution to
global arms exports during that period did not exceed 2 percent. In terms of imports, Africa accounted for only 9 percent of global
trade, but South Africa was the principal African arms importer, accounting for 41 percent of sub-Saharan arms imports.[3]
Consequently, conventional arms controls in most African countries were relatively unsophisticated compared to major arms-
exporting states. As a result, for many of the states in question, there was insufficient national experience to formulate detailed
technical interventions at the meetings. Second, during the preparatory committee meetings, a significant number of African states
did not include relevant arms control specialists on their delegations, mainly because of budgetary constraints. In many cases,
states were represented by officials from their permanent missions to the UN. Lacking the necessary expertise, these officials
tended to limit their interactions to reading out previously prepared statements from their capitals. These circumstances restricted
the opportunities for African states to devise cooperative strategies, establish lobbying blocs, or to join interregional lobbying efforts.
Certain African states did not actively engage in the preparatory committee meetings, perceiving that their views were sufficiently
covered by the statements prepared by the African Group. During the July negotiating conference, sub-Saharan African states were
noticeably more outspoken in their views on an ATT and regularly presented substantial recommendations that had practical
applications. These states also established lobbying initiatives, with the one pursued by the states from the Economic Community of
West African States being the most prominent, or participated in multiregional petitioning efforts. Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South
Africa, and Zambia were some of the more prominent states in this regard. During the third week of the conference, at a critical point
of the negotiations, a group of 74 states, 23 of which were from sub-Saharan Africa, compiled a statement that was read by the
Malawian delegation. The statement called for an ATT to be comprehensive in its scope and to include robust arms transfer criteria.
Since September 2011,
The more proactive approach to an ATT by sub-Saharan African states was not an anomaly.
there had been considerable efforts by a variety of governments, intergovernmental
organizations, UN agencies, and civil society entities to encourage more-substantial
African involvement in the ATT process. Meetings, workshops, and seminars were held; research was
undertaken; and ATT-related documents and resources were produced and distributed. In addition, the majority of African states
included arms control officials or legal advisers on their delegations, which enhanced the states’ capacity to interact more
substantively in the negotiations. A key initiative was the attempt by the UN Regional Centre on Peace and Disarmament in Africa to
facilitate the drafting of an African Union (AU) common position on an ATT. AU member states met in Togo in September 2011 to
compile such a document, but it was not finalized because of the opposition from some North African states. Following consultations
by the AU Secretariat, a second meeting was held in May in Ethiopia, with the financial support of the Australian government, in an
attempt to reach greater consensus on a draft common position. Primarily due to the postponement of the 19th AU summit, the AU
did not officially endorse the draft document.[4] Nonetheless, these developments empowered a greater number of African states to
engage in the ATT negotiations more vigorously and substantively. Three related processes also made important contributions to
more-effective sub-Saharan African involvement in the ATT negotiations. First, in late February, government representatives from
southern and East Africa participated in an ATT seminar in Kenya organized by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research with the
support of the European Commission. Second, representatives from Amnesty International, Control Arms, and the International
Action Network on Small Arms enthusiastically lobbied African governments to support a robust ATT. Third, in consultation with a
number of African governments and with the financial support of the British government, the Institute for Security Studies compiled
an ATT negotiation tool kit for African states in an attempt to contribute to a leveling of the ATT negotiation “playing field.” On the
final day of the negotiating conference, it became evident that, despite the efforts of numerous states, the conference participants
would not be able to agree on a treaty text. Shortly before the closure of the conference, Mexico took the floor and read a statement
that had been signed by 94 states, 15 of which were from Africa. The July 27 statement said in part, We came to New York a month
ago to achieve a strong and robust Arms Trade Treaty. We had expected to adopt such a draft Treaty today. We believe we were
very close to reaching our goals. We are disappointed this process has not come to a successful conclusion today. We are
disappointed, but we are not discouraged. Compromises have had to be made, but overall the text [that Roberto García Moritán, the
conference president] put forward yesterday has the overwhelming support of the international community as a base for carrying
forward our work. Successfully negotiating an ATT within the UN system was always going to be a tall order, as the international
conventional arms business is intrinsically linked to considerations of national security and national interest. Arguably, it was these
considerations by two of the largest arms-producing states, namely Russia and the United States, that ultimately trumped the ATT
aspirations of the majority of UN member states. The future of an ATT now will be determined by the UN General Assembly First
Committee later this year. Either the treaty will be finalized by means of a General Assembly resolution, or UN member states will
decide that they need a second round of negotiations. Given the significant amount of diplomatic capital that most African states
have devoted to the ATT process, it is likely that these states will continue to advocate for a robust ATT in the coming months. In
light of the harm that African people and governments have suffered as a result of the poorly
regulated arms trade, most African states have the moral authority to apply pressure on
major arms-producing states to support the finalization of a robust ATT . The delayed outcome of
the ATT process provides the AU with a key opportunity to make use of the enhanced African commitment to an ATT to revisit the
AU common position on an ATT, as well as devise a strategy for the next round of negotiations.
 Liberalism Good – I-Law
Rejecting international legal frameworks and sovereignty triggers great
power friction and increases the risk of interventionism which turns all the
links. Independently, their abstract moralism trades off with engagement in
liberal internationalism.
McCormack 10 (Tara, Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester, PhD in
IR from the University of Westminster, “Critique, Security and Power: The Political Limits to
Emancipatory Approaches”, pp. 136-139)NFleming
In chapter 7 I engaged with the human security framework and some of the problematic implications of 'emancipatory' security policy
the shift away from the pluralist security framework and the
frameworks. In this chapter I argued that
elevation of cosmopolitan and emancipatory goals has served to enforce international
power inequalities rather than lessen them. Weak or unstable states are subjected to greater international
scrutiny and international institu010tions and other states have greater freedom to intervene, but the citizens of these states have no
way of controlling or influencing these international institutions or powerful states. ¶ This shift away from the pluralist security
framework has not challenged the status quo, which may help to explain why major international institutions and states can easily
the shift away from the pluralist
adopt a more cosmopolitan rhetoric in their security policies. As we have seen,
security framework has entailed a shift towards a more openly hierarchical international
system, in which states are differentiated according to, for example, their ability to provide human
security for their citizens or their supposed democratic commitments. In this shift, the old pluralist
international norms of (formal) international sovereign equality, non-intervention and
'blindness' to the content of a state are overturned. Instead, international institutions and states have
more freedom to intervene in weak or unstable states in order to 'protect' and
emancipate individuals globally .¶ Critical and emancipatory security theorists argue that the goal of the
emancipation of the individual means that security must be reconceptualised away from the state. As the domestic sphere is
understood to be the sphere of insecurity and disorder, the international sphere represents greater emancipatory possibilities, as
Tickner argues, "if security is to start with the individual, its ties to state sovereignty must be severed' (1995: 189). For critical
and emancipatory theorists there must be a shift towards a 'cosmopolitan' legal framework, for
example Mary Kaldor (2001: 10), Martin Shaw (2003: 104) and Andrew Linklater (2005). ¶ For critical theorists, one of the
fundamental problems with Realism is that it is unrealistic. Because it prioritises order and the existing status quo. Realism attempts
to impose a particular security framework onto a complex world, ignoring the myriad threats to people emerging from their own
governments and societies. Moreover, traditional international theory serves to obscure power relations and omits a study of why
the system is as it is: [0]mitting myriad strands of power amounts to exaggerating the simplicity of the entire political system. Today's
conventional portrait of international politics thus too often ends up looking like a Superman comic strip, whereas it probably should
contemporary critical security
resemble a Jackson Pollock. (Enloe, 2002 [1996]: 189) ¶ Yet as I have argued,
theorists seem to show a marked lack of engagement with their problematic (whether the
international security context, or the Yugoslav break-up and wars). Without concrete engagement and analysis,
however, the critical project is undermined and critical theory becomes nothing more than

a request that people behave in a nicer way to each other. Furthermore, whilst contemporary critical
security theorists argue that they present a more realistic image of the world, through exposing power relations, for example, their
lack of concrete analysis of the problematic considered renders them actually unable to
engage with existing power structures and the way in which power is being exercised in
the contemporary international system. For critical and emancipatory theorists the central place of the values of
the theorist mean that it cannot fulfil its promise to critically engage with contemporary power relations and emancipatory
since the
possibilities. Values must be joined with engagement with the material circumstances of the time.¶ It seems clear that
1990s and the shift away from formal framework for international affairs in terms of formal
sovereign equality and non intervention, weak and troubled states have become increasingly opened
up to interference and intervention by great powers . There is no global political constituency in existence
and the world order as it currently is one in which power is unevenly distributed. Shifting away from even formal
prohibitions against intervention and formal sovereign equality simply gives more
powerful states greater power . This cannot represent a step towards greater emancipation
for the citizens of those states, in fact it represents an increasing lack of freedom . For contemporary critical
theorists, there is a failure to understand that rights are not things in themselves that can create freedom. In certain concrete
situations human rights can easily become their opposite, a system in which external powers become sovereign. For this reason, a
critical approach must entail an engagement with the here and now and the exercise of
con- temporary power relations , but this is exactly what contemporary critical and emancipatory theorists are not
doing.¶ An example of this trend can be found in Booth's arguments that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other
declarations of rights have challenged the sovereign state (2007: 166—167). In the first place, as we have seen in chapter 1,
despite such declarations the pluralist security framework remained in place during the Cold War, but perhaps more importantly a
concrete engagement with the exercise of post-Cold War power relations would show that the UN was an institution set up by the
various declarations of
new hegemonic power, America, as a way of cementing its authority. In this context the
human rights were not a challenge to power but a fundamental part of the exercise of
power (Sellars, 2002).¶ Critical and emancipatory theorists have an abstract and idealised
view of the international system, excluding broader questions about international
organisation and power inequalities. Critical security theorists wish the complicated world, and complex conflicts,
to conform to an abstract moral framework . Yet, as 'traditional' theorists E H Carr and Hedley Bull warned, this is
simply an evasion of engagement with the actually existing international order and a
substitution of the moral preferences of the theorist. As Carr argued about contemporary idealists: The
Utopian is necessarily voluntarist: he believes in the possibility of more or less radically rejecting reality, and substituting his Utopia
for it by an act of will ... the Utopian makes political theory a norm to which political practice ought to conform. (1964 [1939]: 11, 12) ¶
Of course, this is not to say that a real cosmopolitan order cannot exist, but this would entail a genuine transformation of the
international and national order. The
international order as it exists is still one that is divided into
states and one which is marked by major power inequalities. In this context, the prescriptions
of critical security theorists which aim to achieve a more 'cosmopolitan' international order
becomes one in which power inequalities are entrenched even further. Moreover, there seems to
be a step backwards in terms of a re-division between those members of the international community entitled to be full members
and those which are there under sufferance and may be punished for their failings. This is quite clear in the human security
framework, as discussed in chapter 7.
 Liberalism Good – Laundry List
Their critique of liberalism is ahistorical – the US-led international order is
the greatest international stabilizer – key to disarmament, human rights
norms, terrorism, and checking revisionist prolif
Yulis 17. (Max Yulis, Penn Political Review. In Defense of Liberal Internationalism. April 8,
2017. pennpoliticalreview.org/2017/04/in-defense-of-liberal-internationalism/)
Over the past decade, international headlines have been bombarded with stories about the unraveling of the post-Cold War world
order, the creation of revolutionary smart devices and military technologies, the rise of militant jihadist organizations, and nuclear
times are paradoxically promising and alarming. In relation to treating the world’s ills,
proliferation. Indeed,
fortunately, there is a capable hegemon – one that has the ability to revive the world order
and traditionally hallmarked human rights, peace, and democracy. The United States, with all of
its shortcomings, had crafted an international agenda that significantly impacted the post-WWII
landscape. Countries invested their ambitions into security communities, international institutions,
and international law in an effort to mitigate the chances of a nuclear catastrophe or another World
War. The horrors and atrocities of the two Great Wars had traumatized the global community, which spurred calls for peace and the
the world’s fickle and declining hegemon still has the ability, but not
creation of a universalist agenda. Today,
the will, to uphold the world order that it had so carefully and eagerly helped construct. Now , the stakes are
too high, and there must be a mighty and willing global leader to lead the effort of diffusing
democratic ideals and reinforcing stability through both military and diplomatic means. To do this,
the United States must
abandon its insurgent wave of isolationism and protectionism, and come to grips with the newly
transnational nature of problems ranging from climate change to international terrorism. First,
the increase in intra-state conflict should warrant concern as many countries, namely in Africa and
the Middle East, are seeing the total collapse of civil society and government. These power
vacuums are being filled with increasingly ideological and dangerous tribal and non-state actors,
such as Boko Haram, ISIS, and Al-Shabaab . Other bloody civil wars in Rwanda, Sudan, and the Congo have
contributed to the deaths of millions in the past two decades. As the West has seen, however, military intervention has not been all
A civil crusade, along with the
that successful in building and empowering democratic institutions in the Far East.
strengthening of international institutions, may in fact be the answer to undoing tribal,
religious, and sectarian divisions, thereby mitigating the prospects of civil conflict. During the
Wilsonian era, missionaries did their part to internationalize the concept of higher education, which has contributed to the growth of
universities in formerly underdeveloped countries such as China and South Korea.[1] In addition, the teachings of missionaries
emphasized the universality of humanity and the oneness of man, which was antithetical to the justifications for imperialism and the
Seeing that an increase in the
rampant sectarianism that plagued much of the Middle East and Africa.[2]
magnitude of human casualty is becoming more of a reality due to advancements in
military technology and the increasing outbreaks of civil war, international cooperation and
the diffusion of norms that highlight the importance of stable governance, democracy,
and human rights is the only recourse to address the rise in sectarian divides and civil conflicts. So
long as the trend of the West’s desire to look inward continues, it is likely that nation states
mired in conflict will devolve into ethnic or tribal enclaves bent on relying on war to maintain their
legitimacy and power. Aside from growing sectarianism and the increasing prevalence of failed states, an even more daunting
threat come from weapons that transcend the costs of conventional warfare. The problem of nuclear proliferation has been around
for decades, and on the eve of President Trump’s inauguration, it appeared that Obama’s lofty goal of advocating for
now that the American president
nonproliferation would no longer be a priority of American foreign policy.[3] In addition,
is threatening to undo much of the United States’ extensive network of alliances, formerly non-nuclear
states may be forced to rearm themselves. Disarmament is central to liberal
internationalism , as was apparent by the Washington Naval Treaty advocated by Wilson, and by the modern CTBT
treaty. The reverse is, however, being seen in the modern era, with cries coming from Japan and South Korea to remobilize and
begin their own nuclear weapon programs.[4]A world with more nuclear actors is a formula for chaos,
especially if nuclear weapons become mass-produced. Non-state actors will increasingly eye these nuclear
sites as was the case near a Belgian nuclear power plant just over a year ago.[5] If any government commits a
serious misstep, access to nuclear weapons on the behalf of terrorist and insurgent groups

will become a reality , especially if a civil war occurs. States with nuclear weapons require domestic stability and strong
security, which is why states such as Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan could be in serious trouble in the
event of a domestic uprising or military coup. The disarmament of all states is essential for human

survival, and if it is not achieved, then a world full of nuclear weapons and an international

system guided by realpolitik could give rise to nuclear warfare . In today’s world, nuclear weapons leave all states
virtually defenseless. But, for nuclear deproliferation to become a cornerstone of the global agenda, a
pacifying and democratic power must rise to the limelight to advocate the virtues of peace, stability, and
human rights. Those who equivocate democratic interventionism as an idealistic crusade

cannot be further from the truth . Some, however, see it as an effective foreign policy that has a grand scheme for
peace in mind.[6] The latter contention, despite being widely disputed, holds the premise for the democratic peace theory.
Throughout the history of all democracies, not one modern-day democracy has fought
against another democracy .[7] Whether that’s because of ideational symmetry, similar
objectives and morals, or generally pacific foreign policies, such a phenomenon must be
given attention by policymakers. According to liberal internationalists, democracies make better
partners, tend to move towards increased political and moral agreement, oppose illiberal
regimes, and support disarmament policies. This supposition is heavily supported by the smooth post-WWII
transitions that the German, Japanese, and Italian governments underwent. All of the governments were formerly fascistic and
authoritarian, but with intensive military and economic support from the West, they became some of the most shining exemplars of
democratic societies. Even today, Germany is the backbone of the European Union and repeatedly
champions democratic norms, such as human rights, economic freedom, and individual
liberty.[8] Equipping other countries with the necessary foundations for democracy is no
easy feat, but the fight for peace far outweighs the costs of inhabiting a world rife with nuclear-

armed authoritarian and belligerent states . In conclusion, liberal internationalism can have a lasting legacy on
the prospects for peace if it is executed properly. Putting democracy, humanism, and liberty on a
pedestal is what states ought to do if they seek to save humanity from itself. Although the rise
of transnational issues pertaining to climate change, nuclear weapons, and civil wars should make international cooperation an
increasingly desired aim, states seem to be thinking just the opposite. Only time will tell whether this is a short-lived trend, or a more
ominous warning for the world at large.
 Interventions Good – Distance
Interventions are good – they create physical distance between
combatants, enforce war-time agreements, and lay the groundwork for
long-term peace
Diehl 14 (Henning Larsen Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, where he
remains Director of Undergraduate Research, Breaking the Conflict Trap: The Impact on
Peacekeeping on Violence and Democratization in the Post-Conflict Context,
www.saramitchell.org/diehl_chapter)NFleming
Generally, Fortna (2008) offers what she describes as a “theory” to explain how peacekeeping
works, although it might not meet everyone’s definition of the term. In her conception, and
reflective of past research on peacekeeping, the prevention of conflict renewal is achieved
through a series of tasks that peacekeepers perform. By separating combatants at a
physical distance , peacekeepers prevent the accidental engagement of opposing
armies, thereby inhibiting small incidents that could escalate to renewed war.
Peacekeepers also inhibit deliberate cheating on cease-fire agreements, as violations can
be more easily detected. The physical separation of the protagonists provides early warning
of any attack and thereby decreases the tactical advantages that stem from a surprise
attack and increases the uncertainty of any side winning the next battle (Smith and Stam,
2003). Renewed warfare in which the aggressor can be identified by the peacekeepers
and in which peacekeepers are partly the target of that aggression is also likely to
produce international condemnation . The costs in international reputation and possible
sanctions, combined with the decreased likelihood of quick success, are designed to be
sufficient to deter any attack (Fortna 2008). Significantly, results from Mason et al (2011)
indicate the conflict diminution effects are just as strong during the time that the
peacekeepers are actually deployed as during the period following their withdrawal. This
suggests not only are the peacekeepers effective in directly deterring or preventing
violence, but that they also facilitate other processes that lay the groundwork for long-
term peace.
 Interventions Good – Epistemology
Scholars need to challenge the careless conflation of peacekeeping with
the ‘War on Terror’ or broader liberalism. Correcting these misconceptions
is vital to saving the peacekeeping enterprise. Building an informed base
of peacekeeping scholars weeds out bad practices and improves
peacekeeping
Paris 10, (Associate Professor Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University
of Ottawa, Saving Liberal Peacebuilding,
aix1.uottawa.ca/~rparis/Saving_Liberal_Peacebuilding_FINAL.pdf)NFleming
The global experiment in post-conflict peacebuilding, underway since the end of the Cold War, has arrived
at a crossroads and it is uncertain how it will proceed.2 While the United Nations (UN) and its member states continue to
reaffirm their support for peacebuilding and to mount new missions aimed at helping countries emerging from civil wars,
observers have questioned the effectiveness and legitimacy of these missions. Many of these
criticisms are warranted: the record of peacebuilding has indeed been disappointing. Efforts to promote liberal democratic governing
systems and market-oriented economic growth – both core elements of the prevailing liberal peacebuilding model – have been more
difficult and unpredictable than initially expected, in some cases producing destabilizing side effects.3 It is crucial for scholars and
practitioners to gain a better understanding of the underlying tensions and contradictions of peacebuilding,4 including by using
recent years have also witnessed
“critical” methods of enquiry that dissect the assumptions of these operations.5 But
the emergence of what might be called a “hyper-critical” school of scholars and
commentators who view liberal peacebuilding as fundamentally destructive or
illegitimate. Some of these critics maintain, for example, that the post-conflict operations of the past two decades have done
more harm than good. Others go further, portraying these operations as a form of Western or liberal

imperialism that seeks to exploit or subjugate the societies hosting the missions. In this
such claims tend to be just as exaggerated as the rosy proliberalization
article, I shall argue that
rhetoric that dominated the peacebuilding discourse in the early-to-mid-1990s, when
democratization and marketization were portrayed as almost magical formulas for peace in
war-torn states. To borrow a phrase from Alan Greenspan, former chair of the US Federal Reserve, early peacebuilding
commentary was “irrationally exuberant” about post-conflict liberalization strategies. The problematic record of peacebuilding in
subsequent years chipped away at this enthusiasm as scholars began to dissect the assumptions and challenges of consolidating
peace after civil wars,6 including assumptions about the relationship between liberalization and peace in post-conflict settings.7 Like
a swinging pendulum, however, criticism of peacebuilding has recently carried past the point of
justified questioning and, in some quarters, now verges on unfounded skepticism and
even cynicism. Careless conflation of multilateral peace operations with the US-led “war
on terror” has accelerated this pendulum swing, as I shall argue below, but whatever the explanation may
be, such denunciations of liberal peacebuilding are both unwarranted and imprudent . They
are unwarranted because such missions, in spite of their many flaws, have done more good than
harm; and they are imprudent because the failure of the existing peacebuilding project would be
tantamount to abandoning tens of millions of people to lawlessness, predation, disease
and fear. In short, there is a need to clarify and rebalance existing academic debates over the meaning, shortcomings and
prospects of “liberal” peacebuilding. In 1993, Gerald Helman and Stephen Ratner wrote a seminal article titled “Saving Failed
States” in which they identified collapsing states as an emerging international security and development priority, and called for new
multilateral method to assist such states.8 Nearly two decades later, the challenge of aiding countries beset by internal unrest and
instability remains urgent – as regional conflicts centred in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and elsewhere attest. But
whereas a few years ago it was irrational exuberance about liberal peacebuilding that needed tempering, today the entire
If the practice of providing large-scale assistance to
peacebuilding enterprise is being called into question.
post-conflict societies is to continue, peacebuilding will need to be “saved” from this
exaggerated backlash. Saving peacebuilding does not mean blindly thoughtlessly
defending current international practices . On the contrary, the principles and methods of
these missions need to be challenged and analyzed continuously. Scholars have an
important role to play in this process: their writings help to inform debates,
to confirm or to disconfirm assumptions, and to frame understandings
about what these missions are and what they do . But not all criticism is equally valid or sound.
hyper-critical
Critical perspectives themselves need to be subject to ongoing scrutiny and review. As it turns out, many
writings have been based on questionable logic and evidence. Saving liberal peacebuilding thus
involves both: (1) continuing to press forward with efforts to dissect and understand the paradoxes and pathologies of
peacebuilding, and (2) ensuring that this critical enterprise is well-founded and justified. Critical studies of peacebuilding are “critical”
in the sense that they ask probing questions about underlying assumptions that might otherwise be taken for granted. However, this
deeper questioning does not, in itself, lead to any particularly conclusions about the merits, morality or advisability of given
peacebuilding paradigm. More precisely, nothing in critical theory or critical scholarship per se implies that liberal peacebuilding,
critical peacebuilding studies have
broadly defined, should be rejected. Nevertheless, for one reason or another,
come to be associated – if not equated – with sweeping rejections of liberal peacebuilding. This
is unfortunate, because the tools of critical analysis could just as easily be used to explore

alternatives within liberal peacebuilding . It is also puzzling because some of the strongest critics of liberal
peacebuilding appear, on close examination, to be arguing from liberal principles themselves. The persistent appeal of liberal
peacebuilding, even among many of its purported challengers, reveals two things. First,
there is greater potential for
conceiving of reforms within the liberal approach to peacebuilding than many of its
critics seem to concede. If many of the proposed “alternative” strategies (such as increasing the ability of local
authorities to challenge the decisions of international officials) are themselves based in liberal principles, it follows that much of the
Liberalism is a broad
critical literature is actually espousing variations within, rather than alternatives to, liberal peacebuilding.
canvas that can accommodate a wide range of political and economic structures as well as
diverse methods for engaging with the inhabitants of war-shattered societies. Indeed, I shall
argue below that there is no realistic alternative to some form of liberal peacebuilding

strategy .9 Second, the apparent disjuncture between the discourse and content of many
liberal peacebuilding critiques raises troubling questions about the current critical
scholarship in this field. Is the rejection of liberal peacebuilding genuine or ritualistic ? Is this
rejection now considered a prerequisite of any “genuinely” critical peacebuilding analysis? One hopes not. Critical scholarship is
crucial to helping us understand the “prevailing order” and how this order is reproduced,10 including in the realm of peacebuilding.
But in the absence of self-criticism, critical theory can devolve into dogmas that can be just as unthinking as other unquestioned
orthodoxies. While the turn to critical theory in this field has generated important insights over the past decade, nothing in
the recent critical literature provides a convincing rationale for abandoning liberal
peacebuilding or replacing it with a non-liberal or “post-liberal” alternative. The literature
does, however, reinforce the case for reforming current approaches to peacebuilding,
without disavowing the broadly liberal orientation of these missions. Clarifying these
points seems important – both for scholars of peacebuilding, and for broader debates
about the future of international assistance to war-torn states.
Framework
 FW – A/S Debate k Advocacy

Topic education is necessary to understand the intricacies of arms sales -

informed clash in policy debates is key to increase transparency, demand
accountability, and create effective advocates
Holden 16 – historian, researcher, and director of investigations at Corruption Watch UK
(Paul, Indefensible: Seven Myths that Sustain the Global Arms Trade, p. 174, lasa-SI)
This is a problem of enormous proportion, well-funded and powerful, with deep historical and
institutional roots. Faced with this seemingly overwhelming advantage, it is easy to fall into
apathy or despair. What, after all, can an individual do to change a systemic problem?
Not much. But we are not merely individuals. We are the beginning of an international
network that will share innovation, resources and practices to make defense industry
players conform to basic standards of accountability and openness , and ensure
governments allocate funds to defense (or to alternative sectors) in ways that meet the
real needs of their citizens.
So how do we get there? There is not going to be a tidy checklist. There are a lot of things that
need to be changed. This is how we get started:
First, learn to recognize the myths and dispute them. Stop engaging in the mythology of the
arms business. The first step in this process is to generate an informed public debate
about the global arms industry, its business model and practices, and its stated
justifications.

Second, several of the myths point us in the direction of seeking long-term, sustainable
approaches to security, rather than panic-driven kneejerk responses. They suggest a different
set of questions to guide policy: how are today’s threats different from past threats and what
does this mean for our countries’ needs, and our world’s needs?
Knowing that weapons, allies and contexts are unstable and that weapons control regimes are
inadequate, we should ask: what are the long-term consequences of today’s deals? Spending
does not necessarily lead to security; and worse, spending on defense can divert public funds
away from more effective uses. If we need to create jobs and stimulate the economy, that
concern should take precedence; but we should look to other sectors that create more jobs, and
more civilian technology, than defense.
The question to start with should be: What is the most effective use of public funds to increase
sustainable human security?

Third, demand transparency . Partisan economic and political interests, not concern with
public security, often dominate arms trade decisions.
Transparency is the best way to combat this tendency. Demand it not only within your
own government, but also in how your government and private corporations engage in
security sector assistance and arms deals with foreign countries. National security does
not require secrecy. The greatest security a country can experience is through transparent
and accountable democratic practices. There may be need for some secrecy, but it should
always be the exception and never be used to hide improper influence, misbehavior or grand
larceny. Support groups in other countries that are also advocating for transparency and
find ways to work together at the intersection of trade deals. Take a look at the Stop the
Shipment campaign for inspiration: it is a campaign that attempted, through putting
pressure on various governments and international organizations, to stop a
contemporaneous shipment of tear gas to the notoriously repressive Bahraini regime.

Fourth, demand accountability . Corruption is endemic to the trade; it is a problem for every
society that engages in arms transactions, producers and purchasers alike.
Some countries have good laws to govern corruption and accountability; make sure they are
being applied. Support whistle-blowing that reveals corruption and overreach. The levers of
accountability as they currently exist in even the most law-governed countries are insufficient, a
fact that is proven time and again when oversight functions as a rubber stamp. Whistleblowers
risk their livelihoods and freedom to expose this fact and deserve our support.

Fifth, following the leadership of local advocates, we can act in solidarity with each
other. There will be specific strategies, need and avenues for engagement that makes
sense for different contexts. For instance, in the US, pressuring Congress to commit to return
military spending to pre-911 levels and demanding increased, rather than decreased, regulation
of the trade would have major impact. In Nigeria, the place to start may be budget transparency
and an end to ‘security votes’. In many countries, enabling the voice of civil society to criticize
and oversee the defense sector is the first crucial step.

Together, we can foster an evidence-driven, accountable and transparent public

discussion of the global arms business . Together, we can start pointing out the
absurdities that protect a business to the detriment of the security and economic
prosperity of the world. By doing so, we can make the world a safer, more prosperous
and more harmonious place.

Building anti-war culture can force restrictions on the market from profiting
of wars – creating effective advocates through an informed discussion on
arms sales is key to create political change
Chaulia 15 – professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal
Global University (Sreeram, “The Causes of Mass Suffering: Toward a Structural Responsibility
Framework,” HeinOnline, Summer 2015, Accessed Online at: https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page
handle=hein.journals/whith16&collection=journals&id=185&startid=185&endid=202, Accessed
Online on 07/17/19, lasa-SI)
A NEW PEACE POLITICS FROM BELOW
The preceding sections have established that while one must pinpoint immediate causes
of seemingly local or internal conflicts, the ultimate global causes should not be brushed
under the carpet. Absolutely "local" wars cannot last for a long duration and cause
phenomenal human suffering on a vast scale. We must therefore cast the net of
responsibility for deep human suffering wider, broader, and more structurally to get to
the bottom of the crises and to craft alternatives to the culture of war, destruction and
abuse . At the level of comprehension and consciousness, one must reexamine the root
causes of terrorism and state repression-typical forms of violence against civilians in
ongoing "internal" wars-by linking local issues and actors to global players at the summit of our
highly interconnected international system.
Having framed great powers, transnational businesses, and international organizations
as ultimately responsible for the incessant bloodletting in volatile regions of the world, it
is incumbent upon me to conclude with ideas of overcoming this multilayered structural
grid of international exploitation and domination. What is the alternative for restoring
human dignity of war ravaged victims when politico-economic elites from the local to the
global levels are all ranged against their welfare and settling scores at the expense of
marginalized civilians? With the advent of multipolarity and its inherent feature of extra
competition among great powers and transnational corporations for commanding resources and
gaining spheres of influence, what is the defense mechanism for the sufferers of wars and
repression?
The answers lie in the organic resistance power of the grassroots that have been
sidelined by the giants atop a global war economy. In 2008, as China began ramping up its
military-industrial complex's exports to unstable parts of Africa, a watershed event occurred in
Durban harbor. A shipment of arms supplied by China and headed to the authoritarian regime of
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was halted by South African workers and activists
holding aloft banners reading: "Zimbabwe need peace, not China guns." The spontaneous
people's action in Durban triggered a regionwide momentum, with other southern African
countries refusing to allow the Chinese vessel to dock. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a world
leader in promoting a culture of peace similar to Pope Francis, remarked at that time in solidarity
with the protest movement that, "if violence flares further in Zimbabwe, those supplying the
weapons will be left with blood on their hands." 53

What this episode conveys is that when civil society is vigilant and organized on the basis
of transnational peace, it can create a new regional consensus and strengthen unity of
peoples to prevent further militarization of conflict prone areas. At the formal
institutional of international legislation, global activists for peace can claim to have
played a steering role, not a supplementary one, in enacting the Arms Trade Treaty of
2014, the Convention on Cluster Munitions of 2008, and the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban
Convention of 1997. Douglas Roche cites these fruits of persistent struggles of the peace
movement to argue that, "pressure from civil society is the best way to galvanize political
and diplomatic systems."s4 It is a colossal mistake to discount the capacity of ordinary
citizens motivated by values of nonviolence and human kindness (as opposed to
professionalized NGOs and aid agencies that depend on donor funds and whose ethics are
compromised) to come together and overthrow oppressive structures that are crushing
humans in war zones. Elites in charge of militaries and treasuries often denigrate
people's movements as idealistic, romantic, naive and politically unrealistic. But as Peter
Ackerman and Jack DuVall's classic book has documented, whole new national, regional
and world orders have been carved out through consistent and active nonviolence from
below."5

The key for the new order lies in lay people realizing their own agency, and seizing the
initiative to demand an end to wars and forced displacements that serve elite interests.
The agenda for activism has to be wider and transcend immediate causes of mass suffering.
The manner in which multiple crosscurrents of progressive politics intersected in the
antiVietnam war era still holds lessons for the 21st century cause of peace with justice.5 6 Just
as the civil rights, women's rights, and anti-war movements made common cause in the
1960s in the Western world, we need a convergence of movements in Global North and
Global South around the pole of "justice," which includes opposing a culture of war as
well as its intimate cousin, the culture of commercial greed symbolized by Wall Street
and its global affiliates that have oiled the machinery of violence.
Today, the communications revolution characterized by mobile telephony and web 2.0
technologies have democratized mass mobilization and empowered horizontal leadership
forms far more than in the antiVietnam war era. Developing countries where dictatorships
and wars have shredded human dignity are also undergoing a population youth bulge. During
the Arab Spring of 2011, I had written that the "combination of technological and demographic
change can alter history by rearranging agency among different segments of society and
ushering in new orders."1 7 Despite the bad news of peaking violence and mass
displacement, there is hope in that the average person today is more efficacious and
empowered to upend the structure that terrorizes her.
 FW – Fatalism
Their fatalistic refusal of politics dismisses the possibility material
improvements to fight against Trumpism – you should prefer a model of
the activity that can immediately mobilize students to dethrone fascism and
prevent ecological disaster
Connolly 17 (William E. Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the political science department at
Hopkins where he teaches political theory. His early book, The Terms of Political Discourse,
was awarded the Benjamin Lippincott Award in 1999. “William Connolly & Nidesh Lawtoo —
Rhetoric, Fascism and the Planetary: A Conversation between William Connolly and Nidesh
Lawtoo” published in The Contemporary Condition
http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2017/07/rhetoric-fascism-and-
planetary.html)NFleming
Bill Connolly: I read Snyder’s book last winter, maybe in January, as I was thinking about using it in the seminar on Fascism. We
didn’t end up using it—there is the problem that you have forty books on the list and you end up using only ten—but I was
impressed with Snyder’s book for several reasons, the most important being its timeliness and its courageousness. He says: We
are in trouble; things are going in the wrong direction; don’t think this is just a little blip
on the horizon that will automatically disappear —and I agree with him on that. I also liked the way the book
is organized around twenty recipes of response. The one that you call attention to, “do
not obey in advance,” that is,
resist tacitly going along to get along. I think of that as congruent with the themes of role
experimentations mentioned earlier. Role experiments create room within the things that you
regularly do , like work, raising kids, attending church, relating to neighbors, writing, retirement investments, teaching, etc.
You then take a step here, a step there, outside settled expectations, because there is
often room to do things that exceed merely going along to get along . They make a difference in a
cumulative effect, yes. But the most important effect is the way they help to recode our tacit presumptions
and orientations to collective action . Even small things. In this spirit, I recently used Facebook to write an open
letter to Donald Trump after he withdrew from the Paris Accord. Making such a minor public statement can
coalesce with innumerable others doing similar things. People shared it; it received a broader hearing;
even some trolls ridiculed it. It would not be easy to take back. The accumulation of such minor actions
counters the scary drive to allow Trumpism to become normalized. Charles Blow, the New York
Times columnist, also keeps us focused on that issue. I like several things about Snyder’s book, but I think—maybe I am wrong for I
might not have read it carefully enough—that it is kind of limited to what you and I, as individuals and small groups, can do. Today
we need to join these small acts to the larger politics of swarming, out of which new
cross regional citizen assemblages grow. Such assemblages themselves, in the ways they coalesce
expose fallacies in the fascist leadership principle. Protests at town
and operate horizontally,
meetings, for instance, fit Snyder’s theme, I am sure. But let’s suppose, as could well happen, that the Antarctic glacier starts
melting at such a rapid rate we see how its consequences are going to be extremely severe over a short period of time. (The
computer models are usually three to five years behind what actually happens on the ice, ground, and atmosphere).
Constituencies in several regions could now mobilize around this event to organize
general strikes, putting pressure on states and corporations from inside and outside at
the same time. So, the main way I would supplement Snyder is to explore the horizontal mobilization of larger assemblages,
to speak to the urgency of time during a period when dominant states so far resist doing enough. Further, from my point of view,
electoral politics poses severe problems; but there is also a dilemma of electoral politics that must be
engaged honestly. Electoral victories can be stymied by many forces . But you must not
use that fact as a reason to desist . For , as some of us have argued on the blog The Contemporary Condition for
several years, if and when the right wing gains control of all branches of government you run
the severe risk of a Fascist takeover . So, participate in elections and act on other fronts as well. Indeed, in the
United States the evangelical/capitalist resonance machine has acted in its way on multiple fronts simultaneously for decades. The
The way to respond to the dilemma of electoral
Right believes in its version of the politics of swarming.
politics is to expand beyond it but not to eliminate it as one site of activity. For, again, if the
right-wing controls the courts, the presidency, both houses of Congress, the intelligence agencies, and a lot of state legislators, they
can generate cumulative effects that will be very difficult to reverse. Aspirational Fascists, for instance, use such victories to
suppress minority voting. So, multiple modes and registers of politics.. I wouldn’t be surprised if Snyder and I agree on that.
Aspirational Fascism Nidesh Lawtoo: I think you’re right that you two would agree. In Snyder’s longer genealogy of fascism and
Nazism, Black Earth, of which the little book is in many ways a distillation, he ends with a chapter titled “Our World,” which situates
fascist politics in the broader context of climate change and collective catastrophes along the lines you also suggested in Facing the
The more voices promoting pluralist assemblages contra the nihilism of fascist
Planetary.
crowds, the better! Speaking of little books, then, I hear you are yourself working a on a new short book dealing with some
of the issues we have been discussing, which is provisionally titled, Aspirational Fascism. To conclude, could you briefly delineate
its general content, scope, and some of the main lessons you hope will be retained. Bill Connolly: This will be a short, quickly
executed book, a pamphlet, that could come out within a year. It’s divided into three chapters, and it will probably be around 100
pages. The first chapter reviews similarities and differences between Hitler’s rhetoric and crowd management and those of Donald
Trump. It also attends to how the
pluralizing Left has too often ignored the real grievances of the
white working class, helping inadvertently to set it up for a Trump takeover . The second chapter
explores how a set of severe bodily drills and disciplines in pre-Nazi Germany helped to create men particularly attuned to Hitler’s
rhetoric in the wake of the loss of WWI and the Great Depression. You and I are having this conversation today in Weimar, a sweet,
lovely, artistic town. Hitler, I am told, gave over 20 speeches here, in the Central platz, to assembled throngs. So, in the second
chapter I attend to how coarse rhetorical strategies, severe bodily practices, and extreme events
work back and forth on each other. That chapter is indebted to a book by Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (1987, 2
vols.); it helps me to attend to how specific bodily disciplines and drills attune people to particular
rhetorical practices and insulate them from others. The themes Theweleit pursues are then carried into the
United States of today as we explore how the neglect of real white working class grievances, the
military training and job disciplines many in that class face, and the interminable Trump
campaign work back and forth upon one another. That is why I never understate the need to attend to our
own bodily disciplines, habits, and role practices. The third chapter is designed to show how what I call multif aceted

pluralism is both good in itself and generates the best mode of resistance to Fascist
movement s. Multifaceted means that it supports generous, responsive modes of affective
communications and bodily interrelations; it also means that the new pluralism treats the white working class
That support must first
to be one of the minorities to nourish, even as we also oppose the ugly things a portion of it does.
include folding egalitarian projects into those noble drives to pluralization that have been
in play; it must also include taking radical action to respond to the Anthropocene before
it generates so much ocean acidification, expansive drought, ocean rising, and
increasing temperatures that the resulting wars and refugee pressures will provide even
more happy hunting grounds for aspirational Fascism . The pluralizing left must come to terms
immediately with the need to ameliorate class inequality in job conditions, retirement security, and workplace authority. That
I pursue a model of egalitarian pluralism, then,
deserves as much attention as the politics of pluralization itself.
that challenges both liberal individualism and the image of a smooth communist future, seeing both to be insufficient to the

twin dangers of Fascism and the Anthropocene today. There are no smooth ideals to pursue on this
rocky planet. But there may be ways to enhance our attachment to a planet that exceeds the contending adventures of mastery that
dominated the 19th and 20th centuries.
 FW – I-Law
International law is effective and the aff’s technical approach is the best
heuristic for mediating ethical concerns and legal manipulability
Kalpouzos 7 [Ioannis, Professor of Law at The City Law School, "David Kennedy, Of War
and Law", J Conflict Security Law, (2007) 12 (3): 485-492,
jcsl.oxfordjournals.org/content/12/3/485.full]
It is important, however, not to sweepingly and debilitatingly generalise discontent about the current
situation. The structural disconnects of the legal system do not mean that law and legal language
cannot be part of the solution. Actions and motives are abstracted in logical categories that seem to reflect a normative consensus or a structural
status quo. Admittedly, the intercession of the law-creating process by the structural and conceptual wall of sovereignty differentiates it from the equivalent process in national

The often-described weaknesses of the international system, the absence of a sovereign to

legal orders.

impose formal validity and the often-disheartening problems of enforcement are very real
difficulties that plague international law and, especially, the laws of war. The stakes there may seem higher and the scrutinising process
weaker. Such problems are sometimes intimidating for legal analysis, but should not be off-

putting and they should not lead to disregard of the importance of law as a tool in the
international system. To the extent that war is the continuation of politics with the admixture of other
means, and that politics is the interaction between different actors in society, legal regulation of

such an interaction, in peace or war, is possible and, indeed, necessary. The task might
be discouragingly complex but the better the use of legal tools, the more accurate the
observation of practice, and the more legitimate the processes of legal abstraction are,
the more the rules will be valid and effective. Ultimately, Kennedy's diagnosis warrants a prescription. The question
that arises is, to which extent focusing on ‘lawfare’ holds interpretative value in order to address the issues at
hand. Although the conflicts within legal concepts and among legal institutions cannot, of course, be resolved

once and for all and although there will always be room for manipulation and instrumentalisation of the
rules, any approach should seek to clarify the interrelations between concepts and actors.

Kennedy does provide interesting insights on this interrelation, but he does so at a rather macroscopic level. The diagnosis
of structural and conceptual confusion warrants a technical legal approach for dealing
with the specific issues that arise from it. Formal legal thoroughness will never substitute personal
moral choices, but it can be an important tool in the effort to minimise the uncertainty in
the use of the rules and the weakness of the institutional structure. The law or even a formal expert consensus
will never substitute the necessary choices by soldiers on the ground or by politicians deciding to wage war, but legal language provides a formal platform for claims to be

supported and actions to be justified. This will not substitute the important moral choices, but it can ground them
in a legal structure that reflects substantive core values and provides useful tools to
assess them. Furthermore, there is a fear that by focusing on ‘lawfare’ one can come very close to accept it. Accordingly, the relativisation of
the formal validity of legal claims can clear the way for supporting utterly subjective
decisions, allowing more powerful actors to manipulate the loopholes. The structural and substantive
loopholes of the legal system are real enough, and Kennedy is right to point that out, but by accepting the practice of
‘lawfare’, a degree of unwarranted justification can be attached to the exploitation of these
loopholes. This, arguably, will not work in favour of the cohesiveness of the legal system,
especially in an area as legally contentious as the laws of war . Kennedy's disenchantment with the expert consensus and

its practical use is perhaps understandable, and his exhortation to ‘experience politics as our vocation and responsibility as our fate’ (p. 172) is

altogether laudable, but we need more than that. We need to know exactly how to assess decisions

and actions on the ground, and professionalism in ‘lawfare’ and moral exhortations are not substitutes
for legal analysis. Both the strengths and weaknesses of this book reinforce the need for a clearer
understanding of the relevant legal rules, their interaction and the nature of the existing
legal regime.
 FW – I-Law Education
Debating the details of grand strategy and international cooperation is the
only way to check the tide of alt-right misinformation that threatens the
integrity of democratic modeling and cooperation with allies – deference to
elites only confirms their power
Eliasson 10 (L. Johan, PhD from Syracuse University in Political Sciences and Senior
Lecturer at the Maxwell School, “Assessing Whether Increased Knowledge of Foreign Affairs
Alters Public Opinion on Foreign Policy and Influences Actions: A First Step” p. 8-13)
A 2007 Pew Research Center national study revealed how Americans’ overall knowledge showed no significant
difference compared to 18 years earlier. 13 The Pew 1989 and 2007 studies of public knowledge of foreign affairs are among the
few who ask about what people know rather than just what they think or believe. My own, limited, 2009 college freshmen survey
showed Americans were much less knowledgeable
showed similar and disappointing results; a 1994 study
that citizens in other rich democracies, and another large study revealed a majority of Americans
cannot define liberal, conservative, various constitutional rights such as free speech, or
a host of other fundamentals of our political system; whereas people knew much more about celebrities and trivia. 14
The 2007 Pews study also finds no signs that overall increased educational qualifications in the U.S. since 1989 had any effect on
overall knowledge of foreign affairs. The average score of 1,500 randomized respondents to a 23-question foreign affairs quiz was
only 10% achieved 90% correct answers . “The survey provides further evidence that
12;
changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public
knows about national and international affairs.” And “…there is no clear connection between news formats
and what audiences know.” 15 But, ”Older Americans - particularly those 50 years old or older - did better than younger people.
Whites scored better than blacks, while more affluent Americans knew more than those with lower household incomes.”16 Yet, it is
noteworthy that two-thirds of the highest scoring group were college graduates. Furthermore, the
findings by Pew in 2007 that income, race, age and education are related to higher levels of 9 knowledge are consistent with
opinion matters for voting since
previous findings in other studies in the 1980s.17 From this we can infer that
more older than younger people respond in polls, and more older, affluent, college
educated, white citizens, as a percentage, vote, thus lending greater significance to their
views from a policy makers’ perspective. But why are we so lacking in understanding international affairs? Being
the sole democratic superpower since World War II contributes a partial but reasonable explanation of dismal levels of public
knowledge. The rest of the world has traditionally come to the US –every religion, language, race and ethnicity is represented within
its borders– leaving many Americans without a perceived need to learn about other regions and policies, at least not the way the
rest of the world studies and follows American culture and politics. While perhaps understandable, Americans’ limited
knowledge of world affairs is neither justifiable nor defensible, and it may carry
implications for US domestic and foreign policies in a global and interdependent world.
Global economic and political integration--with the relative rise in Europe’s, and
increasingly China’s, influence--makes it critically important to avoid misunderstanding
of what other countries do, whether and why certain US policies are pursued, and how
all this influence Americans’ lives . People appear less informed than they care to admit, and some studies confirm
exaggerated self-reporting on how much news people watch.18 Perhaps those who consider themselves informed or well-informed
may be referencing what they think it means to be an “informed” citizen, or they exaggerate to not appear ill-informed. Furthermore,
those who perceive themselves knowledgeable also tend, generally speaking, to participate
more in the political process. Party affiliation was not a determinant of knowledge among top-scorers, but more self-
declared democrats were found in the lowest scoring group, which raises the 10 heretofore unanswered question of whether less
distortion and misperceptions are disseminated among right-wing media outlets. Yet caution is advised, as age, income and
education were much stronger indicators of knowledge, and a college degree with training in discriminating and
evaluating ideas appears the best way to ensure an ability to discriminate among
propaganda and information, and ultimately promote better understanding of
international affairs and foreign policy . All these surveys are nonetheless indicative of a strange phenomenon:
America is world leaders in so many areas, yet its citizens have a dismal awareness of the world they dominate. Bennett et al (1996)
show that Germans are most knowledgeable about foreign policy; that British, French and Canadian citizens also know more than
Americans, and that education was correlated with knowledge of foreign affairs.19 It is probably no exaggeration to say that many
Americans know more about their favorite football team –whose fortunes hardly affect their jobs, security or personal finances– than
they do about what or where we export, who invests and creates jobs in the U.S. Thus, notwithstanding, 24/7 news, the internet, and
a proliferation of related sources of information, Americans’ knowledge of foreign policy and global affairs remains very limited.20
This lack of awareness is even more surprising when one considers that most issues today are what scholars call “intermestic”: they
overlap domestic and international affairs. Pollution and trade are perhaps obvious examples, yet people often fail to recognize how
most products, whether manufactured goods, services, or jobs, are today marketed, sold and bought globally. Noting the distinction
between –for lack of better distinctions, while giving credit to Joseph Nye’s terms– “soft” (economic, social) and “hard” (security,
military) policy areas, I would argue that today the “soft” policy is more important, but the linkages of various economic and trade
areas, and how decisions in one are affect another, are far more difficult to comprehend. 11 This contributes to, at times, self-
defeating advocacy because the linkages, cause-and-effect, are not evident. Obama, yielding to unions, imposed tariffs (taxes) on
Congress imposed a 50¢ per
Chinese tires, was met with a 105% tax on select American poultry exports to China.
gallon tariff on Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol after easily surrendering to farm-lobbyists
and primary-induced politics, further thickening the gravy-related by throwing billions of
tax dollars to subsidize corn based ethanol, which also cuts into the food supply and
raises corn-based food prices for all Americans. An argument may be had that we need to accept different
levels of knowledge, just as people differ in other areas of life, and that having a relatively informed quarter or so of the populace is
sufficient to ensure policy debate and accountability. Yet it’s dangerous if citizens believe it’s sufficient to
assume that all is well as long as policy makers and their staff understand a complicated
foreign policy issue or a relationship –be it political, economic, or other–, and that it matters little if
the public is uninformed, or whether their perceptions are distorted. Uninformed citizens
become ill-informed leaders . A look at recent presidents and elected representatives
reveals that most American policy makers reach top positions lacking any knowledge of
foreign affairs, let allow experience.21 The circle is perpetuated as rising stars often receive incomplete or slanted the
information from peers and superiors. It is appropriate to retain a degree of deference to those we elect, but remember that voting
alone does not absolve us of our responsibilities to acquire accurate information . Better informed citizens are more
likely to hold elected officials accountable . 22 Therefore, a better informed citizenry also
means better informed future leaders. Conversely, a general public lacking in
understanding of foreign affairs provides the elite (policy makers, media) greater
opportunity to manipulate public opinion and diminish transparency . 12 Another argument is that
we have officials elected by, and beholden to, the public, so we can just vote them out. True, but while free speech is
sacrosanct and ignorance a choice available to all, an electorate protesting or making
decisions at the ballot box based on misperceptions, distortions, and myths can have
serious consequences . America’s founding fathers understood that the Republic‘s constitution, norms, values, and
institutions depend for its success on the quality of citizens. Yet to get elected, most candidates and their supports (individuals and
interest groups) prefer carefully targeted and overly simplistic 20-30 second sound-bites. These then constitute the bases upon
which people elect candidates, or express support or opposition to policy proposals. In politics, arguments have great appeal when
kept simple and reflecting long held prejudices. In homes and schools, in the media and in the Congress, die-hard ideologues and
online bloggers frequently substitute misleading clichés for serious debate; rejecting facts, while resorting to intellectually dishonest
labeling and gross generalizations.23Officials or political pundits “explain” a foreign policy decision
using simplistic, overly-generalized, or even erroneous arguments and evidence,
because of peoples’ dismal knowledge of international affairs. One need simply ask
those who support military action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, or to
stop human rights abuses in the Middle East or western Africa, if they would accept such policies if, as a
consequence, gasoline prices rose to $7-8/gallon. 24 While leaders need to explain and justify policies to
the American public, we also know that the attention span is limited and interest may not always be present. The linkages
and fallout from the two decisions to place, and then retract, the missile defense system in eastern Europe cannot be explained in
30 seconds, nor 5 minutes; so do we get the American people to take an hour-or semester long course?25 Contemporary politicians
(on the political left and right) constantly accuse each other and the media of distortions and bias, while they all express their 13
desire for better informed citizens. As Lamar Smith, Republican Congressman from Texas, put it “… if the American
people can’t get good information, can’t get the facts, and can’t make good decisions,
then we simply don’t have a viable democracy .”26 Americans who are outraged when hearing about elected
officials sneaking last-minute, tax-payer funded, amendments for new luxury jets or home-town pet projects into massive
government spending bills, hoping no one discovers them until the bill is signed into law, should be equally concerned with
ubiquitous myths, misperceptions, and distortions perpetuated by many popular media sources, and
serving as the basis of public opinion and lobbying efforts for legislative initiatives that
may well hurt the American worker.

Numerous studies confirm public ignorance about foreign policy

greenlights the worst forms of imperial aggression - turns every link
Eliasson 10 (L. Johan, PhD from Syracuse University in Political Sciences and Senior
Lecturer at the Maxwell School, “Assessing Whether Increased Knowledge of Foreign Affairs
Alters Public Opinion on Foreign Policy and Influences Actions: A First Step” p. 16-18)
A compilation and analysis of several polls over a decade reveal that Americans want the
United Nations to have authority to erect a permanent peacekeeping force, arrest leaders
who commit genocide, and regulate arms trade; 35 all of which US government have
continuously opposed. A 2004 Pew joint study with the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
(CCFR) and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland
survey confirms the mismatch between public and policy makers. Seven in ten (71%)
preferred that the views of the American people as a whole influence U.S. foreign policy
more than the views of the majority of their own party. Most Americans mistakenly also
believe that Congress as a whole, and their own representative, vote consistent with their
(constituents) preferences, while … apparently unaware that Congress as a whole is voting in
ways that are inconsistent with its preferences, thus undermining public motivation to put
pressure on Congress . When Americans were asked how they think Congress is voting on
these issues, they tended to assume, in most cases incorrectly, that Congress as a whole was
voting consistent with their preferences. … large majorities of leaders and the public opposed
increasing defense spending and in 2002 opposed proceeding to build a missile defense system
—both of which Congress has done.36 The study found American leaders misperceive the
public position on these issues, especially when it comes to multilateral initiatives.
Congressional staffers similarly misread their own constituents. In other words, people thought
Congress listens and votes according to majority public views. For the foreign policy issues
explored, in most cases, this was a misperception. While reinforcing previously mentioned
trends of lessened public interest in foreign policy, and that such issues rarely rally voters or
decide elections, a month before the 2006 17 Congressional elections seven out of ten
Americans wanted a change of foreign policy, and these opinions resulted in action, as
numerous incumbents supporting the Bush administration’s foreign policies were voted
out of office .37 “Voters are calling for a sea change in U.S. foreign policy. They want less
emphasis on military force, and more on soft power,” 38 On other issues such as “reducing our
dependence on oil (84%), coordinating intelligence and law enforcement efforts with other
countries (83%), working through the United Nations to strengthen international anti-terrorism
law and enforcement (71%), and building goodwill toward the United States by providing food
and medical assistance to people in poor countries (57%) (all findings consistent with 2004
surveys as well), one could check government no action-doing that-no action-doing that on the
four issues respectively, and thus find little to support the claim that opinion affects policy, as the
two issues we are already engaged in have been ongoing for years, even decades. The tea-
party candidates may be a reaction to people increasingly feeling that congress does not listen
to them, and if so, does the kind of information these members are receptive, and which leads
to opinion, matter? If ideologically distorted (by the left and right), what may be the
ramifications? If popular media, its propagandists and talking heads dominate the information
flow, how do they portray issues of foreign policy interests to Americans? What are Americans
being told, and sold? Examples Would citizens make better choices, and avoid falling for
distorted advocacy that culminate in tariffs, and failed negotiations if they better
understand the functioning and preferences of the largest buyer and foreign supplier of
goods, services, and jobs in the U.S., 18 namely Europe? Though Americans hold
misperceptions and distorted views of Europe and European practices and policies,
more than half of Americans want closer cooperation with Europe. Thus, many Americans
cling to incorrect beliefs about the very people they prefer to have closer ties with, and with
whom they perceive global problems can best be solved.39 The confusion becomes evident
when actual policy is discussed, or when action is called for, as the effects of misperceptions
and myths discussed above set in, and severe skepticism, even opposition, again dominates. It
is difficult to determine whether even those favoring closer ties expect Europeans to simply
walk to the beat of the American drum, serving as ornamental displays of international support
from fellow liberal democracies, or, whether there are genuine expectations of a balanced
relationship and cooperation in addressing common challenges like China’s economic
policy, the Middle East, terrorism, or climate change.
 FW – Disarmament Education
Broader disarmament movements start with youth advocacy – support for
non-proliferation in peer-to-peer educational spaces like debate is essential
Ikeda and Mburu, 17 – Anna Ikeda is a program associate at Soka Gakkai International, a
community-based Buddhist organization that promotes peace, culture, and education, and a
member of Amplify, a global youth network for nuclear abolition. Peter Mburu is also involved
with Amplify. (Anna and Peter, “For sustainable and nuclear disarmament: Engaging and
empowering youth through disarmament education”, Celebrating 15 Years of Disarmament and
Non-Proliferation Education, UNODA Occasional Papers No. 31, December 2017,
https://read.un-ilibrary.org/disarmament/unoda-occasional-papers-no-31-december-
2017_0fc57137-en#page34)//RCU
Why disarmament education
We believe that, if nuclear disarmament is to be sustainable, people everywhere must be
aware of the issue and the risks associated with the weapons. Youth engagement in
particular is the key to sustainability. As Amplify's working paper submitted to the Open-
ended Working Group in May 2016 states, "Once youth are involved, they often stay
involved. Youth who are interested in health, human rights, the environment, disaster
management and, of course, international affairs can apply their expertise and contribute to
nuclear disarmament."2 Moreover, quality disarmament education can help foster action for
complete disarmament.
Disarmament education can take a variety of forms. For instance, it can be incorporated into
formal education, where students are taught about the devastating effects of nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, thus advancing knowledge in school settings
of the urgent need for complete disarmament. Such educational initiatives are taking place in
numerous schools around the world. While often those opportunities take place in elementary,
middle or high schools, it can also be effective in the institutions of higher learning. For instance,
one member of Amplify recalled how she was once proud of her country for possessing nuclear
weapons and developing its capabilities. However, in her graduate studies programme, she
learned of the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons. That experience reversed her
ideas and actually drove her to actively engage in nuclear disarmament activities.
Possibly as effective are educational and awareness-raising opportunities in informal and
non-formal settings, including peer-to-peer education. While disarmament may appear
far removed from young people's everyday lives, seeing others in their age groups engage
in the issue can be a powerful way to attract interest. It can further encourage individual
actions at various levels, which is a key element of disarmament education.

Engagement with ideas of non-proliferation at the high school level spurs

broader change – proven by the CIF, which sounds a whole lot like policy
debate
Toki, 17 – Research Associate and Project Manager of the James Martin Center for
Nonproliferation Studies. (Masako, “Bringing disarmament and non-proliferation education to
young generations: Case study of high school students”, Celebrating 15 Years of Disarmament
and Non-Proliferation Education, UNODA Occasional Papers No. 31, December 2017,
https://read.un-ilibrary.org/disarmament/unoda-occasional-papers-no-31-december-
2017_0fc57137-en#page44)//RCU
As Dr. William Potter, the founding director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), rightly
pointed out in his article for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in 2001, "education is the most
underutilized tool" to solve global challenges, including disarmament, non-proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and peacebuilding. It is difficult to assess how much disarmament education has
progressed and expanded both qualitatively and quantitatively. One indicator, however, is the number of States parties and
organizations that have submitted contributions to the biennial report of the Secretary-General on disarmament and non-proliferation
education. While the number of reports from United Nations Member States remains surprisingly low—usually less than 10—the
number from non-governmental organizations has significantly increased. In particular, contributions by educational institutes and
youth groups increased during the seventh biennial report (A/71/124). Nevertheless, it is still true that disarmament and non-
proliferation education has not expanded enough to be widely recognized for its
importance by national leaders in many States. The year I started working at CNS coincides with the year that the
United Nations Study was adopted at the United Nations General Assembly. I had a chance to write a short report on the United
Nations Study for the CNS website. This gave me an excellent opportunity to learn the process, background and history of the
United Nations efforts to promote such education. In addition, I had a chance to contribute one chapter regarding disarmament and
non-proliferation education to a Japanese book entitled Disarmament of Weapons of Mass Destruction (English translation), edited
by Professor Mitsuru Kurosawa, one of the leading scholars and educators in the field of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation
in Japan. That chapter was the first one to discuss the United Nations Study in Japanese in that kind of scholarly publication.
Through these experiences, I have developed a keen interest in the topic of disarmament and non-proliferation education. Most
importantly, I have been fortunate to be part of several projects on this topic at CNS. CNS education project for high school students
at the Critical Issues Forum CNS
coordinates a variety of disarmament and non-proliferation education
projects for a wide variety of people, from high school students to diplomats and nuclear
physicists. Although many believe that high school students are too young to be engaged in
issues related to disarmament and non-proliferation, this type of conventional wisdom can often be a
hindrance to engaging stakeholders in the most innovative ways, using fresh ideas for tackling
the world's pressing challenges. One of the CNS flagship education projects, the Critical Issues Forum (CIF), is a
unique non-proliferation and disarmament education project. High school students and teachers around the world, including the
United States, Japan and the Russian Federation come together to promote awareness of the importance of these issues. The
project also aims to develop the critical thinking skills of high school students and to develop an
application among participants of different national and cultural perspectives on complex but vital international
security issues. As delineated in the United Nations Study, disarmament and non-proliferation education
requires an interdisciplinary approach and multiple perspectives. The United Nations Study
emphasizes that it is important to teach students how , rather than what , to think in this field.
Objectives mentioned in the United Nations Study are all relevant to the Critical Thinking Curriculum Model, the pedagogical basis of
Students in the programme investigate real-
the CIF programme. This model fosters a multidisciplinary approach.
world problems related to WMD non-proliferation from political , sociocultural, economic and scientific
perspectives. The Study also encourages adopting a multidisciplinary approach for disarmament and non-proliferation
education. The global demands of disarmament and non-proliferation issues require both learners and educators to take this
the overall purpose
multifaceted approach to finding solutions to global challenges. According to the United Nations Study,
of disarmament and non-proliferation education and training is to empower people through
education so that they learn to contribute to solutions for international peace and security. To
achieve this purpose, the teaching methodologies need to be innovative, creative and effective. Drawing upon the knowledge and
experience of technical and policy experts at CNS and experienced high school educators, CIF develops curriculums, methods and
resources for students to conduct directed research on topics related to the disarmament and non-proliferation of WMD, focusing
mainly on nuclear weapons. Since CNS began the CIF programme in 1997, thousands of high school students around the world
have been involved. Starting with high schools in the United States and the Russian Federation, students from China and Japan
CIF provides students with instruction and guidance in
have since joined the project. Coordinated by CNS,
research evaluation, information synthesis and writing to help them develop critical
thinking skills and promote cooperation among participating schools. Each academic
year, CIF selects a topic , taking into consideration current global non-proliferation and disarmament-related events. The
CIF curriculum promotes higher-order thinking skills by engaging students in original research on topics of
national and international importance. Participating teachers have successfully conducted the programme in a wide
variety of subject courses, including aerospace science, physics, chemistry, current issues, government, history, global studies,
English and computer science. The teachers are able to adapt the curriculum to meet United States state educational standards.
The CIF programme also encourages students to develop and deliver research products in innovative and creative formats that
address nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament issues that will enhance peace and security for all mankind. Based on each
year's topic, CIF project members develop user-friendly non-proliferation and disarmament education modules and learning
materials designed for high school students who are participating in the project. However, these educational materials can be used
by anyone who is interested in the topic regardless of participation. CNS has continued to develop project-related online educational
resources. This way, a wider audience can join the project using the CNS educational materials. While meeting face to face is the
best way to communicate, utilizing online educational materials effectively is also one of the most important measures to promote
disarmament and non-proliferation education to a larger audience. CNS subject matter experts, in consultation with high school
education specialists (curriculum designers, teacher trainers and website designers) and experienced high school teachers, will
create an online programme curriculum on the project website. Each annual CIF project typically includes the following key
elements: • Online teachers workshop where CNS experts give lectures to teachers. All the lectures will be recorded. • Study
undertaken by students on non-proliferation and disarmament issues based on each year's topic in the lead-up to the spring
conference under guidelines from teachers and CNS experts. • The International Students Conference where students present their
semester-long studies. • Project evaluation and post-conference briefing. Russian high schools from closed nuclear cities
Partnerships with Russian schools from closed nuclear cities began in 2001. Participation of several high schools from the Russian
Federation's closed nuclear cities is an important aspect of the CIF programme. Since the closed nuclear cities were created to
support nuclear facilities and die families of their employees, the cities' activities and people's lives centre on nuclear facilities.
Therefore, educating those who live in these cities on non-proliferation and disarmament issues will significantly influence global
security. Japanese high schools' participation In 2013, CIF reached a significant milestone. For the first time in the history of the CIF
project, it engaged Japanese high schools from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities devastated by atomic bombs in 1945. Every
year since then, Japanese schools have participated in the project, the number of Japanese schools have increased, and the project
has expanded to include other cities in Japan as well. Hiroshima and Nagasaki student presentations were naturally based on their
own cities' first-hand experience of nuclear devastation. Students from other cities in Japan also placed emphasis on the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki experience, as Japan is the only country that has experienced wartime nuclear devastation. While each Japanese
school comprehensively studied current global proliferation challenges, their message was clear: the vital importance of
understanding the real effects of the use of nuclear weapons against human beings and their long-lasting effects on both humanity
and the environment. The Japanese schools brought fresh perspectives to the CIF project. The Japanese schools' participation
reaffirmed the importance of youth exchange between Japan and the United States in the field of disarmament and non-proliferation
education. While the close relationship between the two countries is unrivalled, disarmament and non-proliferation education
cooperation between them is surprisingly scarce. The two countries' special ties and significant roles in creating a safer and more
secure world through nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation education cannot be overstated. Recent conferences In 2015, to
commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the CIF Student's Conference
was held in Hiroshima, the first city to have ever experienced nuclear devastation. Learning the real impact of the use of nuclear
weapons directly from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the best way to understand how inhumane nuclear weapons are. The three-day
conference included two days of student presentations at Hiroshima Jogakuin, where all the participating schools demonstrated their
semester-long studies on this year's topic, "Nuclear Disarmament: Humanitarian Approach". The last day of the conference featured
speeches by then Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, Governor of Hiroshima Hidemko Yuzaki, and a keynote speech by Mr. Yoshitoshi
Nakamura, the Deputy Director General in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Disarmament, Non-Proliferation and Science Department.
The students also organized a showcase of their presentations from the previous day. In addition, a panel discussion featuring
students from each country was moderated by Professor Nobumasa Akiyama, one of Japan's foremost nuclear disarmament and
non-proliferation experts. To further enhance their understanding of the horrors that nuclear weapons cause, teachers and students
visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and heard a first-hand account of 6 August 1945 from a hibakusha, an atomic bomb
survivor. All participants agreed that their CIF experience in Hiroshima was informative, enriching and enlightening. Learning from
someone who was actually involved in nuclear weapons policy is also another great way to understand how dangerous such
weapons are and how close we have come to the use of nuclear weapons. In 2016, the CIF spring conference featured former
United States Secretary of Defense Dr. William J. Perry. Dr. Perry and his daughter, Ms. Robin Perry, joined the
conference for the entire second day's session, which featured a dialogue session between him and the students, moderated by Dr.
William Potter, CNS founding director. This direct interaction with a former top-ranking United States defence official who had been
deeply involved in United States nuclear weapons policy was an exciting and rare opportunity for participants. Under that year's
theme, "Global Nuclear Vulnerability: Lessons for a More Secure and Peaceful World", students held informative and dynamic
discussions that built upon their semester-long preparation as part of the CIF project. Students and teachers effectively inspired
each other and learned fromother school presentations. It was truly encouraging to see those young future leaders working together
to find ways to reduce nuclear dangers. Before he started his keynote address, Dr. Perry kindly applauded CNS for holding this
"unique and insightful" educational conference, saluting Dr. Potter and CNS for "pioneering" non-proliferation and disarmament
education, and for his tireless and creative efforts to promote such education. He emphasized the importance of
education to reduce nuclear dangers and highlighted that starting such education at the
high school level was an effective way to spark a lifelong engagement with the issue.
These words of wisdom by someone who was directly involved in United States nuclear-weapon
policy has significantly encouraged the continued engagement of high school students in non-
proliferation and disarmament education. The most recent CIF student conference was held in Nagasaki from 3 to 5 April 2017. The
three-day conference included two days of student presentations at Kwassui High School in Nagasaki, where all the participating
schools demonstrated their semester-long studies on this year's topic, "Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and its Role for a
World Free of Nuclear Weapons". Six high schools from across the United States and four high schools from the Russian
Federation's closed nuclear cities joined the seven Japanese high schools from different parts of the country at the conference in
Nagasaki. On 4 April, Dr. Lassina Zerbo, Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, joined
the public symposium of the CIF conference that was held in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum Hall. In addition to his inspiring
keynote address, Dr. Zerbo also joined the students' panel discussion moderated by Professor Keiko Nakamura at the Research
Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University. The CIF project also made efforts to engage the local community and
local governments in the event. Those who joined the symposium to congratulate the CIF participants included Mr. Tomihisa Taue,
Nagasaki Mayor; Mr. Hodo Nakamura, Nagasaki Governor; and Dr. Kozo Akino, a Member of the House of Councilors of the
Japan's National Diet. The main reason for holding the conference in Nagasaki was to strengthen our determination to ensure that
Nagasaki would be the last city to experience nuclear devastation. These future leaders learned many important things from the
hibakusha of Nagasaki, who had experienced the horror of nuclear weapons first-hand, and endured unspeakable ordeals. There
The global
are many obstacles to overcome to make sure that nuclear weapons will never be used again. Conclusion
nuclear situation is more dangerous than ever, as can be seen by recent world events. As
a consequence, education about disarmament and non-proliferation has become more important than
ever. The vision of a world without nuclear weapons can only be realized if future
generations continue to accelerate the momentum towards nuclear non-proliferation and
disarmament. When former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made his major disarmament education speech at the
Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in 2013, he said, "education can help the world to build a global culture of
It is easier for students to learn
peace that rejects all weapons of mass destruction as illegitimate and immoral ...
the logic of nuclear deterrence than to learn to discard the myths that keep nuclear weapons
in place ... But education can help to refute the claim that nuclear disarmament is
Utopian." This statement convincingly supports disarmament and non-proliferation education for young generations that helps
develop their critical thinking skills. Many high school students who have been involved in the CIF project have
testified that the participation in the project was a life-changing experience and that they had
become more interested in world peace and nuclear disarmament. Many of them expressed their desire to
continue to study disarmament and non-proliferation issues. For these students, regardless of the actual
career paths they will eventually select, it is clear that these future leaders will have a positive
impact on peace and security in the world. The power and promise of education to achieve this goal should be
more widely recognized by world leaders. The fifteenth anniversary of the welcoming of the United Nations Study would be the
appropriate place to start to strengthen this effort.
 FW – Strategic Planners
Military operations are accessible, but strategic planners are key. Lack of
public engagement with the details of military policy and cost-benefit
calculations cements poor strategy and causes botched interventions
which answers the “we intervene x place” turns case argument, but only
iterative dialogue about grand strategy can solve
Ricks 17 (Thomas E. “America’s military doesn’t need more money — what it needs is an
engaged public to demand a genuine strategy Money will not fix what ails our military. We don't
have a supply problem, we have a demand problem created by poor strategy.” Published
2/27/17 in Foreign Policy https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/27/americas-military-doesnt-need-
more-money-what-it-needs-is-an-engaged-public-to-demand-a-genuine-strategy/)NFleming

But as a citizen I have concerns. Money will not fix what ails our military. We don’t have a supply
problem, we have a demand problem created by poor strategy . We have a military doing
missions often beyond its purview, acting as the lead government agency in areas it is not qualified to do so,
bearing impossible expectations in the process. As military professionals, we fail if we don’t achieve
national goals (end states); the corollary to this is simple, we must demand clear and achievable goals. Our
lack of both skews defense decisions. I don’t doubt the honesty of military leaders who say maintenance is
limiting flights or our forces are stretched, but these conditions, to me, are a function of a force doing too much, not a function of
limited budgets. A glance at Department of Defense budgets over the last ten years begs the question: Where exactly are the
Stories of America’s military decline overstate their
budget cuts? Where is the huge gutting of the military?
case at best. Army, Air Force, and Navy aircraft fleets outnumber most other countries, the Coast
Guard is one of the biggest navies, and DoD spends more than the next 5-7 powers
combined. In fact, money is not the solution — it may actually be contributing to our problems. Enormous budgets
and unclear strategy allow us to ignore hard choices. Since the advent of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), America has skipped the
“guns vs. butter” argument entirely. Instead of hard choices, America used debt to outsource its wars to a small cadre of competent,
capable, but increasingly distant professionals. Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates once remarked that we spend more on
military bands than diplomacy. Too much money has allowed the military to dominate what should be whole-of-government decision
making. The trouble is, it hasn’t worked. Since the Cold War ended, in all but a few cases the employment of American force has not
succeed as planned. In fact, there is substantial evidence our policies are actually exacerbating problems of regional instability and
terrorism. Our methods have become fundamentally attritional, trading lives and spending
massive sums. Our present strategy presumes inexhaustible money and willpower. But
both our finite and the money pot is running out. Fifteen years after launching a
worldwide effort to defeat and destroy terrorist organizations, the United States finds
itself locked in a pathologically recursive loop; we fight to prevent attacks and defend our values, only to
incite further violence against ourselves and allies while destabilizing already chaotic regions. Our forces are
competent, professional, and effective. But, no matter how good our forces are, it is irrelevant for the reasons laid
out by historian Williamson Murray: “ No matter how effective the military institutions might be at the

tactical and operational levels, if the strategy and political framework [was] flawed, the
result was defeat .” The solution to our strategic malaise is not funding, equipment or technology. We need a
strategy that is sustainable and realistic— one that evaluates threats and defense needs
against a harsh assessment of resources available . It is likely that
(engagements, support to allies, etc.)
American politics and political turnover prevent formulation of a long-standing grand strategy. Nevertheless, this doe s not
alleviate leadership from laying out a vision of American power that incorporates the
interagency better; rather than putting the military in the lead on so many issues. As it stands, we rarely discuss
long-term policy or strategy. For example, at Defense Secretary James Mattis’s confirmation hearings there was little
questioning of our strategy against terror. Rather, like the recent raid in Yemen, conversations devolve into
discussions of tactics. Lately, even these discussions have been politicized, with some asserting that questioning tactics
is tantamount to admitting defeat. This is nonsense. As Peter Lucier recently wrote in this blog, “Failing to question whether they
died for a good reason doesn’t do a disservice to those who died. Failure to examine their deaths is what truly does disservice to the
lives of heroes.” War is always difficult for democracies but the national consensus building seen in previously eras is largely
ignored because the public bears little of the direct cost. Even the massive debt accumulated by fighting is only abstract. In this
sense the AVF short-circuited America’s social contract. It freed national leadership from the grounding reality of public involvement.
Today almost all Americans will say they “support the troops” and most will support
increased defense budgets. But few senior officials or national leaders — certainly not
the public at large — will even ask what, exactly, are we doing in Yemen ? Moreover, is our policy
of targeted killing working? Since we don’t ask even the basic questions, we doom ourselves to continue policies that may not work.
We need clear understanding that using force is a means, not an end; it is certainly not a strategy .
Our military has taken
the lead in foreign policy, resulting in militarized solutions to complex political problems.
Only with a proper, realistic strategy can we align national means with strategic ends in
order to cease using our military as the national Band-Aid to problems better addressed
throughout the interagency. Anything less is a disservice to the public and its military.
 FW – Deference
Only debating the details of militarism can counter overwhelming public
deference to the military – turns all the links
Krebs et. al. 18 (Ronald R, Beverly and Richard Fink professor in the liberal arts and a
professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and an adjunct scholar at the
Modern War Institute at West Point. Robert Ralston, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of
Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Aaron Rapport, lecturer in the Department of
Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. “Americans’ Blind Faith in the
Military is Dangerous” published 12/3/18 in Foreign Policy
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/03/americans-blind-faith-in-the-military-is-dangerous-civilian-
oversight-deference-mcraven-trump/)NFleming
In a Nov. 18 interview with Fox News, U.S. President Donald Trump rekindled his periodic feud with retired Adm. William McRaven,
who designed the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 and who has been a prominent Trump critic. But this time,
Trump went further than just accusing his longtime nemesis of partisanship—“a Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer.”
Trump now seemed determined to undermine the highly decorated Navy SEAL’s professionalism by questioning his signature
accomplishment: “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?” he said. The renewed row is just
another sign that Trump’s love affair with “the generals” may be coming to an end. In mid-
October, in a 60 Minutes interview, he signaled that the secretary of defense, retired Gen. James Mattis, may
be on his way out. Rumors continue to swirl of the imminent departure of White House
chief of staff John Kelly, another retired general. But no one should be distracted by Trump’s ups and downs with the
military’s top brass. This administration’s militarism runs much deeper and is far more
dangerous. It has launched an assault on democratic norms of civil-military relations . One
could be forgiven for not having noticed. While some scholars, civilian defense officials, and military officers have wrung their hands
and gnashed their teeth,the general reaction has been deafening silence. At one level, this is
hardly surprising: The public is typically oblivious of the details of governance . But our
research has discovered that, even if the public were aware, they would not share the anxieties of
these elites, because deference to the military is widespread among all American s. The
classic model of civil-military relations insists that civilians define the nation’s interests
and goals, set the strategy, and decide when force will be used. Ultimately, it is civilians who
have the right to be wrong. In exchange, civilians leave to military officers the matters over which they have expertise:
fine-grained operational and tactical decisions. This division of labor has been regarded as the ideal since Samuel Huntington wrote
The Soldier and the State over six decades ago, and it has been drummed into generations of military officers ever since. When
there is criticism of the traditional model, it calls not for less intervention by civilian
officials but for more . Eliot Cohen—one of the nation’s most distinguished scholars of civil-military relations and, as a
former George W. Bush administration official, no lefty—has made the case for civilian control even at the tactical level. The
Trump administration has not just loosened Obama administration fetters on military force; it has refashioned
civil-military relations and undermined civilian oversight. Last year, Trump empowered Mattis
to set troop levels in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and he gave commanders in war zones more freedom to launch
raids and airstrikes without prior authorization. His then-chief strategist Steve Bannon justified these moves as
“let[ting] the warfighters fight the war,” but critics warned that doing so could divorce the
military’s battlefield operations from civilian-determined strategy. This past summer, Trump freed
the military to launch cyberattacks without higher-level approval or interagency discussions. The Trump administration’s willingness
to dilute its own authority is puzzling—especially for a White House that has generally sought to vastly expand its authority relative
We have long
to other power centers in the government. One explanation lies in its populist instincts and inclinations.
known that Americans hold very favorable views of the military and trust it more than
they do other institutions. Past surveys have not established whether, and to what
extent, Americans also believe that civilian leaders should defer to the judgment of their
counterparts in uniform. Our research shows that deference to the military is so common
among Americans as to be virtually a consensus position. Between September 12 and
21, nearly 2,500 Americans completed a survey we disseminated via the Lucid platform.
This sample was largely representative of the nation with respect to gender, age,
education, race, income, Hispanic origin, state, and region. We asked two related questions. The first
sought to gauge respondents’ deference on strategic matters by asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with the following
statement: “When considering the use of military force abroad, we should first and foremost trust the judgment of U.S. military
leaders regarding whether to deploy U.S. forces.” The second emphasized more tactical decisions: “When considering the use of
military force abroad, we should first and foremost trust the judgment of U.S. military leaders regarding how to use U.S. forces on
the battlefield.” As we expected, respondents were more likely to disagree with the first statement than the second. But we were
surprised by how small these differences were and by how high the overall rates of agreement were with both questions. We found
that nearly 70 percent of Americans agreed to some extent that the country should defer
to the military on whether to use force (strategy), and just 17 percent disagreed to some
extent (the rest were in the middle). Around 75 percent agreed to some extent that the country
should defer to the military on how to use force (tactics), and just 11 percent disagreed to some extent. Overall,
respondents who were deferential on questions of tactics were very likely to be deferential on questions of strategy: Respondents’
views were in agreement 71 percent of the time. These
sky-high levels of deference suggest why the
Trump administration’s military moves have met with little public outcry and why their
critics have been greeted with silence. If the public knew about the administration’s
approach, it would probably think the administration was righting a wrong. Trump’s position
seems designed to resonate with his base. According to our statistical analysis, with respect to both strategy and tactics,
conservatives were more deferential to the military than liberals, older respondents were
more deferential than younger ones, hawks were more deferential than doves, and men
were more deferential than women. Wealthier respondents were also more deferential, as were veterans of the
U.S. armed forces. In short, the respondents most likely to endorse deference to the military shared traits in common with the most
likely Trump voter: male, more conservative, more Republican, older, not poor, military veteran. Support for deference to the military
was strikingly broad across all demographic and ideological groups. While 71 percent of self-identified Republicans (and
Republican-leaning independents) endorsed strategic deference, so did 64 percent of self-identified Democrats (and Democratic-
leaning independents). Merely 15 percent of Republicans rejected strategic deference, and only
18 percent of Democrats did. Some 70 percent of men endorsed strategic deference, but so did 65 percent of women.
Around 75 percent of respondents over 60 supported strategic deference, but so did 60 percent of those under 30. Americans
today have never been more divided over politics , but they are united in their deference
to the military . Our research presents just a snapshot, and we cannot say much about trends over time, as past surveys
have regularly asked only general questions about the topic. But it is possible that civilian deference is higher than
ever . Trump supporters may favor deference to the military because they are supremely loyal to this president and because he
has often suggested that he loves men in uniform. Trump opponents may favor deference to the military because they distrust this
president’s judgment and hope an empowered military—a “benign junta”—might curb his pugnaciousness and impetuosity. Trump’s
verbal assault on McRaven met with widespread pushback, especially after the Republican National Committee echoed the
president in criticizing the admiral. True, some noted that Trump seemed confused about McRaven’s role, as it was not his job to
locate bin Laden. But the far more common publicly expressed reaction was deep offense. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted
that, regardless of McRaven’s views, “I do know that few Americans have sacrificed or risked more than he has to protect America &
the freedoms we enjoy. His military career exemplified honor & excellence. I am grateful for his service.” Texas Land Commissioner
George P. Bush, a nephew of former President George W. Bush, also jumped to McRaven’s defense, calling him “an American
hero.” The president’s attack on McRaven was troubling, but so too was the reflexive genuflection to the military among Trump’s
critics. Their response was hardly unusual. Locating themselves on the safe ground of what historian Andrew Bacevich has called
“the new American militarism,” they were simply enacting a time-honored American public ritual. Politicians in particular, and
Americans in general, routinely honor soldiers for their sacrifice and heroism, hail them for their patriotism, and express gratitude for
their service. They often imply that military veterans, especially top officers, are more virtuous than other Americans. The U.S.
public consensus on civilian deference to the military grows out of that same militaristic soil.
This consensus is dangerous. It allows presidents who surround themselves with
generals to tap into public admiration for the military and bask in the military’s reflected
glory. At the same time, it weakens civilian officials’ claim, under the normal model of civil-
military relations, that they have the right to be wrong and undermines civilian control
over defense policy. Even more worrisome, the top brass may come to believe these militarist
myths: Persuaded of their own superiority, and confident of the public’s trust, they may
come to prefer their own judgment to that of elected officials . That may seem appealing now, given
the current president’s impulsive nature, but it is a treacherously slippery slope . The public consensus on civilian
deference to the military is, finally, deeply un-American. The nation’s Founding Fathers feared overweening state power in general
and military authority in particular. They did not have much faith, however, that the masses would resist the lure of militarism. They
seem to have been right.
 FW – Movements
debates about movement building can be generative, but only if they
accommodate nuanced clash and a wide variety of both reformist and
extra-legal methods of activism – their rejection of dissent is a DA to the alt
because it forecloses the engagement necessary for successful politics

Jeffers et al 16 (Natalie, founder/director of Matters of the Earth, a global social justice

organisation that places creative, innovative tools into hands to educate and empower people in
organising, strengthening and building movements. Matt Meyer, coordinator of the War
Resisters’ International Africa Support Network, representative of the International Peace
Research Association at the UN. David Ragland is a co- founder/co-director of the Truth Telling
Project based in Ferguson, MO, and assistant professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at
Juniata College. He is also a Board member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association
“Refusing to Choose Between Martin and Malcolm: Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and a New
Nonviolent Revolution” (http://www.greanvillepost.com/2016/01/19/refusing-to-choose-between-
martin-and-malcolm-ferguson-black-lives-matter-and-a-new-nonviolent-revolution/)NFleming
In 2016, we must do more than simply acknowledge that we need not choose between Martin and Malcolm. To be effective, we
must actively engage in the texts of Baldwin and Fanon; Dellinger and Braden; Lee-Boggs, Butler and Lorde; as well as hooks and
Abu-Jamal and West. We must learn from a diasporic history of resistance and rebellion, from Haiti, Trinidad and Jamaica; Ghana,
Guinea Bissau and Mozambique; Chile, Costa Rica, and Brazil; India, East Timor, and Vietnam, and – yes – the streets of San Juan
and Brixton. We must interweave, interconnect and intersect nuanced arguments,
achievements and concerns, and be willing to critique and challenge one another as we
reimagine society and explore our universe for new suns. There is much debate about what makes for
effective and transformative movement-building – on local, national, or transnational
scales. This much at least, from the last half-century of history, seems clear: a merger of ideological and
technical thinking will be needed, along with full access to and (re)distribution of all
natural, material, and human resources. A revolutionary nonviolent praxis will require: *A
combination of reform and more radical measures, leading up to fully transformative and lasting change;
*A multiplicity of intersectional strategy and tactics that expand what we consider as nonviolence; *A
disciplined understanding and preparation for the fact that casualties and bloodshed occur in all revolutions, and that militarism on
the part of revolutionaries is always a costly error; * Massive training for mass organising between social,
economic, political and environmental movements, by imaginative, creative, resistance-oriented means;
*Concrete, grassroots constructive programs, that seek to build new societies and
alternative institutions, and that invest in Black communities and the communities of other
historically oppressed peoples and nations; *Explicit programs to eradicate white supremacy and hetero-
normative patriarchy, with the goal of liberation for all people; This is not to say that the U.S. today, despite the ebullient mood on
some campuses, is – to use a favorite phrase of Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichel) – “ready for revolution.” It IS to say that
radicalstoday, across different struggles and movements, might do well to step carefully
around the dividing lines of past decades. We must find intersections and opportunities
that exist in these new spaces, building unity where our elders could not. As the U.S. empire
shows growing signs of decline, lashing out and closing ranks at anything beyond the 1% ruling elite, opportunities for radical
Let us not allow our
change – as well as for vicious backlash and repression – will emerge with growing frequency.
people’s movements to be divided, co-opted, or conquered – especially not along historic fault lines so
clearly set up to divide and conquer us. Liberation educator Paulo Freire noted that “violence is the tool of the master,” and feminist
poet Audre Lorde reminded us that “You cannot dismantle the Master’s House with the Master’s Tools” So, let us reimagine new
ways to build a society where Black people can live freely and dream, and let’s find, as Barbara Deming implored, “equilibrium” in
our revolutionary process. Constantly the hegemonic status quo re-equips to co-opt, capture, and destroy our dissent. Today’s
movements must not seek to be “brought into the fold.” The fold can only hold a few, and we no longer want the morphine of
acceptance. Let
us speak Truth to Empire, like the people of Ferguson and like U.S. political
prisoners have been trying to do. It is time to refuse to fight our grandfather’s battles, and
refuse to be limited by unnecessary past choices and false dichotomies. It is time to build power,
unite, and win!
 FW – Global Solutions Key

localized revolutions fail because they are too focused on particular issues
– globalized solutions involving the state are necessary for political change

Jonathan Pugh ’9 is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Applied Moral Philosophy at The

University of Oxford, 2009, “What is Radical Politics Today?” pages 1-13 || OES-AT
A crisis makes you rethink your life. The recent economic crisis is no exception. All of us are now thinking how our lives could be run differently. This recession seems to be
giving more cause for reflection than most – not only about how the economy is managed, but also about the environment and society more generally. Neo-liberalism has

Many feel that its Right-wing ethos of deregulation, privatisation

governed our lives for nearly thirty years.

and liberation of corporate power has not only failed the world’s financial systems, but
more fundamentally degraded the environment and the social fabric of life. Despite all the expert
predictions, history did not in fact end in 1989 with the triumph of neo-liberalism. While there is much to despair at in our current situation, there is also an underlying sense of

mobilisation
anticipation – change is coming. Specific events are certainly contributing to this mood: not only the collapse of the global financial systems, but the

of people in protests on ever larger scales, the symbolic and historic election of Barack Obama, the end of the George W. Bush
presidency, changing international relations with the Middle East and Asia, the rising power of China and some countries in Latin America, to name just a few. Before we get too

excited though, the ‘revolution’ is not coming anytime soon . No grand alternative ideology or
movement of the masses is waiting in the wings, ready to seize the opportunity. This leads to the
obvious question of this book: What is radical politics today? What is the spirit and nature of radical politics in our times? For this particular book, what is Left-

wing and progressive radical politics? Where they once offered the grand ideology of socialism, what do they offer now? This book is a
broad survey, a step into the character of radical politics today Let’s start this survey with a general definition: What constitutes a ‘radical politics’? The term was

originally coined to describe a politics which gets to the roots of a problem. The Latin noun ‘radix’
means ‘root’. But radical politics not only gets to the roots of a problem. If it is effective, it also turns over, or ‘roots out’, and redefines how society functions. This of course does
not have to mean revolution, in the sense of a communist or Islamic state revolution for example. It does not mean that radical politics is confined to particular causes or issues.
To take just a few examples, in our definition of ‘radical politics’ we could include the radical impact of feminism, modernism, Islam, mass education and health care, Christianity,
neo-conservatism, the Chinese model, feudalism, Right- or Left-wing radicals. All have caused radical changes in society. We look to radical politics to provide an alternative
view of the world, when that world is in trouble. Indeed, if we remember, neo-liberal capitalism was once a radical alternative to the problems of nearly forty years ago. The
1970s were defined by inflation, increased accumulation of capital, unemployment and a variety of fiscal crises. Neo-liberalism beat the other main radical contender at the time,
socialism, in apparently getting to the root of the problem, overturning it, and redefining how society functions. Neo-liberal capitalism was developed by leaders like Ronald
Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and a network of powerful international institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Often called the ‘American Model’,
low wages and high inequality are not central concerns for this system, whose primary function is the liberation of corporate power. Neo-liberalism and free market forces
became the organising framework for society; from the deregulation of finance, to privatisation of health care and educational systems. By the mid-1980s it was no longer
radical, but the accepted norm. I believe that the end of this decade will be singled out by historians as a defining moment in radical politics. We will talk of ‘post-2009’ in times to
come, but not because there has been a ‘grand radical moment’. This moment is significant precisely because people will look back and ask: what was radical politics then?
Given the lack of a clear alternative to neo-liberalism when the financial crisis and recession hit, historians will pay great attention to the spirit, disposition and temperament of
radical politics in our times. They will consider such prominent examples as today’s anti-globalisation movements, anti-capitalists and environmentalists. Historians will explore
the character of radical neoconservatism, the Chinese model and radical Islam. They will examine the spirit of the anti-war protests, peace and justice organisations. They will
interrogate the radical impact of multiculturalism, identity politics and non-governmental development agencies, as the fortunes of these ways of doing politics rise and fall. But
we should not wait for historians. We should begin this survey now. In the crucial years of a crisis which has affected the lives of so many people, it is important to understand
the nature of radical politics, today. The first major challenge we encounter in our survey has already been implied. There are apparently many ways of being radical today.
Some argue that this is the weakness of contemporary radical politics. It has split into too many different factions, or is dominated by people who are disconnected from the rest
of society. Here the examples of creative artists, suicide bombers, anti-capitalists, tree-huggers and anarchists, incapable of mobilising under a single banner, are often used as
illustrations. But so are the small group of out-of-touch elites who ran Bush’s radical neo-conservative agenda, or the dictators of the Chinese or Islamic state projects. In short,
many think radical politics today does not have support from broad sections of society. Others say that this fragmentation is the strength of radical politics. It provides an
opportunity for different groups to challenge the status quo – those environmentalists, feminists, peace movements, for example, which are slowly chipping away at specific
injustices. Moreover, many also argue that grand visions of society – like socialism, neoliberalism or the Islamic state – oppress those who don’t believe in them, as much as
they support those who do. A grand alternative is therefore not the answer at this time of crisis. In today’s diverse cultures, many believe it is better to deal with injustices as they
arise in particular situations, rather than produce a single radical solution for all. These people believe radical politics should be creative, taking many different forms, as
‘women’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Christians’, ‘the poor’, respond to the different circumstances which they face. They argue that it is neither possible nor desirable to produce a one-size-fits-
all vision for society. However, others think that today’s radicals do not work hard enough at reaching out to different parts of society, at bridging the gaps; that they are not
seriously committed to their radical causes. The modern protest – such as Live8 and Make Poverty History – is often seen as illustrating this. At these protests people meet up
with their friends for the day, listen to Bob Geldof or Bono talk about poverty, and express their personal outrage at the world. But when it comes to actually working collectively
for instrumental change and rolling up their sleeves, these protesters are much less interested. They are more worried about being seen at the right protest, wearing the right
coloured bracelet. The supporters of these media events instead say that while this may be true to a certain extent, something needs to be done. They draw our attention to the
effectiveness of modern protests in other areas; for example, their creativity in drawing our leaders’ attention to important issues, like mass starvation in a globalised world. In a
24/7 media-driven society, it is necessary to put on ever more elaborate events, in order to grab our attention, money and time for radical causes. From just these brief

examples, it should be clear that there are many ways of thinking about radical politics today . Its spirit is broad and
diverse. Written for students and the general public, this book is not concerned with complex theoretical debate. Rather, it presents conflicting and contradictory, often
provocative characterisations of radical politics today. It includes original works from leading commentators (mainly from the Left and progressive politics residing in the USA
and England). These gradually build up a broad picture of radical politics today. The book is structured by the following four themes: 1. The place of grand visions in
contemporary radical politics; 2. New forms of radical politics; 3. Radicals’ response to diversity and difference in society; and 4. What today’s radicals think about the state.

The importance of an overarching ‘big idea’ or ‘grand vision’ of how society should
function varies between individuals and to a large extent depends on their political
allegiances. Unlike neo-conservatism and Right-wing Islam for example, Left-wing and progressive radical politics
today do not, in general, offer grand visions for change. Instead, their new forms of radical
politics tend to focus upon particular issues , contexts and events – including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
environment, or the injustices of sweat shops and animal experimentation. There is also an emphasis upon specific identities , such as
expressing the concerns of interest groups like ‘Muslims’, ‘women’ or ‘the disabled’. There is no obvious alternative overarching plan for society, coming from the Left and
progressives. This also illustrates how contemporary radical politics is dominated by the themes of diversity and difference, in what is perceived to be an increasingly complex
world. Societies are often fragmented; communities and individuals disconnected from each other. Many radicals therefore see it as their role to articulate the claims of people
that are not being heard. In turn, the role of the state is increasingly to mediate between these different, often competing interest groups. Against this backdrop, to some radicals
the state is the problem, to others the solution; to some it is irrelevant, and to others it is indispensable in creating the radical changes that society needs today. 1. Grand visions
In his contribution Zygmunt Bauman argues that radical politics today is often not that radical. He ascribes this to our addiction to debt and industrial growth. Most solutions to
the present crisis, which have come from both government and society, will push us further into debt, since they generally rely on returning us to the status quo and
guaranteeing the availability of limitless credit. Yet radicals on the Left have not developed a grand counter-vision to this. For Bauman, we specifically need to develop radical
international organisations which impose limits on consumption, raising the revenue needed to deal with the environmental crisis and social exclusion at a global level. A truly
radical politics – which curtails exploitative attitudes – is lacking. In direct contrast, Frank Furedi argues that the rise of environmentalism and the precautionary principle are
obvious examples of where radical politics has gone wrong. For Furedi, such risk-averse ideals form the basis of a reactionary approach, pervasively holding back radical
politics today. Instead we should confront the limitations on development, tackling those who put the economic and environmental crisis down to human selfishness and greed.
For Furedi the issue is not whether radical politics comes from the Right or Left; both have become risk averse, neither is therefore radical. Paul Kingsnorth agrees that politics
today lacks a radical edge precisely because it is locked into Left/Right history, but for very different reasons to Furedi. For Kingsnorth, both Left and Right are against ‘Deep
Green’ ideology – whose grand vision puts nature resolutely above human progress, uplifting it to a spiritual level. This form of radical politics, dominant in radical debate in the
1960s, has more recently been sidelined. While in agreement with Kingsnorth, James Heartfield reaches the opposite conclusion. He says that in putting nature first, although
limited in number, deep green campaigners manage to oppress the working masses. They directly attack workers whose jobs rely upon environmental destruction (coal miners,
for example). For Heartfield, this shows how radical politics today is dominated by environmental elites who show disdain for ordinary people. Heartfield, like a number of
contributors, argues that radical politics today betrays ‘the workers’, because it is disconnected from the public. It is therefore interesting to note that while Right-wing
neoconservatism was the most powerful form of radical politics in recent memory, Terrell Carver comments that it never had broad-based support from the public. Rather, with a
lack of a credible alternative from the Left, elite neo-cons in Washington manipulated systems of government with devastating consequences. So in her contribution Clare Short
does not celebrate the transformative powers of non-governmental organisations, such as the green parties, development, environmental, anti-war and peace activists. For
nowhere have they managed to break through, achieving significant change or political progress. This means that the Right, in the form of neo-conservatism and increasingly
Right-wing versions of Islam, has simply stepped into the vacuum. Indeed, Short believes that the radical Right will strengthen in coming years, reinventing itself, as people look
for a compass to orientate them out of this crisis. Edward Soja, however, says that in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, radical politics does not ‘revolve around absolute
or categorical choice, such as that between capitalism and socialism. More than ever before, this is not a simple either/or choice.’ He argues that ‘Whatever happens in the
aftermath of these epochal events, radical politics today is shifting its focus, moving away from an all-embracing anti-neoliberalism towards a renewed hope that radical change
is possible.’ In his contribution, which goes against the grain of authors like Furedi and Heartfield, Soja does not look to grand visions, but instead to the emergence of diverse
ways of resisting spatial inequalities across the world, as radical politics today takes on many new forms. 2. New forms of radical politics David Chandler, in contrast, argues that

many new forms of radical politics are dominated by personal and isolated protests . While
this makes protesters feel better about themselves, it do es n ot meet the demands of real political change . He says the
2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests, the Make Poverty History campaign at the end of 2005, the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-

There is no attempt to build a social or collective

Qaeda, are all illustrative of highly individualised protests.

movement. And so, theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing become ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of awareness, rather than
attempts to engage politically with society. Contradictory judgements are a theme of this book. In her contribution Hilary Wainwright is more supportive of new forms of radical
politics today. She says that they reflect a move away from a hierarchical view, with knowledge being the exclusive privilege of a few (the leaders of a party, for example), to an
understanding of diverse and plural sources of knowledge and resistance. From the 1968 student movements and the 1970s women’s movement, to the World Social Forum
and antiwar campaigns, the emphasis is upon developing inter-communication, through complex networks of resistance. In examining performative artworks, Dora Apel
discusses the type of protests which contributors like Chandler would surely criticise. But Apel says that while ‘protest actions, performative artworks and images by themselves
arguably have limited ability to effect direct political change, their power should not be underestimated’. For example, such acts held the American government to account for
their actions in Abu Ghraib. Michael Watts is therefore drawn to the following question. Can radical politics, often geographically dispersed and fragmented as it is today, amount
to a significant challenge to the status quo? While the answer is not clear, Watts argues that resistance to neo-liberalism – if we are to chart the larger landscape – is
heterogeneous and worldwide. The recent revolts in France, the factory occupations in Argentina, the oil nationalisation in Bolivia, and the insurgencies in Iraq are all
symptomatic, even if the national and local dynamics differ greatly. For Watts, we should not be gloomy; he sees regular opportunities as neo-liberalism constantly fails. Jason
Toynbee, however, is more sanguine about new forms of radical politics. Reflecting upon crisis and political transformation at this watershed moment, Toynbee says that:
‘There’s no guarantee, or even likelihood, that recession and the more intense poverty it brings will lead to a resurgence of working-class consciousness and resistance. As the
1980s showed all too well, recessions can weaken resistance by making solidarity more difficult to build.’ Toynbee’s chapter shows how, as Part II unfolds, this interrogation of
the spirit of social engagement and commitment in radical politics is intensifying today. The following three chapters highlight a range of concerns in this regard. James Martin
acknowledges that the test of today’s radical commitment is not that of the last century: namely, demonstrating allegiance to a party or social group. Yet without a programme
and organisation to bring the different groups together, many radicals are failing. The proliferation and pluralisation of new forms of radical politics – from internet blogging to
diverse ways of protesting – has meant that commitment ‘flattens out’. The challenge for radicals is to find new but serious radical commitment, leading to meaningful political
change. In their contribution Jeremy Gilbert and Jo Littler take the example of the Green New Deal, produced by the New Economics Foundation. This shows how some radicals
are practically trying to address the real worry over fragmentation and gesture politics. The Green New Deal aims to move against the anarchic withdrawal that characterises
and alienates so much of radical politics today. It instead seeks to engage with a wide range of people, from civil society, through to the state, via a broad range of strategies, in
order to address the environmental and economic crisis simultaneously. The general thrust of Doreen Massey’s chapter, which closes Part II, is that the crisis presents an

She points out that neo-liberalism only became the

opportunity for disparate forms of radical politics to come together.

norm because so many people worked hard collectively, through a broad range of
strategies, to make it so. It will therefore take collective effort to turn over and uproot.
Massey, like Gilbert and Littler, talks about the Green New Deal. In doing so she highlights how concern with more than ‘one off’ stunts is becoming increasingly important for
those interrogating the spirit of radical politics in our times; particularly post-crisis. The nature of collective action is being seriously examined. The first and second parts of the
book highlight that today’s radicals are sometimes criticised for not being committed enough; for being reactionary, or disengaged from the general public. While several
commentators lament the death of grand visions, others count this as a blessing. Some believe that radical politics is most effective when experimental and creative, and is
better able to deal with the particularity of injustice. Others say that the possibilities for universal transformation are reduced post-crisis, as radical politics focuses too much
upon the micro level. Others still are beginning to discuss how the present crisis may be a turning point: an opportunity for collective action to be reinvigorated through invention
and hard work, and renewed social engagement around newly constituted publics. From this departure, the third section explores how contemporary radical politics deals with
diversity and difference within society. 3. Diversity and difference This is a prevailing theme for many authors, as in radical politics today widespread attention is given to
multiculturalism, identity politics and more recently violence and Islam. As in the previous parts of this book, many contributors are poles apart in their perspectives. Most agree
that as the second millennium ended identity politics gained influence in radical politics, replacing other grand visions. Gregor McLennan is concerned that this has brought
radical politics to a crucial juncture. Too much, and for too long, has the ‘politics of difference’ dominated. For it is not possible to run organisations – like schools or hospitals –
through pressure-group politics alone. So McLennan reflects a mood of restlessness around endless pluralism; calling for a turn towards a majoritarian, broadly secularist radical
politics, uplifting people’s capacities. However, Tariq Modood goes against this emerging grain within radical politics, arguing for multiculturalism as a radical politics.
Multiculturalism, despite what others say, has a radical content. Modood asks us to think about the many Muslims adopting multicultural, rather than the violent, less democratic,
approaches in recent years. For Modood, a successful multicultural ethos shows how Muslims can be radical, engaging peacefully in passionate debates, while living in diverse
societies. However, Nick Cohen argues that there is a different side to multiculturalism. He says: ‘postmodern multiculturalists have taken the liberal idea of tolerance and
pushed it into an extreme relativism which holds that it is wrong for liberals to attack previously disadvantaged groups – “the other” – even when “the other” espoused ideas
which were antiliberal. In short, it has become racist to oppose sexists, homophobes and fascists from other cultures.’ Cohen argues that many Left-wing, liberalminded people
don’t oppose certain abhorrent aspects of radical Islam. Radical politics today is worse off as a result. Coming from a different perspective, Amir Saeed and David Bates point
out the similarities between Muslim beliefs and the traditional Left. They have more in common than what divides them. In turning to multiculturalism, they say, ‘Right-wing
commentators fear the concept of multiculturalism because it implies an erosion of core, national values in favour of diverse cultures. Whilst more liberal commentators appear
to suggest that the concept actually creates divisions in society by emphasising difference rather than stress the common ground.’ The challenge is to bring together like-minded
Muslims and non-Muslims, offering an alternative to free market capitalism. Alastair Bonnett takes yet another tack on this issue of multiculturalism. He writes that
multiculturalists draw upon the myth of a departed universal fellowship, in order to critique the lack of coherence in society. Indeed, Bonnett points out that all radical politics is
generally nostalgic for lost utopias and universal aspirations that provide it with direction. This opens up a new concern for our survey and interrogation of radical politics today –
what is radical politics becoming nostalgic for post-crisis? In his contribution Ken Worpole gives one answer. Like many others in this book he says radical politics needs to
return to a belief in universal needs and conditions. This is illustrated by the example of modern childhood and education. Reminding us that poverty and lack of opportunity still
blight the lives of millions, Worpole demonstrates how difficult it has become to create collective, progressive visions for change through educational systems. Yet he also points
to how few radicals in recent years have been concerned with such universal aspirations. Illustrating this point Sheila Jasanoff questions those who claim that education,
science and technological innovation are universally to the benefit of all. Drawing upon examples such as Harvard University, she argues that the new knowledge economies
and technological innovations are locked into dominant imaginations, which drive us in particular directions, heedless of history, culture or social context. Jasanoff writes that
there are two ways to respond – one modest, the other radical. The modest approach maintains the dominant narrative of progress; that of the North of the globe. The radical
approach politicises innovation, where political alliances are built by disparately concerned people, challenging those who claim that technological innovations are ‘universally’
good for all. Nigel Thrift also explores the tensions between universality, the university and radical politics. Weighing up the pros and cons of universities, he argues that they
need to be defended because of their radical potential to drive society collectively forward for the better, particularly at a time of stagnation and despair. However, Thrift wonders
whether many so-called combative radicals from the Left fully realise this point. For to say that universities are vital civilisational forces, without which we would all be worse off,
can sound fey and oppressive to the full-blooded Left-wing radical. Thrift, however, believes that this reveals a lot about the nature of such radicals today. It demonstrates a
narrow focus upon critique, and a suspicion of authority and expertise. As Will Hutton points out, radical politics on the Left needs a strong, unifying utopian vision. It also needs

. It is also
to be more supportive of the state and institutional structures. When the economic crisis hit, most people turned to the state, not the market, to step in

important for radical politics on the Left to develop strong, overarching narratives, as a
response to the rise in ugly Right-wing nationalisms, and the failures of the centre
ground in mainstream Western politics. Hutton argues that such countervisions are necessary to mobilise people’s imaginations and
desires; to seize the present opportunity for progressive change. But they can only be achieved through the development of strong institutional structures. 4. The role of the
state Further conflicting perspectives are brought out in the last part of the book. Turning to the theme of anarchism, Saul Newman acknowledges that radicals have tended to
look upon it less favourably in the last few years. Nonetheless, he encourages the reader to take a closer look at its successes. Newman says withdrawal from collective
representation, the state and institutions is strictly the only proper radical act. He calls for celebration of such experiments today, saying: ‘this is not an escape from politics –
precisely the opposite: it is an active withdrawal that fundamentally calls into question the symbolic authority of the state’. Chantal Mouffe disagrees in her contribution. Mouffe
distinguishes between two approaches dominating contemporary radical politics: the first as ‘critique as withdrawal’ from the state; the second as ‘critique as engagement’ with

it. She is unequivocal:withdrawal leaves a vacuum, which is frequently filled by the Right . Despite this, a
significant number of contemporary radical theorists still believe withdrawal is more valuable. Turning against this tide, she supports those who extend a

‘war of position’ deep into unjust state practices, building coalitions across a range of
geographical sites, not an exodus. Mouffe thereby illustrates how some leading postmodern and radical thinkers today are looking more
favourably upon the state as an agent of positive change. David Featherstone specifically targets Chantal Mouffe for criticism however, saying she sees: ‘the national as the key
site where political antagonisms are to be constructed and negotiated primarily through parliamentary politics’. Featherstone believes this makes it tricky to recognise and
engage with key contemporary movements bringing neo-liberalism into contestation; namely, the transnational counterglobalisation movements. In contrast to Featherstone,

without the powerful

Alejandro Colás and Jason Edwards explicitly agree with Mouffe’s sentiments about the nation state. These contributors write that ‘

resources of the modern state – its capacity to collect and reinvest revenue; to regulate
the economy and redistribute wealth; to provide for or coordinate the delivery of the
necessary infrastructure in securing basic human needs – struggles for radical
democracy can get stuck in the debilitating treadmill of constant protest, perpetual
mobilisation and ubiquitous antagonism.’ Mouffe, Colás and Edwards alike criticise those who seek to operate too much outside the
state. However, David Boyle points out that many people are concerned with the way in which the state has over-centralised many services, prescribing ever more regulations
and statistics to discipline ordinary life. Boyle’s chapter reveals a wider desire for authentic social interaction, connection and engagement within radical politics today. This
seeks to act against what many radicals see as the overbearing control and power of the state. In contrast, in the last chapter of the book Saskia Sassen explores how

state power can be used for progressive means, particularly in the sphere of international human rights. She says the recent crisis
demonstrates that the state is increasingly the main agent for global change (notably in the USA). With the growing power of state intervention, radicals have

once again been re-thinking their stance towards government. Sassen asks of the USA: ‘could the emergent
internationalism of the executive branch, now used to further the global corporate economy, be used for addressing some of our pressing global challenges?’ Such provocative
statements, contentious within this book of conflicting opinions, demonstrate the diverse but open possibilities within radical politics today. 5. Initial reflections We are at a
watershed moment for radical politics. Despite a global crisis, there is no obvious alternative to neo-liberalism for people to mobilise around. Given that the dominant institutions
of politics have visibly failed us all, radical politics is being forced into the spotlight. For after the spectacular collapse of neo-liberalism, everyone is reflecting upon the radical
alternatives. The question – what is radical politics today? – is no longer of peripheral concern to the population at large. This is a sobering time. As an important aside for
students, we should remember that in the 1980s and 1990s large amounts of money were injected into Rightwing think tanks and educational institutions (particularly in the
USA). Whereas the Left was uncertain about its educational agenda, the Right certainly was not. This meant that educational institutions focused upon the (now discredited)
theories underlying neo-liberalism. Neo-liberal ideology filtered through the educational system, which became a point of indoctrination. Given that neo-liberalism is now
discredited, millions of people educated in the 1980s and 1990s, in turn, naturally have a sense of alienation from both education and politics. Because when the economic crisis
came, these were not places where seriously discussed alternatives to neo-liberalism could be found. This book therefore seeks to reinvigorate the importance of a critical
survey into the spirit of radical politics in our times. As will now be seen, there is a wide range of perspectives to reflect upon.
 FW – State Info k Break-Down State

learning about the particulars of the state is necessary to destroy unjust

parts of the system

Levi R. Bryant ‘12, author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental

Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, The Democracy of Objects, Onto-Cartogrpahy: An
Ontology of Machines and Media, and co-editor of The Speculative Turn with Nick Srnicek and
Graham Harman. He is author of a number of articles on Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, Lacan, and
political theory, ecology, and aesthetic theory, September 15th, 2012, “War Machines and
Military Logistics: Some Cards on the Table” from
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-machines-and-military-logistics-some-
cards-on-the-table/, accessed 7/21/19 || OES-AT
The following post arises out of discussions I’ve been having with Alexander Galloway and Sara Ahmed on the relationship between
ontology and politics on facebook. I confess that I’m thoroughly baffled by the question of what politics
an ontology should entail. I readily recognize that an ontology can be pervaded by illicit
ontological assumptions and that these should critiqued, but still maintain that as a regulative ideal,
our claims about what is and what is not should not be based on our political and ethical
preferences. Indeed, I think that in the past when we’ve attempted to ontologize our political
commitments this has led to horror. For example, this seems to be part of what took place in the Soviet Union. It
seems that they believed that being ineluctably, eschatologically, entailed a certain social condition and therefore felt that any
no inquiry and discourse is
treatment of others was justified on these ground. I also readily recognize that
motivated by some interest or purpose– why else would we do it –and that therefore our
ethical, eudaimonistic, and political aims function as teloi for our inquiry. The doctor, for
example, sets out to investigate the nature of the H1N1 virus for the sake of curing the sickness that accompanies this virus. Yet
this is very different than claiming that the doctor’s desire that the H1N1 virus not exist
entails that it doesn’t exist. Similarly, no one would dream of suggesting that because
the doctor wants to know what causes the bird flu, the doctor is somehow justifying the
bird flu or claiming that it is a good thing. No, the doctor wants to understand the bird flu precisely so he can
prevent it. I’ve thus been shocked to hear some say that if you claim that nuclear bombs

are, you’re somehow claiming that nuclear bombs should be. In his questions to Graham Harman
over at An und Fur Sich, Alexander Galloway even made a similar argument, suggesting that because Harman thinks corporations
are real entities he must also think that they have a right to exist and that they are good things .
I also recognize that
there are norms governing inquiry that we all adopt. I merely think that these norms don’t
legislate what is and what is not. ¶ I’ve thus asked what people are asking for when they ask “what politics does your
ontology entail?” or “what is the politics upon which your ontology is based?” This is a question that makes no sense to me. It’s like
asking “what politics is your chemistry based on?” or “what politics does your chemistry entail?” I don’t see how chemistry entails
any politics. It just says what different atomic elements do under certain circumstances. It doesn’t say which combinations of atomic
elements we should produce. And if chemists combine elements in unethical and unjust ways, I fail to see how this changes the
reality that elements can be combined in these ways. I can easily see Latour’s point that scientists investigated the properties of
certain elements like uranium for political reasons, but I fail to see how this changes the fact that uranium has these properties. I
honestly just don’t understand the nature of the question that’s being asked. So far no one has clarified this for me. read on! What I
find perplexing about this is that all of you asking these questions seem to think that my claim that ontology and
politics are distinct means I reject politics and ethics. As Ian Bogost pointed out in the discussion on
facebook, pointing out that a black person got shot in the face by a white police officer, that that really happened, is not mutually
exclusive to claiming that this act occurred because of racism and that it was unjust. Would we be talking about it at all though if it
didn’t exist? Shouldn’t we have a discourse about what it is for something to exist, what it is for something to happen, what types of
things exist, etc, when discussing these matters? Let’s take Alexander Galloway’s political aims. I presume that he thinks there are
many things wrong with our social world and that he wants to change them. This is a view I share. Indeed, I share just about all his
political commitments. Now I ask Alex this: if we want to change the social world, don’t we need to know how it’s put together, how it
functions, and what causes societies to persist in their oppressive structure? These are all questions of social ontology: what is a
society? What causes social relations to persist or endure in the way they do? What types of beings compose a society? Is it just
people? Are institutions real beings? Are nonhumans like natural resources, technologies, and infrastructure causal factors? Or is it
We need answers to these questions to
only ideologies that lead people to live under such intolerable conditions?
intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “ military logistics ”. We are, after all,
constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it
asks what things the opposing force, the opposing war machine captured by the state
apparatus, relies on in order to deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications
networks, people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology, people believing in the cause,
etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second, military logistics asks how to best
deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine . In what way should we
deploy our war machine to defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism,
neoliberalism , etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are based, what are the privileged
nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon which we want our
nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing change we better know
what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target. What I’ve heard in these
discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics. It’s as if people like to wave their
hands and say “this is horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act. Yeah,
you’re right, it is horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are
horrified when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis
why the social functions in the horrible way, the next response is to say “ you’re
justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This misses the point that the entire
point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you can strategically
intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we already took
for granted your analysis of how horrible things are. You’re preaching to the choir. We wanted to get to work determining how to
change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can decide how to
intervene. We then look at your actual practices and see that your sole strategy seems to be ideological critique or debunking. Your
idea seems to be that if you just prove that other people’s beliefs are incoherent, they’ll change and things will be different. But
we’ve noticed a couple things about your strategy: 1) there have been a number of bang-on critiques of state based war machines,
without things changing too much, and 2) we’ve noticed that we might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that
their position is incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology didn’t matter much. This leads us to suspect
that there are other causal factors that undergird these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to
ourselves, there are two reasons that an ideological critique can be successful and still fail to produce change: a) the problem can
be one of “distribution”. The critique is right but fails to reach the people who need to hear it and even if they did receive the
message they couldn’t receive it because it’s expressed in the foreign language of “academese” which they’ve never been
substantially exposed to (academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to change the
world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social worlds take the form they do that are not of the discursive,
I don’t deny that ideology is one
propositional, or semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both.
component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable
conditions. I merely deny that this is the only causal factor. I don’t reject your political aims, but merely wonder how to get
there. Meanwhile, you guys behave like a war machine that believes it’s sufficient to drop pamphlets out of an airplane debunking
the ideological reasons that persuade the opposing force’s soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting
supply lines, that there are other soldiers behind them with guns to their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they
have families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other things it’s not to reject your political aims, but to say that
I’m objecting to your
perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to change the world. In other words,
tendency to use a hammer to solve all problems and to see all things as a nail (discursive
problems), ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social
assemblages take. This is the basic idea behind what I’ve called “terraism”. Terraism has three components: 1)
“Cartography” or the mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes
the mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) “Deconstruction” Deconstruction is a practice. It
includes both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-structuralist feminist critique,
Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material
or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant. It is not simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive
Part of
social orders to endure or persist, but also material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do.
changing a social order thus necessarily involves intervening in those material networks
to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or feedback mechanisms that allow
them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is “Terraformation”. Terraformation is
the hardest thing of all, as it requires the activist to be something more than a critic, something more than someone who simply
denounces how bad things are, someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing instead other material and semiotic
arrangements rendering new forms of life and social relation possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life.
None of this, however, is possible without good mapping of the terrain so as to know
what to deconstruct and what resources are available for building new worlds. Sure, I care
about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly unjust. But rather than waving my hands
and cursing because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all those about me who don’t agree, rather than playing
the part of the beautiful soul who refuses to get his hands dirty,
I think we need good maps so we can blow up
the right bridges, power lines, and communications networks, and so we can engage in
effective terraformation.
 FW – Anti-war k Other Mvmts

antiwar activism is a gateway to participating in broader movements

Fabio Rojas & Michael T. Heaney ’12 Associate Professor of Sociology Indiana University
& Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies and Political Science University of Michigan,
April 12th, 2012, “Antiwar Politics and Paths of Activist Participation on the Left” from http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~mheaney/Antiwar_Activist_Paths.pdf, accessed 7/21/19 || OES-AT
A plurality of leading,
Our study of activists participating in the 2010 US Social Forum introduces a significant social fact:
contemporary, progressive/left activists had their first experience with activism in the
antiwar movement. This finding does not only hold for activists who had their first experience in the 1960s or the 2000s,
which were peak periods of antiwar activism. Rather, the pattern persists for people who got their start during relative low points for
People may come to have their first experience with
the peace movement, such as the 1970s and 1990s.
activism in the antiwar movement for a wide variety of reasons. The urgency of a pending war
prompts many to take to the streets for the first time. For others, serendipity may play a greater role: A peace demonstration may
simply be the first real opportunity that many people have to participate in activism. Thus, the antiwar movement’s heavy strategic
reliance on street demonstrations – regardless of whether this tactic is effective in achieving political influence among policymakers
Regardless of why antiwar activism is a first event
– provides an introduction to social activism for many.
for many people, it nonetheless often is that first event. Antiwar activists then go on,
over the course of their lives, to combine antiwar with involvement in many other social
causes. We show that the effect of participating in this first event holds even after accounting for other demographic and political
explanations for involvement. The consequences of this pattern are profound. As activists carry the memory of their first involvement
with them, it has the potential to shape the way that they participate in other issues through the tactics they implement, the
Thus, while antiwar activism rarely prevents the onset
arguments they offer, and the frames they devise.
of war (Marullo and Meyer 2004), it has the chance to shape the practices of an entire field of social action by imprinting its
participants. Our work builds on a tradition of scholarship that demonstrates the important biographical consequences of
mobilization (McAdam 1989; Jasper 1999; Fischer and McInerney 2012). Just as people who join social movements in general are
more likely than others to vote or have heightened political participation during their lives (Demerath, Marwell, and Aiken 1971;
Marwell, Demerath, and Aiken 1987), so too does participation in one particular movement have significance consequences for
political involvement. For example, individuals vary in the degree to which they personally identify with the label “activist” (Corrigall-
Brown 2012: 105-22; Teske 1997). Whether or not individuals think of themselves as “activists” is often something that they learn in
the course of participation in movements, rather than prior to their first activist experience (Gamson 1991; Gecas 2000). Thus, which
movement individuals participate with first may matter for whether or not they come to think of themselves as “activists.”
Similarly, the order of participation in movements may matter for the substantive ideas
that individuals develop about politics. As Munson (2008) documents, individuals often do not
bring fully-formed ideologies with them to their first experiences with activism. Rather,
they learn and develop ideologies through their contacts with movements (Blee 2002; Polletta
2002). Our survey of Social Forum activists provides a broadly representative sample of progressive/left activists who were
mobilized in the United States at one particular point in time, while at the same time including people who had their first experience
with activism over many decades, from the 1940s to the 2010s. We recognize that ability of activists to attend this convention
depended on factors such as the costs of attending and their resources to pay those costs. To incorporate these factors into our
analysis, we include variables such as distance traveled and income, and note that the sample includes people from around the
United States and with varied levels of financial resources. By design, our analysis is confined to individuals with at least a modest
level of commitment to activism; enough of a commitment to attend a conference addressing contemporary social issues. Thus, our
conclusions are not reasonably generalizable to individuals below this level of commitment. Although our data by no means provide
a perfect random sample of progressive/left activists in the United States, they do offer a very broad, cross-sectional view of those
who were engaged in the early part of the twenty-first century.
 FW – Transparency Good

Lack of transparency and accountability results in massive corruption

within arms sales transfers
Perlo-Freeman 16 – Head of the SIPRI Project on Military Expenditure in the Arms
Transfers and Military Expenditure Programme (Sam, “Transparency and accountability in
military spending,” SIPRI, 08/03/16, Accessed Online at:
https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2016/transparency-and-accountability-
military-spending, Accessed Online on 07/17/19, lasa-SI)
Sound financial management of a country's security sector is key to efficient and
effective security forces capable of responding to the population's legitimate security
needs. Deficiencies in the way the military budget and arms purchases are decided and
controlled are likely to lead to higher levels of inefficient military expenditure and
inappropriate weapons purchases, consuming often scarce resources that are needed to
address the basic needs of the population.

Lack of transparency in particular creates high vulnerability for corruption, especially in

arms procurement processes. In many countries, the military tends to be one of the most
corrupt sectors of government, and arms procurement—domestic and international—is
especially subject to corruption, in both developed and developing countries.

Avoiding excessive, wasteful and corrupt military expenditures and procurement thus
requires high levels of transparency and accountability in military budgeting and
procurement processes. Such processes should adhere to government-wide financial
management and oversight practices, within a rigorously observed defence policy and
planning framework. This includes adherence to public expenditure management (PEM)
principles of comprehensiveness, discipline, legitimacy, flexibility, predictability,
contestability, honesty, information, transparency and accountability.
These issues are pursued in detail in the SIPRI publication Budgeting for the military sector in
Africa, which includes detailed case studies of eight African countries, discussing the problems
and limitations of their military budgeting processes in relation to an overall framework of good
practice.
The terms transparency and accountability can be used in varying ways. In particular, there is
an important distinction between transparency in the context of inter-state relations, referring to
the voluntary disclosure of information (especially relating to defence and security), which may
be part of confidence-building measures, and transparency as an aspect of internal governance,
referring to the ability of citizens to access relevant information on the activities of government.
Here, transparency is taken to include transparency of information and transparency of
process. Transparency of information on military spending means whether information
of the military budget and actual spending is readily available to the public, and the level
of reliability, detail and comprehensiveness of this information. Transparency of process
refers to whether budgetary decision-making is open and visible, with the reasons for
spending clearly outlined.

Accountability includes accountability of the budget decision process, to parliament and

to citizens ; the implementation of expenditure, namely if spending—and especially
procurement—are controlled by rigorous procedures and subject to civilian control; and
auditing and parliamentary scrutiny of military spending, with improper practices
investigated and prosecuted.

Greater transparency is key to stop illegal arms sales and human rights
violations
Macdonald 16 – director of the Control Arms Secretariat, co-ordinating and supporting the
work of the international Control Arms Coalition (Anna, “Greater transparency around the arms
trade would save countless lives,” The Guardian, 08/24/16, Accessed Online at:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/24/greater-transparency-arms-trade-
save-lives, Accessed Online on 07/17/19, lasa-SI)
The arms trade has operated in the shadows for decades. With the ATT in force, arms deals
may not be made covertly any more. Each state must submit an annual report that declares
which transfers have been authorised. This week, states will also decide whether these reports
should be made public or stay secret. There should be no question about this. They shouldn’t
even be given a choice. Reports must be made publicly available.

Greater transparency can help stop illegal sales, reduce the risk of arms being diverted
to terrorist groups and criminals; stop the flood of weapons to human rights abusers,
and stop the arms that are being used to violate humanitarian law in too many
communities on too many days . It’s time to shine a light on this deadly trade.

Transparency in the arms industry is key to hold government officials

accountable – prevents human rights violations, corruption, and illegal
arms circulation
Ohlsson 06 – Swedish social democratic politician who has been a member of the Riksdag
since 1998 (Carina, “The need for a greater transparency in the arms trade,” Parliamentary
Assembly, 10/16/06, Accessed Online at: http://www.assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/X2H-Xref-
ViewHTML.asp?FileID=11486&lang=en, Accessed Online on 07/17/19, lasa-SI)
IV. Why is transparency important?
15. Increased public information on the arms trade can bring many direct and indirect
benefits.
16. Transparency in the arms trade represents a key feature of democratic
governance and open societies. Parliaments should have access to sufficient information to
enable them to exert control over the conduct of government policies. Citizens should also, as
far as possible, have access to information that relates to their welfare and their society
and allows them to contribute to the development and implementation of sound
governmental policies. In this regard, transparency provides a means for
parliamentarians and civil society to support government efforts to prevent human
rights violations, and promote peace, security and development. Certain countries will
always have strong economic incentives to export arms. Therefore, the introduction of
greater transparency would help ensure that governments are held accountable for their
political commitments and that economic considerations are not prioritised over human
security, the respect of human rights and non-proliferation.

17. One of the main arguments for transparency is that secretive decision-making
often results in bad governance. It is clear that secrecy and corruption have become
closely associated with the arms trade. This was never more apparent than in a number of
European countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading to scandals such as the ‘Arms to
Iraq’ affair in the UK. Transparency International, an international non-governmental
organisation fighting corruption, has published a number of reports providing evidence
that the international arms trade is rife with corruption. In 2001, the Vice-President of
Transparency International went as far as to say that a very high proportion of small arms deals
in the world are the result of bribes.4 The illicit trade depends upon the complicity of state
officials whose silence is bought with bribes. In the so-called ‘grey’ trade5, arms contracts are
often facilitated by the use of ‘commissions’, which are paid both in developed and under-
developed countries. Transparency in the arms trade would help combat corruption and
fraud, just as it does in the financial sector.

18. At the state level, transparency promotes confidence-building and compliance with
national and international regulatory regimes in a number of ways:
• it encourages officials and ministers to comply with the letter and spirit of the law;
• it increases the level of accountability of exporting states by encouraging them to make
responsible decisions concerning the risk that arms transfers may contribute to human rights
violations, or undermine security and development in the importing country;
• it reassures partner governments that the state is complying with regional and international
proliferation control regimes.

19. Transparency can also help to prevent illegal arms circulation . Reports of the
United Nations and regional organisations, as well as analyses by research institutes and
NGOs, have documented how secrecy obstructs actions to prevent and combat illicit
arms trafficking, not least by impeding efforts to prevent the diversion of legal arms into
the arsenals of criminal and terrorist groups. By establishing a paper trail showing the chain
of possession from manufacturer to end-user, governments would be better able to ensure that
arms licensed for export or import are not diverted to unauthorised or destabilising purposes -
including sanctions breaking activities - or fall onto the black market. Also, where problems do
occur, good practice in this area would assist efforts to identify the nature of the infractions and
their perpetrators. Crucially, transparency on arms exports would enable effective
cooperation amongst police, customs and intelligence agencies and would facilitate the
work of such bodies in identifying sources of illegal weapons, particularly as many illicit
consignments of arms begin their journey as legal exports.
20. It has been argued that improving transparency would harm the defence industry.
If this were true, one would expect defence sales from the UK and the US, two of the
countries with the most developed (though not perfect) transparency mechanisms in the
world, to suffer as a consequence. Yet the US is consistently and by far the largest arms
exporter in the world, while UK arms exports as a proportion of total world arms exports have
stayed roughly constant since the UK started public reporting of its arms export licensing
decisions in the late 1990s. Although businesses prefer to operate in environments that
provide for a certain degree of confidentiality, increased transparency is in the interest
of the legitimate defence business because secrecy in the arms trade encourages the
assumption that there is something to hide and in many cases providing more
information to the public would help to avoid misleading or inaccurate reporting. Hence
if a transaction is recognised by all as legal and there is nothing to hide, it benefits the defence
industry as a whole to make this information public. Moreover, old prejudices regarding the
disclosure of defence-related data preclude an informed public debate on the topic, as well as
any matching research and analysis and high-level political discussions. Without a good level
of publicly accessible information on the defence trade and manufacturing, it is
impossible to reliably evaluate the challenges faced by the defence industry in a specific
country and to identify the measures required to address them. On occasion, some
countries in Central and Eastern Europe have had unrealistic expectations about the future
prospects of their defence industry, which were not supported by any reliable analysis of the
industry’s capabilities and the actual level of arms production and export.6

Initiatives to increase transparency has resulted in governments releasing

public data on arms sales – advocating does produce political change
Ohlsson 06 – Swedish social democratic politician who has been a member of the Riksdag
since 1998 (Carina, “The need for a greater transparency in the arms trade,” Parliamentary
Assembly, 10/16/06, Accessed Online at: http://www.assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/X2H-Xref-
ViewHTML.asp?FileID=11486&lang=en, Accessed Online on 07/17/19, lasa-SI)
V. The development of transparency in recent years

21. Since the end of the Cold War, an array of initiatives undertaken at the
international, regional and national levels have tried to increase the level of information
related to arms trade transactions, in parallel with efforts to regulate and restrain the
arms trade. 7 As a result, the number of countries releasing public data on their arms
exports has increased. Countries that produce arms export reports are usually those
that have provided more information. However, many countries that have yet to produce
such reports provide some data through the international release of information to the UN, or
through Customs data.
22. The UN Register of Conventional Arms, which was established in 1992, is to date
the main global arrangement relating to conventional arms transparency, but has yet to
reach its full potential8. Although the majority of Council of Europe member states, regularly
provide information on arms transfers for inclusion in the UN Register, the information submitted
is often incomplete:
• a significant number of countries only submit data on those transactions that they feel
‘comfortable’ reporting on;
• moreover, the seven categories of armaments covered by the Register are restricted to major
weapons systems, such as battle tanks, combat aircraft, heavy artillery and naval vessels, and,
with the exception of Man-Portable Air Defence Systems (MANPADS)9, they do not include
small arms and light weapons (SALW);
• finally, the data is provided to the UN often more than a year after imports and exports have
occurred. At the time of writing of this report (June 2006), of the 46 member states of the
Council of Europe only 18 had submitted data to the UN Register on their arms imports and
exports during 2005.
23. Another tool for international transparency on the arms trade is the UN
COMTRADE database (administered by the UN Statistical Division), which provides global
data on the trade in commodities (including arms) based upon reports from customs
authorities. However,
• COMTRADE relies on voluntary submissions and many European countries withhold
information on some, or all, of their arms transfers;
• furthermore, while some of the data concerns specific weapons (such as pistols and revolvers)
other types of weapons are conflated in broad categories, or mixed up with civilian equipment,
therefore it is sometimes difficult to identify exactly which type of weapon has been exported or
imported;
• as noted above in relation to the UN Register, often data is transmitted to COMTRADE more
than a year after the transactions have occurred, and reports from exporters frequently do not
correspond with those from importers.
24. In addition to Comtrade, EU members, and some associate countries, also submit
similar trade data to Eurostat (the EU’s statistics agency). Eurostat suffers from problems similar
to Comtrade, particularly with some countries censoring their data. Researchers have been
unable to obtain precise definitions of the equipment contained in its various trade categories
from Eurostat.

25. The issue of transparency and accountability of arms export control procedures
has also become an area of significant debate at the national level. Within the Council of
Europe region, there are member states that have developed the practice of producing arms
export reports. It is within the EU sub-region where the most significant advances in this area
have occurred. This can be attributed to a number of factors, including the reaction to various
arms-related scandals in EU member states during the 1990s, pressure from non-governmental
organisations and the reforms which were introduced as part of the EU Code of Conduct on
arms exports.
26. Currently, many EU member states regularly publish annual reports on their arms
exports, including the largest EU arms exporters. Although these reports represent a
good source of information on national arms export control practices, significant
variations remain in the quality and quantity of the information provided, meaning it is
sometimes difficult to compare one report with another. This is why successive European
Parliament resolutions have called on EU member states to provide more detailed information
on their arms trade.10
 FW – 2AC/2NC Policy Ed k Global Focus
There is also an external impact to foreign policy education – it is the only
way to shift the focus of institutions to global issues
Garcel-Ávila 05 [Jocelyne Gacel-Ávila - Ph.D. in Higher Education specialized in
Internationalization of Higher Education. Master of Arts by the University of Paris, specialized in
Foreign Languages and Civilizations. Tenured professor and researcher at the University of
Guadalajara since 1997. “The Internationalisation of Higher Education: A Paradigm for Global
Citizenry”, Journal of Studies in International Education, Vol. 9 No. 2, Summer 2005 121-136]
THE CHALLENGES OF EDUCATION IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT One major factor in the final stages of the 20th century is that humankind entered into an
accelerated process of multidimensional changes encompassing the fields of economy, finance, science and technology, communications,
education, culture, and politics. This new context is characterised by a relationship of increasing

interdependence and competitiveness between nations, modifying the traditional paradigm of interstate relations. No country escaped
this process, nor the inherent challenges. However, although the processes of globalisation and modernisation developed simultaneously throughout the planet, this development has been generated in an

unequal, divergent, and contradictory manner. In summary, there are the “globalisers” and the “globalised,” which brought the end of the 20th
century to a situation of profound and increasing inequality between nations— an atmosphere of exclusion and marginalisation , with

offshoots of violence, wars, ethnic conflicts, terrorism, racism and intolerance,

pandemics, increases in delinquency and organised crime, rising unemployment and
underemployment, and a degradation of the environment and natural resources . At the start of the
21st century, a large part of humanity is every day poorer and further away from development and modernity (Lopéz Segrera, 2001). As far as education is concerned, there is a common consensus that its quality

has, in general, diminished, in accordance with the current belief that individual abilities should be restricted to mere technical-productive functions. This is the setting that all of us now

face and the environment in which we will have to act in the future; and where, of course, educators and
institutions of higher education have to play a part. Therefore, it is crucial for 21st-century society to seek out alternatives to these political
and economic practices, which are expressions of the power held by a mere few countries and international businesses. International organisations such as the United Nations and the World Bank have begun to
warn that although the developed world can attract private capital, build a solid banking and financial system, and invest in human capital, it will not keep on growing if it continues to marginalize much of humanity
(such as women and ethnic minorities) and does not adopt a policy of inclusion. Ultimately, without parallel social progress over the medium and long term, satisfactory standards of living become impossible as
well. In other words, cautioned the philosopher Morin (2001), “The hegemonic system of production is destructive, devastating and, in the final instance, causes anti-development. If conceived solely in a
technicaleconomic form, development is not sustainable. We need a richer and more complex notion of development that is not simply material but also intellectual, emotional and moral” (p. 74). To face these
problems, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has prescribed sustainable human development. This concept is broader than simple economic growth because it encompasses human, cultural,
and educational dimensions. Moreover, the United Nations’ International Conference on Financing for Development (Monterrey, Mexico, March 2002) emphasised the urgent need for an element of solidarity—“la
mondialisation de la solidarité” (the globalisation of solidarity)1 —and respect for the Kyoto accords. In light of the pressing problems faced by world society in the 21st century, these concepts are not only a
response to ethical demands but are also a political imperative (Lopéz Segrera, 2001). These ideas have inspired the 1998 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World
Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century, declaring that higher education—and education in general—should serve a world order that enables the development of a more equitable, tolerant,

and responsible society. If we agree that education is at the centre of all social change, new approaches to educational policy
and process are then needed, because without education there can be no change in mentalities and
society. And without a change in paradigm for international relations, there can be no solidarity among nations. In all countries, the new global context has
prompted a greater demand for education and is forcing institutions of higher learning to reconsider their mission, tasks, and responsibilities, as
well as to develop innovative strategies to improve their relevance and function, leading to the following question: How can
institutions of higher education adequately prepare their graduates to live and participate as global citizens and professionals? To be relevant in the new global

environment, today’s education must conceptualise everything with the age of

globalisation and within the environment and complexity of the planet. Knowledge of the world itself has become a vital
intellectual necessity , just as the solution to international problems requires a global
approach and planning process . To achieve this, however, we must reform mentality, and therefore a change in
educative paradigms. Educational strategies in the 21st century must begin with a common foundation, which would include the search for a standard of teaching competitive on an
international level but adapted to local conditions. In this new global environment, one of the basic and fundamental functions of a university should then be the fostering of a global consciousness among
students, to make them understand the relation of interdependence between peoples and societies, to develop in students an understanding of their own and other cultures and respect for pluralism. All these

aspects are the foundations of solidarity and peaceful coexistence among nations and of true global citizenship. In this context, the objective of internationalisation must be
focused on an updating of academic content , making global phenomena understandable while promoting intercultural understanding and sustainable
human development. The internationalisation of the main functions of the university should then help spur the development of a
global consciousness (Oxford Dictionary of New Words, 1991), defined as comprehension of and receptivity to foreign
cultures, and the availability of certain knowledge of, and information about, socioeconomic concerns and
ecology. In fact, internationalisation in this context appears to be the key strategy to develop this kind
of education. This is why it is relevant to link the internationalisation our way of thinking: a reform that is paradigmatic and not programmatic. The development of a
new consciousness—a global consciousness—among people is a key aspect of this reform, however, it requires a change in process to the response to

crucial questions, such as What kind of education is required in the 21st century to face the challenges of globalisation? How can
internationalisation contribute to developing educational programs adequate for the
needs of this century? What are the characteristics and elements of an internationalised curriculum to educate global and multicultural citizens? What types of
policies and institutional strategies must institutions of higher education follow to
internationalise their main functions? What are the strengths and weaknesses of international activities in universities, as well as the outlook for the
internationalisation process in the world? What role should education play in international cooperation and international relations to foster a world citizenry?
 FW – Empathy/Racism/Sexism/World Skills
International education is crucial in the 21st century – it creates a cognitive
shift towards more empathic citizens
Garcel-Ávila 05 [Jocelyne Gacel-Ávila - Ph.D. in Higher Education specialized in
Internationalization of Higher Education. Master of Arts by the University of Paris, specialized in
Foreign Languages and Civilizations. Tenured professor and researcher at the University of
Guadalajara since 1997. “The Internationalisation of Higher Education: A Paradigm for Global
Citizenry”, Journal of Studies in International Education, Vol. 9 No. 2, Summer 2005 121-136]
the international
INTERNATIONALISATION AS A NEW PARADIGM FOR THE EDUCATION OF THE 21ST CENTURY Based on the above-described conceptual framework,

dimension of universities should constitute a key educational resource for training citizens
with a critical perspective and the adequate preparation to work and live effectively and successfully in a global
context. It represents an educational reform whose ideals are the driving force behind
the political, ethical, and intercultural nature of the social relationships that support the
formation of a critical citizenry by developing global consciousness and perspective in university graduates. The
international curriculum should therefore focus on developing in university graduates respect for humanity’s differences and cultural wealth, as well as a sense of political responsibility, turning them into defenders

Internationalisation strategies are therefore crucial for the education of the 21st
of democratic principles of their society, and true architects of social change.

century and and

constitute a crucial an important tool inbringing to fruition the new educational vision proposed by Delors (1997), “the
four pillars of the education of the future,” and French philosopher Morin (2001) of the “seven complex lessons in education for the future.” According to these proposals, and especially the one described by
Morin, if we conclude from the evidence that there is a serious, deepening gap between, on one hand, our disjunctive, fragmented, shared knowledge, and on the other hand, the realities and problems that are
each day more poly-disciplinary, transversal, multidimensional, transnational, and global, then the education of the future must teach the following four basic dimensions: the context, the global, the
multidimensional, and the complex. Morin described the seven areas of knowledge that should be taught by the education of the future, as follows: detecting error and illusion, principles of pertinent knowledge,
teaching the human condition, teaching earth identity, confronting uncertainties, understanding each other, and ethics for the humane genre. The main function of future education would be therefore to foster a
general intelligence capable of interconnecting these dimensions and fostering the development of the intellectual capacities in individuals. Furthermore, Morin stressed that one of the basic functions of

education is to promote world understanding, ethics, and culture , as cultures must learn
from one another, and that comprehension between humans is the first requirement for intellectual and moral solidarity on earth. Needless to say,
international education is one of the rare educational strategies that has the potential
for fostering these perspectives in students , based on a deep reform of the curriculum
of higher education (Mestenhauser, 1998). To achieve these goals, the international curriculum should favour the
holistic formation of the individual and be based on an integral, humanistic, and socioreconstructive curricular
structure. Its objective would be to help students develop a global perspective. One model for such a curriculum could be borrowed from Hanvey’s (1982) very interesting work that described the five
dimensions of a global perspective in the following way: perspective consciousness, state-of-the-planet awareness, cross-cultural awareness, knowledge of global dynamics, and awareness of human choices. In

Hanvey’s (1982) words, A global perspective has the potential to be conducive to a cognitive change:
from national thought to that of an international nature; from a traditional way of thinking to a rational one. The result would not mean a loss of
identity, but the acquisition of a broader worldview . Nations would begin to understand
that their own interests and activities cannot be separated from those of others, and they would pay more

attention to human problems that transcend international, regional and local interests . The
concept of interdependence would begin to be recognized, and the connections, consequences

and vulnerabilities of the global system would be understood. The role of the nation-state as the principal player in interstate
politics would be called into question when faced with the need for a coordinated, global system. The individual would become a citizen of the

world, with a sharper awareness of his own and foreign cultural perspectives, and with a stronger empathy for other cultures . [S]he would be
informed about the state of the planet and the principle social and political happenings around the globe, thereby taking on a greater commitment to the
construction of a better world. (p. 37) C. Bennett (1995) depicted the six objectives of a global and multicultural curriculum that can serve as a

basic model, to be used as a common root in general education curriculum: understanding multiple historical perspectives; developing cultural
consciousness; developing intercultural competence; combating racism, sexism, prejudice, and all forms of
discrimination; raising awareness of the state of the planet and global dynamics; and developing
social action skills. A concurrence with Hanvey’s global perspective is obvious. This kind of content in the general education curriculum could be ideal for internationalization-at-home
strategies. These curriculum objectives concur greatly with what Morin described as the anthropological, cultural, intercultural, ecological, and civic-terrestrial consciousness and also with the four pillars of the
education for the 21st century depicted in Delors (1997): to learn how to learn, to learn how to live with others, to learn to be, to learn how to do. Another concurrence between international education and
UNESCO’s 21stcentury educational vision is that it stresses that, besides providing students with a higher level of professional and academic competence, which is characteristic of the knowledge society, today’s
education has to foster in students intellectual capacities and cognitive abilities making them able to contribute to a social, economic, and political environment that is global, interdependent, and multicultural.
 individuals will find themselves faced with the challenges of adapting to new
Indeed, in the new century,

responsibilities, the need for participation, pluralism, and the change in values. For this reason, rather
than simply providing students with professional training for an ever-changing job market, universities must educate for the acquisition of competence and for “employability.” As a result, to be successful,
professionals will each day be required to develop more and more cognitive skills such as abstraction, systematic thought, experimental investigation, and teamwork. Once again, in this particular aspect,

international education and experience seem to offer a great potential to enhance these kind of
cognitive skills , demanded by this new context. On this point, Mestenhauser (1998) demonstrated in his article titled “Internationalisation of Higher Education: A Cognitive Response to the
Challenges of the Twenty-First Century” that international education supports the development of certain
intellectual abilities that are not generally acquired in the traditional classroom but that coincide with the necessities and the demands of
21st-century society. Indeed, when the students leave their own cultural environment—for study abroad or academic programs based on intercultural communication techniques with
content that highlights the international and global dimension of human and social interaction— they have the possibility to develop a capacity for adaptation

and flexibility as they are faced with rapidly changing situations and the opportunity to broaden their cultural and intellectual
horizons and to adapt to different kinds of people. Mestenhauser (1998) demonstrated that international
education promotes such cognitive skills as the following: ability to recognize differences,
understanding the difference between emic and etic thinking, ability to make cognitive
alterations/shifts , ability to recognize knowledge gap, ability to communicate cross-
culturally , ability to recognize scarce knowledge, ability to think comparatively, ability to change self-
perception, ability to know how to compare one’s own country, possessing knowledge about other cultures,
possessing diagnostic skills, understanding differentiation, ability to recognize trends in other cultures,
understanding cognitive complexity and cognitive integration , understanding a variety
of learning styles, and understanding the difference between product and process learning. Thus, in other words, all these aspects make
international education one of the key strategies for the 21st-century education.
 FW – A2: International Education Inev
Success of broader international education relies on recognizing its
importance
Garcel-Ávila 05 [Jocelyne Gacel-Ávila - Ph.D. in Higher Education specialized in
Internationalization of Higher Education. Master of Arts by the University of Paris, specialized in
Foreign Languages and Civilizations. Tenured professor and researcher at the University of
Guadalajara since 1997. “The Internationalisation of Higher Education: A Paradigm for Global
Citizenry”, Journal of Studies in International Education, Vol. 9 No. 2, Summer 2005 121-136]
despite its essentially contemporary nature, we
INTERNATIONALISATION: REALITY AND PERSPECTIVE Unfortunately,

cannot overlook the fact that, to date, the above-mentioned potential and qualities of international
education have not yet been recognized. Generally speaking, present-day educational systems in Latin America, and Mexico in
particular, accord little importance to intercultural and international perspective and even neglect longterm strategies. Universities in Mexico largely underestimate the personal
and intellectual growth stimulated by contact and empathy with other cultures. A simple tour d’horizon of the higher education environment in the early 21st century leads us to
realise that we are still far away from an international university and an international dimension integrated into the mainstream of the educational process. In this context, it is
relevant to observe the evolution of universities over the centuries, in an effort to understand their present state. Indeed, a look back on the history of universities reminds us that
higher education institutions have gone through different eras, the two primary of which are usually described as convergence and divergence. The first era took place during
the times of the medieval universalist model and gave rise to the cosmopolitan university that sought to unify the world through knowledge, at a time when knowledge knew no
boundaries. The second era developed during the Reformation and gave birth to the diversification of university models. This trend grew stronger during the Industrial
Revolution and the economic expansion of capitalist countries, up to the present time, and emphasised the national character of educational systems and objectives. In fact, we

Nevertheless, as
may say that today’s university still remains trapped in a national environment and is a national organisation, no longer international by nature.

a result of globalisation, universities are showing clear signs of a new period of convergence. On
the other hand, Kerr (1990) pointed out that there might exist a potential conflict between the national and

international character of universities. Kerr contended that there is a potential conflict between the university as a political
organisation forced to follow a national agenda, and the university as an intellectual
institution that participates in international academic networks and transcends national borders. This idea is also
expressed by Trow (as cited in Scott, 1998) who introduced the concept of the “public life” and “private life” of universities. Because most universities are public institutions, he
said, they must follow a political agenda that involves such priorities as broader access to students, financial austerity, and the need for greater diversification to meet the market

universities
demands. These are just some of the pressures that weigh on universities today. As a result, we may say that at the beginning of the 21st century,

continue to be influenced by protectionist nationalist feelings. They are under constant

pressure to meet immediate market demands, and they largely respond to national dynamic and local interests.
Similarly, the current dominant paradigm—that is, competitiveness—tends to reinforce a survivalist mentality, which favours approaches that focus on the present and
disregards strategies for the future as well as long-term solutions. Thus, educational institutions may be led to neglect development of visionary responses, which could mean
that global trends will leave them behind. The concept of private life described by Trow (1973) refers to the intellectual role of the university, which is centred on teaching and the

the intellectual role played by the university expands and flourishes

search for knowledge. According to Trow,

at its best in an international context, thus reinforcing the idea that knowledge has no borders. Trow concluded that, until now,
universities have functioned internationally through their private lives rather than their
public lives and emphasised that these two aspects may act in opposition to each other and block the internationalisation of higher education. Nevertheless,
what is new and remarkable about the new global context is that the imperatives of globalisation, on one hand,
and the growing demand for higher education in the knowledge society on the other, are producing a
synergy that yields to a greater internationalisation of educational systems. These trends are stressed
by the strategic value of knowledge in the progress of society, linguistic unification through the use of English, decreasing importance accorded to religious and political schools

of thought, the role of new information and communication technologies, and the existence of exchange programmes on an unprecedented scale and scope. In a
society based on knowledge, the strategic value of knowledge will increase; therefore, the value of universities will
increase as well, given that they are the source of nearly all knowledge being produced. This fact emphasises the university’s international character because its
intellectual and academic functions are essentially international. This is why there is a strategic aspect to research that stresses that no antagonism exists

between a university’s national and international vocations, and that, on the contrary, these two
functions are compatible and essential in the new global environment. Thus, despite their intrinsic nature as
national organisations, universities must find a way to be national and international. This situation

must compel the different stakeholders to create a relationship between institutional objectives and the
need for a greater opening to the outside world. As a result, today the momentum of these globalizing trends
heralds an era of partial reconvergence among the different educational systems. One way for
today’s university to meet the challenges of a globalised society may be to rescue its “internationalist” past and make use of global affinities and international networks to build
 the
models for transnational cooperation. These models could help universities take back the internationalist and universalist role they once played. In other words,

international environment is the forerunner of reconciliation, a successful combination

of, or a convergence between, the university’s public life and its private life.
 FW – A2: Cant Engage Institutions
Public opinion shapes foreign policy decision-making but only if the public
is well-informed
Weatherford Knecht 06 [Tom Knecht - Associate Professor of Political Science at Westmont.
Stephen Weatherford – professor of political science at University of California Santa Barbara.
“Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Stages of Presidential Decision Making”, International
Studies Quarterly 50:3 (September 2006), pp. 705-27.]
Recently, scholars have begun to challenge the elite-centric model, arguing that public opinion
responds rationally to international events and policies (Kusnitz 1984; Wittkopf 1990; Holsti 1992, 2004; Jentleson 1992; Mayer 1992; Page and Shapiro
1992). In contrast to much of the pioneering work on opinion and foreign policy, these studies demonstrate a strong correlation

between public opinion and foreign policy choice, indeed sometimes a closer connection than in domestic
issue areas (Page and Shapiro 1992; Monroe 1998). More importantly, the revisionist literature contends that
public opinion can potentially influence foreign policy decisions. The public's views may
set a “region of acceptability” that bounds politically feasible options (Russett 1990: 110; cf. Powlick 1991; Sobel
2001) or even determines foreign policy decisions (Small 1988; Bartels 1991; Hartley and Russett 1992; Page and Shapiro 1992). This stronger view
contends that as political elites are ultimately accountable to the public, rational politicians attempt

to gain an advantage at the polls by enacting policies favored by the public.2 We can sharpen the empirical implications of this debate by considering how elected
officials estimate the potential political consequences of policies. How Do Policy Makers Estimate the Electoral Consequences of Policies? Presidents consider the

potential reactions of the public when making foreign policy decisions for several
reasons. The most prominent is that leaders in democracies are held accountable in regular elections.
Research on elections and voting shows that a substantial portion of the public takes foreign policy
issues and accomplishments into account in choosing between candidates, and the literature on audience costs
integrates the idea into a larger theory of foreign policy making (Aldrich, Sullivan, and Borgida 1989; Ninic and Hinckley 1991;
Fearon 1994; Smith 1998). The president's need to maintain or increase political capital can also influence

foreign policy decisions (Neustadt 1960; Light 1982; Sullivan 1991; for an opposite view, see Edwards 1991). The key component in political capital is approval ratings, as
presidents able to maintain high levels of approval are likely to be more influential in dealing with Congress. Unpopular foreign policies can quickly erode political capital and weaken the prospects for the
administration's foreign and domestic agendas alike. Public opinion is also important to lame-duck presidents. A president worried about his place in history may use the last years of his tenure to enhance his

good reasons to take the public's views

public support or to set the electoral stage for his heir apparent by initiating popular foreign policies. Having

into account does not yet clarify how presidents would go about estimating the electoral
impacts of their foreign policy choices. It is, for instance, often the case that the general public has only vaguely
formed preferences on the concrete aspects of overseas issues at the time the White
House must select a policy course. Moreover, it is not the public's current views that are critical to politicians' calculations, but the potential that the public will
respond negatively when the next election rolls around. Rather than assuming that the public's policy preferences are fixed, and asking what impact those preferences have on presidents' decisions, instead

we might question how policy makers' anticipation of future preferences shape their
decisions.3,Arnold (1990:11; cf. Kingdon 1989:60–68) introduces the notion of “potential preferences” and emphasizes that politicians' skill at “estimating … potential policy preferences is more art
than science. Although experts in public opinion can show how to use scientific methods to measure current preferences, legislators rarely employ such methods outside of electoral campaigns.” In thinking about
what sort of information is most needed in this situation, it is useful to distinguish between the popularity of a policy proposal and the salience of the issue (Jones 1994; Kollman 1998; Soroka 2003). Kollman

(1998) points out that politicians generally have quite good information about the popularity of particular
policies: the public's preference for one policy direction over another tends to be stable, and conventional
public opinion polls provide reliable information about popularity (Jacobs 1992; Page and Shapiro 1992; Herbst 1993; Jacobs and Shapiro 1995).4
Moreover, because such sentiments are relatively constant, politicians can learn from historical

experience. Since Vietnam, for example, politicians understand that a drawn-out, costly war is likely to alienate the public. Elites frequently rely on a fairly accurate type of “folk-wisdom” when
determining the prospective popularity of policies (Foyle 1999). However, the salience or relative importance of a policy issue is

something about which politicians need information, but they generally cannot learn this from
conventional opinion polls or experience. “Politicians want to know what proportion of constituents, when voting in the next election, will weigh the actions of their elected representatives on a

particular policy issue. More salient policy issues will weigh more heavily on voting decisions than will less salient policy issues …” (Kollman

1998:9). Although, as Kollman notes, public opinion polls do not regularly track the salience of policy issues ,
policy makers are attentive to the prominence of the issue in the public's informational environment, specifically its visibility in the media's coverage of public affairs. Our empirical analysis uses this indicator to
gauge variations in the salience of foreign policy issues.
 FW – Mitchell

Deliberative citizenship is necessary to change government from the

outside and solving existential crises
Mitchell 10 [Gordon R. - Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the
Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs the William
Pitt Debating Union. “Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science”,
Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 13, No. 1, 2010, pp. 95–120]

Yet this essay highlights how rhetorical scholarship’s relevance can be credibly
established by outsiders, who seek access to the creative energy flowing from the classical Greek
rhetorical lexicon in its native mode, that is, as a tool of invention designed to spur and hone rhetorical
performance. Analysis of the intelligence community and EPA debating initiatives shows
how this is the case, with government agencies calling for assistance to animate
rhetorical processes such as dissoi logoi ( debating different sides ) and synérchesthé (the performative
task ofcoming together deliberately for the purpose of joint inquiry, collective choice-making, and
renewal of communicative bonds).74 This demand-driven epistemology is different in kind from
the globalization project so roundly criticized by Gaonkar. Rather than rhetoric venturing out from its
own academic home to proselytize about its epistemological universality for all knowers, instead here we have actors not
formally trained in the rhetorical tradition articulating how their own deliberative objectives call
for incorporation of rhetorical practice and even recruitment of “strategically located
allies”75 to assist in the process. Since the productivist content in the classical Greek vocabulary serves as a critical
resource for joint collaboration in this regard, demand-driven rhetoric of science turns Gaonkar’s original
critique on its head. In fairness to Gaonkar, it should be stipulated that his 1993 intervention challenged the way rhetoric of
science had been done to date, not the universe of ways rhetoric of science might be done in the future. And to his partial credit,
Gaonkar did acknowledge the promise of a performance-oriented rhetoric of science, especially one informed by classical thinkers
other than Aristotle.76 In his Ph.D. dissertation on “Aspects of Sophistic Pedagogy,” Gaonkar documents how the ancient sophists
were “the greatest champions” of “socially useful” science,77 and also how the sophists essentially practiced the art of rhetoric in a
translational, performative register: Th e sophists could not blithely go about their business of making science useful, while science
itself stood still due to lack of communal support and recognition. Besides, sophistic pedagogy was becoming increasingly
dependent on the findings of contemporary speculation in philosophy and science. Take for instance, the eminently practical art of
rhetoric. As taught by the best of the sophists, it was not simply a handbook of recipes which anyone could mechanically employ to
his advantage. On the contrary, the strength and vitality of sophistic rhetoric came from their ability to incorporate the relevant
information obtained from the on-going research in other fields. 78 Of course, deep trans-historical differences make uncritical
appropriation of classical Greek rhetoric for contemporary use a fool’s errand. But to gauge from Robert Hariman’s recent reflections
on the enduring salience of Isocrates, “timely,
suitable, and eloquent appropriations” can help us
postmoderns “forge a new political language” suitable for addressing the complex raft of
intertwined problems facing global society. Such retrospection is long overdue, says Hariman,
as “the history, literature, philosophy, oratory, art, and political thought of Greece and Rome have never been more accessible or
less appreciated.”79 This essay has explored ways that some
of the most venerable elements of the
ancient Greek rhetorical tradition—those dealing with debate and deliberation —can be
retrieved and adapted to answer calls in the contemporary milieu for cultural
technologies capable of dealing with one of our time’s most daunting challenges . This
challenge involves finding meaning in inverted rhetorical situations characterized by an
endemic surplus of heterogeneous content.
Afropessimism K
***AFF
Greatest Hits
 Gordon---2AC
Afropessimism is wrong---it’s an incomplete project which means it can be
dismantled and “institutions” are not monolithic---the alt’s determinism
trades off with the possibility of progress---that means the aff is a good
idea even if it fails
Lewis Gordon 17, Masters in Arts and in Philosophy @ Yale, PhD in Philosophy @ Yale,
Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Judaic Studies and the
Caribbean, Latino/a, and Latin American Studies, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs,
“Thoughts on Afropessimism”, 2o17, Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 1, 105–137 //hh

I begin with this tale of philosophical abstraction to contextualize Afropessimism. Its main exemplars, such as Jared
Sexton and Frank Wilderson III , emerged from academic literary theory, an area dominated by poststructuralism
even in many cases that avow ‘‘Marxism.’’ Sexton (2010) and Wilderson (2007) divert from a reductive poststructuralism,
however, through examining important existential moves inaugurated, as Daniel McNeil (2011, 2012)
observed, by Fanon and his intellectual heirs. The critical question that Afropessimism addresses

in this fusion is the viability of posed strategies of Black liberation . (I’m using the capital ‘‘B’’ here to
point not only to the racial designation ‘‘black’’ but also to the nationalist one ‘‘Black.’’ Afropessimists often mean both, since blacks
The world that produced blacks and in
and Blacks have a central and centered role in their thought.)
consequence Blacks is, for Afropessimists , a crushing, historical one whose Manichaean
divide is sustained contraries best kept segregated. Worse, any effort of mediation leads to
confirmed black subordination . Overcoming this requires purging the world of
antiblackness. Where cleansing the world is unachievable, an alternative is to disarm the force of antiblack
racism. Where whites lack power over blacks, they lose relevance – at least politically and at levels
of cultural and racial capital or hegemony. Wilderson (2008), for instance, explores my concept of ‘‘an antiblack world’’ to build
similar arguments. Sexton (2011) makes similar moves in his discussions of ‘‘social death.’’ As this forum doesn’t afford space for a
long critique, I’ll offer several, non-exhaustive criticisms. The first is that ‘‘an antiblack world’’ is not
identical with ‘‘the world is antiblack.’’ My argument is that such a world is an antiblack racist
project . It is not the historical achievement . Its limitations emerge from a basic fact : Black
people and other opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight, as we see today in
the #BlackLivesMatter movement and many others, against it. The same argument applies to the argument
about social death. Such an achievement would have rendered even these reflections stillborn. The basic premises of the
Afropessimistic argument are, then, locked in performative contradictions . Yet, they have
rhetorical force. This is evident through the continued growth of its proponents and forums (such
as this one) devoted to it. In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I argued that there are forms of antiblack racism offered under
the guise of love, though I was writing about whites who exoticize blacks while offering themselves as white sources of black value.
Analyzed in terms of bad faith , where one lies to oneself in an attempt to flee
displeasing truths for pleasing falsehoods , exoticists romanticize blacks while affirming
white normativity, and thus themselves, as principals of reality. These ironic, performative
contradictions are features of all forms of racism, where one group is elevated to godlike status
and another is pushed below that of human despite both claiming to be human. Antiblack racism
offers whites self-other relations (necessary for ethics) with each other but not so for groups forced in a
‘‘zone of nonbeing’’ below them. There is asymmetry where whites stand as others who look downward to those who are
not their others or their analogues. Antiblack racism is thus not a problem of blacks being ‘‘others.’’ It’s a
 Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), reminds
problem of their not-being-analogical-selves-and-not-evenbeing-others.
us that Blacks among each other live in a world of selves and others . It is in attempted
relations with whites that these problems occur. Reason in such contexts has a bad habit of walking out when
Blacks enter. What are Blacks to do? As reason cannot be forced, because that would be ‘‘violence,’’ they must ironically reason
Racism is, given these arguments, a project
reasonably with forms of unreasonable reason. Contradictions loom.
of imposing non-relations as the model of dealing with people designated ‘‘black.’’ In Les Damne de
la terre (‘‘Damned of the Earth’’), Fanon goes further and argues that colonialism is an attempt to impose a Manichean
structure of contraries instead of a dialectical one of ongoing, human negotiation of contradictions. The former segregates the
groups; the latter emerges from interaction. The police, he observes, are the mediator in such a situation, as their role is
force/violence instead of the human, discursive one of politics and civility (Fanon, 1991 ).
Such societies draw legitimacy
from Black non-existence or invisibility. Black appearance, in other words, would be a violation
of those systems. Think of the continued blight of police, extra-judicial killings of Blacks in those
countries. An immediate observation of many postcolonies is that antiblack attitudes, practices, and
institutions aren’t exclusively white . Black antiblack dispositions make this clear . Black
antiblackness entails Black exoticism. Where this exists, Blacks simultaneously receive Black
love alongside Black rejection of agency. Many problems follow. The absence of agency bars
maturation, which would reinforce the racial logic of Blacks as in effect wards of whites. Without
agency, ethics, liberation, maturation, politics, and responsibility could not be possible. Afropessimism faces the
problem of a hidden premise of white agency versus Black incapacity. Proponents of Afropessimism
would no doubt respond that the theory itself is a form of agency reminiscent of Fanon’s famous remark that though whites created
Whites clearly did not create Afropessimism , which
le Ne`gre it was les Ne`gres who created Ne´gritude.
Black liberationists should celebrate. We should avoid the fallacy, however, of confusing source with
outcome. History is not short of bad ideas from good people. If intrinsically good, however, each person of African descent would
become ethically and epistemologically a switching of the Manichean contraries, which means only changing players instead of the
game. We come, then, to the crux of the matter. Ifthe goal of Afropessimism is Afropessimism, its
achievement would be attitudinal and, in the language of old, stoic – in short, a symptom of antiblack
society. At this point, there are several observations that follow . The first is a diagnosis of the
implications of Afropessimism as symptom. The second examines the epistemological
implications of Afropessimism. The third is whether a disposition counts as a political act and, if so, is it sufficient for its
avowed aims. There are more, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll simply focus on these. An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it
is the other side of optimism. Oddly enough, both are connected to nihilism, which is, as Nietzsche
(1968) showed, a decline of values during periods of social decay. It emerges when people no longer want to be
responsible for their actions. Optimists expect intervention from beyond. Pessimists
declare relief is not forthcoming. Neither takes responsibility for what is valued . The valuing,
however, is what leads to the second, epistemic point. The presumption that what is at stake is what can be
known to determine what can be done is the problem . If such knowledge were possible, the
debate would be about who is reading the evidence correctly. Such judgment would be a
priori – that is, prior to events actually unfolding . The future, unlike transcendental conditions such as
language, signs, and reality, is, however, ex post facto: It is yet to come. Facing the future, the question isn’t what will be
or how do we know what will be but instead the realization that whatever is done will be that on which the

future will depend . Rejecting optimism and pessimism, there is a supervening alternative:
political commitment. The appeal to political commitment is not only in stream with what French existentialists call
l’intellectuel engage´ (committed intellectual) but also reaches back through the history and existential situation of enslaved,
racialized ancestors. Many were, in truth, an existential paradox: commitment to action without
guarantees. The slave revolts, micro and macro acts of resistance, escapes, and returns help
others do the same; the cultivated instability of plantations and other forms of enslavement, and
countless other actions, were waged against a gauntlet of forces designed to eliminate any
hope of success . The claim of colonialists and enslavers was that the future belonged to
them, not to the enslaved and the indigenous . A result of more than 500 years of conquest
and 300 years of enslavement was also a (white) rewriting of history in which African and First
Nations’ agency was, at least at the level of scholarship, nearly erased. Yet there was resistance

even in that realm, as Africana and First Nation intellectual history and scholarship attest .
Such actions set the course for different kinds of struggle today . Such reflections occasion meditations
on the concept of failure. Afropessimism , the existential critique suggests, suffers from a failure to
understand failure . Consider Fanon’s notion of constructive failure, where what doesn’t initially work
transforms conditions for something new to emerge. To understand this argument, one must rethink the
philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of Euromodern thought on what it means to be human. Atomistic and
individual substance-based, this model, articulated by Hobbes, Locke, and many others, is of a non-relational being that thinks, acts,
the human
and moves along a course in which continued movement depends on not colliding with others. Under that model,
being is a thing that enters a system that facilitates or obstructs its movement. An alternative model,
shared by many groups across southern Africa, is a relational version of the human being as part of a larger system of meaning.
Actions, from that perspective, are not about whether ‘‘I’’ succeed but instead about ‘‘our’’ story across time. As relational, it means
that each human being is a constant negotiation of ongoing efforts to build relationships
with others , which means no one actually enters a situation without establishing new situations of action and meaning.
Instead of entering a game, their participation requires a different kind of project – especially where the ‘‘game’’ was premised on
where the system or game repels initial participation, such repulsion is a shift in
their exclusion. Thus,
the grammar of how the system functions, especially its dependence on obsequious subjects. Shifted energy
affords emergence of alternatives. Kinds cannot be known before the actions that
birthed them. Abstract as this sounds, it has much historical support. Evelyn Simien (2016), in her insightful political study
Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s
Historic Firsts, examines the new set of relations established by
presidential campaigns. There could be no Barack Obama without such important
predecessors affecting the demographics of voter participation . Simien intentionally focused on the
most mainstream example of political life to illustrate this point. Although no exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s ‘‘success’’
emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and many others’) so-called ‘‘failure.’’ Beyond presidential
electoral politics, there are numerous examples of how prior, radical so-called ‘‘failures’’
transformed relationships that facilitated other kinds of outcome . The trail goes back to
the Haitian Revolution and back to every act of resistance from Nat Turner’s Rebellion in the
USA, Sharpe’s in Jamaica, or Tula’s in Curac¸ao and so many other efforts for social transformation to come. In
existential terms, then, many ancestors of the African diaspora embodied what Søren Kierkegaard (1983) calls an
existential paradox. All the evidence around them suggested failure and the futility of hope . They
first had to make a movement of infinite resignation – that is, resigning themselves to their
situation. Yet they must simultaneously act against that situation . Kierkegaard called this seemingly
contradictory phenomenon ‘‘faith,’’ but that concept relates more to a relationship with a transcendent, absolute being, which could
if Afropessimism appeals to
only be established by a ‘‘leap,’’ as there are no mediations or bridge. Ironically,
transcendent intervention, it would collapse into faith. If, however, the argument rejects
transcendent intervention and focuses on committed political action, of taking responsibility for a
future that offers no guarantees, then the movement from infinite resignation becomes
existential political action . At this point , the crucial meditation would be on politics and
political action . An attitude of infinite resignation to the world without the leap of committed
action would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic. Similarly, an attitude of hope or optimism about
the future would lack infinite resignation. We see here the underlying failure of the two approaches. Yet ironically,
there is a form of failure at failing in the pessimistic turn versus the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on resignation as the
goal, then the ‘‘act’’ of resignation would have been achieved, which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would be a successful
failing of failure. For politics to emerge , however, there are two missing elements in inward
pessimistic resignation . The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it requires the
expanding options of a social world. Turning away from the social world, though a statement about
politics, is not, however, in and of itself political. The ancients from whom much western political theory or
philosophy claimed affinity had a disparaging term for individuals who resigned themselves from political life: idio¯te¯s, a private
person, one not concerned with public affairs, in a word – an idiot. I mention western political theory because that is the hegemonic
intellectual context of Afropessimism. We don’t, however, have to end our etymological journey in ancient Greek. Extending our
linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years, we could examine the Middle Kingdom Egyptian word idi (deaf). The
presumption, later taken on by the ancient Athenians and Macedonians, was that a lack of hearing entailed isolation, at least in
terms of audio speech. The contemporary inward resignation of seeking a form of purity from the loathsome historical reality of racial
oppression, in this reading, collapses ultimately into a form of moralism (private, normative satisfaction) instead of public
responsibility born of and borne by action. The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without
[ power ] it. But what is power? Eurocentric etymology points to the Latin word potis as its source, from which came the word
‘‘potent’’ as in an omnipotent god. If we again look back further, we will notice the Middle Kingdom (2000 BCE–1700 BCE) KMT/
Egyptian word pHty, which refers to godlike strength. Yet for those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a
source: In the Coffin Texts, HqAw or heka activates the ka (sometimes translated as soul, spirit, or, in a word, ‘‘magic’’), which
makes reality. All this amounts to a straightforward thesis on power as the ability with the means to
make things happen . There is an alchemical quality to power. The human world, premised on symbolic
communication, brings many forms of meaning into being, and those new meanings afford
relationships that build institutions through a world of culture, a phenomenon that Freud (1989) rightly
described as ‘‘a prosthetic god.’’ It is godlike because it addresses what humanity historically sought from the gods: protection from
the elements, physical maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such
power clearly can be abused. It is where
those enabling capacities (empowerment) are pushed to the wayside in the hoarding of social
resources into propping up some people as gods that the legitimating practices of cultural
cum political institutions decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism . That institutions in
the Americas very rarely attempt establishing positive relations to Blacks is the subtext of
Afropessimism and this entire meditation. The discussion points, however, to a demand for
political commitment . Politics itself emerges under different names throughout the history of our species, but the one
occasioning the word ‘‘politics’’ is from the Greek po´lis, which refers to ancient Hellenic city-states. It identifies specific kinds of
activities conducted inside the city-state, where order necessitated the resolution of conflicts through rules of discourse the violation
of which could lead to (civil) war, a breaking down of relations appropriate for ‘‘outsiders.’’ Returning to the Fanonian observation of
selves and others, it is clear that imposed limitations on certain groups amounts to impeding
or blocking the option of politics . Yet, as a problem occurring within the polity, the problem short of war
becomes a political one. Returning to Afropessimistic challenges, the question becomes this: If
the problem of antiblack racism is conceded as political, where antiblack institutions of power
have, as their project, the impeding of Black power, which in effect requires barring Black access to
political institutions, then antiblack societies are ultimately threats also to politics defined as the
human negotiation of the expansion of human capabilities or more to the point: freedom. Anti-politics
is one of the reasons why societies in which antiblack racism is hegemonic are also
those in which racial moralizing dominates: moralizing stops at individuals at the expense of
addressing institutions the transformation of which would make immoral individuals
irrelevant . As a political problem, it demands a political solution . It is not accidental that Blacks
continue to be the continued exemplars of unrealized freedom. As so many from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Angela Davis (2003) and
Michelle Alexander (2010) have shown, the expansion of privatization and incarceration is squarely placed in a structure of states
and civil societies premised on the limitations of freedom (Blacks) – ironically, as seen in countries such as South Africa and the
United States, in the name of freedom.
 Spence---2AC
Learning to seize power through debating institutional dynamics enables
meaningful progress and internal link turns the alt
Lester Spence 15, Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns
Hopkins University, BA and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan,
“Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics”, Punctum Books, pp140-147
//hh

All four examples have a few things in common. First all occurred at a moment where all seemed lost. While
I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest that these events suggest that neoliberalism is “naturally” contested—just as there is no “good
while the neoliberal turn has signifcantly
teaching gene” there is no “contest neoliberalism gene”—I would say that
altered our ability to argue for public goods, it hasn’t killed that ability. It still exists . It exists in
institutions we have written of thinking they are no longer relevant —like teachers unions. It
exists in populations we’ve written of because we believe they are incapable of radical
political action— black youth . It exists in cities that we don’t think of as having a long
history of radical political struggle —like Jackson, Mississippi . Second all three recognized
the fundamental role politics played in their struggles. The black youth organizers recognized
that they had to pressure Maryland state legislators to kill the prison . The black radicals in
the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement made electing Chokwe Lumumba a component of
their organizing . The CTU chose to take the city head on and to hold a series of town hall
meetings designed to inform people of the ways political officials, philanthropists, and
corporations are working together to neoliberalize and kill public education. The
#blacklivesmatter movement recognized that politics was at the center of their struggle in
Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere . All campaigns used moral language in making their arguments.
In Jackson they argued that the current way power was allocated in Jackson was immoral because it
largely concentrated all of the benefits into a few (predominantly white) hands. In Baltimore they argued that
putting $104 million to the goal of incarcerating youth was immoral given the lack of money being spent on youth in other areas, and
later that Freddie Gray’s (and before him Tyrone West’s) murder was immoral. In Chicago they argued that closing 50 schools was
immoral because it severely impacted the ability of poor black parents and black students to get the same degree of learning their
white counterparts had. However, they didn’t rely on those arguments. They understood that seizing
power ( rather than speaking truth to it ), that proposing new alternatives, would at some
level have to involve political struggle. Morality wasn’t enough . Even if we had a common defnition of
morality, a Christian-infuenced morality for example, that sense of morality could still be interpreted in diferent ways based on
Relying on morality can make it hard to move against the wealthy charter school
material interest.
proponent who sincerely believes that privatizing public schools represent the best hope for
increasing positive outcomes among black children. Relying on morality can make it very difficult to argue against
the political bureaucrat who says — as they did in the case of Baltimore —that the conditions of youth currently held in adult prisons
is so bad that the moral choice would be to give them their own facility where they won’t have to face the risks associated with being
housed with adults. In deciding how we go about making our arguments and how we go about choosing our strategies and tactics
we should act morally—I do believe our politics have to be rooted in a certain sense of ethics. We should never , however,
ignore the fundamental role politics plays and should play in our struggle . Not only did
they focus on politics, they all relied on political organizing . Organizing that included long
discussions about political issues that mattered, but also parties and other events designed to get people working
with each other and trusting one another. In general, people do not come to a common understanding of the
structural dynamics of the problem they face, and to a common understanding of what the
solution should be , through being exposed to a charismatic speaker, or through “ loving black people”,
without having the space to talk about the issues in depth over a long period of time . The
CTU organized for several years to be able to get a 90% vote. The infrastructure black youth in Baltimore relied upon was by
definition designed to inculcate critical thinking skills as well as a sense of the way racism worked at structuring black life chances.
The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement worked for years to build the critical capacity required to elect Chokwe, first to the City
There is no way to get around the fact that the
Council, then Mayor, and to put the political platform into action.
type of work we have to do to rebuild a sense of the public interest is going to take a long time
and has to start by building connections between people who may not think of themselves
as political , who may not think of the various issues they struggle with as being the product of the neoliberal turn, who may
I’m
not know what neoliberalism is. What I am referring to here is not the same as getting people to attend a rally or a march.
referring to political organizing — building the capacity of people to govern and make
important political decisions for themselves —not political “mobilizing ”. Mobilizing people
for a protest act of one kind or another may get people out to engage in a specific act, but unless
combined with organizing work, will not cause those people to organize for themselves. Tird in each
case they were not only reactive, they were not only being critical of the turn and its efects, they proposed a positive
alternative. Protest is not enough . Just as the neoliberal turn did not simply occur when the welfare state was
removed, rather it occurred when the welfare state was removed and then replaced with a new program, we will not be able
to build a sustainable constituency for a new world without articulating as clearly as
possible what that new world will look like, what type of policies would result, what the
benefits of those policies would be . Fourth while each of these instances represent responses against the
neoliberal turn broadly considered, they each began locally. Te Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has several chapters throughout
the country and has already held one conference (planned before Lumumba’s untimely passing) about the Jackson model (which
itself is partially based on ideas developed in Spain) and how to export it to other cities. Te movement against the proposed youth
jail in Baltimore relied in part on data accumulated by the ACLU on the schoolto-prison pipeline. And as I noted above the Chicago
Teachers Union have begun organizing events all across the country to get people to understand how the privatization movement in
education afects them. And each of the #blacklivesmatter campaigns began with a specifc local act of police brutality and used that
act to organize locally. With this said though each case represents a local struggle people could experience directly. Mark Purcell
(2006) argues that academics and activists alike run the risk of falling into the “ local trap ” by arguing
that there is something inherently better and anti-neoliberal about organizing locally . I agree
with him a little. Te Civil Rights Movement represented in large part a fght against white supremacy as embedded in local and state
politics —the local was not the site of empowerment but rather the site of profound disempowerment for black people throughout the
North and the South. However at the same time I argue that sustainable organizing is more likely to occur in response to a local
issue (a local school closing, a rise in foreclosures in a local neighborhood, a jail built up the road, a local referendum) that can then
be connected to other local issues and made national rather than the other way around. And again the Civil Rights Movement
represents the best example of this —people weren’t interested in ending Jim Crow as much as they were interested in
desegregating the buses they took to work everyday, desegregating the restaurants they passed on the way to school,
desegregating the schools themselves. Fifth they used a variety of black institutions in their struggles. Te Baltimore youth all
attended black public schools in Baltimore. Tey used the public schools to garner support for their work and to build relationships
with black adults and black children. While a number of Baltimore area churches do promote the prosperity gospel, not all do. A few
black churches in Baltimore became critical spaces for organizing against the jail—in fact I ended up fnding out about the movement
against the jail in the frst place through hearing a young progressive black nationalist Baltimore pastor speak about the movement.
And they used popular culture. Tey used poetry, they used rap and hip-hop, they used parties, understanding that while again the
national terrain for hip-hop may move with rather than against the neoliberal turn, they themselves could use it to speak to their local
condition. And later they used these same institutions and spaces for their fght against police brutality. Similarly in Jackson the
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement did not operate from a clean slate. Tey relied on professors from nearby Jackson State University,
they used connections with local churches to gain support for their activities. And the CTU was itself located in one of the most
they all relied on the fundamental premise that black
important institutions in black communities, schools. Lastly,
people had the capacity to be the change they wanted to see in the world . They neither
believed that black people’s fundamental condition was bruised and broken, nor did they believe
that black people because of the contemporary condition didn’t love each other. At the same time
though they understood explicitly and implicitly that love was not enough . And while each organization does have a
number of leaders they have largely (though not fully) stayed away from the type of prophetic politics that have often created
problematic internal hierarchies. Again there are significant diferences between these instances. And even though each of
these instances were victorious ones that helped to change the terrain of political
struggle , there is still much more to be done . In the case of Baltimore they stopped the youth jail but
were not able to stop the privatization of Baltimore youth recreation centers, nor have they been able to (as of yet) redirect the $104
million to more progressive ends. Jackson elected Lumumba mayor but after his untimely passing his son ended up
coming in second. Chicago teachers made substantial gains as a result of the strike but they were not able
to prevent the 50 schools from being closed. The #blacklivesmatter movement as it stands has not gone without critique. Te
most notable one is that even though the project has increased the range of black lives that people are willing
to fight for, it still hasn’t gone far enough. Although it’s reasonable to assume, based on the limited data we have, that black boys
and young men are victimized by police more than other populations (and to the extent the zero-tolerance technology itself
generates broader forms of policing in places like schools), black boys and young men are not the sole target. Black women have
been victimized both directly and indirectly by police, as have black transgender populations. These acts have in many instances
been as violent as those perpetrated against their male counterparts, and they have been videotaped as well. But they haven’t
garnered the same degree of support and/or outrage. Extending the #blacklivesmatter movement to include the lives of black
women and transgender populations that are also the victims of police violence would be more than simply a good thing. However
there’s a more systemic problem at work. The idea behind “black lives matters” represents an opportunity to organize around and
against a certain type of suffering, a uniquely black suffering, made possible by the neoliberal turn. (It bears repeating, this is not
simply the “new Jim Crow” at work. The odds that someone like me would sufer the type of horrifc death someone like Freddie Gray
did is very slim.) However the politics of the #blacklivesmatter movement do not quite match the phrase. Every single time the
#blacklivesmatters movement appears it does so in the presence of either a horrific instance of black death or a startling instance of
police brutality. One could argue given this that the real politics of the movement refect the concept that (graphic) black death
matters rather than black life. This move makes a great deal of sense — one way to think about this move is to think about the way
civil rights movement activists used non-violence. Particularly when news cameras were present, non-violent tactics of protest
tended to really highlight how violent and terroristic white supremacy in the South and other places was. However, by privileging the
graphic black death, the victim shot in his back while running away, the victim who had his back violently broken by police, it ends
up ignoring the many forms of non-graphic black death that occurs not because of police violence per se, but because of economic
violence. If Freddie Gray weren’t murdered by the police but rather experienced a slow death due to lead poisoning it’s unlikely we’d
be talking about him right now. It’d be unlikely that Baltimore would’ve had anything like an uprising. Following up, by privileging
black death, graphic black death, we privilege certain types of tactics, strategies, and institutions. We counter the spectacle of the
murder with the spectacle of the mass assembly, in the form of the protest march, or the spectacle of the mass disruption, in the
form of the highway stoppage, or even in the form of the type of violent actvity the uprising hinted at. Actions in other words that are
not only designed to transform the event into a black-and-white catalytic moment where people and the institutions around them feel
forced to make a choice for the status quo or against it. And the organizations and institutions we call into being end up being those
designed to generate these types of activities and to generate support for these activities (in order to grow the organizations and
we also privilege anti-police legislation, and perhaps more
institutions themselves). As far as solutions go,
broadly, legislation designed to counter the school to prison pipeline. The political solution for black life
matters is to reduce the likelihood of a graphic singular black death— a kid shot on the way to the corner store, a young man shot
while holding a BB gun he may have planned on purchasing, a black couple driving a car with a tendency to backfre. The
types of politics that generate change when the deaths come slow, painfully, and in
aggregates , or when the issue is an entire legal framework (like the Maryland Law Enforcement Ofcers Bill of Rights) is a
diferent politics . It is not solely or primarily a politics of the spectacle . Spectacle can work here in
instances. It can be used to mobilize support. It can be used to increase awareness and general participation. And sometimes in
combination with other tactics it can be used to disrupt. To generate and prolong crises. The types of crises that engendered the
same type of problems that caused the neoliberal turn. Certainly in the case of Baltimore a range of institutions and elites had no
ready-to-roll-out solutions to the issues that the uprising called up. But these aren’t enough. It requires a politics
attuned to the type of long term institution building that builds the capacity of individuals
to govern and devise alternatives themselves . It also requires a solution set that is more
about combating the type of long term institutional violence that doesn’t necessarily have a
Trayvon Martin or a Freddie Gray at the center. The types of violence that, instead might have Freddie Gray at the
center, but not at the moment of his murder but at the moment he was found to have lead poisoning. I use these examples in order
to argue that we aren’t starting from scratch necessarily— some of the work is already being done
on the ground. I use these examples in order to show that we already have the seeds for a new institutional
framework that re-roots the economy in politics and in the public interest. To show that we aren’t alone,
and that a number of people recognize another way of life is possible. There aren’t as many of us as we’d like,

but there are far more of us than we think.

 Lipsitz---2AC
Social death is wrong---abolition democracy, Civil Rights Movement, and
BLM all prove---future-oriented resistance is good
George Lipsitz 17, American Studies scholar and professor in the Department of Black
Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, "What is
this Black in the Black Radical Tradition?”, in “Futures of Black Radicalism”, pp108-110, google
books //hh

Three miracles seem to characterize the history of Black people in the United States. The very survival of Black
people in the face of murderous brutality and genocidal intent qualifies as a miracle . The
enduring reality of Black humanity in a society that has used every means at its disposal to
destroy Black dignity and deny Black people the opportunity to exercise their full humanity
appears miraculous. The historical record of democratic aspiration and achievement by Black
people , of creating democratic opportunities for themselves and extending them to others,
seems to defy normal rational explanations . Despite the social death at the center of the
slave system and the organized abandonments of today's neoliberal capitalism, despite beatings, lynchings,
shootings, mass incarceration and systematic impoverishment, Black people have survived
and thrived . In slavery, African people in the Americas owned virtually nothing, not even the
skin on their backs. They had every reason to give in to despair. Yet they somehow managed to
survive , to extend recognition and respect to each other while in bondage , and to
maintain a commitment to the linked fate of all humans. Time and time again, Black people have countered
vicious dehumanization with determined and successful re-humanization. Insisting on their own humanity and

the humanity of all people , even that of their oppressors, they have been at the forefront of what Dr.
King called “the bitter but beautiful struggle” for a more just and better world. From the
egalitarian politics of abolition democracy in the wake of the Civil War and the
participatory democracy of the civil rights movement to the contemporary insurgencies
waged under the banners of # BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName , struggles for Black
survival and Black humanity have repeatedly linked the termination of existing racist
policies to the creation of new democratic practices and institutions. Forced to cope with the nadir
of political evil over centuries, Black people have responded consistently by forging advanced concepts
of a deeply politicized love . Perhaps precisely because brutality and oppression can make people decidedly unlovable,
African people in America have been adept at finding ways to perceive something left to love
inside themselves and in others. That ability has enabled their survival, the preservation of their
humanity, and their emergence as the nation's foremost champions of democracy and social justice. The people who were
systematically denied access to the fruits and benefits of democratic citizenship and social membership turned out to be the people
three
who valued democracy the most and who did the most to extend it to others. Cedric Robinson has demonstrated that the
miracles were not really miracles at all, but rather products of a collective intelligence developed
over generations of struggle. In Black Marxism, Robinson defines the Black Radical Tradition as “the continuing
development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of
the greatest achievement of the
obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”1 Thus in many ways,
Black community was itself, its emergence as an aggrieved and insurgent polity committed
to social justice. The “Black” in the Black Radical Tradition is a politics rather than a
 pigment, a culture rather than a color. Yet this Blackness does not presume a unified homogenous
community with only one set of interests, needs, and desires. On the contrary, Robinson's research reveals
that the key building blocks for Black survival, Black humanity, and Black democracy came from
the lower rungs of Black society, from the plantations and slave quarters, out of the
contradictions of the rural regimes of slavery and debt peonage and the living conditions in
ghettos of northern and western cities. Experience taught the Black poor and the Black working
class that racial capitalism entailed “an unacceptable standard of human conduct”2 that they
needed to counter with a politics that was “inventive rather than imitative , communitarian
rather than individualistic, democratic rather than republican, Afro-Christian rather than secular and materialist.”3
Robinson's emphasis on political struggle as the main explanation for Black survival,
humanity, and democracy reminds us not to confuse the grandiose aspirations and illusions
of the powerful with the actual lived experiences of those they control . Slavery did
mandate legally and militarily supported social death, but slaves worked assiduously and
effectively each day, every day, each year, and every year to create a rich social life. 4 As
Robinson argues, “Slavery gave the lie to its own conceit: one could not create a perfect system of
oppression and exploitation .”5 Domination produces resistance , and resistance plants the
seeds of a new society within the shell of the old. As Robinson explains in Black Movements in America, "The
resistances to slavery were the [END PAGE 109] principal grounds for the radically alternative political culture that coalesced in the
Black communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the era of revolutionary, liberal and nationalist impulses among
Europeans in North America.” 6 Declaring Blacks to be less than human could not make them so ,
even in the eyes of their oppressors. Research by John Blassingame, George Rawick, Sterling Stuckey, Herbert Gutman, and
slaves fused African retention and New World invention to
Stephanie Camp (among others) reveals how
forge a culture that affirmed their humanity and the humanity of others.7 They recognized this common
humanity through multicultural, multiracial alliances with poor whites and others in maroon communities. 8 In colonial Louisiana,
Blacks reached out to Native Americans for help in resisting slavery.9 Slave owners, however, were less
successful in preserving their own humanity . In order to maintain the illusion of complete
control, they tortured, whipped, hanged, burned, and dismembered their "property" when it
displayed signs of having human will.10 Black people witnessed white people's inhumanity and
pitied them. As early as the 1820s, David Walker argued that while whites lost the moral capacity to perceive
the evil they enacted, they nonetheless knew "in their hearts" that Blacks were human. He argued
that it was precisely this recognition that propelled their cruelty and brutality: they presumed that
Blacks resented them and, if given the opportunity, would do to whites what whites had done to
Blacks.11 In his history of the New Orleans slave market, Walter Johnson notes a similar loss of humanity among slave owners.
Whites invested more than money in the slave system; they looked to it to elevate them beyond the status of ordinary mortals and
became outraged when their chattel refused to conform to the roles they had been assigned. Johnson notes: The greater the
transformative hopes slaveholders took with them to the slave market, the more violent their reactions to the inevitable
disappointment of their efforts to get real slaves to act like imagined ones ... If they had to, they would use brutality to close the
distance between the roles they imagined for themselves and the failings of the slaves they bought as props for their performance.
12 [END PAGE 110]
 Lipsitz---AT: Voting/Housing Acts Bad---1AR
Yes progress---individual instances of failure doesn’t prove broader
structures, just that those laws were poorly written and got circumvented
Naomi Zack 17, Ph.D, Columbia University, New York, Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Oregon, Eugene, “Ideal, Nonideal, and Empirical Theories of Social Justice: The
Need for Applicative Justice in Addressing Injustice” in “The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy
and Race”, Feb 2017, 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190236953.013.59 [ability edited] //hh

Voting Rights and Residential Segregation The coexistence of just law, principled progressive
rhetoric, and unjust practice is clearly evident in US race-related voting policies and residential
segregation. In both the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, legal justice
was announced, which has been circumvented by apparently legal unjust practices. Many
whose interests are at stake do not regularly vote, because of a general political cynicism or local experience that their votes do not
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was meant to
affect their lives, or in some cases, new political barriers to voting.
protect the rights of blacks to vote in southern states and localities where white officials had
violated that right. The Act required federal judicial jurisdiction over “voting qualifications or prerequisites.” The 113th
Congress passed the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014, stating that it “Expands the types of violations triggering the authority
of a court to retain such jurisdiction to include certain violations of the Act as well as violations of any federal voting rights law that
prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.” However, the 2014 Amendment
Act also “Excludes from the list of violations triggering jurisdiction retention authority any voting qualification or prerequisite which
results in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote that is based on the imposition of a requirement (p. 555) that an individual
provide a photo identification as a condition of receiving a ballot for voting in a federal, state, or local election” (113th Congress,
2013–2014). After the 2014 Voting Rights Amendment Act, a number of state legislatures passed, or began the process of passing,
voter photo identification requirements, and a debate is in process. Proponents of the 2014 Amendment Act claim that photo IDs
prevent voter fraud. Opponents claim that the risk of voter fraud has been exaggerated and that photo identification requirements
make it more difficult for some poor, nonwhite, and elderly citizens to vote—and that the requirements favor Republicans, because
those voters without photo IDs are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates (Charen 2014). No one can credibly say that
nonwhite citizens do not have a right to vote. But for some, that
right is mediated by requirements that they may
not be easily able to meet; that is, their right to vote is obstructed. Race-related unjust practices
by federal government agencies and local government have been more specific than the
general pronouncements of the Fair Housing Act, as well as the Voting Rights Act. The 1965 Fair
Housing Act outlawed racial discrimination in housing, but the exclusion of nonwhites from
housing available to whites continued from earlier polices that were in place higher up the
property chain than direct discrimination at the point of sale or rental. In a 2014 report for the Economic Policy Institute,
government policy on state and local levels explicitly
Richard Rothstein provides an historical account of how
supported residential racial segregation, and how the fact of racial segregation restricted the kind of housing that
nonwhites could buy or rent. Rothstein’s focus is on the race-related housing history of Ferguson, Missouri, and nearby townships.
But, insofar as he is referring to national practices, instituted or approved by the federal government, and insofar as many
communities throughout the United States have racially segregated, substandard housing, with substandard infrastructure and
public services, Rothstein’s report is a description of national injustice. Rothstein writes that in spite of the Fair Housing Act, the
following practices became commonplace: Many … explicitly segregationist governmental actions ended in the late 20th century but
continue to determine today’s racial segregation patterns. In St. Louis these governmental policies included zoning rules that
classified white neighborhoods as residential and black neighborhoods as commercial or industrial; segregated public housing
projects that replaced integrated low-income areas; federal subsidies for suburban development conditioned on African American
exclusion; federal and local requirements for, and enforcement of, property deeds and neighborhood agreements that prohibited
resale of white-owned property to, or occupancy by, African Americans; tax favoritism for private institutions that practiced
segregation; municipal boundary lines designed to separate black neighborhoods from white ones and to deny necessary services
to the former; real estate, insurance, and banking regulators who tolerated and sometimes required racial segregation; and urban
renewal plans whose purpose was to shift black populations from central cities like St. Louis to inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson.
(Rothstein 2014, 2) Rothstein also notes that governmental actions supported a segregated labor market so that most African
Americans could not afford to move to into middle-class communities, and when they did, unscrupulous real estate agents scared
white owners into selling their property at below-market prices. The inability to accumulate intergenerational wealth through home
ownership creates a further dimension of the injustice of US segregated residential housing (Rothstein 2014, 6). (p. 556) One
way to approach situations such as unfairly segregated housing would be through
additional legal action that positively specified both how such progressive formal law
(e.g., the Fair Housing Act, Hud.Gov. 2015) was required to be implemented and how violations would
be penalized . It is naïve to assume that the only thing necessary for racial equality in housing is
that sellers and landlords not discriminate, when the regulatory and sales apparatus of the
housing industry is discriminatory. The net effect of that apparatus is that many African Americans, whose parents
cannot subsidize a down payment for home ownership or three-months’ rent in advance for first-time rentals, will not face racial
discrimination if they try to buy or rent in a segregated black ghetto! General ignorance about the history of
housing segregation , with government support on federal as well as local levels, indicates that there is much
about the relationship between written law and societal reality that requires empirical
research to support the discourse of injustice theory . At the very least, the ways that the freedoms
legitimately inherent in private property rights have been abused by some to limit the freedoms of others should be considered as
part of any theory of ownership.
Impact Turns
 Institutions Good---2AC
Institutional focus is vital to dismantle white supremacy and the carceral
state---focus on spectacular revolution trades off with tedious analysis of
how institutions shape racialized violence
Kirstine Taylor 18, assistant professor in Political Science and the Center for Law, Justice &
Culture @ Ohio University, law and society scholar who specializes in the politics of race in
American democratic thought and institutions, and African American political thought, “American
political development and black lives matter in the age of incarceration”, Taylor and Francis,
Published online Jan 19 2018,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21565503.2017.1419434 //hh
APD = American political development
What is the use and purpose of American political development (APD) in the era of Black Lives
Matter? At first glance it might appear that the discipline, preoccupied as it is with apprehending
the historical development of U.S. political institutions and the durability of shifts in the governing power

of the American state, is perhaps less than agile at analyzing such a new, evolving, and diffuse
social movement (Orren and Skowronek 2004). Indeed, as Christopher Lebron notes, unlike the Black Power Movement
whose political vision is contained in Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s indispensable 1967 text, Black Power, the Movement for
Black Lives has no singular text to provide it with philosophical anchorage (Lebron 2017). And in place of centralized leadership that
has been a hallmark of black civil rights organizations since the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), the Movement instead mobilizes in real time based on a simple, urgent claim: that black lives are human lives and
should not be subjected to cursory, vengeful or routine termination. These characteristics present challenges to scholars seeking to
the precarity of
assess the Movement’s precise impact on state development and state power. At the same time, however,
African American lives in the U.S. is not a new phenomenon, nor is mobilization for the
protection of those lives. When Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created the Movement for Black
Lives, they responded not only to a singular event of violence perpetrated and justice denied – the 2013 acquittal of
neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin – but to deeply rooted and

deeply historical patterns of racialized state violence in the U.S. As Neil Roberts puts it, Martin’s death
“marks a moment in American political life where past and future are mutually determining” (2012). In this sense, Garza, Cullors,
Tometi and the countless advocates of #BlackLivesMatter tread in the tradition of Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde,
James Baldwin, and others who have mobilized against the vilification of blackness and for the protection of black people since the
end of Reconstruction (Francis 2014; Taylor 2016; Lebron 2017). Since Martin’s death, the work of the Movement has only spread
as the list of names of black and brown men, women, and children subjected to police violence grows longer. A year after
Zimmerman’s acquittal protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri in response to officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of Michael
Brown. This event crystalized state violence in black communities as a national problem and crystalized #BlackLivesMatter as, in
the words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “a movement, not a moment” (Taylor 2016). In 2016, the Movement articulated a radical
platform includes the
platform of liberation centered on the “increasingly visible violence against Black people.”1 The
familiar problem of violent policing, but also targets what Juliet Hooker terms “the key pillars of
contemporary white supremacy”: mass incarceration, heightened state surveillance of
black-centered organizations, the militarization of law enforcement, capital punishment,
and economic injustice (Hooker 2017). While #BlackLivesMatter is best known for its attention to policing, the
Movement is dedicated to fighting a complex set of interlocking institutions that render
black life in the U.S. precarious . In this light, given the longstanding and ongoing nature of the problems to which the
Movement responds, the question of APD’s utility in the age of Black Lives Matter actually betrays a prior question that scholars of
APD may yet grapple with: What
is the use of APD in an age in which African Americans and other
people of color are disproportionately subjected to the racialized state powers of surveillance, policing,
and incarceration? In this article, I seek to clarify APD’s role in analyzing the institutions to which the Movement for Black Lives
primarily responds – surveillance, policing, and incarceration. In particular, I speak to what the discipline can offer
given the challenges of the current Trump era . The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency and the
concurrent popularization of white populist nationalism in mainstream American politics presents unique challenges. From his 1989
insistence that the Central Park Five be executed to his suggestion that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in
Trump has owed his political rise in part to a form of
August 2017 was attended by “very fine people,” President
open racial demagoguery not seen in a presidential election since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 bid. What was once
aberrational in the post-civil rights era is now nearly common. Today, as scholars strive to understand how we arrived, or arrived
again, in an era of overt white supremacist rhetoric, APD’s focus on historical institutional change offers
necessary grounding . In the case of Black Lives Matter, the discipline fills out the picture of how the
U.S. carceral state , encompassing surveillance, law enforcement, and incarceration, became a primary
governing institution in the U.S . – and what relation this bears to spectacular displays of
white nationalism that are increasingly common today.

Rethinking racism in the age of incarceration

At the height of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s then chief strategic advisor Steven Bannon commented on Black
“In the meantime, here’s a thought,” wrote Bannon, “What
Lives Matter protests in the wake of police violence.
if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world,
some people who are naturally aggressive and violent” (2016). Here as elsewhere, Bannon sounds for all the
world like midcentury southern segregationists who denounced the Civil Rights Movement and the implementation of Brown v.
the idea of
Board of Education by offering up well-worn images of black criminality. Popularized in the early twentieth century,
innate black criminality has buttressed a host of urban, state, and national policies
regarding African Americans (Muhammad 2010). But in the 1950s and 1960s, the idea hit new heights of popularity as
the nation adjusted to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that separate did not mean equal. In September 1956, for instance, two
years after Washington, D.C. desegregated its public schools, the monthly publication of the Mississippi White Citizens’ Council ran
a political cartoon depicting violence in the capitol city’s integrated schools. In it, a schoolhouse, labeled “the nation’s integrated
showcase,” explodes from the inside out, its roof flying off and its doors bursting open to expel white students who run with arms
outstretched to the safety of nearby Virginia (The Citizens Council 1956). At the time, Virginia was the home of the massive
resistance movement, so called because it sought to resist any desegregation effort in keeping with the Supreme Court’s decision.
The message of the cartoon is clear: white students can only be kept safe by keeping their schools free from black students. On this
logic, integration and black civil rights are law-and-order issues. The Citizens’ Council was not alone in this rhetoric. Other southern
publications likewise bolstered the supposed link between blackness and violence. Massive resistance literature out of Alabama
darkly reported in 1961 that “Negro juvenile delinquency” in Philadelphia escalated due to black and white students attending
integrated schools (George 1961). The author, the segregationist crusader W. George, linked this outcome to the “hereditary”
propensity of black youth towards crime. Segregationist politicians eagerly dispensed the same rhetoric. In the months before the
1960 Civil Rights Act moved through Congress, for instance, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond submitted a report into the
Congressional Record that argued there was an “incontrovertible link” between integration and crime, and accused New York
senator Jacob Javits and other civil rights supporters of attempting to “‘export’ New York City’s combination of integration, crime,
and racial strife to the South” (quoted in Crespino 2012). But by the time Barry Goldwater secured the Republican nomination for the
presidency in 1964, theories of innate black criminality were largely considered out of step with American values, and Goldwater’s
bigoted campaign lost definitively to Lyndon B. Johnson’s coalition of liberals and moderates. In place of overtly racist rhetoric that
If the idea
sutured criminality biologically to race, colorblindness came to define the racial rhetoric of the post-civil rights era.
that African Americans are “naturally” predisposed to “aggression and violence,” in Bannon’s
terminology, reeks of old-fashioned biological racism, scholarship in race and APD
demonstrates that the expansion of state institutions that disproportionately target,
police, and incarcerate African Americans and other people of color elides easy
categorization . In fact, the decades of overt white supremacy’s relative absence in national political campaigns are the very
decades of the U.S. carceral system’s most rapid expansion. Between Goldwater’s campaign and Donald Trump’s, the U.S. carceral
population grew from two hundred thousand to over two million people. Currently, an astonishing 6.7 million adults are incarcerated
in prisons or jails or are on probation or parole, and several hundred thousand more are detained in immigration detention centers
That the U.S. carceral system has a distinctly racial
and juvenile correctional facilities (Kaeble and Glaze 2016).
character is undeniable, so much so that Michelle Alexander has termed it “the New Jim Crow”
(2010). At yearend 2015, African Americans and Latinos together made up 57% of the U.S. prison population and fully half of the
U.S. jail population, far outpacing their share of the general population (Carson and Anderson 2016; Minton and Zeng 2016). What
APD
role did arguments of the Citizens Council and Strom Thurmond play in the creation of the carceral state? Some
scholarship argues that midcentury southern segregationists played an outsized role. According to
these scholars, the rise of law-andorder politics and the subsequent ballooning of the U.S. carceral system is the result of southern
racial conservatives working to maintain the violent prerogatives of Jim Crow, white working class discomfiture with the scope of
liberal civil rights policy, or the result of Nixonian southern strategists capitalizing on rising white anxieties of “street crime” after the
riots of the 1960s (Carter 1995; Beckett 1999; Flamm 2005; Weaver 2007; Alexander 2010). But while it is possible to draw a line
from midcentury southern segregationists’ rhetoric of black “criminality” to the tough-on-crime politics that popularized the War on
scholarship also cautions that
Drugs, mandatory minimums, “three strikes” laws, and crime control legislation, recent
overt racism played only a partial role in the creation of the carceral state. Naomi Murakawa and
historian Elizabeth Hinton, for instance, each document the role that liberal policymakers have played in the
creation of our now expansive prison system (Murakawa 2014; Hinton 2016). Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Daniel HoSang,
and Jordan Camp have separately illustrated the popularization of crime policy in the supposedly liberal bastion of California
(Gilmore 2007; HoSang 2010; Camp 2016). Marie Gottschalk highlights, among other things, the surprising role victim’s rights
groups played in passing tough-on-crime legislation and the severely limited dent prison reform movements have made in recent
efforts to reduce the prison population (2006, 2014). Judah Schept documents the steadfast commitment to prison building in the
progressive university town of Bloomington, Indiana (2015). And Michael Javen Fornter and James Forman, Jr. both identify black
elected officials as central figures in the twentieth century’s drive to incarcerate black people (Fortner 2015; Forman 2017). In my
own research, which focuses on the development of state-level carceral policy in the post-World War II American South, I am finding
that even in the nation’s most racially conservative region the origins of crime policy are multiple,
encompassing Old South segregationist and New South moderate legislative agendas .
For instance, North Carolina, long considered the South’s most progressive state, was a pioneer of carceral expansion at
midcentury. Between 1951 and 1969, North Carolina substantially revised and expanded its criminal code, increased and
professionalized its investigative and law enforcement agencies, increased its capacity to incarcerate juvenile offenders, and
doubled its prison population, which would balloon alongside the nations in subsequent decades. African Americans felt these
developments most acutely. By 2012, 56% of North Carolina’s 38,385 inmates were African Americans, far outpacing their
representation in their overall population in the state (Lancaster and Sullivan 2012). These expansions took place as North Carolina
politicians attempted to rein in both white supremacist violence and black civil rights activism, what politicians referred to as
“extremism on both sides.” On the one hand, the new crime legislation and increased law enforcement powers targeted the activities
of the United Klans of America, a white terrorist organization who boasted a particularly large membership in North Carolina in the
1960s. Consider, for instance, Governor Terry Sanford’s language in a speech denouncing the growth of the Klan in the summer of
1964: Because there is a growing concern across the state, I think it is necessary to remind the people involved that the Ku Klux
Klan is not going to take over North Carolina. Taking the law into their hands, running people away, burning crosses, making
threats, wearing hoods, are all illegal practices and are not going to be permitted ... Let the KKK get this clear. I am not going to
tolerate their illegal actions, and the people of North Carolina are not going to put up with it. I repeat, the KKK is not going to take
over North Carolina. (Sanford 1964a) In an effort to curtail well-worn tactics of white extralegal violence gaining speed and force in
the state, the North Carolina General Assembly passed explicitly anti-Klan legislation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the
General Assembly created special punishments for arson of public buildings, made it unlawful to use a false bomb or call in false
bomb threats, outlawed the use of threats over the phone, created mandatory minimum punishments for the possession of
explosives, and made it unlawful to burn schoolhouses. Even as they outlawed the high crimes of dedicated white supremacists,
North Carolina politicians also passed new legislation designed to criminalize the everyday, nonviolent political behavior of black
civil rights activists. When the Greensboro Four first sat down at Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960, launching the sit-in
movement that would soon spread like wildfire across the South, the governor responded not with the terminology of innate black
criminality, but of public safety. He explained to a gathering of black civil rights leaders in 1963: These mass demonstrations also
had reached the point where I, as head of the executive branch of government, responsible for law enforcement, peace and order,
was required to establish a firm policy for North Carolina. My responsibility for public safety required that I take action before danger
erupted into violence. I do not intend to let mass demonstrations destroy us. I hope you will not declare war on those who urge
courses of reason at this time. (Sanford 1964b) New legislation designed to criminalize civil rights protest heightened the state’s
power to police, apprehend, and jail black citizens. By the close of the 1960s, North Carolina had passed new criminal trespass
laws, made “demonstrations or assemblies of persons kneeling or lying down in public buildings” a misdemeanor crime, and
outlawed several tactics and activities relating to the Civil Rights Movement. The targeted policing of African Americans, the purview
of law enforcement since the invention of slave patrols, now took on a colorblind cast. Increasingly in the midcentury South, the
racialized policing of civil rights activists, and black use of public space more generally, operated absent the old segregationist logic
that African Americans are naturally violent. Instead, a surprisingly raceneutral language of “public peace” and “law and order” came

institutional roots
to define the growing carceral regime of the New South. In sum, the literature demonstrates that the

of U.S. carceral expansion are multiple and complex, and cannot be

reduced to the presence of overt white supremacist logics . To be sure, conservative
politicians have been the traditional proponents of tough-on-crime laws. Richard Nixon pioneered “law and order” as a winning
political rhetoric in his Southern Strategy in 1968. Ronald Reagan famously insisted that he had an “eighteenth-century attitude on
law and order.” And in 2016, Donald Trump accepted the nomination to the U.S. presidency with a direct message: “I am the law-
and-order candidate.” But despite
the ostensible link between law-and-order Republican leaders, racial
conservatism, and crime policy, the institutional history of the carceral system’s development in
the last half of the twentieth century is far more complicated . Indeed, the two farthest-reaching crime bills
in American history were the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1968 and the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act,
both signed into law under Democratic administrations. In the South, law enforcement expanded and new crime legislation passed,
both falling heaviest on African Americans, at the very historical moment that Klan activity was outlawed and white supremacy
derided as outdated and hateful.

Conclusions

The scholarship revealing the complex racial roots of U.S. carceral state does not stand alone
in its attention to race and political development . Scholars of race and APD have for
decades labored to reveal the racial underpinnings of the American state . This scholarship
spans virtually every aspect of the nation’s political development, and includes uneven
processes of regional democratization (Lowndes 2009; Johnson 2010; Mickey 2015), segregation and city
development (Sugrue 2005; Lassiter 2006; HoSang 2010; Johnson 2014; Schickler 2016), labor (Frymer 2011), law and
civil rights (Brandwein 1999; Novkov 2008; Dawson 2013; Francis 2014; Thurston 2015), the formation of police (Sullivan
2008; Singh 2014), the presidency (Milkis 2008), and the way we count citizens (Thompson 2016). Despite the fact
that, as Julie Novkov, Joseph Lowndes, and Dorrian T. Warren have noted, “race is present at every critical moment in political
development in the United States,” it is only in the last few decades the precise relationship between race and the nation’s political
development has been a subject of serious scholarship (Lowndes, Novkov, Warren 2008). In transgressing disciplinary norms and
ideological blind spots that typically understand race, racism, and anti-racist movements as side stories rather than main features of
the literature on race and APD has revealed that race is a central feature in the
political development,
creation, management, and governance of American political institutions. The form of state
power that the Movement for Black Lives identifies as “ the war on black people ” – the cocktail of
racialized surveillance, policing, and incarceration that plagues black communities and other communities of color – can and
has operated in the absence of racial demagoguery . To be sure, this does not lessen or alleviate the
necessity of eradicating white nationalism, and particularly white nationalist violence, from our current politics, but it does suggest
that vanquishing these does not “fix” the problem of racialized state violence. Indeed, if we are to learn any lessons from the history
of mass incarceration’s emergence and development from the APD literature, it should be that racialized state power does
not require the terminology of white supremacists. In an era of Charlottesville and chants of “Build the wall!”
our collective focus is easily drawn to the spectacular and away from the
longstanding and institutional, but black and brown lives also depend on
our attention to the quieter routines of institutionalized racial violence that
have developed in post-civil rights era – even, and perhaps especially, in the absence of overt
demagoguery. This
is the task of APD in the age of Black Lives Matter: to provide a longer, larger,
and more complicated story of the institutions and patterns of governance that render
black lives uniquely precarious in American life.
 Hope Good---AT: Warren/Sullivan---2AC
Meliorism, or pragmatic hope, overcomes Warren’s and Sullivan’s
critiques---aiming for proximate, possible goals solves their offense---it’s
uniquely true in the context of refining demands over a series of debates
Sarah M. Stitzlein 18, Professor, University of Cincinnati School of Education and Affiliate,
Philosophy Department, “Hoping and Democracy”, Contemporary Pragmatism 15 (2018) 228-
250,
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah_Stitzlein/publication/325585403_Hoping_and_Demo
cracy/links/5c2d0259a6fdccfc707827c5/Hoping-and-Democracy.pdf *we disagree with use of
gendered language as quoted //hh

Second, structural violence and inequality, common amongst poor and racial minority
communities in America , has wreaked havoc on hope. In some cases, it has eroded hope.11 In others it
has rendered hope exhausting,12 with marginalized citizens told that they must never give
up hope and that they must keep trying to earn a better life for themselves, in part through improving
their own character regardless of the stagnant harmful practices of others. Many of those citizens are left either
nihilistically without hope or perpetually chasing a vision of justice that is (perhaps sometimes
intentionally kept) out of reach.13 I intend to describe a form of hope that is more
sustainable and more attuned to the real conditions of life that we can control and others
where we have limited control.

<BEGIN FOOTNOTE 12> Calvin Warren , “ Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope ,” cr: The
New Centennial Review, 15 (2015), pp. 215–248. Shannon Sullivan , “Setting aside hope: A pragmatist
approach to racial justice,” in Pragmatism and Justice, ed. by Susan Dielman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). <END FOOTNOTE 12>

Third, citizenship in America has increasingly become centered on individuals, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, and private
success. Historical accounts of rugged individualism have now joined forces with calls to educate children in grit and expectations
that one will fight to earn one’s position and goods in a competitive marketplace.14 This environment lacks trust in others and
discourages collaborative effort. Often those who have not been successful in the past, or do not see viable avenues for being so in
the future, fatalistically accept these conditions and become passive about countering or changing them. While others who have
enough resources and power to be comfortable with the present conditions, indulge in the privilege of being cynical or apathetic.
Some spread these states of hopelessness or jaded negativity through memes and messages on social media, especially about the
role and effectiveness of government, rendering cynicism a collective practice.15 Cynics, left believing that their political efforts are
useless or ineffective and perhaps that everyone acts on self-interest, are left to look out merely for themselves, without a sense of
responsibility to act on behalf of themselves and others. Indeed, cynics may mock others who do not hold such views as naïve and
out of touch with reality. Cynicism functions as a distancing maneuver, separating citizens from each other, from formal democratic
institutions, and from civic organizations, where visions of an improved world and action to achieve it tend to occur. My notion of
hope aims to span those divides.

Finally, what is left of hope has become privatized.16 This is exacerbated as neoliberalism continues to
assert Margaret Thatcher’s claims, “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families,” and “there is no
alternative to the market.” Hope is reduced to a mere drive to achieve one’s own limited dreams,
or those of one’s children, typically only through financial terms and material goods. When citizens are
rendered isolated competitors, they lose the ability to detect social problems and the motivation to ameliorate them, especially if the
effects on one’s self or family are not immediate. Economist Tyler Cowen describes these citizens as the new “complacent class,”
who are content with the way things are as long as they are not directly harmed and as long as they can stay surrounded by people
and things that confirm their experience of the world. In their complacency, the members of the complacent class are unable to
“inspire an electorate with any kind of strong positive visions, other than some marginal adjustments.”17 I aim to show how hope
is better understand as a social and political endeavor that brings us into contact with others as
we craft visions of the future.
In sum, these changes in citizens’ lives and views debilitate individual citizens and democracy as a whole. They keep us from
recognizing and solving collective problems and from leading better lives together. Citizens sit around waiting for reasons to hope,
sometimes becoming swept up in campaign rhetoric when election cycles come around, rather than acknowledging that hope is
I will turn now to depict a pragmatist account
generated through action as subjects working together, as I will argue.
of hope that can be formally cultivated in schools and informally in our lives together—a way of hoping
together that may better support democratic life in these challenging times.

2 Pragmatist Hope

I offer here a pragmatist account of hope , largely based in the philosophy of John Dewey. Notably, Dewey
himself does not provide such an account, even though hope underlies much of his work and was evident in his own personal life as
he encountered considerable despair at the loss of two of his children and his wife, while also facing two world wars. I construct a
Pragmatism begins
view of hope from Dewey’s well-articulated elements of inquiry, growth, truth, meliorism, and habits.
with the real and complicated conditions of our world. It brings together intelligent reflection with
inquiry, habits, and action so that we can understand and change our environments to better align
with our needs and desires. Hope plays an important role in that process.

Inquiry, Growth, and Truth

For Dewey, hope often arises within the midst of despair, when we have lost our way and are struggling to move forward. Dewey
describes these moments as “indeterminate situations.” He turns to the process of inquiry via the empirical method to help us
explore those situations, consider possible courses of action, and test out various solutions. It is inquiry that helps us to understand,
act upon, and reconstruct our environments and our experiences so that we are able to move forward out of the indeterminate
situation. In a richly cognitive and often social practice, inquiry invokes curiosity and problem solving to move us out of ruts. Indeed,
Growth describes how
this method combats the stagnation of fatalism by urging us to formulate and try out solutions.
reconstructions of our experiences through inquiry develops physical, intellectual, and
moral capacities , actualizing them and helping them inform one another so that they continue
in a chain that enables one to live satisfactorily. We grow when we learn from inquiry into indeterminate situations
and create ways to re-establish smooth living that carries us from one activity to the next. Many people wrongly

assume that growth necessarily has an end —as if it were “movement toward a fixed goal.”18 We tend to
think of growth as only progression toward some specific outcome, such as mastering bicycle riding or
graduating from high school. But this way of thinking tends to place the emphasis on the static terminus, rather than focusing on the
process of growing as itself educative and worthwhile. Dewey’s alternative view of growth does not neatly and linearly
move toward a fixed goal. Instead, he describes trajectories that are more complicated, often shifting with the
environment. Moreover, holding onto a fixed goal may be undesirable because doing so employs a limited or
possibly foreclosed vision of the future. Instead, as changes occur in one’s environment, Dewey asserts that
people must continually inquire into moments of uncertainty and changing
circumstances , develop new hypotheses about those situations, and revise their aims.
Dewey works with what he calls “ends-in-view,” which are relatively close and feasible, even
if difficult to achieve , rather than overarching goals at some final endpoint in the future. Those ends-in-view guide our
decisions and hypotheses along the way, keeping us resourceful in the present. In Dewey’s words, the discovery of how
things do occur makes it possible to conceive of their happening at will, and gives us a start on selecting
and combining the conditions, the means, to command their happening...there must be a realistic study of actual
conditions and the mode or law of natural event, in order to give the imagined or ideal object definite form and
solid substance—to give it, in short, practicality and constitute it as a working end.19 For Dewey, ends and
means are intelligently considered in light of each other, with both being revisable, and neither abstracted from the other. Each
fulfilled end-in-view sustains our hope by highlighting meaningful headway and directing our further action. Ends-in-view later
become means to future ends, working in an ongoing continuum. This sustenance of hope differs from theological accounts which
are difficult to sustain on faith alone and may leave believers frustrated at an apparent lack of action or improvement. It also differs
from positive psychology and grit literature which tends to focus on large, far-off, and challenging goals that one holds tenaciously.
Many people think of hope as goal-directed and future-oriented. While objects of hope for
pragmatists may temporarily serve as ends-in-view , the practice of hope moves us forward
through inquiry and experimentation as we pursue our complicated trajectory . It helps to unify
our past, present, and future. Hope, then, is not just about a vision of the future, but rather a way of living
in the present that is informed by the past and what is anticipated to come. Whereas utopian
views of what could be may actually immobilize one and may exhaust one in the present,
pragmatist hope is always tied to what one is doing and feasibly can do in the present ,
especially when equipped with knowledge of the past. Central to pragmatist philosophy, ideas become true insofar as they “work” for
us, fruitfully combine our experiences, and lead us to further experiences that satisfy our needs. Pragmatists are concerned with the
concrete differences in our lived experiences that an idea’s being true will make. Pragmatic truth expresses “the successful
completing of a worthwhile leading.”20 Unlike truth as a corresponding match between proposition and reality, pragmatist truth is
something that occurs when the goals of human flourishing are satisfied, at least temporarily. Built into these criteria is consideration
of the well-being of others, for successful leading through experiences almost always necessarily requires working and
communicating with others. Additionally, the differences an idea will make are quite limited, and therefore less truthful, if relevant
only to one person. While not a comprehensive vision of the good life, certain norms including equality and just communication are
entailed both in these deliberations and the determination of truth.21 We must consider how to flourish alongside others as we craft
our ends-in-view. This differs considerably from other philosophical and psychological accounts of hope based on the desire of
objects or states of affairs regardless of whether they are good for us or other people.

Meliorism

Pragmatists like Dewey recognize the difficulty of present circumstances, yet approach them practically,
rather than idealistically, with thoughtful action, believing that circumstances can be improved.22 Unlike simple optimists, however,
they do not hold that the situation will necessarily work out for the best, but rather they believe
people should make efforts to contribute to better outcomes . Such efforts are rarely undertaken alone,
instead they are tied to others who are working together to solve problems. In the words of contemporary pragmatist Cornel West,
“Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet when
we know that the evidence does not look good...Hope enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the
evidence.”23 Meliorism entails action in the face of difficulties . Dewey sees hope as a way of living aligned
with meliorism, “the idea that at least there is a sufficient basis of goodness in life and its conditions so that by thought and earnest
Meliorism is not a belief in inevitable progress, but rather a
effort we may constantly make better things.”24
call to human action, especially in the midst of struggle and uncertainty . Dewey firmly argued that
it would be foolish to believe that there is “an automatic and wholesale progress in human affairs,” insisting instead that
betterment “depends upon deliberative human foresight and socially constructive work.”25 Martin
Luther King, a champion and practitioner of hope, was enshrined on the floor of Obama’s oval office with his phrase: “The
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Importantly, given how many
hopes fell flat under the messianic figure of Obama, King later explained in a pragmatist spirit of
meliorism, “Human progress never rolls on wheels of inevitability ; it comes through the
tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself
becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation . We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the
time is always ripe to do right.”26 We cannot wait until we have a clear picture of our final future
goals ; rather, we must act now in intelligent ways and through inquiry to bring about better
conditions and, thereby, truth.27 And we must be flexible to change and redirect our efforts
as they unfold. Meliorism is an alternative to both pessimism and optimism . It cultivates hope,
growth, and better worlds. For some pragmatists, like Colin Koopman, this meliorism-based hope is “the pragmatist affect par
excellence: ‘hope is the mood of meliorism’ (27), ‘the characteristic attitude of pragmatism is hope’ (17).”28 One may not be
drawn to a meliorist outlook, though —especially if one’s life has been plagued by hardship. But such an
outlook can be supported with evidence and ultimately fostered. Teachers, religious leaders, and fellow
citizens can chart the historical impact of human effort that has demonstrably improved the world. They can reveal goodness and
just action even in the midst of or following many atrocities of justice. Meliorism is not Pollyannaish, however, for it acknowledges
the lasting blows of many moments of despair and the difficulty through which improvement has been won. Our hope must
be cautious and contingent, open to criticism and validation .29 Because of this, meliorism fits
well with democracy as a way of life where our hopes can be nurtured together and where
inquiry tests and revises what we believe to be true or desirable. Additionally, meliorism is aligned with a
belief in the agency of people, trusting that they can have significant impact on the world and may improve it. Their agency
plays out not only in the action they undertake to achieve an ends-in-view, but also in their
shaping and revising of the ends-in-view they hold .30 Such agency comes about through the practice of
habits.

Habits Habits begin with impulses that naturally urge us to act. As we engage with the world around us, including being shaped by
cultural norms, our impulses collect and mold into habits. People tend to develop similar habits because of similar transactions with
the environment. Some of those habits become customs, or typical ways of acting. While we learn these indirectly or through the
teachings of our parents, their cultivation is most overt in schools, where we learn about acceptable behaviors while imitating the
behavior we see from our teachers and others. While most people think of habits as dull routines that we repeat exactly, Dewey
views habits as predispositions to act. They make up our ways of being and our dispositions, and we enact them with ease and
familiarity because they have proven to help us lead our lives smoothly. Dewey adds, “Any habit marks an inclination—an active
preference and choice for the conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not wait, Micawber-like, for a stimulus to turn up so
that it may get busy; it actively seeks for occasions to pass into full operation.”31 Habits, then, seek to be put into intelligent action;
they are not mere defaults we thoughtlessly rely upon. Because habits are urges to act, they give rise to desires. Importantly, habits
also offer a way to pursue those desires, often through thought or bodily movement. For Dewey, habits “do all the perceiving,
recognizing, imagining, recalling, judging, conceiving and reasoning that is done.”32 They organize our perceptions based on past
experiences so that we can form ideas about the world that we test out in order to overcome indeterminate situations. As we
encounter new stimuli, habits help us to filter and make sense of those encounters, enabling us to develop ideas about them. Habits
then provide the know-how to act in the world because they entail our working capacities. Finally, we reflect on our experiences and
our inquiries to determine which habits bring about our growth by promoting smooth and just transactions with the world and with
other people. So, while habits compose us individually, they are intimately linked to other people also. The growth of individuals is
often linked to the growth of the community. We employ inquiry not just to reconstruct our world, but also to reconsider and reshape
our habits when problematic conditions or novel situations arise. It is the intellectual aspect of habits that gives them meaning and
keeps people elastic and growing. Habits give us both strength and flexibility. When we are deep in despair, our selves may come
apart. Unsure how to proceed, our habits may flounder. We may succumb to bad habits that lack such flexibility, such as cynicism or
apathy, that keep our lives stagnant and fail to keep up with the changing world. But rather than reconciling ourselves to such a
state, Dewey’s philosophy offers us ways of life that can help to reorient us.

Habits of Hope

hope, as a set of habits and their enactment, is most essentially a disposition toward possibility and change for the
I contend that
betterment of oneself and others. It is
a way of being that overcomes the paralysis of pessimism by
bringing together proclivities and intelligent reflection to motivate one to act and it provides a structure to sustain
us as we do so. Hope is a way of projecting ourselves toward a better future, positioning us toward action. In Dewey’s words,
pragmatist habits of hope are “active attitudes of welcome.”33 They are ways we greet the world and project ourselves in it. Even
when carried out in seemingly independent ways, the processes of inquiry, truth, growth, and development of habits unite us with
hope is not just about change, however.
the affairs and well-being of others. Hope theorist Alan Mittleman argues that
He rightly argues thathope can also be about maintaining conditions that help us to flourish. I would add
that even in such conservative circumstances aimed at preservation, hope is about change away from how things
are currently going or the direction in which they are trending, where those conditions may
be in jeopardy.
 Anti-Militarism Good---2AC
Militarism and hegemonic imperialism are NOT neutral---they’re crucial to
sustaining anti-Black violence domestically---means the aff is a pre-
requisite to the alt
Ajamu Baraka 14, BA in international studies and political science from the University of
South Florida, Tampa, MA and PhD in political science from Clark Atlanta University, has
served on the boards of several human rights organizations, including Amnesty International,
the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Africa Action, “Race and Militarism from Ferguson to
Syria: A letter to African Americans”, Ajamu Baraka, Oct 8 2014,
https://www.ajamubaraka.com/race-and-militarism-from-ferguson-to-syria-a-letter-to-african-
americans/ //hh

The Black radical tradition has always understood the inextricable link between racism
and militarism : racism as a manifestation of white supremacist ideology, and militarism as the
mechanism to enforce that ideology. That fundamental link grounds our analysis of the Obama administration’s policies in
Iraq and Syria. But the
link between race ( white supremacy) and the deployment of violence to enforce
the interests of white supremacy also explains the repressive mission and role of the police
in the colonized barrios and segregated African American communities within the U.S.
Achelle Mbembe explains in “Necropolitics” that “…in modern philosophical thought and European political practice …, the colony represents the site
where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law … where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war
without end.” In the non-white world of the internal and global colonies, the rules are different. In those zones where the consent of the oppressed is not

expected, colonial/capitalist domination is reinforced with force and violence. In those colonized
spaces it is clear that the people are not the ones to be “protected and served,” and even gestures such as
throwing one’s hands up to surrender only means that the police have a better shot. Even the time-honored idea of national sovereignty is different in
As we have
the non-European world than what is taught in political science and international relations classes, according to Mbembe.
witnessed in Iraq, Libya and Syria, sovereignty “relies, to a large degree, in the power and
capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” That is why the Obama administration has
not bothered to give its actions in Syria any legal justification . As Samantha Powers, Obama’s lunatic
representative to the United Nations claimed, the U.S. has all of the authority it needs to bomb in Syria. The African Americans who
are supporting the latest war plans in Iraq and Syria while simultaneously calling for something called
justice in Ferguson have forgotten, or never completely understood, that the war being waged
by the U.S. to maintain global Western hegemony also includes them as a target . If
Congress can give unanimous consent to the murder of more than 2,000 people in Gaza, the
majority of them women and children, why would anyone think that those same people would really care

about a few hundred African Americans who are being murdered annually by police forces charged
with containing a population that has been rendered economically superfluous? The value put on black life by the occupation

force in Ferguson and in our communities across the country is no different than the value
put on the lives of the “natives” in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. occupation forces .
The cavalier way in which white policymakers decide issues of war in the non-white
nations of the global South and place tens of thousands of innocents at risk mirrors the
value they put on non-white life in the U.S., especially when those non-white bodies are involved in activities that they
define as threatening – like resisting, or at this point simply existing. We must always remind ourselves that in the colonies of the world as well as the
the non-white is seen as the living negation of
racialized, segregated communities in the capitalist metropolis,

everything deemed important to the European mind – the underclass, the violent, the welfare queens,
gangbangers, the terrorists – the quintessence of evil. And in reminding ourselves of this reality we can remain
clear about what forces and interests we should oppose and with whom to be in
solidarity . What this means is that we cannot afford the comforting myths of U.S. benevolence
that attempt to conceal the naked deployment of U.S. state power in the service of
Western capitalist/colonialist interests . And we must view with suspicion, if not treat with disdain, our
comrades, white and black, who support U.S. interventions, even if they frame that support
in leftist justifications. For oppressed nations and peoples’ of the world, the U.S. white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy is and
remains the principle contradiction. There must not be any nationalist sentimentality or equivocation on that position. The current phase of naked
aggression in Syria is not a reflection of U.S. strength but rather its weakness. Nonetheless, we cannot underestimate the threat that the continued
In the U.S., the national security
reliance on militarism and repression poses for African Americans and the peoples of the world.
apparatus has been moving systematically to strengthen its ability to target, contain, disrupt and
repress when necessary all domestic oppositional movements. The threat of domestic terrorism
provided the convenient cover for intensifying those efforts in the post-9/11 period, the result being
graphically demonstrated by the militarized police in Boston and their police-state tactics in
the aftermath of the Boston bombing, and in Ferguson, Missouri in response to a few hundred
demonstrators protesting another killing of an unarmed black person. The white supremacist,
colonial/capitalist, patriarchal ruling classes of the U.S. and Europe are clear , even if we are not, that
war and repression will be used with brutal efficiency to maintain their hegemony . Their
brief turn toward utilizing “soft power” to shore up “legitimacy” in response to popular opposition to the Bush
administration with the “selection” of Barack Obama ( the smiling brown face of imperialist domination), was only a short-term tactical
innovation of that strategy. Scholars, pundits and commentators from across the political spectrum in the U.S. have already started to
speculate on the legacy of Obama’s presidency. And even though his record of “accomplishments” is thin, very few will identify

the most significant but insidious legacy of his presidency – concealing the reality of
racialized violence in the service of Western global white supremacy.

No distancing---discussions of problematic military policies abroad are the

same debates that shape anti-Black policing and militarization domestically
Stephen Graham 10, Professor of Cities and Society @ Newcastle, Ph.D. (Science and
Technology Policy), Programme for Policy Research in Engineering, Science and Technology
(PREST), University of Manchester, “Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism”, pp19-23,
google books, OCR via onlineocr.net //hh
As well as the military and geopolitical catastrophe that is the
overwhelmingly urban war in Iraq, there are iconic
military operations such as the US 'Black Hawk Down' humiliations in Mogadishu in 1991, US operations in Kosovo in
1999 and Beirut in the 198os, and various US operations in the Caribbean and Central America: Panama City
(1989), Grenada (1983), Port-au-Prince (1994). Urban conflicts such as those in Grozny in Chechnya (1994),
Sarajevo (1992-5), Georgia and South Ossetia (2008), and Israel-Palestine (1947- ) also loom large in
current military debates about the urbanization of warfare . The US military's focus on
operations within the domestic urban sphere is also being dramatically strengthened by
the so-called War on Terror ,8° which designates cities - whether US or foreign - and their
key infrastructures as `battlespaces : Viewed through such a lens, the Los Angeles riots of 1992; the various
attempts to securitize urban cores during major sports events or political summits; the military response to Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans in zoos; the challenges of 'homeland security' in US cities - all become low-intensity' urban
military operations comparable to conducting counter-insurgency warfare in an Iraqi city.8"Lessons
learned' reports drawn up after military deployments whose goal was to contain the Los Angeles riots in 1992, for example, credit
the "'success" of the mission to the fact that "the enemy" - the local population - was easy to outmaneuver given their simple battle
tactics and strategies'.82 High-tech
targeting practices such as unmanned drones and organized
satellite surveillance programmes, previously used to target spaces beyond the nation to (purportedly) make the nation safe,
are beginning to colonize the domestic spaces of the nation itself. 83 Military doctrine has also
come to treat the operation of gangs within US cities as 'urban insurgency, 'fourth-generation warfare' or 'netwar', directly analogous
to what takes place on the streets of Kabul or Baghdad.84 Importantly, then, the US military's paradigms of urban
control, surveillance and violent reconfiguration now straddle the traditional
inside/outside binary of cities within the US nation versus cities elsewhere . Instead, the
'security' concerns which until recently dominated abstract foreign-policy discussions now erupt within ordinary urban sites - spaces
of the 'homelancr. What had previously been international security concerns are now
'penetrating ... all levels of governance. Security is becoming more civic, urban,
domestic and personal : security is coming home:85

CITIES AS BATTLESPACE
The city [is] not just the site, but the very medium of warfare - a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux."

Driving the military targeting of the ordinary sites and spaces of urban life across the world is a
new constellation of military doctrine and theory . In it, the spectre of state-versus-state military conflict is
seen to be in radical retreat. Instead, the new doctrine centres around the idea that a wide spectrum of
transnational insurgencies now operate across social, technical, political, cultural and financial
networks. These are deemed to provide existential threats to Western societies by targeting or
exploiting the sites, infrastructure and control technologies that sustain contemporary cities. Such lurking threats are presumed to
This situation,
camouflage themselves within the clutter of cities for protection against traditional forms of military targeting.
the argument goes, necessitates a radical ratcheting-up of techniques of tracking, surveillance
and targeting, centred on both the architectures of circulation and mobility —infrastructure — and the spaces of everyday urban
life. The focus of this new body of military doctrine thus blurs the traditional separation of

military and civil spheres , local and global scales, and the inside and outside of nations. In so doing, writes Jeremy
Packer, 'citizens and non-citizens alike are now treated as an always present threat. In this sense, all are imagined as
combatants and all terrain the site of battle :87 In the case of the United States, for example, this
process allows the nation's military to overcome traditional legal obstacles to deployment
within the nation itself !' As a consequence, the US military's PowerPoint presentations talk of urban operations in
Mogadishu, Fallujah or Jenin in the same breath as those during the Los Angeles riots, the anti-globalization confrontations in
Seattle or Genoa, or the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Such a paradigm permits a host of
transnational campaigns and movements - for social justice or ecological sustainability,
against state oppression or the devastating effects of market fundamentalism - to be
rendered as forms of `netwar , in effect turning the ideas of the Zapatistas into the equivalent
of the radical and murderous Islamism of al-Qaeda.89 Finally, this blurring means that the
militarization and walling of national borders , such as that between the US and Mexico, not only involve
the same techniques and technologies as the walling-off of neighbourhoods in Baghdad or
Gaza, but sometimes actually involve lucrative contracts being awarded to the same military
and technology corporations. Thus it becomes imperative to continually connect the effects
of US military aggression abroad with US domestic counterterrorist policies in what is
now commonly called the homeland - policies which target, profile, map and incarcerate
In a context where `imperial power operates by obscuring the links
Arab and Asian Americans in particular.
between homeland projects of racial subordination and minority co-optation and overseas
strategies of economic restructuring and political domination, as Sunaina Maira and Magid Shihade describe
it, 'this link between the domestic and overseas fronts of imperial power helps us

understand that the shared experiences of Asian and Arab Americans in the US , both those that are
are due to the workings of empire :9° These radical and multiple blurrings have
visible and those not so visible,
other manifestations as well. Civil
law enforcement agencies, for example, are becoming remodelled
along much more (para)militarized lines." As well as reorganizing themselves to engage in highly militarized
counterterrorist operations and the fortification of major conventions, sports events or political summits, they increasingly adopt the
techniques and language of war to launch SWAT teams against a widening array of civilian events and routine call-outs?' 'There
is something driving an attitudinal shift among police , en masse; states the Signs of the Times blog,
which 'is prompting zealous overreaction even to minor disturbances :93 Peter Kraska has
estimated that SWAT teams are called out in the US about forty thousand times a year, a rise from the three thousand annual call-
outs of the 198os.94 Most of the call-outs, he notes, are executed to 'serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders Explicitly military
models thus increasingly sustain new ideas in penology and law enforcement doctrine and technology, as well as civilian
surveillance, training, simulation, and disaster assistance.96 Doctrines addressing urban warfare, military operations on urban
terrain, or low intensity conflict -military concepts developed for the purpose of controlling urban masses on the global periphery -
are quickly imitated 'to discipline groups and social movements deemed dangerous within the heartlands of the imperial
metropolis:97 Military-style command and control systems are now being established to
support 'zero tolerance' policing and urban surveillance practices designed to exclude failed
consumers or undesirable persons from the new enclaves of urban consumption and leisure.98 What Robert Warren calls 'pop-up
armies' are organized transnationally to pre-emptively militarize cities facing major anti-globalization demonstrations.99 The
techniques of high-tech urban warfare - from unmanned drones to the partitioning of space by walls and

biometric check-points - increasingly provide models for the reorganization of domestic urban
space .''' In addition, the almost infinite metaphorization of 'war' - on crime, on drugs, on terror, on
disease - solidifies wider shifts from social, welfarist and Keynesian urban paradigms to
authoritarian and militarized notions of the state's role in sustaining order.
Perm
 T/L---2AC
Permutation---do both---channeling activist energy toward policy change is
vital
Jasmine Syedullah 17, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies @ Vassar, BA, Brown
University; PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz, “‘When I Fall:’ A Reparation of Despair”, in
“Critical Exchange on Afro pessimism”, 2o17, Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 1, 105–
137 //hh
Afro-pessimism is finding its way, as this critical exchange advances, into fields far less familiar with the fugitive communities and
maroon abolitionist investments to which it is indebted. It is a mode of conversation about race and racism that cohered against a
backdrop of the election of the first black American president and in opposition to those who anticipated, far too soon, that with black
representation at the highest level of national governance we must have finally arrived at the end of the era of antiblack racism. A
new generation of activist-scholars is rising up and speaking out against the false optimism of post-racialism. Were black lives to
matter, were the critical condition of black peoples’ lives and the forces that structure that condition a pressing concern to people
wherever they live, clear and common across lines of racial, national, and ethnic difference, their pessimism would have no place in
a politics of liberation. Their pessimism
is, however, a prophetic defense against the future white
supremacy makes all but inescapable. Their despair works to expose the limits of political agency,
incorporation, representation, and progress. Instead of demands for rights and protection
under the law , they center the nihilism of white supremacy, focusing in particular upon the
singular, irredeemable significance of slavery and ongoing justifications for black suffering that
persist in its wake. Rather than making a case for or against the project of Afro-pessimism
as an academic enterprise , what I am inspired by in this intellectual movement is the
enthusiasm with which my students are taking it up as a way to conjoin their activism with
their analyses of race and racism . For them, this field is defined by more than a static contest of those for and
against. At its best, Afro-pessimism is not about the future of black studies as much as it is about the future of black life. The
antagonisms within and around the field of Afro-pessimism are animating an atmosphere of unrest with implications for black
studies, the university, and the country at large. Read as a trans-generational call and response for black liberation born of what
what we have to
Sudbury calls, ‘‘activist motivations for involvement and barriers to participation,’’ it stands to reason that
gain from its young and plastic drive to get free from both the burdens of anti-blackness and
white supremacy is still unfolding and I believe the best is yet to come. Forced to Believe Jared Sexton
(2016, pp. 6–7) writes that, ‘‘In a sense, Afro-Pessimism is not an intervention so much as it is a reading ... It is a reading of what is
gained and lost in the attempt – the impulse – to delineate the spatial and temporal borders of anti- blackness, to delimit the ‘‘bad
news’’ of black life ... to find an edge beyond or before which true living unfolds. It is an attempt to resist that centrifugal force that
overwhelms us like fear or exhausts us like fatigue.’’ What is gained by situating current activist and
academic debates on Afro- pessimism , as Sexton does, within a larger politics of loss – the loss

of property, of rights, of belief in black life ?

If Afro-pessimism is a project of loss mitigation, a viable alternative to
dispositions of dispossession that animate unrest, in the academy, in cities and communities, and in the U.S. as a whole, then it
could serve as a first step on the road to seeking reparation for the conditions so many black
people are subject to living within, that intimate union of national belonging and domestic violence that is the reward for
legal legibility. Pessimism-in-defense-of- black-life is then, neither strictly academic, nor a merely matter of
resentment, but necessarily political, a social force that presses back upon the coherence of

politics- as-usual . It has roots in the everyday spaces of ‘‘getting over,’’ refusal, or non- compliance in encounters with
enslavers, overseers, and patrollers in the fields, quarters, and swamps of the plantation South. Consequences for such movement
against the nihilism of white supremacy have historically included policing, criminalization, internment, torture, and death. They have
Given that the
culminated in national crisis at catastrophic as civil war and as transformative as the movement for civil rights.
endgame of Afro-pessimism as an academic enterprise is limited by its location within the
neoliberal university (see Fred Moten and Stephano Harney’s ‘‘The University and the UnderCommons,’’), the most
generative aspects of its analysis of anti-blackness and Western civilization are indebted to
knowledge about black life and liberation produced outside the academy and on the ground
of struggles for freedom . The pessimism of conventional philosophical concern presses on the ontological foundations
Prophetic despair, such as that
of a person’s individual sense of agency and purpose, throwing one’s will to live into question.
which Baldwin expresses in an often quoted interview between James Baldwin Dr. Kenneth Clark in May of 1963, presses on
the material cohesion of our moral infrastructure. In the interview Baldwin professes to remaining pessimistic with
regard to his own life when he says, ‘‘It doesn’t matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the
time I was 17, you’d done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?’’ He goes
on a bit later to refuse, in no uncertain term, pessimism as a politics of the future. When Clark asks, ‘‘Jim, what do you see deep in
the recesses of your own mind as the future of our nation, ... I think that the future of the Negro and the future of the nation are
linked ... What do you see?,’’ Baldwin replies, ‘‘ I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive . To be a pessimist means
that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can
survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the
I want to hold them, not resolve them,
country (Clark et al., 1963). I want to savor the tensions of Baldwin’s response.
and observe how they situate pedestrian personal pessimism outside the movement for black
life, while calling out the limits of a political process propelled and legitimated by white
supremacy. Even insofar as pessimism is a social expression of the affective limits of social death, a feeling that brings us back
to life, out of isolation, and into conversation with each other the promise of pessimism is clearly far more than an academic matter.
The antithesis of pessimism in this instance is not optimism but apathy, willful passive acceptance of the untenable conditions of a
people systemically and forcibly made to understand that there are some whose existence is at best immaterial and at worst a clear
and present danger, and then there are those lives that do matter. What we have been witnessing in the activist and academic
movements for black life is the implosion of identity politics and the failure of its possessive claims to liberal demands for rights and
protection. The abolition of whiteness demands a kind of justice the state may not yet know how to sanction. As Patrisse Cullors
(2015), one of three original founders of #BLM, argues, ‘‘I
believe we can’t wait on the State to take care of our
Black lives. We have to show up now to build the world we want to see.’’ Thinking the purchase of the
pessimistic prophetically then, as a residual, inevitable, yet generative practice of the black prophetic tradition with reparative
properties that precede and exceed Afro-pessimism’s formal incorporation into scholarly journals and conferences, I find myself
constantly reminding my students that while we can take the analysis of power Afro-pessimism offers and run with it, academic
enunciations of pessimism run the risk of remaining loyal to the limits of legibility and
respectability of politics as usual . As Nick Mitchell (forthcoming, p. 10) writes: ‘‘When the intellectual
becomes interchangeable with the slave, it is perhaps too easy ... to smooth over the fact that
black intellectuals have interests as intellectuals that can and do diverge from those of the
people for whom they might want justice. Without an acknowledgement (not a confession) of this divergence ... the
project of race theorization risks deploying the generalizing force of theory and the moralizing tendency of critique to generalize a
class perspective.’’ What we are dealing with here is more than occidental anxiety of ontological uncertainty. It is an ethical
imperative to engage in a struggle to change the meaning of rights and protection from the ground up (or suffer senselessly at the
altar of the state’s right to defend itself by any means necessary). As Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) suggested in the interview with
Kenneth Clark, the pessimism of antiblack racism is not just a black problem, it presses on the condition of whites and upon the
country as a whole: ‘‘These people have deluded themselves for so long, that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their
conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.’’ The predicament of the
pessimist is not a personal problem that is easily self- contained. It presses upon the body, moving it to unrest, unleashing a rage
that cannot stand to be at home in moral monstrosity. It just wants to burn it all down. ‘‘Now, we are talking about human beings,
there’s not such a thing as a monolithic wall or some abstraction called the Negro problem, these are Negro boys and girls, who at
16 and 17 don’t believe the country means anything that it says and don’t feel they have any place here, on the basis of the
performance of the entire country.’’ The question Afro-pessimism poses as a practice of prophetic desire then, turns away from a
politics of recognition and respectability toward an abolitionist praxis of fugitive reparation to ask, ‘‘Will you run with me?’’ Does my
pessimism press on your sense of superiority, exception, perfection enough for you to forfeit your status and help us move the
country, force the nation to believe there is freedom beyond this world, a more prophetic imagination of difference, identity, and
inclusion? ‘‘What white people have to do,’’ Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) reminds us, ‘‘is try and find out in their own hearts why it
was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you
need it.’’ In the present moment Black Lives Matter (BLM) is advancing the cause for the abolition of white supremacy in local
ways in chapters throughout the world. They call us to account for the material consequences of the
unfinished work of antislavery abolition and reconstruction . They are part of an underground lineage
of fugitive communities that emerged from the marshes, swamps, and hiding spaces of the plantation South. Their message is
decentralized. It is not uniform. It does not reproduce old antagonisms. It does not pit moral suasion against direct confrontation. It
does not ask that we choose to remain either optimistic or pessimistic. It exercises a practice of the political that harnesses both. In
this last section then I turn to a speech against apathy by Patrisse Cullors, a beacon in a leader-full movement who has been
animating pessimism as a protocol of self-care and prophetic political organizing powerful enough to propel activist and intellectual
movements from isolated places of loss into collective liberation, out of abstractions into objections, subjecting the logics
of antiblack racism to the collective force of intersecting fugitive communities of
abolitionist movement against nihilism and toward an affirmation of life. We Can Survive? At age 25 on
19 April 2015 Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained while shackled by his feet in a Baltimore Police Department van where he
was being held in custody following his arrest. Baltimore stood up, rose up, died in, and rolled out. We all bore witness. His death
was deemed a murder by the medical examiner a few weeks later. That Sunday morning, May 3, 2015, I, a Buddhist, found my way
to church, to All Saints in Pasadena, CA, into the strikingly upper-class congregation of post-service attendees who piled in along
with an unlikely mix of young greater Los Angeles activists-of-color and their white hipster allies. It would be my first time hearing our
speaker in person. The whole room stood and cheered as she entered – the woman who helped coin the hashtag, the longtime
activist organizer, Patrisse Cullors greeted us like family, all knowing eyes, bright smiles, and then began a talk she called ‘‘Abolition
Theology.’’ Her voice was clear and certain, free of the cross-bearing affect of black suffering that often accompanies talk of state-
Cullors gave us a speech that touched us, that
sponsored antiblack violence in predominately white spaces.
moved us – mourning, rage and all – into a mood for collective action. She impressed upon us the
fact that the movement for black lives was a call to action for all black life, not just the
names we could recite , not just cisgendered young men, not just ‘‘innocent’’ ‘‘children,’’ not just Americans. She let us
know there had been recent formations of #Black Lives Matter chapters beyond U.S. borders. There were Afro-Latino chapters,
chapters forming in Haiti, and in Ghana. She reminded us that the concept of blackness that resonates across the globe called on
us to broaden the scope of our movements and to build alliances, to build with Latino communities in particular. It was a call for
We were being enlisted in a movement that began, she reminded us, with the
#BLM without borders.
movement to abolish the institution of slavery. We were being reeducated as she drew connection between the
hard-won efforts of formerly fugitive abolitionists to build resilient communities out of the so-called contraband during and following
the Civil War through to the present-day ‘‘leader-full’’ movement of #BLM. ‘‘Isn’t this a great time to be alive?’’ Cullors asked in
closing. Is she joking I wondered? I found not one drop of cynicism in her question. Without missing a beat, she proceeded to relay
the names, the facts, the numbers, the bodies felled by police, by gun, by force. As she listed the lives taken a wave of loss flooded
She left us eager to join her
the room and we were still, breathless. ‘‘Protest is about disrupting apathy,’’ she continued.
in this twenty-first century revival of reconstruction, in a fight for food, for access to housing,
for access to education, and for a kind of justice for black lives that will not come
without our willingness to show up, stand up, and throw down . In the streets, in solidarity, we will
find the power to change people, she said, to change policy . She echoed the words of civil rights
organizer Ella Baker, ‘‘the
system under which we now exist has to be radically changed... It means
facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you
change that system.’’ For Cullors that ‘‘means’’ came by way of waves grief, rage, despair, the loss of family, the loss of
hope, bearing witness, heartbreak, and the will to return to face it all again. She closed us out with the rallying chant of the
movement for black lives, the recitation of a prayer by Twentieth century fugitive slave Assata Shakur, ‘‘ It
is our duty to fight
for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to
lose but our chains.’’ The congregation’s joy burst through the siren of her words and bound us toward another way of sitting
with the litany of loss. We Must Survive What Baldwin and Cullors make clear is that pessimism is most powerful as

an unrelenting political process of coming back to life, beginning to feel one another’s
humanity . What my students who are taking up the work of Afro-pessimism are in most need of
are new ways to put their pessimism to work, to come together and collectively counteract the mind-numbing

We need not fear falling short .

soul-crushing isolation centuries of antiblack racism have waged on our humanity.
The more we ‘‘fail,’’ the stronger we rise to try again armed with the alchemy of despair. What we
need are stories and speeches, and spaces that moves us from abjection toward that fertile ground of self-transformation one can
only find in the witness of another. What might we give up in a move from critique to healing and reparation, generative of the choice
to be fearless in the face of the impossibilities of freedom? What might the audacity to ‘‘lean on each other,’’
as Jasmine Abdullah Richards says in the epigraph, and imagine a future for black life otherwise, add to
the pursuits of the pessimist?
 AT: Affect/Melancholy---2AC
Combining political struggle with affective sorrow is effective---BUT,
individual apolitical strategies are doomed to fail---only the perm solves
Joseph Winters 16, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African and African
American Studies at Duke University, where he also holds secondary positions in English and
Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Ph.D., Princeton University 2009, B.A., Harvard
University 1999, “Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress”,
Chapter 2 “Unhopeful but Not Hopeless: Melancholic Interpretations of Progress and Freedom”,
Duke University Press, 2016 //hh

THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SORROW AND LITERATURE

Why should we still read and engage The Souls of Black Folk? What is Du Bois’s relevance for thinking about the current
relationship between race, gender, class, and politics? How does Souls invite the reader to reimagine the relationship between
literature, aesthetics, and politics? Why
should we pay as much attention to themes of loss, sorrow,
death, and alienation in his thought as we do to motifs of progress, uplift, recognition, and the
training of the black masses? While scholars disagree about how to interpret and understand Du Bois’s legacy, there
seems to be consensus that engaging his thought continues to be productive and useful (even if only to trace and examine the
limitations and gaps that Du Bois passed down to future generations). Commentators like Robert Gooding-Williams, for instance,
argue that Souls is a major contribution to modern political thought because it attempts to delineate the appropriate political
response to white supremacy, particularly as it operates in the Jim Crow era. Yet for Gooding-Williams, there are severe blind spots
in Du Bois’s vision. For one, Du Bois adopts an expressive, romantic understanding of black peoplehood. He is seduced by a notion
of the folk that assumes a coherent, pre-given racial identity, a seduction that I discussed and criticized in chapter 1. In addition to
this limitation, Gooding-Williams argues that Du Bois’s political imagination is defined by a simple notion of recognition. The goal of
black people’s strivings, according to the author of Souls, should be assimilation into, without a transformation of, the social-political
order. As Gooding-Williams puts it, “Thus the raison d’etre of [black] leadership was to incorporate the excluded Negro masses into
the group life of American society. To be exact, it was to assimilate them to the cultural standards, or norms, constituting American,
and more generally Euro-American modernity.”52 In opposition to this simple model of assimilation, Gooding-Williams turns to
Frederick Douglass, who offers a pragmatic, non-essentialized understanding of race and politics in which the elimination of white
supremacy requires the transformation of the social order.53

This interpretation underscores the more optimistic side of Du Bois’s thought, the part of Souls that argues for the resolution of black
double-consciousness through assimilation into the nation-state and Euro-American modern life. This is a Du Bois who is relatively
sanguine about the ideals, norms, and practices of American
democracy and Western civilization more
broadly. The basic arrangements are good; the problem is that certain groups are
excluded from these essentially good arrangements . Yet as I have argued in this chapter, Du Bois
often undermines and troubles his own optimism . Throughout the text and his corpus, he acknowledges that
these arrangements rely on ongoing exclusions and erasures, imperial violence, and
cultural amnesia . In addition, while Du Bois might endorse assimilation, the incorporation of black bodies and black cultural
forms (especially the sorrow songs) into the nation-state disrupts and unsettles prevalent ways of narrating and imagining American
history, modern life, and human existence. By placing racial trauma at the heart of American history, this heart becomes a broken
one; experiences of racial loss and disappointment, experiences that constitute America’s brief history, challenge deeply entrenched
fantasies of American exceptionalism and human triumph. Finally, Du Bois suggests that while the language of
recognition, freedom, and rights are indispensable for political struggles , these struggles
also need to be inspired by memories of loss, memories of disappointed longings and strivings,
and a heightened sensitivity to those bodies, practices, communities, and desires that reside on
the opaque sides of our multiple social Veils, those that elude current forms of recognition and protection. The
sphere of recognition, in other words, never exists without shadows, losses, and specters.
Progress always both involves and excludes a Josie, someone for whom progress is
“necessarily ugly.”
While Gooding-Williams points out the limitations in Du Bois’s political vision, Adolph Reed examines the problems, constraints, and
exclusions within fashionable, literary interpretations of Du Bois. Throughout his study of Du Bois’s thought, Reed’s language can
sound scathing and dismissive of African American studies, especially the work of Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker. Yet it is
important to keep in mind that Reed is responding to what he sees as an overabundance of particular kinds of readings of Du Bois,
readings that reify or essentialize the notion of double-consciousness and black identity more generally, that conflate the cultural
politics of difference with real politics, and that downplay Du Bois’s life-long activism within spaces and institutions outside of the
academy. Throughout W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought, Reed examines and historicizes the recent obsession with
Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness, a concept that clearly informs my interest in themes of loss and alienation in Du Bois’s
work. There are several basic claims that Reed makes in opposition to the recent fad in cultural and literary studies to frame our
understanding of black people within a general notion of “two-ness.” For one, Reed suggests that the idea is not as unique as some
commentators assume, nor was it very significant for Du Bois. To show the ordinariness of Du Bois’s concept of double-
consciousness, Reed situates the idea within the tradition of liberal reform and the general disillusionment with American ideals at
the beginning of the twentieth century. As he reminds the reader, many progressive activists and intellectuals, including Jane
Addams, underscored experiences of fragmentation and alienation in response to the complexities of American life. Reed also
reminds the reader that “Du Bois dropped the double-consciousness idea early in his career,” a fact that should generate skepticism
toward the recent obsession with this concept by African American studies scholars.54 Reed further contends that the recent
fascination with the first essay in Souls and the accompanying double-identity motif (instead of the essay arguing against Booker T.
Washington’s model of accommodation) is indicative of the tendency to depoliticize Du Bois and African American studies in
general. Finally, Reed argues that scholars
essentialize the black experience by assuming that double-
consciousness applies to black people’s struggles across time and space. This causes them to
overlook the ways this concept has been contested and reimagined as it travels to different
contexts . In its most recent expression, according to Reed, the notion of double-consciousness is a
product of black middle-class angst and often functions to accentuate racial commonality and
downplay class and gender differences within black communities and political discourses.55
when we take the double-consciousness motif out of its “proper” context, we
According to Reed,
attribute this quality to all black people, thereby reinforcing an ahistorical notion of blackness
and black peoplehood. As he puts it, “As a proposition alleging a generic racial condition—that millions of individuals
experience a peculiar form of bifurcated identity, simply by virtue of common racial status—the notion seems preposterous on its
face.”56 I agree with Reed that double-consciousness is a limited heuristic concept; it clearly does not apply to all blacks in the
same way and it can be used to ignore tensions and conflicts within black communities. At the same time, this concept continues to
generate meanings and possibilities that Reed does not consider. Because every idea travels and takes on new contexts during its
journey, it can form new constellations with ideas, concepts, and imaginaries that were either absent or neglected in the “original”
I suggest a revision of the
context. In light of this and in light of the broader claims in this book about loss and melancholy,
double-consciousness motif that escapes both racial essentialism and Reed’s narrow, historical,
and contextual interpretation. As Reed implies, the doubling trope in Souls can actually apply to human subjects more
generally, even as it gets articulated differently across space and time and even though it has a particular set of historically shifting
meanings and implications for black selves. Recall that the twoness that Du Bois articulates in the first chapter of Souls is defined in
part as an internalization of the conflict between democratic ideals and the concrete realities for black people. It is also a way to
register strivings that remain unreconciled, longings that remain unsatisfied. As many authors have argued, especially those
there is something about human desire, in a broad sense, that
associated with psychoanalytic thought,
often leaves selves disappointed, that leaves human subjects with a sense of incoherence and
brokenness. Our desires clash and collide with the aspirations of others; the satisfaction of one person’s desire often requires
that someone else’s desire is thwarted or frustrated; people often long for an existence marked by happiness, plentitude, and the
absence of discord, a longing that can create a greater sense of internal conflict when contrasted with the vicissitudes of everyday
life. To
suggest that this fractured existence is a general human condition does not foreclose an
examination of the ways this condition is mediated and differentiated by history, race, gender,
class, and other identity markers. It doesn’t mean that all of us experience and perform this general human quality in the
same manner; in fact, certain kinds of communities bear the onus of “owning” this fractured condition
while others are imagined as being whole, coherent, and liberated from the tragic quality of
human existence.57 Du Bois’s concept, on my reading, provides one powerful articulation of the broken quality of being
human, a feature that modern black subjects experience (with varying degrees of intensity and relevance) in ways that are
historically specific but also analogous to other groups and experiences. In addition, Du Bois shows us how this sense of twoness
might enable a critical disposition toward the social world; critique and resistance, to put it differently, often rely on a sense of
unease, discordance, or unhappiness with the state of things.58
Reed’s major qualm with literary interpretations of Du Bois is that they depoliticize his thought and legacy. In his engagement with
scholars like Baker and Gates, Reed detects a tendency in African American studies to focus on literary tropes and cultural
vernacular within a text like Souls rather than concrete political goals, aims, and strategies. This specific accusation exemplifies his
long-standing feud with cultural studies; for Reed, these sets of discourses are characterized by posturing, esoteric rhetoric, trope-
mongering, and an avoidance of concrete political activity, especially the kind of politics that takes shape in labor struggles.59 Yet
Reed seems to be tethered to a narrow conception of the political when he claims, for instance, that Du Bois’s critical chapter on
Washington’s conservative plan for racial uplift is the chapter that really matters politically. As Gooding-Williams points out, Du
Bois’s political vision is very much shaped by a model of mutual recognition, a model that he endorses in the first chapter of Souls
chapters are
and troubles in many of the other sections, including the chapters on Josie, John, and the death of his son. These
just as important politically insofar as they expand our imagination of political struggle, an
expansion that entails taking loss and death just as seriously as freedom, recognition,
and the protection of rights . In general, Reed’s reductive understanding of politics neglects the important relationship
between aesthetics and politics in Souls. The sorrow-song tradition, in addition to poetry, inspires and haunts Du Bois’s thoughts
sorrow reverberates throughout Souls as mode of remembrance and
and reflections throughout the text;
reflection, as sensitivity to loss and suffering, as a longing for a different kind of world, and a
way to trouble triumphant, forward-marching ideals . Reed might rejoin by pointing out the
dangers of conflating aesthetics and politics, of thinking that literature and
music can function as a substitute for the slow, tedious labor of organizing
bodies and developing strategies to alter laws, policies, and conditions . I
would certainly agree with him here. At the same time, it would be dangerous to completely separate
aesthetics and politics , especially if we define the former as the organization of desires,
sensibilities, and affects.60 It seems to me that any political struggle must take seriously the
ways the order of things secures itself by producing complacent, indifferent selves,
selves unaffected and unmoved by the pain and anguish that we inflict, directly and
indirectly, on others . This indifference is facilitated and reinforced by narratives of progress,
reassuring narratives that necessarily work to manage and tame dissonant memories, feelings,
and affects. The writing in Souls exposes wounds in the social order; it invokes feelings of grief, sorrow, disappointment,
ambivalence, longing, and hope but in a manner that does not allow the hope to mitigate or resolve the melancholic attachments
and feelings. In a culture that generates amnesia and fantasies of racial reconciliation, in ways that have detrimental effects for
communities that confront daily the ugly side of progress, how could the affective work of sorrow and
remembrance in Du Bois’s thought not have political implications?
Reed’s critique of African American studies and cultural politics points to a broader discussion about the relationship between art
and political resistance, a relationship that authors like Du Bois and Adorno help us think about. In his well-known essay “Criteria of
Negro Art,” Du Bois contends, against the purists, that “all art is propaganda.”61 In other words, for Du Bois, art (from the spirituals
to fiction and poetry) should always be advancing a political agenda, particularly the struggles and strivings of black people. Art, for
Du Bois, is one way for blacks to demonstrate their humanity in a world that either questions or denies this attribute. But because
black people’s artistic creations will resemble those of other groups, Du Bois suggests that art points beyond rigid notions of racial
difference. Similarly, because black art will most likely express recurring themes and values, Du Bois resists a rigid understanding of
politicized art (one in which authentic art refers exclusively to works that speak to the struggles and strivings of black people). For
Du Bois, an artwork connects truth, beauty, and the imagination in a way that broadens human understanding and potentially
increases “sympathy and human interest.”62 Of course the relationship between the imagination and social and political realities,
like power and oppression, is complicated. The products of the artistic imagination are both real and more and less than real. Any
piece of art is made, produced, consumed, and interpreted within social arrangements and realities that make that work possible. At
the same time, the artistic imagination is always reconfiguring and re-expressing the empirical world. As Adorno puts it, “The non-
existing in artworks is a constellation of the existing.”63 Artworks are therefore inspired by existing relationships and conditions but
they also place these relationships into novel and unprecedented configurations, enabling selves to relate to the familiar in
unordinary ways.

Adorno claims that while art points to better possibilities not yet realized, it also expresses social wounds and fissures that tend to
be ignored or denied in everyday life. By placing empirical realities and details in a “new light,” art exposes agony, loss, and social
wounds in ways that threaten our sense of coherence and assurance. By representing suffering in a creative and nontraditional
manner, art can disrupt our everyday ways of perceiving and responding to bodies in pain and struggle. Alluding to Picasso’s
famous painting Guernica, Adorno writes, “The socially critical zones of artworks are those where it hurts; where in their expression,
historically determined, the untruth of the social situation comes to light.”64 In other words, part of the hopeful, or un-hopeless,
the agony of social existence, the ways social life excludes,
dimension in art is its ability to expose
alienates, fractures, and erases. A better world, Adorno suggests, relies, in part, on our capacity to be
affected, hurt, and figuratively wounded by this predicament. For Adorno, the style and form of the artwork is
one way the broken quality of social existence is performed and articulated. Along this line of thought, certain kinds of genres such
as atonal music or the essay resist expectations of unity and harmony, potentially rendering selves more open to ambiguities,
tensions, and fissures in the social world (or at least expose strong desires for coherence and neatness). Adorno beautifully
delineates the relationship between artistic style, resistance, and identity: “The moment in the work of art by which it transcends
reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable
unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the
necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.”65 This fraught relationship between style and content is, as described
above, exemplified by the different genres and styles that Du Bois draws from in The Souls of Black Folk (prayer, poetry, fiction,
music, essay, history). While Du Bois was always unsatisfied with the lack of coherence in the text, we might read this lack of
stylistic coherence, this fragmented quality, as a dimension of his work that continues to unsettle our investments in rendering racial
difference and history lucid and easily manageable. In light of the ways many of our popular narratives tend to disavow the
complexities and tensions involved in modern racial formations and dramas, reflecting on the relationship between style, content,
and resistance within literary works carries political implications.

In response to Reed’s general concerns about the evasion of politics within black and
cultural studies , I suggest that we avoid two false options. One option suggests that we should
conflate politics and aesthetics or politics and the reading and interpretation of cultural
productions. This position would permit subject matters like affect, remembrance,
interpretation, and “vulnerability to the other” to supersede the tedious work of
organizing, grassroots politics, supporting progressive candidates, and changing laws .
The other option, sometimes put forth by Reed, assumes that the latter activities are what really matter
politically, that these actions exhaust the political field. This position consigns the former matters
(literature and aesthetics) to a realm of cultural politics , a realm that is both ancillary to and derivative of
material, class-inflected relationships. This standpoint similarly contends that the importance ascribed to
interpretation, affect, vulnerability, and imagination in the sphere of cultural politics evades
real, practical action and therefore capitulates to the neoliberal regime . My reading of the work
While I acknowledge that political
that melancholy and sorrow perform in Du Bois’s text avoids these false alternatives.
struggle always exceeds and involves more than what we can glean from a text, I also contend
that the affects and sensibilities produced by reading, interpretation, and the production and
consumption of art can complicate our conception of the political. Similarly, these affects, these ways of
being unsettled by the suffering of others, reminds us that transformation of our social worlds requires what Hebert Marcuse calls a
“new sensibility.”66 Cultivating this different sensibility might render us more attuned to the
erasures and exclusions involved in the proverbial expansion and progression of
freedom, democracy, and capital . Cultivating different modes of attunement and levels
of sensitivity may also make selves more open to neglected possibilities and novel ways
of being within the current order of things . Finally, by affirming what Reed disparagingly refers to as cultural
politics, one acknowledges the limitations of “real” politics, the sobering fact that there will always be conditions that governments,
states, and laws will not be able to fix. Whereas Du Bois hints at the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and ethics, authors
like Ellison and Morrison develop and rearticulate this relationship. In chapter 3, I examine how Ellison and Morrison emulate Du
Bois’s use of the sorrow songs by introducing jazz tropes and motifs in their novels and essays to contest triumphant narratives of
racial progress. I examine how jazz provides Ellison and Morrison “with a slightly different sense of time” and history, much as
sorrow songs did for Du Bois.
Alt
 T/L---2AC
The alternative fails---ideas are not solutions and can’t change opinions of
those in power---prefer macropolitical focus on contingent institutional
actions that can do or undo racial injustices
Naomi Zack 17, Ph.D, Columbia University, New York, Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Oregon, Eugene, “Ideal, Nonideal, and Empirical Theories of Social Justice: The
Need for Applicative Justice in Addressing Injustice” in “The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy
and Race”, Feb 2017, 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190236953.013.59 [ability edited] //hh

Ideals of justice may do little toward the correction of injustice in real life . The influence of John
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has led some philosophers of race to focus on “nonideal theory” as a way to bring
conditions in unjust societies closer to conditions of justice described by ideal theory .
However, a
more direct approach to injustice may be needed to address unfair public policy
and existing conditions for minorities in racist societies. Applicative justice describes the applications of
principles of justice that are now “good enough” for whites to nonwhites (based on prior comparisons of how whites and nonwhites
are treated). Social information just dribbles in, bit by bit, and we simply get used to it. A single story about a person really hits home
at once, but the grinding injustices of daily life are endured. It is easy to ignore them and we do. Judith Shklar, The Faces of
Injustice (Shklar 1990, 110) Ideal theory about justice extends from Plato’s Republic to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, including
many careers devoted to analyses and criticism about such texts in political philosophy. Rawls offers a picture of the basic
institutional structures of a just society, on the premise that in order to correct injustice, we must first know what justice is. According
to Rawls, while “partial compliance theory” studies the principles that govern how we are to deal with injustice, full compliance
theory, or ideal theory, studies the institutional principles of justice in a stable society where citizens obey the law. Rawls began A
Theory of Justice with the claim: “The reason for beginning with ideal theory is that it provides, I believe, the only basis for the
systematic grasp of these more pressing problems” (Rawls 1971, 8). Rawls’s ideal theory is too abstract to
correct injustice or provide justice for victims of injustice in reality, because it is based on a
thought experiment and the assumption of a “well-ordered” society in which there already is
compliance with law (Zack 2016, 1–64). What people care about in reality concerning justice is not what ideal justice is or
would be, but how immediate injustice can be corrected . Injustice is always specific in

concrete events that are recognizable as certain types , for example, theft, murder, or police racial
profiling. Injustice can be corrected by punishing those responsible for it in specific cases and
instituting social changes that prevent or reduce future occurrences of the same type. (p. 549) Rawlsian nonideal
theories of justice, constructed for societies where people do not comply with just laws, rely on ideal theory as a standard for just
institutional structures. The main question driving nonideal theory is how to construct a model or picture of justice that will result in
the future correction or avoidance of present injustices. John Simmons quotes John Rawls from Law of Peoples, on this matter.
Nonideal theory asks how this long-term goal might be achieved, or worked toward, usually in gradual steps. It looks for
courses of action that are morally permissible and politically possible as well as likely to
be effective [LOP p. 89]. (Simmons 2010, 7) However, injured or indignant parties may not care about the long-term goal of
justice that could lead to balance or compensation for their situations. Not only are what P. F. Strawson (1962) called “reactive
attitudes,” such as moral indignation, blame, and a desire for deserved punishment, strong in their focus on injustice, but the
best theory of justice in the world does not tell us what to do about the injustices we are
faced with in the here and now, especially “the more pressing problems” of race-related
injustices . Such questions cannot be answered with reference to ideal theory or some

application of ideal or nonideal theory to their concrete situations, because the a priori nature of both of these
does not provide a fit with specific contingencies —ideal and nonideal theories do not generate practical bridge
principles. As theories, they posit ideal entities, but without the apparatus of scientific theories which
provides connections to observable entities or events. (Moulines 1985). The correction of injustice or injustice
theory requires a philosophical foundation for itself. Models
of justice have often been naïvely utopian
throughout the history of philosophy, because they are based on an assumption of automatic
total compliance , as though the right words or pictures by themselves have the power to transform reality, or as though
agreement with those right words or pictures will automatically result in action that will automatically make the world instantiate
those words or pictures. When they are not fantastically and ineffectively utopian in this way, such models have been used to justify
the already-existing dominance of some groups over others. (A prime example is John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government,
written decades before 1688 Glorious Revolution, to express the interests of the new rising class of landed gentry, which were
eventually fulfilled by a Protestant king on the throne and a strong representative parliament after that revolution [Laslett 1988].)
Models of justice have legitimately served to inspire law in modern societies with government constitutions and national and local
law. But, sometimes, as in US founding documents, although universal and absolute justice is proclaimed, subsequent events make
it clear that this language was intended to legitimize just treatment for members of selected groups only, that is, white male property
owners, at first. As a result of just law and its selective application, over time, there comes to be justice for an expanding group, but
still not everyone in society. However, what is written, together with descriptions of real justice for some, can be a powerful lever for
obtaining justice for at least some of the excluded. To understand how that works, it is necessary to develop an approach to justice
that begins with injustice, in real situations where there is already some degree of justice in a larger whole. The extension
of existing practices of justice to members of new groups is applicative justice , a concept
with substantial historical and intellectual precedent, although not by that name. In what follows, more will be said about the idea of
Voting rights and housing rights are
applicative justice and then its (p. 550) history will be considered.
examples of candidates for applicative justice in our time. Finally, content in the form of narrative may be
motivational for social change. The Idea of Applicative Justice Applicative justice is an approach to justice with
the goal of making the unjust treatment of some comparable to those who already receive just
treatment. Applicative justice takes a comparative approach , for example, comparing how
young black males are treated by police officers in contemporary US society, to how young
white males are treated (Jones 2013; Zack 2013, 2015). Applicative justice rests on a pragmatic
approach to social ills , which includes the premise, based on Arthur Bentley’s 1908 insights in The Process of
Government, that government is much more than the apparatus of state and written laws and court
decisions. Government is an extended, dynamic process, an ongoing contention among
interest groups in society . This full-bodied, empirical and pragmatic view of government process
entails, for example, that we consider as parts of the same political mix/phenomenon/raw material all of the
foregoing: the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, the 1960s Civil Rights Legislation, doctrines of probable
cause, the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, racial profiling, and police homicide
with impunity. Thus, Rawls’s insistence that “the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the
calculus of social interests” (Rawls 1971, 4), should be understood as “the rights secured by justice should not be subject to political
bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” In reality, “the rights secured by justice” are constantly subject to political bargaining
and the living calculus of social interests. One consequence of this empirical perspective is that moral outrage, critiques
of white supremacy, or analyses of white privilege, along with other forms of blame,
cannot be assumed to have the power to change anything, by themselves . By contrast,
changing relationships between police officers and their local communities, or changing the rules of engagement when police stop
or attempt to stop suspects, might on this view have some causal power (Ayres and Markovits 2014). It is important to realize that
such changes in practice would not be specific applications of a theory of justice, but ways of changing social reality into a different
political mix. However, a better theory of justice, even a more racially egalitarian one and even a theory of applicative
justice that was widely accepted, would still be no more than a change in what Bentley calls “political content.” Any theory of justice
or any set of just laws is compatible with widespread racially unequal and unjust practice. And the converse also holds. Unjust
laws or laws with gaps for unjust practice are compatible with just practice. Thus, applicative justice is
pragmatic in taking the whole political mix/phenomenon/raw material as its subject for a specific injustice. Unlike ideal or nonideal

applicative justice approach brooks little faith that reality can be

justice theory, the

changed by a special conceptual space or mode of critical moral discourse

that is undertaken apart from reality . Reality cannot be changed by
normative pronouncements, by or on behalf of the oppressed, but only by
shifts in existing interests of groups of real people . To base hopes for
change on normative content alone may paralyze [eliminate] the means for
taking action that could result in change, because such content proceeds
as though matters of justice were only matters of argument . Those who have
opposed (p. 551) social racial justice have understood this well enough, because instead of mainly
arguing against new just law over the twentieth century, they have taken action to block
progress. Race and Justice Consideration of race and injustice together, within political philosophy,
focuses on the need for specific groups to not be treated unjustly. For a group to be treated justly, a large
number of its members need to be treated justly. But for a group to be treated unjustly, it is sufficient if a smaller number or lower
proportion than required to meet the standard of just treatment be treated unjustly. One reason for this asymmetry is that just
treatment is easily normalized within communities, whereas unjust treatment of only a few is disruptive and considered abnormal
among other members of the group to which victims belong (although not necessarily by members of groups who are generally
treated justly). The unjust treatment of a small number ripples from their friends and relations to other members of the same group,
who realize that they are subject to similar unjust treatment from their membership in that group alone. More broadly, if the group
treated justly and the group treated unjustly belong to the same larger collective, such as whites and blacks in the United States,
then the unjust treatment of even a very small number of that total collective of residents or citizens should be disruptive to the
whole collective, given promulgated principles of “justice for all.” But that does not always happen, at least not in ways that result in
real change. Apathy and self-absorption of those not treated unjustly is part of the reason, although another significant part is that
the group treated justly already knows that the national collective rhetoric of justice is intended to apply primarily to them. It is that
kind of disparate treatment, which does not disrupt everyone, even though it should, which calls for a theory of applicative justice, on
applicative justice is not only an abstract theory.
the abstract level where people call for justice. But
Applicative justice requires comparisons of group treatment. If minorities are treated unjustly, a description of
that injustice does not require an ideal or nonideal theory or model of justice, but simply a comparison with how the majority is
treated. (The term “minorities” refers to those disadvantaged or oppressed, because sometimes minorities are greater in number
than “majorities,” e.g., blacks under apartheid in South Africa, American slaves in some Southern states, or black Americans in
some twenty-first-century cities.) The principles and mechanics of justice that work well enough for most white Americans need to
be applied to nonwhite Americans. For rhetorical purposes, it might be evocative to talk about black lives or black rights, but strictly
speaking the subject is a racial framework that is color-blind in an important part of law—constitutional amendments and federal
legislation—but not in reality. This gap between written law and social reality can be viewed as hypocrisy, racial bias, or white
a perspective
supremacy, only if one assumes that written law is an accurate description of, or blueprint for, social reality. But
that takes in the whole process of government reveals that the gap and what is permissible
within it, are parts of the same whole process. The contrast between blueprints and maps is important to consider.
Political philosophers often proceed as though their writings about justice are blueprints, when
they should instead begin by constructing maps. (p. 552) Present politics or a political party in
power may present obstacles and challenges to applicative justice in any specific case. Those
who aim for applicative justice must struggle against such obstacles and challenges, as
well as the ignorance, prejudice, and ill will of large parts of voting publics under
democratic government , and in addition, media misrepresentations, business interests in a status quo, and lack of
understanding of oppression by those who are treated unjustly. For example, the injustice in the disproportionately large number of
African Americans in the US criminal justice system has been supported by law-and-order politics, the War on Drugs, belief in racial
gender myths (e.g., the larger-than-life black rapist), explicit racism, media sensationalism of crime committed by black men, profits
made by for-profit prison corporations, and embrace of self-destructive subcultures by some black men who become incarcerated.
At the same time, as an efficient cause or precipitating factor, ongoing racial profiling by police helps feed the system with new
suspects, about 90 percent of whom plead guilty in preference to the risks and costs of a trial (Kerby 2013; Rakoff et al. 2014).
Intergenerational poverty, unemployment, and undereducation contain people within this system, and the high rates of nonwhites in
complexity of causes
the prison population are used as official justification for racial profiling (Zack 2015, chap 2). Thus, the
and background factors associated with the disproportionate number of African American male prison inmates can be
understood through a number of approaches. The normative approach of applicative justice
would be to address those causes or factors, distinctly and individually, through specific
changes in concrete practice, as well as changes in law, as relevant.
 Structuralism Bad---2AC
**careful highlighting these, some of them use p strong language so make sure you’re ready to
defend it

The alt’s vagueness and insistence on sweeping changes while rejecting

pragmatism ensures it fails and makes conditions worse
John McWhorter 17, teaches linguistics, philosophy, American Studies and music at
Columbia University, “Black People Should Stop Expecting White America to ‘Wake Up’ to
Racism”, Daily Beast, Updated Apr 14 2017, Published Jul 11 2015,
https://www.thedailybeast.com/black-people-should-stop-expecting-white-america-to-wake-up-
to-racism //hh
The idea is that the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s wasn’t enough, that a shoe still has yet
to drop. Today’s Dream is that white America will somehow wake up and understand that racism
makes black America’s problems insurmountable. Not in-your-face racism, of course, but structural racism
—sometimes termed White Privilege or white supremacy. Racism of a kind that America must get down on its knees
and “understand” before we can move forward. The problem is that this Dream qualifies more as a fantasy. If

we are really interested in helping poor black people in America, it’s time to hit Reset. The
Dream I refer to has been expressed with a certain frequency over the past few weeks, after a succession of events that neatly
illustrated the chance element in social history. First, a white woman, Rachel Dolezal, bemused the nation with her assertion that
she “identifies” as black. Everyone had a grand time objecting that one can’t be black without having grown up suffering the pain of
racist discrimination, upon which Dylann Roof’s murder of nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church put a gruesome
the shootings motivated the banning of
point on the issue. Dolezal was instantly and justifiably forgotten, after which
the Confederate flag from the American public sphere. However, practically before the flags were
halfway down their poles, the good-thinking take on things was that this, while welcome, was mere
symbolism , and that what we really need to be thinking about is how to get America to
finally wake up to —here comes the Dream— structural racism . A typical expression of the Dream is
this one, from Maya Dukmasova at Slate: “There is little hope for a meaningful solution to the problem of
concentrated poverty until the liberal establishment decides to focus on untangling a different
set of pathologies—those inherent in concentrated power, concentrated whiteness, and
concentrated wealth .” Statements like this meet with nods and applause. But since the ’60s, the space between
the statements and real life has become ever vaster . What are we really talking about when
we speak of a “liberal establishment” making a “decision” to “untangle” notoriously impregnable
things such as power, whiteness and wealth? This is a Dream indeed , and the only reason it even
begins to sound plausible is because of the model of the Civil Rights victories of fifty years ago, which teaches us that when it
dreaming of an almost unimaginable political and psychological revolution
comes to black people,
qualifies as progressivism. After all, it worked then, right? So why be so pessimistic as to deny that it could happen again?
But there are times when pessimism is pragmatic. There will be no second Civil Rights revolution. Its victories grew not only from
the heroic efforts of our ancestors, but also from a chance confluence of circumstances. Think about it: Why didn’t the Civil Rights
victories happen in the 19th century, or the 18th, even—or in the 1920s or 1940s? It’s often said that black people were “fed up” by
the ’60s, but we can be quite sure that black people in the centuries before were plenty fed up too. What tipped things in the 1960s
were chance factors, in the same way as recent ones led to a breakthrough on the Confederate flag. Segregation was bad P.R.
during the Cold War. Television made abuses against black people more vividly apparent than ever before. Between the 1920s and
the late 1960s, immigration to the U.S. had been severely curtailed, so black concerns, while so often ignored, still did not compete
with those of other large groups as they do today. There is no such combination of socio-historical factors today. No, the fact that
Hillary Clinton is referring to structural racism in her speeches does not qualify this as a portentous “moment” for black concerns.
Her heart is surely in the right place, but talking about structural racism has never gotten us anywhere significant. Hurricane Katrina
was 10 years ago; there was a great deal of talk then about how that event could herald some serious movement on structural
racism. Well, here we are. There was similar talk after the 1992 riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict and, well, here we
are. The old-time Civil Rights leaders did things; too often these days we think talking about things is doing something. But what,
really, are we talking about in terms of doing? Who among us genuinely supposes that
our Congress, amidst its clear and implacable polarization, is really going to arrive at
any “decisions” aimed at overturning America’s basic power structure in favor of poor
black people? The notion of low-skill factory jobs returning to sites a bus ride away from all of
America’s poor black neighborhoods is science fiction. In a country where aspiring teachers can consider it
racist to be expected to articulately write about a text they read on a certification exam, what are the chances that all, or even most,
black kids will have access to education as sterling as suburban white kids get? Many say that we need to move black people away
from poor neighborhoods to middle-class ones. However, the results of this kind of relocation are spotty, and how long will it be
before the new word on the street is that such policies are racist in diluting black “communities”? This is one of Dukmasova’s points,
and I myself have always been dismayed at the idea that when poor black people live together, we must expect social mayhem.
what is the
And, in a country where our schools can barely teach students to read unless they come from book-lined homes,
point of pretending that America will somehow learn a plangent lesson about how black people
suffer from a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and therefore merit special treatment that no other
groups in America do? Calls for reparations for slavery, or housing discrimination, resonate indeed—and have for years
now. However, they result in nothing, and here we are. Note: I’m not saying it wouldn’t be great if these

things happened. However, I argue that they cannot happen . It was one thing to convince America that
legalized segregation and disfranchisement were wrong. However, convincing America that black people now
need the dismantling of “white privilege” is too enlightened a lesson to expect a vast,
heterogeneous and modestly educated populace to ever accept. How do I know? Because I
think 50 years is long enough to wait. Today’s impasse is the result of mission creep. The story of the Civil Rights
movement from 1965 to 2015 started as a quest to allow black people the same opportunities others enjoy but has shrunken into a
project to show that black people can’t excel unless racism basically ceases to exist at all. This is understandable. The concrete
victories tearing down Jim Crow have already happened. Smoking out the racism that remains lends a sense of purpose. And let’s
the result is
face it: There’s less of a sense of electricity, urgency, importance in teaching people how to get past racism. But
that we insist “What we really need to be talking about” is, say, psychological tests showing that
whites have racist biases they aren’t aware of such as tending to associate black people with negative words, or
white people owning up to their “Privilege,” or a television chef having said the N-word in a heated moment decades ago (or posing
for a picture where her son is dressed as Desi Arnaz wearing brown makeup). So, drama stands in for action .
Follow-through is a minor concern. Too many people are reluctant to even admit signs
of progress , out of a sense that their very role is to be the Cassandra rather than the problem-solver. So, little gets
done . In a history of black America, it is sadly difficult to imagine what the chapter would be about after
the 1960s, other than the election of Barack Obama, which our intelligentsia is ever
anxious to tell us wasn’t really important anyway . Maybe we’re getting somewhere on the police lately. But
there’s a lot more to being black than the cops. There is much else to do. This new Dream, seeking revolutionary
change in how America works, is not only impossible, but based on the faulty assumption that black Americans are
the world’s first group who can only excel under ideal conditions. We are perhaps the first people on earth taught to consider it
insulting when someone suggests we try to cope with the system as it is—even when that person is black, or even the President.
But this “Yes, We Can’t!” assumption has never been demonstrated. No one has shown just
why post-industrial conditions in the United States make achievement all but impossible for any
black person not born middle-class or rich. What self-regarding group of people gives in to the idea that low-skill
factory jobs moving to China spells the end of history for its own people but no one else’s? To be sure, Bayard Rustin, Civil Rights
hero and intellectual, famously argued in 1965 that automation and factory relocation left poor blacks uniquely bereft of opportunity,
such that he called for the Civil Rights movement’s next step to be a call for job creation to a revolutionary degree. However, 50
years is a long time ago. Immigrants moving into black communities and forging decent existences—
many of them black themselves—have shown that Rustin’s pessimism did not translate
perfectly into later conditions . Today, community colleges offer a wider range of options to poor black people than
black inner-city communities such as Alice Goffman’s On the Run and Katherine
they did 50 years ago. Books depicting
Newman’s No Shame in My Game tiptoe around the awkward fact that there are always people in such
communities who acquire and keep solid jobs— something even black activists often bring
up in objection to “pathologizing” such communities. I am calling neither for stasis
nor patience . However, the claim that America must “wake up” and eliminate structural racism
has become more of a religious incantation than a true call to action. We must forge
solutions to black America’s problems that are feasible within reality —that is, a nation in which
racism continues to exist, compassion for black people from the outside will be limited and mainly formulaic (i.e. getting rid of flags),
and by and large, business continues as usual. Here are some ideas for real solutions: 1. The War on Drugs must be eliminated. It
creates a black market economy that tempts underserved black men from finishing school or seeking legal employment and
imprisons them for long periods, removing them from their children and all but assuring them of lowly existences afterward. 2. We
have known for decades how to teach poor black children to read: phonics-based approaches called Direct Instruction, solidly
proven to work in the ’60s by Siegfried Engelmann’s Project Follow Through study. School districts claiming that poor black children
be taught to read via the whole-word method, or a combination of this and phonics, should be considered perpetrators of a kind of
child abuse. Children with shaky reading skills are incapable of engaging any other school subject meaningfully, with predictable life
results. 3. Long-Acting Reproductive Contraceptives should be given free to poor black women (and other poor ones too). It is well
known that people who finish high school, hold a job, and do not have children until they are 21 and have a steady partner are
almost never poor. We must make it so that more poor black women have the opportunity to follow that path. The data is in: Studies
in St. Louis and Colorado have shown that these devices sharply reduce unplanned pregnancies. Also, to reject this approach as
“sterilizing” these women flies in the face of the fact that the women themselves rate these devices quite favorably. 4. We must
revise the notion that attending a four-year college is the mark of being a legitimate American, and return to truly valuing working-
class jobs. Attending four years of college is a tough, expensive, and even unappealing proposition for many poor people (as well as
middle-class and rich ones). Yet poor people can, with up to two years’ training at a vocational institution, make solid livings as
electricians, plumbers, hospital technicians, cable television installers, and many other jobs. Across America, we must instill a sense
that vocational school—not “college” in the traditional sense—is a valued option for people who want to get beyond what they grew
up in. Note that none of these things involve white people “realizing” anything. These are the kinds
of concrete policy goals that people genuinely interested in seeing change ought to
espouse . If these things seem somehow less attractive than calling for
revolutionary changes in how white people think and how the nation
operates, then this is for emotional reasons, not political ones . A black identity
founded on how other people think about us is a broken one indeed, and we will have more of a
sense of victory in having won the game we’re in rather than insisting that for us and only us,
the rules have to be rewritten.

Portrayal of all Black experience as monolithic and generalizing anti-

Blackness into a structural phenomenon is ahistorical and causes violence
Coleman Hughes 19, columnist at Quillette who has contributed to WSJ and NYT, junior at
Columbia College studying philosophy, “Racism, re-examined”, Columbia Spectator, Jan 30
2019, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2019/01/31/racism-reexamined/ //hh
Whether it’s driving while black, barbecuing while black, or swimming while black, many black
people can recall a similar experience––a time when a white person treated them with suspicion because of their skin
color. In those moments, when the sting of racism is fresh, it’s easy to become pessimistic about the

state of racial progress in America . After my experience in the Writing Center, for instance, it might have
been tempting to conclude that Columbia, for all its pretension to diversity and inclusion, functions, in effect, as
a vessel for systemic racism. But I didn’t come to that conclusion, and here’s why. Of the
thousands of social encounters I’ve had in my two and a half years at Columbia––with friends, professors, and
administrators––only one of those encounters was racist. To pick a single social interaction and

claim that it represents a larger trend is to make the same error that racists make :
painting with a broad brush . For racists, a single scary encounter with a black person is
enough to prove that black people are generally scary. I would be repeating their mistake if I
treated a single racist encounter with a white person as proof that Columbia is generally racist. In her well-known TED Talk, the
novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns about the “ danger of a single story.” I fear that there’s a
single story being told about black students at Columbia: We are all victims of white supremacy.
Last year, a professor of mine told our class that “all people of color are victims of oppression,” as if this
were an inarguable statement of fact. She went on to tell us that black people have historically been spoken for, and spoken over,
by white people. I couldn’t help but notice the irony. She was a white person making a false claim about my lived experience––that
I’m a victim of oppression––while simultaneously decrying the erasure of black voices by white people. The truth is that racism has
had no serious effect on my opportunities in life. Bigotry, in overt and subtle forms, has been an occasional nuisance for me, but it
Although my
has never blocked me from accessing the doors to education, political participation, or economic opportunity.
experience doesn’t reflect that of all black people, it is shared by a substantial number . In a 2016
Pew poll, 51 percent of black respondents said that their race “ hasn’t made much difference in
their ability to succeed ” in life. Among black Americans with a high school diploma or less, 60
percent agreed with the same statement. You could be forgiven for believing that all black people see racism as a
fundamental obstacle in their lives, but many, myself included, do not. The idea that all black people are victims not
only fails to capture the truth, it also caricatures black opinion as monolithic . On the contrary, there is a

rich variety of political opinion among black Americans. Black Democrats, for instance, are more likely
to identify as ideologically conservative than liberal––30 percent compared to 28 percent––and more likely to identify as moderate
than anything else, according to a recent article in the New York Times. In recognition of the diversity of opinion within the black
community, politically minded Columbia students
have a responsibility to engage not just with opinions held
by black liberals, but also with opinions held by black conservatives and moderates. Some
students, however, believe that such opinions are harmful and therefore unworthy of engagement.
Yet if the goal of “promoting black voices” is to be considered more than mere lip

service, then it must also include , for instance, the 32 percent of black Americans who agreed
with the statement: “Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their
own condition.” Whether you agree with the statement itself is beside the point . The point is
The existence of
this: A belief held by nearly a third of black Americans deserves more than a reflexive dismissal.

racism is an undeniable fact. But the relationship between racism, politics,

and social mobility should not be treated as a finished discussion . Rather, it
should be approached as an ongoing dialogue that aims to reflect the full spectrum of political
opinions held by black Americans—and ultimately by all Americans.
Framework
 Militarism---2AC
Subjectivity goes one way---connecting arms sales to cultures of militarism
broadly is the only way to create effective radical strategies against anti-
Black gratuitous violence---revolutionary political pedagogy is vital
especially in the age of Trump
Henry Giroux 16, the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the
English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in
Critical Pedagogy, most recent books include: The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights
2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015),
America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City
Lights, 2017), and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018),
M.A. in history at Appalachian State University, D.A. (Doctor of Arts) in history at Carnegie-
Mellon in 1977, “War Culture, Militarism and Racist Violence Under Trump”, Truthout, Dec 14
2016, https://truthout.org/articles/war-culture-militarism-and-racist-violence-under-donald-
trump/ //hh
With Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, the scourge of authoritarianism has
returned not only in the toxic language of hate, humiliation and bigotry, but also in the emergence of
a culture of war and violence that looms over society like a plague. War has been
redefined in the age of global capitalism: it has expanded its boundaries and now
shapes all aspects of society . As Ulrich Beck observes, “ the distinctions between war and peace,
military and police, war and crime, internal and external security” have collapsed . As
violence and politics merge to produce an accelerating and lethal mix of bloodshed, pain,
suffering, grief and death , American culture has been transformed into a culture of war. War
culture reaches far beyond the machineries that enable the United States to ring the world
with its military bases, produce vast stockpiles of weapons , deploy thousands of troops all over the
globe and retain the shameful title of “the world’s preeminent exporter of arms, with more
than 50 percent of the global weaponry market controlled by the United States ,” as reported
by Denver Nicks. War culture provides the educational platforms that include those cultural apparatuses,
institutions, beliefs and policies with the capacity to produce the discourses, spectacles of
violence, cultures of fear, military values, hypermasculine ideologies and militarized policies
that give war machines their legitimacy , converting them into symbols of national identity, if not honored ideals.
As a
Under such circumstances, the national security state replaces any viable notion of social security and the common good.
militarized culture is dragged into the center of political life, fear feeds a discourse of bigotry,
insecurity and mistrust, adding more and more individuals and groups to the register of
repression, disposability and social death. Violent lawlessness no longer registers ethical and moral concerns,
and increasingly has become normalized. How else to explain Trump’s comment, without irony or remorse, during a campaign rally
in Iowa that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters”? Ruthlessness, narcissism
and bullying are the organizing principles of Trump’s belief that only winning matters and that everything is permitted to further his
own self-interests. These are the values that underlie his call for “ law and order,” which is more
properly understood as a call for the lawlessness of the police state . Another register of
lawlessness is evident in the presence of a ruthless market-driven corporate culture marked
by an economic and political system mostly controlled by the ruling financial elite. This is a
mode of corporate lawlessness that hoards wealth, income and power through the
mechanisms of a national security state , mass surveillance, the arming of local police forces, a
permanent war economy and an expansive militarized foreign policy. Trump’s recent
appointments of neoliberal elites, such as Steven Mnuchin, a long-time hedge fund manager and investment banker, to be his
treasury secretary and Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, to head the Commerce Department make clear that he intends to allow
This is an upgraded
the managers of big banks, hedge funds and other major financial institutions to run the economy.
version of neoliberalism which, as Cornel West points out, serves to “reinforce corporate
interests, big bank interest, and to keep track of those of who are cast as peoples of color ,
women, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans, and so forth…. So, this is one of the most frightening moments in the history of this very
fragile empire and fragile republic.”

Military Mania

Trump’s appointment of warmongering, right-wing military personnel to top government posts and his ongoing rhetoric
suggesting the need for a vast expansion of the military-industrial complex signal a further
intensification of America’s war culture , one that inspired an article to be published in Forbes with the headline:
“ For The Defence Industry, Trump’s Win Means Happy Days Are Here Again .” William D.
Hartung makes the latter point clear by citing a speech Trump gave in Philadelphia before the election in which he called for tens of
thousands of additional troops, a Navy of 350 ships, a significantly larger Air Force, an anti-missile, space-based Star Wars-style
program of Reaganesque proportions, and an acceleration of the Pentagon’s $1 trillion “modernization” program for the nuclear
Evidence for an
arsenal…. [all of which] could add more than $900 billion to the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade.
updated and expansive war culture is also visible in Trump’s willingness to consider a mob of
racist neoconservatives for inclusion in his administration — picks, such as John Bolton and James Woolsey,
both of whom believe that “Islam and the Arab world are the enemy of Western civilization” and are strong advocates of a war with
Iran. He has welcomed disgraced military leaders, such as David H. Petraeus, former four-star Army general and director of the
Central Intelligence Agency; he has appointed as secretary of defense retired United States Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis who
opposed closing Guantánamo, along with Obama’s nuclear treaty with Iran. Mattis was brusquely fired by the Obama administration
as the Central Command boss. Meanwhile, in a particularly worrisome appointment, Trump has chosen retired Gen. Michael Flynn
to become his National Security Advisor. Flynn was fired for abusive behavior, has been accused of mishandling classified
information, and is a firm supporter of Trump’s pro-torture policies. The New York Times reported that Flynn, who will occupy “one of
the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy…. believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global
scale, and the Muslim faith itself is the source of the problem … describing it as a political ideology, not a religion.” In other words,
Flynn believes that 1.3 billion Muslims are the enemy of Western civilization. He has also claimed “that Sharia, or Islamic law, is
spreading in the United States” (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency,
Trump’s love of the military
subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them “Flynn facts.”
suggests that he will expand rather than cut back on America’s infatuation with its wars, and will
do nothing to alter a dishonorable foreign policy standard that has propelled the US into a
permanent war status for the larger part of the 21st century. As Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, since the
latter part of 2001 this has resulted in “something like 370,000 combatants and noncombatants [being] killed in the various theaters
of operations where U.S. forces have been active.” This is how democracy ends.

Landscapes of a War Culture

As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire,the
veneration of war in the United States has now reached a dangerous endpoint and has become
the foundation of politics itself. This is especially true as Americans entered into one of the most appalling and
threatening periods of the 21st century. They write: War has passed from the final element of the sequences of power — lethal force
as a last resort — to the first and primary element, the foundation of politics itself…. In order for war to occupy this fundamental
war must become both a
social and political role, war must be able to accomplish a constituent or regulative function:
procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social
hierarchies, a form of biopower aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life. The
violence produced by a war culture has become a defining feature of American society, providing a common ground for the
deployment and celebration of violence abroad and at home. At a policy level, an arms industry fuels violence
abroad while domestically, a toxic gun culture contributes to the endless maiming and
deaths of individuals at home . Similarly, a militaristic foreign policy has its domestic counterpart
in the growth of a carceral and punishing state used to enforce a hyped-up brand of
domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth and various emerging protest movements in the US.The
section on “End the War on Black People” in the “Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice”
outlines this in detail. There can be little doubt that a racist repressive state apparatus will be expanded with Trump’s choice of Jeff
Sessions for attorney general. Sessions was once denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s on the grounds that he was a racist. He
supports capital punishment and is poised to intensify the racist expansion of the criminal justice system. As John Kiriakou makes
clear, quoting the nonprofit news organization, The Marshall Project: Things will likely change quickly under Sessions. The new
attorney general “helped block broader drug sentencing reform in the Senate this year despite wide bipartisan support, saying it
would release ‘violent felons’ into the street.” He will also be tasked with carrying out the new president’s policies on private
prisons…. Just weeks before the election, Geo Group, the second largest private prison corporation in America, hired two former
a hyper-punitive
Sessions aides to lobby in favor of outsourcing federal corrections to private contractors. Since the Nixon era,
political culture has served to legitimate a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue,
and to fuel the racist system of mass incarceration. As Angela Davis argues in Freedom Is a Constant
Struggle, the persistent killing of Black youth testifies to a long history of domestic terrorism
representing “an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official and extralegal, from slave patrols and the Ku
Klux Klan to contemporary profiling practices and present-day vigilantes.” The historical backdrop to the current killing of Black
youth, men and women must
be coupled with the shameful truth that “11 million Americans cycle
through our jails and prisons each year.” Rebecca Gordon points out that the United States is home to only 4 percent
of the global population and yet it holds 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. Moreover, 70 percent of these prisoners are people of
color. These figures testify not only to the emergence of a police state, but also to a justice system that has a long legacy of being
driven by racism. Under such circumstances, important distinctions between war and civil society
collapse as the police function as soldiers, cities are transformed into combat zones ,
shared responsibilities are replaced by shared fears and public safety is defined increasingly as a police matter. Neoliberal society
has ceded any vestige of democratic ideals to a social formation saturated with fear, suspicion and violence. The line has become
blurred between real acts of violence and mythical appeals to violence as cleansing and restorative, as is evident in Trump’s
emotional appeal to his audiences’ rage and fear. Dystopian violence is now legitimated at the highest level of politics, both in its
Politics is
use as a spectacle and as a policy of terror initiated most specifically in the murderous rampage of drone warfare.
now an extension of the culture of war, and violence is a generative force in the production of
everyday life.

Normalizing Violence
The normalization of violence in US society is not only about how it is lived and endured, but also about how it becomes the
connective tissue for holding different modes of governance, policies, ideologies and practices together. All of
these come to resemble military activities. And it is precisely such activities that serve to legitimate the
war on terror, the use of mass surveillance, the weaponizing of knowledge and the merging of a
war culture and warfare state. As Jonathan Simon has detailed in his book, Governing through Crime, in the aftermath of
the transition from the welfare state in the 1960s to the current warfare state, the appeal to fear on many political

fronts became paramount in order to legitimate a carceral state that increasingly

governed through what can be termed the war on crime, especially affecting
marginalized citizens. Violence, however grotesque, has been relegated to the most powerful force mediating human
relations and used to address pressing social problems. Violence is a habitual response by the state in almost every dilemma.
Police violence is only one register of the landscape of everyday violence . The hidden
structure of violence is not always on full display in the killing of Black people . It can also be
found in a range of largely invisible sites of brutality that include debtor’s prisons for children, racist juvenile courts, schools modeled
after prisons, a systemic debt-machine and municipal governments that function as extortion factories and inflict misery and penury
upon the poor. The registers of militarization produce armed knowledge through university
research funded by the military-industrial-Pentagon complex . Meanwhile, a growing culture of political
purity houses a discourse of “weaponized sensitivity” and “armed ignorance.” Empathy for others only extends as far as recognizing
those who mirror the self. Politics has collapsed into the privatized orbits of a crude essentialism that disdains forms of public
discourse in which boundaries collapse and the exercise of public deliberation is viewed as fundamental to a substantive
democracy. This was made clear in Trump’s repeated use of language in the service of violence at his pre-election rallies.

Intolerable Violence in a Militarized Culture of Everyday Life

Intolerable violence has become normalized . Uncritical support for a militarized culture now finds expression in
a range of everyday events extending from the nightly news reports and the simulated violence of screen culture, to sports events.
One often-overlooked egregious instance is evident in numerous military ceremonies that have become central to sports events, a
number of which are paid for by the Pentagon. For example, Eyder Peralta, a reporter for NPR, pointed out that a recent Senate
report indicates that in the past few years, “the Pentagon spent $6.8 million to pay for patriotic displays during the games of
professional sports teams.” Intolerable
violence is also elevated to an everyday occurrence and
legitimated in less evident ways through what Michael Schwalbe has called instances of “ micro
militarism ,” which he defines as “pro-military practices squeezed into small cultural spaces.” Such instances are low-key
advertisements for militarism that, while largely unnoticed, saturate the culture with militaristic values that celebrate war as the
primary organizing principle of society and a general condition of the social order. This is the small change of militarism. Think, for
example, of the ATM receipts that post a “Support the Troops” message under the customer’s bank balance. We encounter such
messages when checkout clerks at gas stations and supermarkets ask for donations to “support our troops.” Such messages
function as military recruiting advertisements on the side of buses, cabs and billboards. Higher education institutions sponsor ads for
graduate programs with pop-up images on their websites, such as “Advance Your Military Career with an MBA.” As Schwalbe
argues, inherent in all of these messages is the idea that freedom and democracy are dependent upon the use of military force,
state violence, and military service, the essence of which is “obedience, not courageous independence.” These “small cultural
spaces” — when combined with various sites of militarism, ranging from public schools and sports events to popular cultural and
policy-making institutions — normalize war and violence. In this way, they make it more difficult for the American public to question
the merging of war and politics and the pathologizing of politics by a culture of violence. One consequence is that democratic
idealism is replaced by the ethos of militarism, and violence becomes the axiom by which everyday problems are both defined and
mediated. Accordingly, the dominance of war-like values “expands from the margins of society to become a powerful process by
which civil society … organizes itself,” and coincides with what Catherine Lutz describes as “the less visible deformation of human
Trump’s rhetoric in support of violence and
potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”
discrimination threatens to further the transformation of the police into SWAT teams and the
endless practice of arresting students for trivial behaviors in schools, subjecting Black people to
fines for breaking rules that are petty and punitive and criminalizing Black people through
policies of racial profiling that constitute practices of state harassment and violence .
Aggressive policing is the underside of white supremacy because it is largely used in the service of whites
against Blacks who have committed no crimes. And with racists, such as Jeff Sessions and Stephen Bannon holding top positions in
the Trump administration, fantasies of America being transformed into a white public sphere will be at the center of politics. War
culture is legitimated ideologically by collapsing public issues into private concerns . This
is a powerful pedagogical tool that functions to depoliticize people by decoupling social problems from the
violence inherent in the structural, affective and pedagogical dimensions of neoliberalism.
Capitalism is about both winning at all costs and privileging what Zygmunt Bauman calls a “society of individual performance and a

This mode of individualized politics functions as a

culture of sink-or-swim individualism.”

weapon of fear that trades off conditions of precarity in order to amplify

the personal anxieties, uncertainties and misery produced through life-
draining austerity measures and the destruction of the bonds of sociality and solidarity. Abandoned to their
own resources, individuals turn to what Jennifer Silva describes in her book Coming Up Short as a “mood economy” in which they
“turn to emotional self-management and willful psychic transformation.” At the same time, it redefines the pathologies of poverty,
patriarchy, structural racism, police violence, homophobia and massive inequities in income and power as personal pathologies and
shortcomings to be overcome by support groups, safe spaces and other reforms that sometimes ignore the need to fight for what
Robin D. G. Kelley calls “models of social and economic justice.”
Toward a Comprehensive Politics
Any attempt to resist and restructure the intensification of a war culture with its white supremacist, ultra-nationalist underside in the
US necessitates a new language for politics. Such a discourse must be historical, relational and as comprehensive as it is radical.
Historically, the call for a comprehensive view of oppression, violence and politics can be found in the connections that Martin Luther
King, Jr. drew near the end of his life, particularly in his speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” King made it clear that
the United States uses “massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted,” and that such
violence could not be clearly addressed if limited to an analysis of single issues, such as the Vietnam War. On the contrary, he
argued that the war at home was an inextricable part of the war abroad and that matters of militarism, racism, poverty and
materialism mutually informed each other and cut across a variety of sites. For instance, he understood that poverty at home could
not be abstracted from the money allotted to wars abroad and a death-dealing militarism. Nor could the racism at
home be removed from those “others” the United States demonized and objectified
abroad, revealing in their mutual connection a racism that drove both domestic and
foreign policy . For King, “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” had to be resisted both through a
revolution of values and a broad-based nonviolent movement at home aimed at a radical restructuring of American society. One
ethical referent for King’s notion of a radical restructuring was his moral and political abhorrence of the killing of millions of children
— at home and abroad — by a war culture and its ruthless machineries of militarism and violence. Michelle Alexander has also

one thing we can learn from King is the need to connect the dots
argued that

among diverse forms of oppression . A broader view of oppression allows us to see

the underlying ideological and structural forces of the new forms of domination at work
in the US . For instance, Alexander raises questions about the connection between “drones
abroad and the War on Drugs at home.” In addition, she argues for modes of political inquiry
that connect a variety of oppressive practices enacted in order to accumulate capital —
such as the workings of a corrupt financial industry and Wall Street bankers, on the one hand, and the moving of jobs overseas, the
foreclosing of homes, the increase in private prisons and the caging of immigrants, on the other. Similarly, Alexander calls for
“connecting the dots between the NSA spying on millions of Americans, the labeling of mosques as ‘terrorist organizations,’ and the
spy programs of the 1960s and 70s — specifically the FBI and COINTELPRO programs that placed civil rights advocates under
constant surveillance, infiltrated civil rights organizations and assassinated racial justice leaders.” More recently, we have
seen the call for such connections emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement and a
range of other grassroots movements whose politics go far beyond an agenda limited to
single issues, such as the curbing of anti-Black violence . This type of comprehensive
politics is exemplified in the policy document, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy
Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” created by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition
Angela Davis has for years been calling for progressives to build links to
of over 60 organizations.
other struggles and has talked about how what has happened in Ferguson must be related to
what is happening in Palestine . This type of connective politics might raise questions about what the US immigration
policies and the racist discourses that inform them have in common with what is going on in authoritarian countries, such as
Hungary. Another example is illustrated when Davis asks what happens to communities when the police who are supposed to serve
and protect them are treated like soldiers who are trained to shoot and kill? How might such analyses bring various struggles for
social and economic justice together across national boundaries? In her book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Davis argues that
such connections have to “be made in the context of struggles themselves. So as you are organizing against police crimes, against
police racism you always raise parallels and similarities in other parts of the world [including] structural connections.” Davis
embraces what she calls the larger context, and this is clearly exemplified in her commentary about prisons. She writes: We can’t
only think about the prison as a place of punishment for those who have committed crimes. We have to think about the larger
framework. That means asking: Why is there such a disproportionate number of Black people and people of color in prison? So we
have to talk about racism. Abolishing the prison is about attempting to abolish racism. Why is there so much illiteracy? Why are so
many prisoners illiterate? That means we have to attend to the educational system. Why is it that the three largest psychiatric
institutions in the country are jails in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Rikers Island, Cook County Jail, and L.A. County Jail? That
means we need to think about health care issues, and especially mental health care issues. We have to figure out how to abolish
homelessness. We need a new political vocabulary for capturing the scope and
interconnections that comprise the matrix of permanent war and violence that shape a
variety of experiences and spheres in American society , all of which will expand under the Trump
presidency. While
the current focus on police killings, gun violence, mass shootings and acts of
individual bloodshed are important to analyze, it is crucial not to treat these events
as isolated categories. By doing so we lose a broader understanding of the
ways in which American society is being held hostage to often invisible
but formative modes of intolerable violence that are distributed across a
range of sites on a daily basis . This is especially true as Americans enter into a historical moment in which
the highest reaches of government will be run by a group of officials who support a president who has condoned torture, wants to
increase the numbers of and power of the police, views Black neighborhoods as manifestations of a criminal culture, staffs his
cabinet with racists, militarists and misogynists, and views violence as a legitimate tool for dealing with dissent. Noam Chomsky is
right in calling Trump, his generals, and the Republican Party “the most dangerous organization in the world.” Intolerable violence is
most visible when it attracts the attention of mainstream media and conforms to the production of what Brad Evans and I have
discussed as the spectacle of violence, that is, violence that is put on public display in order to shock and entertain rather than
inform. However, such violence is just the tip of the iceberg and is dependent upon a foundation of lawlessness that takes place
through a range of experiences, representations and spaces that make up daily life across a variety of sites and public spaces.
Those spaces of lawlessness are on the rise, and the ominous shadow of authoritarianism is at our doorstep. Nevertheless, such
forces cannot be allowed to cancel out the future and promises of a radical democracy.

Militant Hope and the Politics of Resistance

The first step in any form of collective resistance is to recognize the seriousness of the political, social and economic threat that a
Trump administration poses to the United States’ fragile democracy. Secondly, while American society may be slipping away into
the shadows of authoritarianism, it is imperative to think politics anew in order to wage more formidable struggles in the name of
economic and social justice. All societies contain sites of resistance, and progressives with structural power need desperately to join
with those who have been written out of the script of democracy to rethink politics, find a new beginning and develop a vision that is
on the side of justice and democracy. Hope in the abstract is not enough. We need a form of militant
hope and practice that engages with the forces of authoritarianism on the educational
and political fronts so as to become a foundation for what might be called hope in action
— that is, a new force of collective resistance and a vehicle for anger transformed into collective struggle, a principle for making
despair unconvincing and struggle possible. Education must become central to any politics of
resistance because it is fundamental to how subjectivities are produced, desire is constructed and
behavior takes place. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, was right in insisting that subjectivity is both the material of politics and
Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, was
the platform where the struggle over consciousness and resistance takes place. Antonio
right in arguing that at the heart of political struggle is a war of position, a struggle in which
matters of education, persuasion, language and consciousness are fundamental to
creating the formative culture that makes radical change possible . This is a struggle in which inner
worlds are made and remade not only under the weight of economic structures but also through the pedagogical mediums of belief,
moments of recognition and identification. While we may be entering a period of counterrevolutionary change, it must be
remembered that such historical moments are sometimes as hopeful as they are dangerous. Hope at the moment resides in
struggling to reclaim the radical imagination and bringing together an array of single-issue movements, while working to build an

Central to such a task is

expansive, broad-based social movement for both symbolic and structural change.

the need to build alternative public spaces that offer fresh educational
opportunities to create a new language for political struggle along with
new modes of solidarity. At stake here is the need for progressives to make education central to politics itself in
We must disrupt the “common sense” that is produced
order to disrupt the force of a predatory public pedagogy.
in mainstream cultural apparatuses and that serves as glue for the rise of right-wing populism.
This is not merely a call for a third political party. Any vision for this movement must reject the false notion that capitalism and
democracy are synonymous. Democratic socialism is once again moving a generation of young people. We need to
accelerate this movement for a radical democracy before it is too late.
***NEG
T/L
 K---Short---1NC
Liberalist calls for progress <<based on empathy and human rights>>
sustain ontological anti-Black violence in a race to define Humanist
progress in opposition to Black being---<<upheaval of state
institutions/abolition of Whiteness>> is a pre-requisite to effective political
action---otherwise, “progress” gets coopted into more insidious forms of
violence
Purti Pareek 16, B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Critical Race Theory from NYU, currently a
J.D. candidate @ Washington University, “Reform: Friend or Foe?”, or “ANTI-BLACKNESS
AND LIMITATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY REFORMIST FRAMEWORKS”, Confluence, Apr 26
2016, https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/context/interdisciplinary-seminar/reform-friend-or-
foe //hh
Looking specifically at the category of the “Black” will shed light on Coates’s first argument in regards to the contemporary black
body being shaped by legacies of slavery. The category of the “Black” was one that was created out of
devaluation (Wilderson 10). There was no abrupt outbreak of violence that suddenly disposed
people; rather, from the Middle Passage onward, what constitutes Blackness is a violence
founded in the legacy of slavery. The category of Blackness was developed because slavery
made structural incapacity distinct from the disenfranchisement experienced by other people of
color (Asians, Indians, mixed-race people, etc.) (23). Because of historical constructions of the Black body
that reach into the present, the Black body has been automatically associated with inferiority,
malice, and dereliction. The Black body in this sense allows even socioeconomically
disadvantaged Whites to claim at least “they were not a slave.” As such, the trauma and
violence of the Black body is without analogy . The Middle Passage not only
transformed subjects into veritable objects , but also worked to produce a “Black” population
out of a lineage of enslaved Africans. Analogous to this line of reasoning is Coates’s argument that “they made us into
a race, we made ourselves into a people” (10).

For today’s Black bodies, it means that even if Blackness elevates itself to something regarded
as having social worth, the very concept of blackness is still within the bounds of social
death. In this context, a body can be stigmatized for merely being Black, as evidenced in occurrences such as Henry Louis
These miniscule acts of gratuitous violence are
Gates’s arrest for simply being “suspicious” outside his own home.
often replicated, and, though they are frequently dismissed as harmless, they solidify narratives of racial
violence (Wilderson 120). This is because representations of the Black body are signified through a
system of social intelligibility through which Black bodies are read and evaluated in
juxtaposition to others . Every White woman who clutches her purse a little tighter when walking past a Black male
reenacts the negative construction of blackness, thus playing into structures of oppression.

Looking at Coates’s second argument, that contemporary Black bodies are structured by anti-Blackness, it is helpful to look at
scholar George Yancy’s work. He articulates that the body is a living thing rather than a non-living container of the mind. Yancy goes
a step further in his analysis by examining the historical experiences through which the Black body has been demarcated. The body
the White
as such is created through certain historical and ideological discourses that affect the way we view it today. Indeed,
body is created through different historical and ideological discourses that construct it as
superior. For example, the Middle Passage and the trauma inflicted on Blacks through the Middle
Passage was a process that devalued the Black body while increasing value of the White body by forcing
ownership of one onto the other (218).
However, the abstract devaluation of the Black body is illustrated in much more than just
political discourse .

In the pre-Civil War era, there came explosions of voyeuristic imagery of Black persons being
lynched, beaten, and even raped . Many circulated this imagery as public display of violence.
This served two purposes. For White Confederates, this circulation helped other Black persons ‘ stay in
their place’ and not try to infiltrate White situations . This was to say that Blacks had to remain on the
For black persons and white
outskirts of society and not enter economic, political, social, or even educational spaces.
sympathizers, such images helped bring to light the physical violence many black persons had
to undergo, and the hope was that their circulation would spur activism. Despite this naïve
wish, these images did not do this. Saidiya Hartman points out that these images of
torture are replicated with much ease (3). These images assume that even White audiences
can empathize with, speak to, and bear witness to Slave suffering . They do this by being
replicated and circulated with the implicit goal of inspiring empathy . By referencing identities here,
I am referencing the structural limitations of identification. Notwithstanding the prevalence of these images as a means to threatened
and/or to instill empathy, in Scenes of Subjection, Hartman criticizes overtly violent imagery and the problems
of empathetic identification. She indicates that details often put forth in these images
allowed readers to gain a sense of amusement in the face of slavery , even if that
feeling was processed subconsciously. Furthermore, photographers could only create empathy for the enslaved by assuming that
even a White audience had the ability to ever come to grips with the violence of slavery. In that way, the enslaved person had to
step into the place of the viewer and camouflage into the viewer’s humanity instead of being represented as an object with no
analog that lacks any capacity with which to be empathized. This is an optimistic reading of those who wish to empathize with
characters in Slavery images. For the most part, the very mechanism of slavery, that is, rendering a human being as property—as a
thing— the enslaved does not even have subjectivity with which there can be any empathy
at all (9). Because of this, there is a critical limitation to these images .
Violent images of Black persons provoke reactions from observers by showing acts of violence as they are being inflicted or the
aftermath of these acts. Viewers may imagine that they are experiencing the suffering depicted firsthand, thereby creating a shared

the voice of the viewer of these narratives not

experience of horror (Hartman 18). Often times,

only speaks for the enslaved but also replaces the voice of the enslaved (that
In trying to empathize, which requires the projection of oneself onto the
is, if the enslaved had a voice in the first place).
other in order to better understand the other, the observer starts to feel for himself instead of the
enslaved (20). While it can be argued that this is the success of empathetic identification, it is argued that such
identification is possible because of the fungibility of the slave body . This is not true identification.
Instead, fungibility of the slave body allows for the slave body to be replaced by that of the viewer
and/or the reader. Empathetic identification , then, is not with the enslaved person but with
the viewer themselves . When looking at it through this lens, it is palpable that true empathetic identification
with the enslaved is not only not possible but, when attempted, it sustains dehumanization
by erasing the enslaved body and replacing it with the viewer’s . By using fungibility
Black bodies could be traded without the individual ever having a say in
here, I hope to underscore that
where that individual would go. This is obvious in the case of the trans-Atlantic slave trade where enslaved
persons had no agency in society, as they were not able to decide where they could go or what
relations to be a part of. In the case of images of the enslaved, empathy can be elicited because the viewer can replace the
protagonist captive with him or herself.
More often than not, relying on empathy for impact means the White body needs to put itself in the place of the Black body in order
to make the suffering of Black bodies visible. Then, even though that suffering may become intelligible, it
is only done so through the destruction of the Black body (Hartman 19). Lastly, it is assumed that
these images are productive because audiences can understand the other’s pain and overall positionality. This is far from the case.
As said prior, instead
of the viewer expanding his or her conception of the other, the viewer
replaces the other with him or herself (21). Trying to fit into the other’s shoes is the only beginning point of a possible
empathetic image. This speaks to not only the violent ramifications of images when discussing the enslaved but also the
impossibility of narratives that can be translated to the viewer.

What also contributes to the fungibility of the Black body is that the Black body is always
positioned in relation to the White gaze. The Black body is not seen in relation to itself but in relation to how the White
gaze situates it. The White gaze, then, is what controls, disciplines, and even dissects the Black body. The Black body under the
White gaze does not exist anterior to the performance of White spectatorship (Yancy,“Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body”
222). This most basic act of seeing someone as Black already affects the view one has of that person, including the basic view that
The view of being demarcated by the Middle Passage is something that
person has of him or herself.
disrupts the first-person knowledge of a person and causes difficulties in constructing truly
autonomous bodily schema. One only views the Black body as it is already referred to,
categorized as, and named as in context of larger semiotics of privileged White bodies .
That darkness is what becomes historicized and resides within the White gaze and in a backdrop of anti-blackness.

We can see that the ingrained body politic of all Blacks is one of being locked in the trajectory of the slave. For example, Yancy’s
encounter with his White math teacher when he was “discussing about the requirements involved in becoming a pilot . . . he looked
at me and implied that I should be realistic (code word for realize that I am Black) about my goals” (218). In this example, the
normative body politic leads Yancy’s teacher to expect Yancy, a Black teenager, to be rowdy, and when Yancy deviates from that
norm, the teacher cannot accept it. Similarly, the fact that Yancy did not want to pursue the normal vocational occupations that were
created for Blacks at that time, his teacher had returned him to himself as a “fixed entity, a niggerized black body whose epidermal
The fixed
logic had already foreclosed the possibility of becoming anything other than what was befitting its lowly station” (219).
mentality of Whites locks Blacks into the positionality of experiencing acts of violence such as
the above, moments when bodies are indelibly marked with this stain of darkness. Yancy’s math teacher calculated Yancy’s
future by factoring his Blackness, and others do the same. This is most evident in contemporary examples of education and
educational discourses where most low-income areas are concentrated with Black kids and are referred to as the “ghettos.” By
looking at Yancy and Hartman’s arguments regarding the social and political sphere, we can see that historical instances
of “progress” were not really progress, and any other tactics developed throughout
history and recycled in the future may not have the progressive effects we hope for them
to have. This is mainly because they do not have the Afro-Pessimist identification that is
critical of history as mode of progress itself.

The above analysis throws into crisis the contemporary human rights and legal
framework that is most often cited when talking about racial inequality. The main question present here
is, How can America and the policies it puts forth take into account for all people who
make up America? Problematizing this question and the idea of reform via
present day frameworks, Coates notes that the starting point of this
question is itself incorrect . Instead of questioning how can we create policies that are more inclusive of all
A crucial
types of peoples and battle social inequality, we need to first question who is even considered a person in America (10).
part of this discussion is the development of the Human in opposition of the category of Black.
Blackness exists in a state of absolute dereliction. It is the zero-point of all Human endeavors, as
it serves to ground humanity’s image of itself during the Enlightenment period and
beyond . The Enlightenment, with the rise of science and loss of ontological foundation in
God , found itself in crisis, as the very fate and essence of Human could no longer be divinely
ordained. Moreover, the alarming awareness that man was perhaps not in God’s image was compounded with the discoveries of
peoples in the New World and the depths of the African continent, challenging Europe’s exceptionalist cultural practices and concept
of who is Human. For example, consider how startling it was for European explorers to encounter the African tribal life of the
Khosian people in the late seventeenth century: Without the textual categories of dress, diet, medicine, crafts, physical appearance,
and most important, work, the Khoisan stood in refusal of the invitation to become Anthropological Man. S/he was the void in
discourse that could only be designated as idleness. Thus, the Khoisan’s status within discourse was not that of an opponent or an
interlocutor, but rather of an unspeakable scandal (Wilderson “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal” (23).

The Khosian, as something unsignifiable in European coding of Human during this encounter, then served not only to rupture the
Human identification of Europe by challenging the social edifice upon which Europe saw itself as civilized man, but it also moved to
strike both fear and fascination in the heart of Europe. These encounters demonstrated the possibility that behind the mask of
European science, ritual, politics, and life was something as anti-Human and “animal” as the Khosian.

One can easily imagine that, in order to heal the wound inflicted by the loss of God’s grounding,
and to reconcile the animal encounter within the civil European, that the obvious step
forward by White civic forces was to not only exclude the African from Human life by
rendering it animal, but also to juxtapose the African animal figure as a demarcation that
granted European’s a new ground for their Humanity: the color of their skin . Crisis was averted
in this way. The Human essence was secured by the animalization of another, which paved the way to render Africa a hunting
The race of Humanism…could not
ground for animals; for slaves. This is also highlighted by Wilderson, who notes,
have produced itself without the simultaneous production of that walking destruction which
became known as the Black. Put another way, through chattel slavery the world gave birth and
coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent; and
with these joys and struggles, the Human was born, but not before it murdered the
Black , forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks (20-22)

With this in mind, one can understand how the Enlightenment period, with all its talk of liberation,
was also the period most known for slavery , as it became a method to fabricate the Human essence of White
populations. Even the most supposedly progressive of the White resistance, the American revolutionaries for instance, who saw
slaves on an everyday basis, could say that they as Whites deserved freedom from such things as taxation, because at the very
least, they were not slaves; they were not Black. They were Human.

It is Blackness that serves as a dam that holds the waters of the Human in place even
now, lest the referent to Humanity’s essence is lost again . The hierarchical and interlocking relation of
White society as Human over-determines and delimits the purview and reach of Black capacity exactly in this way. A Black
body, even prenatally, is a priori exposed to a legacy of slavery and cannot transcend
itself in assuming other subject positions . The only way to reconcile this
bifurcation, far from mere Biopolitical analysis, is to destroy one of the
ontological fixtures, Black or White, as they are antagonisms. Blackness
as slave could not exist without Whiteness; Whiteness as master could not
exist without Blackness . It seems clear then that the obvious ethical alignment is decidedly against the master,
who continually murders people of color. This, however, entails
a structural, material struggle that cannot
occur in the confines of human rights, reform, or legal analysis in so far as neither of these
frameworks is attentive to the limits of their discussion of power for oppressed peoples .
Similarly, the granting of human rights to populations assumes that there are rights that a citizen
must attain. By the prior discussion of who is Human and how Human is defined, I indicate that not all residents of a nation-state
will be citizens. Therefore, the concept of citizen and rights that are granted require the exclusion of non-citizens intrinsic to
sovereign power. In this case, I
treat the non-citizen the same as the anti-Human, the Black. Discourses
of rights, then, need the existence of the non-citizen. The role that Black folk and legal/political
non-citizens (such as refugees and migrant workers, to just name a few) play is to remain excluded from the
political orders of the nation-states they inhabit, instead shaping the modern political order
via their exclusion.

The limitations of conventional reform are further illustrated when we investigate the
foundations of the institutions (e.g. governments and supranational organizations such as the United Nations)
Notions of
involved. US institutions are purportedly founded upon principles of democracy, justice, and liberalism.
democracy and justice are used as justifications for governments everywhere to intervene and
subjugate different populations , inside and outside of their own nation-states. Therefore, these values are used to
justify the state’s domination over a group of individuals. In order to create a mutually beneficial relationship between citizens of a
nation and the government, John Locke’s theory of social contract was used as a framework for many Western governments. In his
Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke elaborates that the state and citizens of the state would be bound by a moral and
social contract to act in each other’s interests. In Locke’s view, the government is only legitimate because the citizens give it the
powers to be legitimate. None of Locke’s writings take into account the concepts of race, gender, or class. Locke takes for granted
this colorless and universal approach to government and Statism, a system where the state has centralized control over political and
economic affairs. The mainstream analytic view of the Cartesian individual as per Contractarian theory influences colorblind theories
that justify violence in the name of reason and justice.

In The Racial Contract (1997), Charles Mills asserts that this analytic view ignores the historical and social processes through which
identities are formed. The United States’ governmental institutions have their origins in principles developed by political philosophers
such as Locke. As a result, our institutions and their methodologies, such as reformist policies,
have the same gaps that their originating theories have. Since our institutions have ignored
the historical processes through which many person’s identities have come about, they seldom
take into account the historical and present discrimination people of color face when
engaging in the political sphere . It should be noted here that many argue historical processes have
not been ignored, as illustrated by affirmative action and various other equal-opportunity
policies . I would argue that these policies address certain individualized instances of racism and anti-
Blackness but not the structural instances as such . The policies passed seldom address institutional power
and its connection with structures of domination. Having colorblind institutions and a colorblind justice
system not only fails to contest racial domination, but they assist in the reaffirmation of
anti-Blackness by leaving historically bound and oppressive structures intact .
Beyond the active omission of race, gender, and class from his theory of government, Locke anchors his theory on the principle of
property ownership. The state’s primary purpose was and is to protect private property and advance one’s rights to property.
Looking at the relationship between Blacks being anti-Human and thus technically property and Locke’s interpretation of rights, it is
the state that was created was one that protected slave owner’s rights to enslaved
clear that
persons and maintained the positionality of a Black person as enslaved. We need not go further than
original drafts of the constitution to see examples of this. In the constitution, enslaved persons were described as property that
enslaved persons, and later
owners had the right to trade and destroy (Wilderson, Red, White, and Black 354). Moreover,
on, their black decedents during reconstruction, were not seen as peoples to be educated, to
have rights (mostly because they were still property) even though later on, slavery was repealed via law.
If Locke’s theory of government is accepted as the foundation of liberalism, then there remains a relationship between the
establishment of Black persons as anti-Human and resembling property instead of ontologically Human in modern day liberal
democratic societies. Liberal notions of rights are not only inapplicable to Black folks in
modern day society, but also the advancement of liberal rights to sustain a Black
person’s positionality as an anti-Human apolitical commodity . Even worse , it is in
opposition to this idea that human rights are developed . As the human-rights framework or any liberal-
rights framework exists in the status quo, they exist from the foundation of Locke’s liberal notions of rights vis-à-vis protection of
private property. It becomes crystal clear that rights-oriented
frameworks aggressively work to grant rights to
White citizens from the political order of the nation-state that may grant rights in the first place,
and, in turn effectively rendering Black people as non-citizens regardless of their legal
status . It is this foundation of transforming African peoples to Black flesh through the Middle Passage and adopting Locke’s
theory of government that creates the notions of rights through protection of private property on which all rights-oriented frameworks
are based.

Indeed if all of the above is true, then does reform have any chance of instituting
progress? Can institutional racism be challenged in society, as it exists today? A prominent counter-example is
the Civil Rights Movement. It is argued that the Civil Rights Movement was a movement that led
to definite progress; it gave Blacks the right to vote among other legal guarantees. Various scholars
argue that the Civil Rights Movement was another band-aid solution. The Civil Rights

Movement, arguably, did not address the actual conditions of violence Black folk faced .
Even after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, Black people are incarcerated at higher rates than any other
population, experience astronomical rates of HIV infection, poverty, as well as many other
material deprivations. Orlando Patterson explains in Slavery and Social Death that no other category but Black
and White served to fuel the machinations of Western understanding because of the specific
position of Blackness as animal towards Whiteness as agential human. During the Enlightenment period
and thereafter, even the most hardened of European criminals could expect death or

banishment, but never enslavement — never can a White face serve as an animal
in opposition to another category, as it would call into question the
content of Humanity itself . For example, the reason that Blacks were enslaved was because they were not
deemed as human but as a commodity to be traded. Although this is such a simple point, it is important to reiterate because it
means that despite the subjectivity of other races, the Black is dead in so far as it can be reduced to
chattel and owned by others . This “death” experience is what shapes the entirety of the Black experience, even when
put into the hands of colored masters because it exposes those marked as Black to a specific form of violence experienced by those
who are not recognized with humanity.

There has been great debate over how to best challenge social death and discuss whether
social death exists at all. Many argue that despite the being socially dead, Blacks can gain
power through engaging in rigorous government reform and advocating for themselves .
This approach is championed in hopes that power would be materially redistributed where Black
populations would no longer be systemically discriminated against. Conversely, there are scholars
who argue that social death can only be challenged when we challenge the very existence of
US civil society , as it exists in the status quo. As discussed earlier, if we accept the assumption that the construction of the
United States itself was an unethical one, then it becomes inevitable that any measure taken via civil
society will only work to strengthen that unethical construction of the United States .
Because of this, it also becomes inevitable that even the most liberal reformist policies can only
alleviate individual instances of discrimination against Blacks but not systemic oppression.
Advancing these sentiments and arguments in a much more personal way, Coates concludes his book by noting that we must also
we must
no longer view oppression such as slavery from within Western society but its opposite. I agree with Coates’s take that
take the standpoint of the oppressed and realize that Black subjugation foregrounds White
dominance from the outside and flows into all other aspects of oppression. Only after
understanding this and incorporating this framework into all other human rights,
politically reformist, and legal frameworks can we create a starting point to address
racial inequality in the United States that is not doomed for failure.
Yes Structure
 AT: Civil Rights Movement---2NC
Civil Rights Movement was definitely bad for black people
Dominique Thomas 19, Scholarship to Practice Fellow at the University of Michigan in the
National Center for Institutional Diversity, PhD Community Psychology (Georgia State
University), “Black Lives Matter as Resistance to Systemic Anti-Black Violence”, Journal of
Critical Thought and Praxis @ Iowa State University Digital Press & School of Education,
Volume 8 Issue 1 Resisting Structures of Violence Article 4,
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1196&context=jctp //hh

Civil Rights Movement

This resistance continued into what we now refer to as the Civil Rights Movement . The Civil Rights
Movement, as most know it, emerged from events such as the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycotts, and the Brown
v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case involved the citation of Mamie
and Kenneth Clark’s famous doll studies to demonstrate the psychological harm that segregation inflicted on African American
children (Belgrave & Allison, 2018). Centered at this movement was the attainment of civil rights,
especially voting rights . Resistance came in the form of protests, marches, sit-ins, speeches,
and boycotts. This mass movement of resistance resulted in gains, such as the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which supposedly ensured formal political equality
(Taylor, 2016). Many of these gains would receive a backlash . Backlash The FBI’s
Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) sought to eliminate, delegitimize, and subvert
(structural, epistemic, and physical violence) Black organizations such as the Black Panthers and members
of the Civil Rights Movement such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (Taylor, 2016) and even surveilled Black
student unions at universities (Rogers, 2012). King’s assassination in 1968 proved a turning
point ; riots broke out as anger, frustration, and grief poured out into the streets. King himself would refer to such emotional
outbursts as the “language of the unheard,” (King, 1966). The response to urban rebellions of the time period

was to frame them as being the cause of crime, which would require additional
and more forceful policing (Alexander, 2012). The use of racially coded language ( epistemic
violence ) by politicians promoted systemic anti-Black violence under the guise of “law and
order” (Alexander, 2012). Republican party strategist Lee Atwater outlined this “southern strategy” in a 1981 recording: “Now
you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is,
blacks get hurt worse than whites...‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing...and a hell of a lot more
The use of coded language allowed politicians to promote
abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger,’” (Perlstein, 2012).
racist agendas under plausible deniability that their actions were intentionally racist
(structural and epistemic). This also served to discipline rebelling African Americans and to stamp out protests and demonstrations
as a means of lodging complaints at the state (Brown, 2016; Taylor, 2016). Such increasingly punitive and
disempowering policies led many to question the utility of electoral politics and voting.
African American communities would vote for Black politicians who would presumably serve in
the community’s interest, only to see those elected officials’ efforts stymied by White-
dominated committee and legislatures . Alexander (2012) points out that in 1870 (five years after the Civil War),
15% of southern representatives were Black while in 1980 (15 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965), only 8% of southern

. This made it much more difficult for Black communities to

representatives were Black

resist this systemic violence given how much the burden of proof lies on victims of discrimination to prove in
court that it happened. Police units became much more militarized and many Black communities began to resemble places of
military occupation and surveillance (Alexander, 2012). The rise of mass incarceration and the War on
Drugs (structural and physical violence ) devastated countless African American
communities and families, the effects of which are still felt to this day. Morsy & Rothstein (2016) found that African
American children were six times more likely to have/had an incarcerated parent even though African Americans were no more
likely to use drugs; yet, they still were more likely to be arrested. Imprisonment creates a host of additional problems and barriers for
families and communities such as more economic instability and worse health outcomes (Morsy & Rothstein, 2016). The 21st
century has brought a host of new issues to consider for African Americans. Police brutality and shootings of unarmed African
Americans have gained more attention in the media due to cell phone videos and the internet. While such evidence may be
necessary to convince others to enact change, one has to wonder the effect on African Americans of consuming numerous stories
such as these. Many believed, despite the warnings from many Black people, that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 signaled
the dawn of a post-racial society (Taylor, 2016). Although his election galvanized young voters and African Americans,
disillusionment settled in after high-profiled cases of police brutality, shootings of unarmed Black people, and an increasing
awareness of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. Given the present- day political climate, African Americans feel
especially vulnerable, and there has been an increasingly frequent string of police calls on African Americans minding their own
business, leading to a new hashtag #livingwhileBlack. African American communities are over-policed and over-surveilled,
producing negative effects on the health and well-being of African American communities (Sewell et al., 2016). The intersection of
physical, structural, and epistemic forms of anti-Black violence required a response that was radically intersectional.
Reps Defenses
General Apoc Rhet Answers
 Disaster Reps = Activism
Depictions of disaster are not entertainment – they fuel pro-social behavior
and lay the groundwork for activism
Boulianne et al, 18 – Shelley Boulianne is an Associate Professor of Sociology at
MacEwan University with a PhD from Wisconsin-Madison; Joanne Minaker is an Academic
Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Sociology at MacEwan; Timothy J. Haney is a
Professor of Sociology and Board of Governors Research Chair in Resilience & Sustainability at
Mount Royal University (“Does compassion go viral? Social media, caring, and the Fort
McMurray wildfire”, Information, Communication & Society, 2/1/2018,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1428651)//RCU
Popular depictions of disasters on television and in movies fuel ongoing notions that dis-
asters trigger panic (at best) or prompt widespread anti-social behavior (at worst). These
popular depictions turn disasters into a media spectacle, viewed out of both fascination
and for pleasure (Gotham,2007; Recuber,2013). After disasters, media coverage focuses
heavily on the anti-social aspects of public response, such as looting, violence, and rioting;
coverage that both spreads misinformation and delays response and recovery (Tierney, Bevc, &
Kuligowski,2006). The vast majority of the time, however, this narrative and the misleading
perceptions it provokes are false. Tierney (2007) calls the perpetuation of the disaster-
provokes-disorder frame as‘the disaster mythology,’as it is the most dur- able and prevailing
understanding of human response to a catastrophe.
How do people actually respond to disasters? As Drabek (1986) first argued disasters
provide a ‘strategic research site ’ for better understanding the conditions under which
organizations, institutions, and value systems emerge and change. This strain of disaster
social science teaches us that, on the whole, affected people and those in surrounding
areas engage largely in pro-social behavior (Dynes,2006; Rodríguez, Trainor, & Quaran-
telli,2006); they care for others, volunteer, donate money, and otherwise support those in
struggle. People also create new, emergent social network ties and organizations aid in the
disaster response and recovery (Murphy,2007), leaving the post-disaster community
stronger, in many ways, than the pre-disaster community‒a place that Solnit (2010) calls‘a
paradise built in hell.’In short, altruism and care-work are defining features of dis- asters. A
missing thread within this growing disaster literature, however, is the extent to which social
media affects people’s ability to display pro-social and caring behavior.
 Speech = Compassion
Speech acts don’t cause ressentiment or disconnect, they translate to
compassion and on-the-ground support – social media has played an
outsized role in recent disasters
Boulianne et al, 18 – Shelley Boulianne is an Associate Professor of Sociology at
MacEwan University with a PhD from Wisconsin-Madison; Joanne Minaker is an Academic
Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Sociology at MacEwan; Timothy J. Haney is a
Professor of Sociology and Board of Governors Research Chair in Resilience & Sustainability at
Mount Royal University (“Does compassion go viral? Social media, caring, and the Fort
McMurray wildfire”, Information, Communication & Society, 2/1/2018,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1428651)//RCU
Discussion
Does compassion go viral? In our discussion we address this important question and explore
the implications of our findings. While we do not deny that social media can pro- duce hostile
discourses, bullying, and other dire outcomes, our research shows that social media can also
produce positive outcomes, and can serve as a conduit for care and con- cern. In the case of
the Fort McMurray wildfire, an analysis of Twitter data illustrates themes of care and
concern regarding those displaced by the wildfire. The most popular messages on Twitter
were those expressing support, recognizing charitable efforts and invitations to help those in
need. These messages point to a‘spirit of care’related to this disaster.
Our survey data suggest that using social media to follow the wildfire translated into a
greater likelihood of helping (i.e., donating, volunteering, or acting to care for those affected
by the fire). This is consistent with research on traditional media use and donating to
international disasters (Adams,1986; Brown & Minty,2008; Feeny & Clarke,2007; Martin,2013a,
2013b; Simon,1997; Waters & Tindall,2011). In other words, when a tweet goes viral, it has
the power to create real caring acts –which is vital and impactful in times of disaster.
Following the wildfire on social media encouraged Albertans to help in concrete and
immediate ways. This is consistent with the existing literature suggesting a positive
correlation between social media use and civic engagement (Boulianne,2015, 2017). This
study is distinctive in highlighting the mechanisms through which social media engagement
translates into demonstrated action to lend support. These mechan- isms–knowing someone
directly affected, caring about Albertans, and feeling concern for those affected–mediate the
relationship between social media use and charitable responses. Ideally, we would use multi-
wave panel data to assess these causal pathways linking media use and engagement as well
as to specify the causal ordering of key variables (e.g., Boulianne,2011). However, such data
are nearly impossible to collect in the context of disasters which happen unexpectedly.
Our research challenges existing frames of disaster-provokes-disorder (Tierney,2007) and
instead offers a frame that disaster-prompts-care . The systematic analysis of Twitter data
and correlations observed in survey research demonstrate that disaster prompts care. This
supplements the anecdotal evidence offered about disasters prompting care, as observed in
the rabbit rescue in the 2017 California wildfire. In other words, in disasters, affected
people and those in surrounding areas engage largely in pro-social behavior
(Dynes,2006; Rodríguez et al.,2006); they care for others, volunteer, donate money, and
otherwise support those affected. In addition, in contrast to media depictions of dis-
asters in terms of panic and anti-social behavior, we reveal the role of social media in
pro- moting pro-social behavior–helping, recognizing others’help, and expression of care and
concern. Contrary to cynical views that social media engagement fuels disconnection –
even hatred‒ we found promise in social media technologies to create social bonds and
humanize relationships such that members of the Alberta community demonstrated care for
each other.
The combination of Twitter data analysis with survey data suggests that this‘spirit of care’had an
impact. Following the wildfire on social media increased levels of care and concern (i.e.,
empathy or compassion for disaster victims). These findings point to the emergence of a spirit of
care in the aftermath of the Fort McMurray fire, and suggest that this caring spirit is facilitated at
least to some degree through social media. This spirit of care is exemplified in the analysis of
popular Tweets related to the wildfire and sup- ported with survey data with strong
associations between social media use and care and concern.
Accident Reps
 1AC/2AC Miscalc Reps Good

The 1AC is a form of “nuclear learning” that reveals the fragility of the
nuclear age – it’s a precondition to policy deliberation
Pelopidas, 17 – Benoît Pelopidas holds the junior chair of excellence in security studies at
Sciences Po. He is also an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
(CISAC) at Stanford University and a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Programme on
Science and Global Security. (Benoît, “The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of
overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises”, European Journal of International
Security, 2017, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-international-
security/article/unbearable-lightness-of-luck-three-sources-of-overconfidence-in-the-
manageability-of-nuclear-crises/BDE95895C04E7E7988D15DB4F217D1E4)//RCU
On 25 November 2016, Fidel Castro died. He was the last surviving elite participant in the
1962 nuclear crisis, widely regarded as the closest humanity ever came to nuclear war.
With his passing we have lost a direct link with the experience of very intense fear of
imminent nuclear war, and with the learning of the crucial role of luck in preserving the
world from nuclear devastation. From now on, our interpretation of the danger of the most
dangerous crisis in the history of the nuclear age is radically detached from direct experience at
the highest levels of decision-making.
At the same time, all nuclear weapons states are developing vast programmes to
enhance their nuclear weapons capabilities, tensions between Russia and the West remain
high, and the current US president is suspected by some to be more prone to using nuclear
weapons in anger than any of his predecessors.1 In such a context, this article offers a
broader investigation of our beliefs about the ability to control nuclear weapons and manage
nuclear crises based on a study of the so-called ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ (hereafter referred to as
the Crisis).
This crisis, which today is widely considered to be the closest mankind has ever come to
nuclear war, is an essential case study for assessing the fear-inducing effects of nuclear
weapons and understanding the possibility of nuclear learning .2

‘Learning’ in this context means learning from history, and it assumes that the interpretation of
key events in the nuclear age plays a decisive role in the behaviour of policymakers in crisis
situations.3 My understanding of learning is based on the three following premises. First, I
accept the assumption that national experience is a major source of learning.4 Second, I accept
the finding of the literature portraying overconfidence as a source of increased risks.5
Third, I assume that shared international learning about the limits of controllability of
nuclear weapons is a n important precondition for more informed nuclear decision-
making and public deliberations on the subject.6 As a consequence of these three premises,
I regard the absence of learning, or forms of memory that systematically deny the role of
luck and promote overconfidence, as contributing to nuclear danger.7 The fact that
learning is rare does not make its absence any less problematic or puzzling.
The core puzzle of this article is the following: the latest assessment of the Crisis emphasises
the underestimation of the danger at the time, the limits of control over nuclear weapons, and
the role of luck in the peaceful outcome of the Crisis. However, not all policy and scholarly
communities have taken these insights seriously. The unbearable lightness of luck seems
constantly to escape the learning process.8 This article explores three reasons for this
failure to learn, focusing on ideational factors. I do not deny the role of institutional and
bureaucratic dynamics in the entrenchment of representations related to nuclear weapons,
which will be explored in a subsequent essay, but I do not analyse them here. Staying at the
level of ideas emphasises the responsibility of scholars and analysts to work in the
name of avoiding overconfidence without waiting for structural or institutional change.9
 2AC Miscalc Rhet Good

Miscalculation rhetoric is essential to challenge nuclear overconfidence –

discursively imagining future scenarios for escalation spills-up to more
responsible policy-making which dampens conflict
Pelopidas, 17 – Benoît Pelopidas holds the junior chair of excellence in security studies at
Sciences Po. He is also an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
(CISAC) at Stanford University and a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Programme on
Science and Global Security. (Benoît, “The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of
overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises”, European Journal of International
Security, 2017, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-international-
security/article/unbearable-lightness-of-luck-three-sources-of-overconfidence-in-the-
manageability-of-nuclear-crises/BDE95895C04E7E7988D15DB4F217D1E4)//RCU

Full awareness of the limits of knowledge of and control over nuclear weapons is
crucial for historical accuracy , for nuclear learning , and as a starting for a fruitful
nuclear weapons policy debate that would include strategic, ethical, and political
concerns.
This awareness is all the more important as overconfidence has been shown to be a
cause of increased danger. Therefore, learning from the Cuban Missile Crisis is essential
given that, over the last thirty years, analysts have discovered and confirmed that it was one
of the most dangerous events in the history of the nuclear age, the peaceful outcome of
which was partly due to luck, and that in the preceding three decades they had been
overconfident in the ability of good management to explain its peaceful outcome. In order
to understand the construction of such overconfidence, I have accepted the idea that learning
occurred mostly at the national level and focused on the French case, in comparative
perspective. I have first shown how those scholarly findings have not been adequately refuted
and argued that those who do not take these elements seriously have done so via
epistemological or practical inconsistencies. The rejection of counterfactual thinking as a
legitimate scholarly practice is another way of rendering these findings invisible without having
to refute them. Finally, I have used the French example to show that an experience and
official memory of the Crisis that is not based on fear does over time fuel
overconfidence in the safety, controllability, and predictability of nuclear crises.
American and British elites and populations did not grasp the full extent of the dangers at the
time but, unlike the French, they certainly experienced fear. These ideational and disciplinary
factors would be sufficient to prevent the problem from emerging as an issue of public concern
in France; they also call for responsible nuclear scholarship to address them without waiting for
structural or policy change. This opens up three avenues for research.
First, social scientists cannot let Fidel Castro take the unbearable lightness of luck with
him to the grave. Following from the efforts of cognitive psychologists to uncover our
tendencies to deny luck retrospectively, further exploration of the politics of luck and how
the distinction between risk and uncertainty (as uncontrollability and unknowability even of the
boundaries of the possible) has been blurred would be a first critical step towards a
reconceptualisation of nuclear controllability, a reconceptualisation that would place luck at
the heart of political and ethical action, power and responsibility over time.126 At the empirical
level, this approach would involve treating the question of ‘how close did we come to
nuclear disaster’ as a starting point , and focusing on pathways towards disasters rather
than patterns identified in the past and expected to bind possible futures.
Second, cases of near-nuclear use need to be requalified as events worth
investigating.127 Diplomatic historians and security studies scholars could fruitfully join forces
independently of their views on the value of counterfactuals. Indeed, we need further
investigations into the history of nuclear-armed states both to unearth primary documentation
about the past security and safety record of nuclear arsenals and to allow for rigorous
counterfactual thinking, going beyond risk thinking.128 Comparative critical oral histories of
nuclear close calls would likewise help recover the limits of control over nuclear weapons
as a legitimate object of scholarly interest. Such an approach would also tackle directly the
scholarly problem of uncritical reliance on accounts from former officials, while at the same time
addressing the policy problems that result from misguided assumptions of a shared
experience and interpretation of events like the Crisis.129 The empirical dimension of this article
is only a first step in this direction.130 This research programme allows analysts to start
working against overconfidence without waiting for structural or institutional reforms
and suggests that they have a responsibility to do so.

Third, in security studies, it is crucial to reassert the socially and historically constructed
process of valuation of nuclear weapons instead of perpetuating the widespread
assumption that the destructive capability of nuclear weapons triggers adequate fear, which in
turn initiates a learning process that is sufficient for existential deterrence to work everywhere.
If the relevant French decision-makers were indeed adequately afraid at the time but did not
leave any evidence of it, the contentions of this article would remain valid: that absence of
evidence would only be additional evidence of the scholarly blinders entailed by a rejection of
counterfactual thinking; in any case, and whatever the unspoken thoughts of decision-makers at
the time, their public display of fearlessness would be consequential for future generations of
leaders. Evidence of private doubts on the part of statesmen would only bring to the fore the
need to reconnect nuclear weapons scholarship with democratic theorising and the issue of
citizens’ right to know. Identifying the effects of rejecting counterfactual thinking and
documenting the diverse experiences and memorialisations of nuclear danger as components
of a process of valuation of nuclear weapons are ways to understand and counter
overconfidence in their controllability. This is crucial for policy-relevant learning because
the coexistence of this diversity of memories with the retrospective illusions of unanimity and
control gives an unsettling resonance to Peter Sloterdijk’s claim: ‘the only catastrophe that
seems clear to all is the catastrophe which no one survives’. 131
 Miscalc Threats Good: NoKo

Miscalculation rhetoric is especially justified for North Korea – ambiguity,

first-strike pressures, and low controllability
Bell and Macdonald, 19 – Mark S. Bell is an assistant professor of political science at the
University of Minnesota. Julia Macdonald is an assistant professor of international relations at
the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. (Mark S. and Julia, “How
to Think About Nuclear Crises”, Texas National Security Review, February 2019,
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/74831)//RCU
Furthermore, a crisis between the United States and North Korea would likely have low
levels of controllability:121 The robustness of North Korea’s command and control
systems is unknown and would likely be aggressively targeted in the initial stages of any
military confrontation; there are few institutionalized avenues for crisis negotiation or
communication between the two sides; North Korea’s or America’s red lines for nuclear
use are unclear and ambiguous; and while any nuclear use would likely be limited on the U.S.
side given the small geographic territory of North Korea, North Korea’s small arsenal makes it
more likely that it would have to quickly use all weapons at its disposal in order to try to
respond to any U.S. first strike.122 If our assessment of incentives for first use and
controllability are correct, a potential crisis between the two countries would likely unfold
according to the logic of the firestorm model — the most volatile and dangerous of the
four models and one in which sudden and significant escalation across the nuclear
threshold is possible. U.S. policymakers should therefore be under no illusions that a
conventional war with North Korea will reliably remain conventional — rapid nuclear
escalation is highly possible. Given the costs of such a war, avoiding any crisis with North
Korea that could quickly escalate should be a higher priority for U.S. policymakers than if a
potential U.S.-North Korean crisis were likely to unfold according to one of the other models of
nuclear crisis.
 Accident/Miscalc Threats Real
Threats are real --- tensions are comparable to the cold war
Perry 17 – former U.S. Secretary of Defense (1994-1997); author “My Journey at the Nuclear
Brink” [William J. Perry; The Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe Is Greater Today Than During the
Cold War; 01/20/2016 Updated Dec 06, 2017; https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nuclear-
catastrophe-risk_b_9019558] mp
During the Cold War we maintained a powerful force of nuclear weapons with more than 10,000 strategic
nuclear warheads deployed in a so-called triad: intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and

bombers armed with nuclear bombs and air-launched cruise missiles. Even with conservative estimates of expected attrition to this force, it
was powerful enough to destroy the Soviet Union many times over. So it was considered to be an
assured deterrent to a nuclear attack on the U.S. But maintaining this powerful deterrence force had
its own set of dangers. There was a continuing threat of a nuclear war erupting by
miscalculation (as nearly occurred in the Cuban Missile Crisis), or by accident (we had three false alarms that I am aware of, and I don’t know
how many might have occurred in the Soviet Union). Any such nuclear war, however it started, could have brought about the end

of our civilization. But we believed then that it was necessary to take those risks because of the
threats posed by the Soviets. I believe that we are now on the verge of a new nuclear arms race, and that we are
drifting back to a Cold War mentality. When the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union dissolved, it seemed to me that it was no longer
necessary to take those terrible risks. When I was secretary of defense, I made it my highest priority to reduce the dangers posed by the Cold War nuclear arsenal, especially
the “loose nukes“ in former republics of the Soviet Union. During my term in office, we dismantled about 8,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. and the former Soviet Union
(including all of the “loose nukes”), signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and ratified START II. When I left office, I thought we were well on our way to dealing
with the danger posed by the Cold War nuclear arsenal. Indeed, some progress continued to be made. The Moscow Treaty was enacted during the Bush administration, and the
New START Treaty in the first term of the Obama administration, each entailing modest reductions in our deployed nuclear forces. But since then, reductions have stopped.

Our public is blissfully unaware of the new nuclear dangers they face. I believe that we are now on the verge
of a new nuclear arms race, and that we are drifting back to a Cold War mentality. Moreover, I believe that the risk of a nuclear catastrophe

today is greater than it was during the Cold War — and yet our public is blissfully unaware of the new nuclear dangers they face.
This has inspired me to write a book, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” with the goal of educating the public about these dangers. In it I recount my own experiences that have
led me to become increasingly alarmed about the growing nuclear dangers. I describe working on a special analysis team during the Cuban Missile Crisis (when each day I
thought would be my last day on Earth), and later as an undersecretary of defense in the Carter administration being awoken by a call from North American Aerospace Defense
Command during one of the false alarms (when I thought for a few heart-stopping seconds we were about to suffer an attack from 200 Soviet missiles). I also detail my work in
reducing nuclear dangers during my term in office as secretary of defense, the op-eds done jointly beginning in 2007 with George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, in
which we alert the public to post-Cold War nuclear dangers and propose specific steps to reduce those dangers, and my deep concern over recent developments that loom over

a growing antagonism between the U.S. and Russia and the building of a new
us:

generation of nuclear weapons. Russia is already well underway in its rebuilding program, and it has
lost no opportunity to advertise what it is doing. It has also used this arsenal to threaten its European
neighbors (with Iskander missiles) and the U.S. (proclaiming that “Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive
ash”). Even though I believe that these threats are rhetoric, I do understand that our natural instinct is to respond in kind — returning the threats and playing “follow the leader” in
the arms buildup. But do we really want to give up on diplomacy; do we really want to recreate the Cold War nuclear arsenal, with its great costs and even greater dangers? I
believe that it is time to take a deep breath and ask what we really should be doing on this issue that affects the very survival of our civilization. We should not accept that
diplomacy is incapable of reducing the present antagonism between the U.S. and Russia, anymore than with Iran. We should not accept that diplomacy is incapable of reducing
the present antagonism between the U.S. and Russia, anymore than we accepted that it was impossible to use diplomacy with Iran. We have many common interests with
Russia. Even as we confront Moscow on disputed issues, we must work together on others such as preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. And while I have for
many years urged that we move toward the elimination of nuclear weapons, I believe that, in the present geopolitical circumstances, we must continue to maintain a strong

we should not respond symmetrically to

deterrent, which will require some modernization of our aging forces. But as we modernize,

Russia, nor should we simply rebuild the force that we had during the Cold War. As we modernize,
we should not respond symmetrically to Russia. In the last five or six decades, technology has changed enormously, as has geopolitics. I

believe that it is not necessary to continue to maintain the triad that was established during the Cold War. I would support a
recapitalization of the submarine force and the building of a new long-range stealth bomber, which, like the B-2, could be used for either nuclear or conventional forces. But I
would let the ICBM force and the ALCM force phase out as they aged, rather than replace them. Dropping those two systems would be significantly less costly than rebuilding

Phasing out the Minuteman force has the additional

them, and our strategic bomber forces would still provide an unambiguously strong deterrent.

reducing the possibility of an accidental nuclear war, by eliminating the need for a
benefit of

“launch-on-warning” policy. But more important than my view on force structure is my concern that I seem to be a voice in the wilderness. What I am
really advocating is not so much a particular force structure, but a serious national discussion on this issue, the outcome of which has hugely important security and financial
consequences — for the U.S. and for the world. Considering the huge costs entailed, and, even more importantly, the transcendental security issues at stake, we must not
simply drift into a decision about how our future deterrent force will be structured.
 Miscalc Risk High
Russia lacks effective warning systems – magnifies the risk of miscalc
Schlosser 16 – the author of “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus
Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,” from 2013, and a producer of the documentary “Command
and Control,” from 2016 [Eric Schlosser; World War Three, by Mistake;
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake; December 23, 2016]
mp *brackets denoted for edited ableist language
Russia’s greatest strategic vulnerability is the lack of a sophisticated and effective early-
warning system. The Soviet Union had almost a dozen satellites in orbit that could detect a large-scale American attack. The system began
to deteriorate in 1996, when an early-warning satellite had to be retired. Others soon fell out of orbit, and Russia’s last functional early-warning satellite
Until a new network of satellites can be placed in orbit, the country
went out of service two years ago.

must depend on ground-based radar units. Unlike the United States, Russia no longer has two
separate means of validating an attack warning . At best, the radar units can spot warheads only minutes before they
land. Pavel Podvig, a senior fellow at the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research, believes that Russia does not have a launch-on-warning policy—
because its early-warning system is so limited. According to Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear-policy expert at the Middlebury
Institute of International Studies, the deficiencies in Russia’s command-and-control system feed the
country’s long-standing fears of encirclement by enemies ready to strike. During the twentieth
century, Russia was attacked with little warning by both Germany and Japan. “I think the Russian leadership is terrified of a
decapitation strike,” Lewis told me recently. “Perhaps some of that is paranoia, but, on the other hand, the United States opened
Operation Iraqi Freedom, in 2003, by striking Dora Farm—a failed decapitation strike against Saddam Hussein.” Russia’s fierce
opposition to an American missile-defense system in Europe is driven by fear of the role it
could play in a surprise attack. During a crisis , Russia’s inability to launch on warning
could raise the pressure on a Russian leader to launch without any warning . The logic of
a first strike still prevails. As John Steinbruner, a renowned nuclear theorist, explained more than thirty years ago, shooting first
“offers some small chance that complete decapitation will occur and no retaliation will follow. . . . [It] is probably the only imaginable route to decisive
victory in nuclear war.” Vladimir Putin now wields more power over Russia’s nuclear forces than any
leader since Khrushchev. Putin has displayed great boldness and a willingness to take risks in
foreign affairs. A surprise attack on the United States, given its nuclear superiority and largely invulnerable ballistic-missile
submarines, would probably be [devastating] . And yet the alternative might appear worse. Putin has
suicidal

described an important lesson he learned as a young man in Leningrad: “ When a fight is inevitable, you have to hit

first.”
 Trump Irrat = Miscalc

Trump irrationality is an impact magnifier – escalating arms race creates a

psychological threat that spurs miscalc
Schlosser 16 – the author of “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus
Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,” from 2013, and a producer of the documentary “Command
and Control,” from 2016 [Eric Schlosser; World War Three, by Mistake;
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake; December 23, 2016]
mp *edited for ableist language*
the emotional stability of the Commander-in-Chief became an
During the recent Presidential campaign,
issue, with some arguing that a calm disposition might mean the difference between peace on Earth
and a nuclear apocalypse. The P resident o f t he U nited S tates has the sole power to order the use of
nuclear weapons, without any legal obligation to consult members of Congress or the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Ideally , the President would never be short-tempered, impulsive, or clinically depressed. But the mood
of the Commander-in-Chief may be irrelevant in a nuclear crisis, given the current
technological constraints. Can any human being reliably make the correct decision,
within six minutes, with hundreds of millions of lives at stake? Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin confront a stark
choice: begin another nuclear-arms race or reduce the threat of nuclear war. Trump now
has a unique opportunity to pursue the latter, despite the bluster and posturing on both sides. His admiration
for Putin, regardless of its merits, could provide the basis for meaningful discussions about how to
minimize nuclear risks. Last year, General James Mattis, the former Marine chosen by Trump to serve as Secretary of Defense, called
for a fundamental reappraisal of American nuclear strategy and questioned the need for land-based missiles. During Senate testimony, Mattis
suggested that getting rid of such missiles would “reduce the false-alarm danger.” Contrary to
expectations, Republican Presidents have proved much more successful than their Democratic counterparts at nuclear disarmament. President
George H. W. Bush cut the size of the American arsenal in half, as did his son, President George W. Bush. And President Ronald Reagan came close
to negotiating a treaty with the Soviet Union that would have completely abolished nuclear weapons. Every technology embodies the values of the age
destruction of cities and the
in which it was created. When the atomic bomb was being developed in the mid-nineteen-forties, the
deliberate targeting of civilians was just another military tactic. It was championed as a means to

victory. The Geneva Conventions later classified those practices as war crimes—and yet nuclear weapons have no other
real use . They threaten and endanger noncombatants for the sake of deterrence .
Conventional weapons can now be employed to destroy every kind of military target, and
twenty-first-century warfare puts an emphasis on precision strikes, cyberweapons, and minimizing civilian casualties. As a technology, nuclear
weapons have become obsolete. What worries me most isn’t the possibility of a cyberattack, a technical glitch, or a
misunderstanding starting a nuclear war sometime next week. My greatest concern is the lack of public awareness about this existential threat, the
absence of a vigorous public debate about the nuclear-war plans of Russia and the United States, the silent consent to the roughly fifteen thousand
nuclear weapons in the world. These machines have been carefully and ingeniously designed to kill us. Complacency increases the odds that, some
day, they will. The “Titanic Effect” is a term used by software designers to explain how things can quietly go wrong in a complex technological system:
the safer you assume the system to be, the more dangerous it is becoming.
 Miscalc = Extinction
Risk of miscalc is existential – their ev doesn’t assume escalating tensions,
no checks, and misuse
Schlosser 16 – the author of “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus
Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,” from 2013, and a producer of the documentary “Command
and Control,” from 2016 [Eric Schlosser; World War Three, by Mistake;
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake; December 23, 2016]
mp
- Empirical examples for why miscalc is net more likely
- Trump is an impact magnifier – but no checks because no one knows how to react in an actual
nuclear crisis
- Provides political explanation for why miscalc happens – first strike if there’s a perceived threat –
use it or lose it
On June 3, 1980, at about two-thirty in the morning, computers at the National Military Command Center, beneath the Pentagon, at the headquarters of
the Pentagon’s alternate
the North American Air Defense Command (norad), deep within Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and at Site R,
issued an urgent warning: the Soviet Union
command post center hidden inside Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania,
had just launched a nuclear attack on the United States. The Soviets had recently invaded
Afghanistan, and the animosity between the two superpowers was greater than at any other time since the
Cuban Missile Crisis. U.S. Air Force ballistic-missile crews removed their launch keys from the safes,
bomber crews ran to their planes, fighter planes took off to search the skies, and the
Federal Aviation Administration prepared to order every airborne commercial airliner to
land. President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington,
D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from

Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike
would have to be ordered quickly ; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom
called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched. Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that

she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized— it
was a false alarm . An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications
device at norad headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents. A
similar false alarm had occurred the previous year, when someone mistakenly inserted a
training tape, featuring a highly realistic simulation of an all-out Soviet attack, into one of
norad’s computers. During the Cold War, false alarms were also triggered by the moon rising over Norway, the launch of a weather rocket
from Norway, a solar storm, sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds, and a faulty A.T. & T. telephone switch in Black Forest, Colorado. My book
“Command and Control” explores how the
systems devised to govern the use of nuclear weapons, like
all complex technological systems, are inherently flawed. They are designed, built,
installed, maintained, and operated by human beings. But the failure of a nuclear
command-and-control system can have consequences far more serious than the crash of an online
dating site from too much traffic or flight delays caused by a software glitch. Millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, could be annihilated
inadvertently. “Command and Control” focusses on near-catastrophic errors and accidents in the arms race between the United States and the Soviet
Union that ended in 1991. The
danger never went away. Today, the odds of a nuclear war being started
by mistake are low—and yet the risk is growing, as the United States and Russia drift toward a new cold war. The
other day, Senator John McCain called Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, “a thug, a bully, and a murderer,” adding that anyone
who “describes him as anything else is lying.” Other members of Congress have attacked Putin for trying to influence the Presidential election. On
Thursday, Putin warned that Russia would “strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear
forces,” and President-elect Donald Trump has responded with a vow to expand America’s nuclear
arsenal. “ Let it be an arms race ,” Trump told one of the co-hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We will outmatch
them at every pass and outlast them all.” The harsh rhetoric on both sides increases the
danger of miscalculations and mistakes, as
do other factors. Close encounters between the military
aircraft of the United States and Russia have
become routine, creating the potential for an unintended
conflict. Many of the nuclear-weapon systems on both sides are aging and obsolete. The personnel who
operate those systems often suffer from poor morale and poor training. No ne of their senior officer s has firsthand

experience making decisions during an actual nuclear crisis . And today’s command-and-
control systems must contend with threats that barely existed during the Cold War:
malware, spyware, worms, bugs, viruses, corrupted firmware, logic bombs, Trojan
horses, and all the other modern tools of cyber warfare. The greatest danger is posed not by any technological
innovation but by a dilemma that has haunted nuclear strategy since the first detonation of an atomic bomb: How do you prevent a nuclear attack while
preserving the ability to launch one? “The pattern of the use of atomic weapons was set at Hiroshima,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of
the Manhattan Project, said in November, 1945, just a few months after the Japanese city’s destruction. “They are weapons of aggression, of surprise,
Nuclear weapons made annihilation vastly more efficient. A single bomb could
and of terror.”
now destroy a target whose elimination had once required thousands of bombs. During an aerial
attack, you could shoot down ninety-nine per cent of the enemy’s bombers—and the plane that you missed could obliterate an entire city. A war
between two countries with nuclear weapons, like a Wild West shoot-out, might be won
by whoever fired first. And a surprise attack might provide the only hope of national
survival—especially for the country with an inferior nuclear arsenal. During the same month that
Oppenheimer made his remarks, Bernard Brodie, a political scientist at Yale University, proposed a theory of nuclear deterrence that has largely
the threat of retaliation offered the only effective defense
guided American policy ever since. Brodie argued that
against a nuclear attack. “We must do what we can to reduce the advantage that might
accrue to the enemy if he hit first,” Brodie wrote, after the Soviet Union had obtained its own nuclear weapons. Despite all the
money spent on building nuclear weapons and delivery systems, their usefulness would be mainly psychological.
“What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the

enemy thinks we have,” a classified Pentagon report explained. “ The mission is persuasion .” The fear of a
surprise attack and the necessity for retaliation soon dominated the strategic thinking of the Cold War.
Every year, technological advances compressed time and added more urgency to decision-making. At a top-secret briefing in 1961, Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara was told that a Soviet surprise attack on just five targets—the Pentagon, the White House, Camp David, Site R, and High
Point, a bunker inside Mount Weather, Virginia—had a good chance of wiping out the civilian leadership of the United States. By striking an additional
nine targets, as part of a “decapitation” attack, the Soviet Union could kill America’s military leadership as well. The Soviets might be able to destroy
America’s nuclear command-and-control system with only thirty-five missiles. Under McNamara’s guidance, the Kennedy Administration sought ways
to maintain Presidential control over nuclear weapons. The Pentagon deployed airborne command posts, better communications and early-warning
systems, Minuteman missiles that could be quickly launched, and a large fleet of ballistic-missile submarines. Many of these elements were put to the
test during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a series of misperceptions, miscalculations, and command-and-control problems almost started an
accidental nuclear war—despite the determination of both John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to avoid one. In perhaps the most dangerous
incident, the captain of a Soviet submarine mistakenly believed that his vessel was under attack by U.S. warships and ordered the firing of a torpedo
armed with a nuclear warhead. His order was blocked by a fellow officer. Had the torpedo been fired, the United States would have retaliated with
nuclear weapons. At the height of the crisis, while leaving the White House on a beautiful fall evening, McNamara had a strong feeling of dread—and
for good reason: “I feared I might never live to see another Saturday night.”
 Scenario Planning Good

Scenario planning is uniquely valuable for international military policy – it

spills up and creates more effective advocates
Bass 09 (James E., Major, USAF, Associate Attorney over a nine year period with Gibson,
Dunn & Crutcher LLP in both California and Hong Kong, graduated with a B.A. degree from
Yale University 1982 and obtained his J.D. degree from Stanford University in 1987
“UNILATERAL VS. MULTILATERAL ENGAGEMENT: A SCENARIO-BASED APPROACH TO
GUIDING AMERICA’S FUTURE FOREIGN POLICY” Department of Defense Security Report,
p. 10-11)NFleming
The scenarioplanning methodology allows decision makers to envision a future context in
which important actions and decisions take place. It examines factors that impact the
environment in which strategic decisions are made and provides a framework that
allows decision makers to anticipate the consequences of alternative courses of action.
The valuable insights gained from scenario planning provides policymakers the tools needed to
make sound decisions in the present context that will yield favorable results regardless
of what the future holds.36 Scenario planning prepares decision makers to act with
certainty today, despite the uncertainties of tomorrow. This research paper will use the scenario-planning
process to portray US multilateral engagement solutions across an array of alternative futures to uncover the positive benefits of
multilateral engagement in each possible future scenario. Where appropriate, it will also identify possible negative implications of
both policy alternatives. The US foreign policy background analysis presented earlier provides a foundation that will guide strategy
choices for each scenario. This research examines opportunities and challenges of alternative futures that may confront
policymakers in an unpredictable global context to expose possible benefits of a future multilateral foreign policy strategy. The
results of this study will help to guide future national security strategy to the best possible
course for future foreign policy engagement regardless of changes in the international
system. By examining US attitude toward multilateralism, reviewing historic US foreign
policy strategy and engagement, and assessing the benefits and costs of unilateral and
multilateral policy engagement international, this research will bring to light an
important issue with major impact on national security and the status of American 11
hegemony . The scenario-planning process goes one step farther by building a case for multilateralism in future US foreign
policy engagement. Scenario Planning Process Scenario planning has a process that allows policymakers to
examine a range of possible futures and prepare a course of action for all possibilities.
This process accounts for otherwise unforeseen events, and conveys the effects of
policy choices. Si mulating policy choices in a range of possible futures allows
policymakers to select the particular actions that yield the best outcome .37 In The Art of the
Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, Peter Schwartz describes eight steps to developing scenarios which
provide the construct for this study (see Table 1.):

Comparisons are essential for scenario-planning in international relations –

it’s an effective descriptor for ambiguous regions
Mallard, 17 – Gre´goire Mallard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology
and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva).
After earning his PhD at Princeton University, Pr. Mallard was an Assistant Professor of
Sociology at the Northwestern University for five years. He is the author of Fallout: Nuclear
Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and co-editor of
Contractual Knowledge: One Hundred Years of Legal Experimentation in Global Markets
(Cambridge 2016), and Global Science and National Sovereignty: Studies in Historical
Sociology of Science (Routledge 2008). (Gregoire, “From Europe’s past to the Middle East’s
future: The constitutive purpose of forward analogies in international security”, American Journal
of Cultural Sociology, 2017, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41290-017-0049-3/)//RCU
Conclusion
Many decisions of world-historical importance, as David Gibson (2011b, p. 1) writes about
the Cuban Missile Crisis, are shaped by how people talk about the future. Still, as he adds, if
we now ‘‘know a great deal about how [people] construct stories about the past,’’ – as the latter
has been the focus of a wide range of studies on national narratives (Olick, 1999; Savelsberg
and King, 2005; Torpey, 2006; Schwartz, 2011) – we still know ‘‘little about how people tell
stories about the future,’’ (Gibson, 2011a, p. 368) and how the latter can help policymakers,
ordinary citizens, and other individuals, who coordinate to produce or resist social and
political change.
Building upon the dramaturgical tradition (Goffman, 1959) and the recent interest in
anticipatory practices in international relations (Lakoff, 2007; Aradau and Van Munster,
2011) and cultural practices more generally (Cerulo, 2006; Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013), this
article showed how analogical reasoning was used to ‘‘constitute’’ objects of comparison
(here, regional orders) into stable objects of deliberation and intervention. So far, the
literature that looks at the significance of knowledge practices designed to envision the future,
such as modeling, forecasting, and scenario planning, has emphasized the predictive use of
metaphors and comparisons: their use by policy makers to foresee the likely consequence
of their action in a world of uncertainties, or their varying levels of success (or failure) to
predict likely outcomes (May, 1973; Jervis, 1976; Kuklick, 2006). However, as this article
claims, analogies used to talk about the future play an essential part in constituting
strategic outcomes (such as a peaceful region) as objects of knowledge and intervention.
Forward analogies can serve such constitutive purposes as they can give, in the present, a
higher degree of reality to an unstable ontology ( like a region ) whose future existence
and whose contours have yet to be defined. In the case under study, the commensuration
made between ‘‘Europe’’ and the ‘‘Middle East’’ helped constitute the latter as an object of
deliberation across former warring parties (Israel and Arab states).

Scenario planning can be good

Fitzsimmons 18 – research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War
College, PhD in international security policy from the University of Maryland [Dr. Michael
Fitzsimmons, Strategic Insights: Challenges in Using Scenario Planning for Defense Strategy,
January 30, 2018; https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/index.cfm/articles/Challenges-in-Using-
Scenario/2018/01/30] mp
Lawrence Freedman and Colin Gray are two of the most famous contemporary scholars of military strategy. Within the past few years, each published
a book addressing different aspects of the same practical problem of strategy: defense planning.1 Considered to be strategy’s mundane cousin,
defense planning revolves around how a nation designs its military according to its views of the future. Freedman’s and Gray’s verdicts on the subject
are very similar and simply put: we are usually wrong when we predict the future of war. This judgment is not new; indeed, it conforms with the
observations of countless defense policymakers and analysts on the challenges of strategic planning in national security.2 However, those looking to
the works of these preeminent strategists for practical prescriptions on confronting uncertainty in planning are liable to be underwhelmed. Freedman
warns against expecting either too much or too little continuity in current security trends, ultimately concluding that many predictions about the future of
war “deserve to be taken seriously,” but all should “be treated skeptically.”3 In a similar vein, Gray concludes his study with a list of findings that
 The time is ripe for further reflection on this
defense planners may find accurate, but not particularly novel.4
important and enduring problem as the United States enters another season of issuing formal
strategic plans, including a new National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and
Nuclear Posture Review, among others. The Army recently published a new version of the foundational doctrine Field Manual 3-
0, Operations, and will continue developing its new ambitious planning framework for “Multi-Domain Bat tle.”5
How, in the process of all this planning, does the most powerful military in history currently handle the fundamental
challenge of making strategic choices for the future in the face of deep uncertainty? In theory, one of the Department
of Defense’s (DoD) most important tools for strategy development under uncertainty is scenario planning.
Distinct from operational planning, which focuses on applying existing capabilities to today’s

threats, scenario planning aims to explore a wider range of possible challenges several years or
even decades into the future .6 Using alternative future scenarios to test prospective capabilities, concepts,
and policies—through wargaming, modeling, and other analytic techniques— is a unique and

necessary method for grappling with uncertainty . Since 2002, the DoD has employed a formalized joint process for
scenario planning known originally as the Analytic Agenda, subsequently renamed Support for Strategic Analysis ( SSA). Its codified purpose is to
“support deliberations by DoD senior leadership on strategy and planning, programming,
budgeting, and execution (PPBES) matters, including force sizing, shaping and capability
development.”7 However, despite its intended importance to the DoD planning processes, the SSA enterprise is actually far less influential
than it could be on senior leaders’ decision-making. You will search many hundreds of pages in vain for any reference to the SSA process in the
memoirs of Defense Secretaries Rumsfeld, Gates, and Panetta.8 The process has struggled to gain traction in recent major strategic reviews in the
Pentagon. In addition, discussion of SSA in professional literature is almost entirely confined to the defense analytic community. Policy and strategy
debates, by contrast, frequently include general discussions of scenarios, but almost never address how military leaders and organizations should or
do apply scenarios in their decision-making. The limits of classification have some bearing on SSA’s low public profile, but the more important
explanation is simply that scenario planning in the DoD has not fulfilled its promise as a fulcrum for strategic planning. As veteran analyst Paul Davis
put it in his 2016 report to Congress on the status of joint scenario analysis, “defense secretaries, Joint Staff chairs, and service chiefs are fully aware
that they are planning under deep uncertainty. They have not been well served by analysis that suppresses uncertainty.”9 Why is this so hard? Some
of the answers are partly submerged in the arcane details of bureaucratic processes and incentives, but the obstacles have strategic ramifications. Six
nettlesome challenges in particular have complicated the execution of effective scenario planning in the Pentagon over the years. They can be
summarized as dilemmas between competing priorities or concepts. Likelihood vs. plausibility as appropriate planning factors. How likely does a
scenario need to be to compel planning? Furthermore, how likely is any given scenario in the first place? Despite the use of many scientific-sounding
arguments on the subject, and despite superficial deference to the intelligence community as an authority on the subject of likelihood and plausibility,
the answers to these questions are entirely subjective and unverifiable. Everyone has an opinion, and very few can be disproved. This means that a
nearly endless number of uncertainties can be cause for legitimate debate in making scenario assumptions, from the large (would we really deploy
combat forces to that continent?) to the small (would that ally give us that percentage of ramp space at that commercial airport?). This is a very
problematic feature of a process dependent on extensive collaboration and consensus-based resolution of major issues. High-resolution analysis of a
the uncertainty of the future security
small number of cases vs. low-resolution analysis of a large number of cases. Clearly,
environment demands examination of a range of scenarios for force planning. On the other hand,
understanding (much less predicting) combat outcomes is a complex endeavor, requiring specification of many factors. Trade-offs are required
between depth and breadth, but consensus on the proper balance here is always fragile and unstable. Moreover, it is worth noting that the
analytic and bureaucratic cultures of DoD organizations tend to favor depth over breadth. Long,
structured timelines for data development and analysis vs. the need to be responsive to
senior leader guidance. The more complex scenarios and associated data become, the longer it takes for the system to produce and
approve those products. This is a challenge regardless of which end of the spectrum (identified in the previous point) the system tends toward (i.e.,
many simple scenarios or few complex scenarios). A small number of highly detailed scenario products generates significant workload and requires
long and structured timelines for development—but so do a large number of less-detailed scenario products. This presents a challenge in making the
scenario products responsive to senior leader input. Such input inevitably disrupts timelines for data development and analysis, compromising the
timeliness of SSA products. Transparent and collaborative process vs. innovative exploration of new
concepts and capabilities. It is no secret that bureaucratic processes are enemies of innovation. The natural dynamics and politics of
developing collaborative products across multiple organizations with differing incentives tend to produce compromises that elude difficult choices rather
than confront them, and suppress experimental ideas rather than nurture them. SSA products often bear the mark of such compromises and tend to
hew closely to conventional, established thinking about strategic and operational approaches to scenarios. Yet there is not a simple solution to this
problem. SSA products are bound by the need to foster a transparent collaborative process, both because the issues addressed require the expertise
of a diverse range of organizations, and because the viability of their ostensible role in shaping programs and budgets depends on a certain degree of
Appropriateness of operational plans vs.
institutional credibility that is conferred by the transparent, collaborative process.

scenarios as the basis for force planning and “requirements” generation. In theory, force
planning, development, and investment should support near-term needs from deliberate
planning and those derived from potential future contingencies in an integrated fashion .
In fact, because operational planning and force planning processes are so segregated in the DoD, operational plans and future scenarios end up
having force planning
competing with, rather than complementing, each other when it comes to strategic resource allocation.10 Clearly,
either solely focused on current plans or unrelated to current plans would be
inappropriate. Nevertheless, the DoD has always struggled to strike a deliberate balance in this regard. Prerogatives of
civilian planning guidance vs. military operational art. Finally, the SSA process experiences a constant struggle,
as do many Pentagon processes, in defining a boundary between those prerogatives and judgments that civilian guidance predominates and those that
military operational expertise predominates. The point of enumerating these debates or dilemmas is not to criticize any particular position an
organization might take on the substance of the issues. Rather, it is to paint as clear a picture as possible of the fundamental structural impediments to
designing an effective scenario-planning process to support force development. Any such process will need to grapple with these dilemmas, and will
have to make trade-offs, whether deliberate or accidental, among worthy but competing goals. When the current round of official strategizing has
culminated, senior officials, congressional overseers, and defense professionals would do well to take stock of how well the process was or was not
served by scenario analysis, and grasp the opportunity to revitalize this essential tool for strategic planning.
Climate Reps
 1AC/2AC Climate Reps Good

The 1AC is an affective expression of the catastrophe we’re already in –

impending climate change should have already put the world in a state of
emergency – imagining extinction is the only way to overcorrect for that
bias
Mulvogue, 18 – Philosophy PhD candidate at York University in Ontario, Canada (Jessica,
“CATASTROPHE AESTHETICS: AFFECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN
EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA ART”, GRADUATE PROGRAM IN CINEMA & MEDIA STUDIES
YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO, October 2018,
https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/35853)//RCU

The larger point, however, which this dissertation attempted to make clear, is that climate
change presents us with a catastrophe much more extensive and pervasive, much more
destructive and deadlier, than any imaginations of the ‘big one.’ But as I write this on my
back porch, on a warm summer morning, shaded by a canopy of foliage teeming with insects,
squirrels, and swallows, my cat chasing flies while cicadas sing and birds chirp alongside
sounds of airplanes and streetcars –my world, life, unfolding as it does on most summer
mornings–, it is hard to realize, to imagine, that an extensive catastrophe is underway, a
catastrophe that while anthropogenic, exceeds the human sphere, a catastrophe
operating in the interstices of human and Earth history.
The ‘big one’ is easy to imagine. We have references to these kinds of catastrophes; they are
recounted in historical documents, testimonials, oral tales, and in literature, photography, and
film, especially of late. Climate change as catastrophe is much harder to imagine both
because it is anomalous and because it is bound up in a myriad of processes and
systems, some of which challenge human faculties of comprehension. Since it is
something never experienced before, it is accordingly very difficult to sense or to know as
a lived experience. But the ability to generate knowledge about it is crucial for carving
out a path for moving forward . We might wonder: what would an international
coordinated effort look like to ‘deal’ with a catastrophe already underway? What systems
could be put in place? What instructions could be given? What gestural rituals prescribed?
What script could be followed to attempt to save as much of Earth as we can? Before we could
ever possibly answer these questions, before we can learn how to live better within climate
change, we first need to understand and be able to sense the complex catastrophic
present .

I have argued in this dissertation that the aesthetic realm is a privileged space in which
climate change catastrophe can be made visible, and more broadly, sensible. This is
because artworks have been considered to be ‘bundles of affect’; they offer us experiences
that differ in intensity from our day to day life. As such they are sites in which the more
indiscernible aspects of climate change can be brought to the fore. Through a set of case
studies, my dissertation has considered artistic strategies that take different tacks in expressing
and elucidating the indiscernible contours, relations, and violence that make up this quotidian
catastrophe. Catastrophe aesthetics is, I have contended, a means through which novel
experiences and new relations with climate change can be forged; and in these new
relationalities, different epistemologies of climate change can emerge.

My case studies were diverse in form and content. This was intentional. Given the extent of
climate change, we need to match that extent with multitudinous imaginations about
different aspects and versions of the present; we need to engage with the many different
worlds these artworks and others present, in an effort to increase our ‘power to be
affected.’ That being said, this dissertation presented only a handful of artworks from three
different perspectives. In the timespan in which this project was conceived and written, the
effects of climate change have become more apparent, and accordingly, the number of artists
interested in creating work about climate change has increased exponentially. Phenomena such
as species extinction, the unexpectedly fast rate at which polar ice is melting, land
desertification, and the accumulation of plastic in the oceans have captured the attention of
artists and scholars. There is thus much more work to be done in incorporating a plethora of
new art works into the framework of catastrophe aesthetics. For now, however, I will sum up the
main arguments about those works and groups of works that were included in this dissertation.
While Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope and World Game were imagined well before climate
changed was named, they nonetheless responded to the possibility of imminent and profound
global changes. Emerging just on the cusp of the environmental movement, these works are
understandably anticipatory; Fuller believed that they were apparatuses that could help thwart
an oncoming catastrophe. We know now that the catastrophe of climate change was already
underway. And yet they were remarkably prescient. First, they understood this catastrophe to be
of a complex, global nature; not only did they embrace a then-bourgeoning systems perspective
that was gaining appeal across Earth sciences, they used such perspectives to think natural
systems alongside human systems and processes. These works put forth imaginations of
the biosphere and noosphere in which these spheres were figured as profoundly
interrelated. Their ‘planetary’ perspective thus merged the ‘whole-earth’ and ‘one-world’
discourses that Denis Cosgrove saw as distinct kinds of ‘globalisms’ operating at this time. In
this way, the Geoscope and World Game exhibited the idea that human thought and action is
enmeshed with many different kinds of nonhuman systems. Second, the Geoscope and the
World Game suggest that an intellectual knowledge of the planetary system does not suffice. As
immersive expanded cinema environments, these media experiments attempted to attune
spectators to the feeling of the planetary : placing the spectator within a mini-world was a
way to arouse a sense of the magnitude of Earth and the spectator’s place on or within
it; and adorning this apparatus with a screen that visualized data was a way of turning abstract
scientific data into an aesthetic experience. Here, intellect and aisthesis – those two kinds of
knowledge– came together. The creation of a heightened affective environment was
essential in generating the ‘planetary consciousness’ that would become so influential in
the decades that followed. These works were thus attempting to make visible and sensible the
multiple interrelations that constitute Earth and the World as systems and that informed, for
Fuller, an immanent global catastrophe. But catastrophe may here figure in another way too.
 2AC Climate Reps = Reflex

Only describing climate change with sublime rhetoric fosters self-

reflexivity and grasps the magnitude of the issue –forwarding a concrete
political action changes the message from despair to urgency
Quartz, 19 – MA in Communications Studies candidate at the University of Montana (Sean,
“The climate change sublime: Leveraging the immense awe of the planetary threat of climate
change”, ScholarWorks at the University of Montana, 2019,
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12439&context=etd)//RCU
Implications for Environmental Communication Scholars and Advocates
Climate change as a sublime. Detailing the updated threat-based sublime response and
modified sublime rhetoric pattern lead to a definition of climate change as a sublime.
Conceptualizing climate change as a sublime may be productive as the theory of the
sublime is grounded in terror (Burke, 1823), a (un)natural sublime object (Oravec, 1996;
Nye, 1994), and the mobilization of political action (Oravec, 1981). Indeed, conceptualizing
climate change as a sublime reveals a tension, as sublime rhetoric is an “aesthetic
appreciation of nature” as well as the understanding of “its impending destruction”
(Oravec, 1996, p. 72), both of which climate change comprises. Climate change is nature,
despite how unnatural humans have caused it to become, and it carries qualities for aesthetic
appreciation or revulsion in the environments it shapes, whether positive or negative.
Additionally, climate change represents not only the destruction of natural geophysical
processes but also represents the potential for those (un)natural processes to enact further
destruction. This tension leads to the conceptualization of climate change as a sublime,
which I define as the tensions that arise from recognizing the planetary threat of climate
change and the need to take adaptive and political actions to address its immensity,
while simultaneously experiencing the comparative insignificance to the enormous threat,
which evokes powerlessness, uncertainty, and dread. Climate change is awful (awe-full)
because of the immensity of its threat to humanity.
Implications for environmental communication scholars. Chasing Ice’s and Chasing Coral’s
usage of the threat-based awe of climate change and their modifications to the sublime rhetoric
pattern demonstrates that sublime rhetoric is adaptable in overcoming a variety of constraints.
Significantly, sublime rhetoric is effective in overcoming constraints from vast crises that
dwarf the people perceiving it. Environmental communication scholars must give more
attention to different invocations of sublime rhetoric to explore its possibilities in productively
communicating the various exigencies of the Anthropocene. This attention is warranted as the
environmental crises impacting our planet are increasingly on a vast scale and, as a
result, sublime rhetoric may become increasingly predominate in environmental
discourse .

The climate change sublime functions similarly to the tensions that Peeples (2011) identifies
in the toxic sublime, particularly in the way that it creates a space for reflection into one’s
consumptive habits . The toxic sublime are “the tensions that arise from recognizing the
toxicity of a place, object or situation, while simultaneously appreciating its mystery,
magnificence and ability to inspire awe” [emphasis in orginal] (Peeples, 2011, p. 375). Similar to
the toxic sublime, the climate change sublime “raises questions of complicity, producing
an internal reckoning (at least initially) as one measures one’s life choices against the
sites of destruction ” (Peeples, 2011, p. 388). This same internal reckoning is what both
Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral use to situate the audience as responsible through their
“passive acquiescence” (Oravec, 1981, p. 255), as the carbon-industrial complex that fuels our
modern world is so intrinsically tied to a western individual’s lifestyle means that we are all
responsible for climate change, to a degree.
My analysis of the climate change sublime also illustrates an important connection
between the sublime response and another central concept in environmental rhetoric,
the locus of the irreparable (Cox, 1982). The elements of the irreparable are central to the
use of sublime rhetoric for purposes of advocacy, as the natural sublime object is
constituted as unique , precarious, and in need of timely action in order to forestall loss,
thus warranting urgent decisions or actions (Cox, 1982). The climate change sublime acts
as the threat to the natural sublime object, evoking the irreparable not only for the specific object
in question, but also for the entirety of the planet due to the macro scale of climate change’s
threat. The internal reckoning of complicity brought forth by the climate change sublime not
only produces self-reflexivity on how one has contributed to the threat to the natural
sublime object, but also to the natural sublime object of the planet itself. Indeed, when
developing the threatening exigence of the climate change sublime, both films posit a world
ravaged by unchecked climate change. With the climate change sublime, the irreparable is
not only evoked in regard to the deprivation of the particular natural sublime object, but also to
the irreparable loss of a livable planet and the many natural sublime objects that the Earth
houses. The potentiality of the climate change sublime is the death of natural wonder , a
warrant that contributes to its overall persuasiveness .

My analysis also complicates the conclusions of O'Neill et al. (2013) that few images of climate
change imagery can promote both salience and efficacy. The climate change sublime in these
two films addresses this issue through a pattern that first drives the importance of climate
change through juxtaposing the natural sublime object with a threat of the climate change
sublime, and then leads the audience out of that fear through discourse designed to
empower audiences with efficacy. On one hand, Chasing Ice supports the research by O'Neill
et al. (2013), as its sublime rhetoric is ultimately counterproductive to situating audiences as
efficacious. On the other hand, Chasing Coral complicates this research because its narrative of
images, through the sublime rhetoric pattern, imparts both the saliency of climate change and
provides an effective efficacy message to audiences. However, the research by O'Neill et al.
(2013) did not account for a narrative of images as it instead focused on static imagery, such as
still photographs. So, while my findings of Chasing Coral complicate O'Neill et al.’s (2013)
results, it also furthers their research by suggesting that a succession of images, structured in a
sublime rhetoric pattern, can both impart the saliency of climate change while promoting the
audience’s efficacy.
These two films are just two instances of what I am calling the climate change sublime.
Environmental communication scholars should further research distinct evocations of threat-
based awe and unique modifications to the sublime rhetoric pattern to address different
exigencies, environmental or otherwise. This research would advance environmental advocacy
in the Anthropocene and address the engagement of audiences with planet-spanning issues. By
studying different evocations of threat-based awe from anti-natural sublimes, environmental
communication scholars could offer insight into anti-natural sublimes and their particular
instances of awe to shed light on the societal meanings attached to these objects. By studying
different modifications to the sublime rhetoric pattern, environmental communication scholars
could determine the productivity of different methods to engage audiences with elements of the
Anthropocene. Such research would prove useful as it is becoming increasingly necessary to
address climate change and oceanic plastic waste, for example. Environmental communication
scholars could also discover the effectivity of methods to lead audiences out of the fear from the
anti-natural sublime. I have identified one method, that of identification, in my research. There
may be other methods that deserve inquiry and should be brought to light to aid environmental
communication.
Implications for environmental communication practitioners. For climate change advocates,
my analysis suggests that these communicators must attend to the need for efficacy
messages and identification with active political agents as a necessary component of
any “fear appeal.” A fear appeal has three components: first, the rhetor offers a threat that
is perceived by the audience; second, the audience experiences a resulting sense of
fear; third, the rhetor provides a component of efficacy to which the audience then acts
upon (Witte, 1992). Sublime rhetoric, regardless of its intended purpose, mirrors the fear appeal
in its pattern: first, a threat to the natural sublime object is introduced; second, the audience
experiences dread to which they must be led out from; third, audiences are presented with
efficacy either directly or indirectly.
 2AC Apoc k Environmentalism

Apocalyptic imaginations are the backbone of modern environmentalism –

the 1AC’s rhetoric is a prerequisite to utopian planning
McNeish, 17 – Senior Lecturer at the School of Social and Health Sciences at Abertay
University (Wallace, “From revelation to revolution: apocalypticism in green politics”,
Environmental Politics, 7/25/2017,
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09644016.2017.1343766)//RCU
Conclusion: which apocalypse? Whose utopia?

If ‘ the apocalypse is the mother of all Christian theology’ (McGinn 1995, p. 61), it is clear from
the exposition I have presented that it is also one of the parents of contemporary
environmental politics ; the other is modern science. These parents have a tempestuous
but productive relationship that pivots around the dynamic tensions created by bringing
a powerful narrative myth together with a rational analytical framework that generates
falsifiable results about the effects of human actions upon the natural world. Comparative
analysis shows that, like the history of Christianity as a religious social movement in its initial
insurgent and later militant Reformation and postReformation phases, modern
environmentalism was born, shaped and animated in the post-World War Two period by the
spirit of apocalypticism. Exploration of the two competing traditions of apocalyptic Christian
theology, post-millennialism and pre-millennialism, reveals affinities with utopian millenarianism
in the key currents of radical green thought and political practice: social ecology and deep
ecology. Similarly, when Christianity was established, institutionalised and codified by church
leaders working with the Roman power elite, as in mainstream market-driven forms of
contemporary environmentalism, the most immediate elements of its apocalyptic ideological
perspective were suppressed, softened or refashioned into an official discourse of
amillennialism which serves the interests of entrenched social and economic power. The
contemporary debate about apocalypticism and global warming is therefore an important and
deeply political controversy about the relationship of environmentalism to institutions and power.
What matters above all for green politics in the twenty-first century is the type of apocalypticism
that becomes dominant – will it be one that emphasises endings or new beginnings? The status
of the apocalypse in western culture tends towards cataclysmic ending and civilisational disaster
that translates environmentally into what Kingsnorth (in Monbiot 2009) calls McCarthyism (after
the desolate vision of ecological dystopia described in Cormac McCarthy’s seminal novel The
Road (2007)). Millenarianenvironmentalists such as McIntosh, critical intellectuals such as
Klein and greens associated with various branches of social ecology attempt to rescue the
unfolding environmental apocalypse from this debilitating negativity and reconnect it to
its original utopian promise. In this broadly social ecological discourse, the apocalypse is
deployed critically as a revelation about both the rapacious unsustainable nature of
capitalist modernity and the positive utopian potentials existing within the here and now
for the type of social–ecological revolution that global warming necessitates. Its task is
however made difficult by dystopian greens such as Lovelock and some strands of deep
ecology, whose fatalistic apocalypticism is steeped in pessimism about human civilization.
 2AC/1AR Threat Rhet k CC

Sacrificing accuracy for persuasion is especially justified in the context of

climate change – it’s the only way to get non-scientists on board
D’Ovidio, 18 – MA in Communications from Rhode Island College (Louisa, “Apocalyptic
Rhetoric and Subversive Framing in ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’”, Rhode Island College Digital
Commons, https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1147&context=honors_projects)//RCU
Discussion and Impacts
This section will revisit the original research question: Is “The Uninhabitable Earth” a
persuasive climate change narrative? As well as the secondary question: Was the
controversy that surrounded the article a well-founded, informed critique? This questionwas
selected because, as stated, the frame is not unique to the field, but rather the controversy
surrounding the publication is what has elevated the article to rhetorical consideration.
Scientific critiques of “The Uninhabitable Earth” focused on the particularities of David
Wallace-Wells’ communication of scientific facts but ignored the persuasive effects of
Wallace-Wells’ work, an area in which they were not authorities. In particular, Michael Mann
denounced the persuasion but failed to tear down any arguments in the article, especially the
claims made about the issues that surround the scientific communication of climate change. Its
message is effective as persuasion, and should be evaluated as persuasion, not as a
scientific report. The article reached a huge audience, generated a conversation that is
still continuing ten months later. The scientific community wanted this article to use no
other rhetorical techniques to convince its audience besides scientific fact. Based on
Brummett's apocalyptic rhetoric model, Wallace-Wells’ is not apocalyptic rhetoric at all-- it is
an apocalyptic narrative in the tradition of religious scholarship, which has been
proven , in the past, to sway and motivate audiences . The controversy should consider the
question: In the case of communicating climate change science, should persuasive
techniques take precedence over ethics? Whether or not it is ethical and “correct” to write
climate change stories in such a way is a different conversation. Critics must be able to evaluate
this message free from judgments concerning narrow questions of whether or not this news
story will make every citizen install solar panels on their homes. That is not what the article sets
out todo, nor does it allude to such. The text is explicitly clear in its purpose at many points:
scare an unconcerned audience by showing them where a path of uncorrected, risky
behavior could lead.
For all the scientists’ talk about the best practices for convincing an audience to take action, the
reality of our world is such that many people are terrified and no one can seem to take
substantial actions. The discourse scientists created concerning “The Uninhabitable Earth” is a
distraction from the real risks and questions of mitigating climate change. Wallace-Wells and
Mann are in agreement on all the questions of stasis: climate change is happening, it is
impacting us in these ways, it will hurt many lives globally, and there is a plan of action to avoid
this that we must take.
Put simply, invalidating articles concerning scientific journalism based on the emotions
they elicit is harmful to the message of climate change and to the movement as a whole.
This study has presented evidence that many people already do not trust the mass media when
it comes to scientific journalism. By working to invalidate an article that was widely received,
reviewers are spreading falsehoods about rhetoric and communication, under the guise of a
crusade against scientific falsehoods. These critiques are just an extension of the
“reticence” of the community and an attempt to control the conversation that we need to
have, instead of a contribution.
Our society must be able to rely upon and take part in the conversation about climate
change, and we must be allowed to voice the emotions that connect us to that
conversation. Our society cannot be expected to talk about climate science as if we
werewriting a peer-reviewed scientific journal article . Scientific reports are not written to
persuade the general public or even assume the general public as the target audience, rather
scientific reports inform the academy and legislature of the best disciplinary understanding of
the problem. Scientific reports, of course, have their place within the conversation, as scientific
reports are rhetoric, but rhetoric created through the use of logos only.
Again, for all the scientific communities’ critiques about journalistic efforts to communicate
climate change, and their claims that this article is damaging and there are better ways to write
about the science, the public has yet to see anything as widely read emerge from the
scientific community. Emotional appeals should not be evaluated through the lens of
scientific rhetoric, as they are not such. Journalistic efforts are not working to accomplish the
same goal. Wallace-Wells, and other journalists working to convey scientific narratives in a way
that captures the imagination, should not be picked apart at the seams of the particularities.
Those concerned about climate change cannot use confusing numbers, statistics, and
safe language to convince. The public needs heightened language, artistic metaphors
and heightened emotions portrayed in mass media messages about climate change.
These things must have an important place in the climate change rhetoric.
The apocalyptic narrative of the article was not particularly unique to the field, but the massive
push back and response as well as the massive audience is what truly sets this article apart.
Apocalyptic metaphor and narratives have been shown to be effective in the past in the
face of seemingly monolithic, systemic issues. Its nuanced approach to human advocacy
and choice in its appeals show the audience that there are many branching paths forward.
Rhetoric that illuminates the paths and generates serious concern over our circumstances is
essential in spurring us to strive for a better future.
 2AC/1AR Scare Tactics Good

The 1AC is not a science report, it’s a persuasive speech – we use the
same tactics of climate advocates in front of the UN – linguistic analysis
proves
van der Deijl, 19 – degree of Research Master of Arts in Linguistics candidate from the
University of Leiden (Emma, “That hour is almost upon us: Metaphors in climate policy
speeches at the UNFCCC climate conference”, March 2019, Leiden University,
https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/71525/Emma%20van%20der%20Deijl.
%20Thesis%20Research%20Master%20Linguistics.%20Leiden%20University..pdf?
sequence=1)//RCU
This thesis demonstrated that the language used by world leaders at the United Nations
climate conferences reflect either a scenario of great danger and threat or a scenario of a
harmonious transition, allowing for the continuation of existing norms. Neither seem to
incite a good incentive for action (this is discussed in 6.2.2). I found this
impacted/nonimpacted dichotomy in a corpus of 25 speeches held at the United Nations
climate change conferences in the years 2013 until 2017 . This dichotomous discourse fits a
target approach of the climate change problem. Whether we will be able to stay under this
target, will determine if the world will be in an impacted or non-impacted state. The two-degree
line is the concrete realisation of this target. The danger lies on the other side of this line, where
climate change becomes a threat. Removing this threat will allow the world to return to a stable
and balanced norm, which will be achieved through a quiet transition to a clean energy
economy and sustainable development.
The dichotomous discourse in the speeches is partially constructed by metaphors and themes
that represent the scenario of the non-impacted state of the world. In this scenario, climate
change is manageable: it is simply a problem of a budget being disturbed; nothing in the world
has changed except the amount of carbon emitted by economic activities. A recurrent theme in
the corpus of speeches was the counting of carbon and emissions in general, using “carbon
compounds” and talking about efficiency measures as the solution. Phrases like “clean energy”
and “green growth” deny the idea that economic growth might be in opposition to climate
change mitigation measures. This is part of another theme that is part of this non-impacted
scenario, where we will go through a harmonious transition to a world that is mitigated to climate
change. Part of this theme are expressions that express the continuation of existing economic
norms, allowing for “business-as-usual”, such as “sustainable development”, “green
development”, “green economy” a “sustainable future”, a “transformation”, “resilience”, “balance”
and “harmony”. In this non-impacted scenario, the planet is also framed as a patient, being sick
of the carbon overload that needs to be “saved” in order to return to the healthier status quo.
On the other side of the dichotomous discourse are themes and metaphors that refer to
the impacted state of the world when we do not manage to mitigate climate change
before reaching a critical limit. A first theme in the corpus of speeches is what I
summarized as the “urgency theme”, including a range of phrases that refer to the fact
that action should happen now, that we are almost too late and referring to what will
happen in the case of inaction or not enough action. This includes phrases referring to
time, to making noise and sounding the alarm, and to the natural disasters that are
threatening us. Furthermore, a recurring metaphor in the corpus that evokes the image of the
impacted world after passing the threshold of climate change mitigation is the road metaphor.
The road metaphor fits into the target approach, with the journey on the road only being in
service of reaching the destination of the road, negating the consequences of the impacts of
climate change that might happen while being on the road. The classic war frame in climate
change discourse is also part of the corpus of speeches, emphasizing the great threat
that needs to be fought. We are either going to win or to lose, and we are fighting to
avoid the latter result. A last pervasive theme is representing a more far away target to
avoid: the irreversible effects of climate change that the next generations has to deal
with. We owe it to them to carry our responsibility in the climate change problem. There
are certain actions that only we can take, and it will be too late for the next generation to take
them. This reference to our children and grandchildren seems to be the most pervasive way to
convince people of the urgency of the climate change problem.
Deterrence Reps
 2AC Deterrence = Ontological Security
Deterrence secures ontological security – that prevents cycles of violence
Lupovici, 8 – Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of
Toronto (Amir, “Why the Cold War Practices of Deterrence are Still Prevalent: Physical Security,
Ontological Security and Strategic Discourse”, Canadian Political Science Association Annual
Conference, https://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Lupovici.pdf)//RCU
Recent years have seen an increased interest in the study of the connections between
identity and security. One of the theoretical frameworks of this exploration is based on
ontological security, a concept related to actors’ sense of security about their identities,
their future, and the context in which they operate. It is argued that states with ontological
security are those that routinize their relations with other states and are successful in
establishing stable social identities . Jennifer Mitzen contends that states are sometimes
forced to choose between physical security and security of identity, and thus are trapped
in an “ontological security dilemma.” Since this dilemma may lead to the prolongation of
conflicts, further attention, as Mitzen argues, should be given to how states can break
away from it.

I suggest that one of the few options for escaping from the dilemma of ontological security
is to implement practices of mutual deterrence , because, if implemented successfully,
these may increase the physical security of the actors without posing grave threat to
their identities. I argue that the study of deterrence as an idea and as a norm that evolved and
was institutionalized in the international system provides an understanding not only of how
deterrence ideas allowed for the regulation of non-violent behavior between the
superpowers during the Cold War, but of how they constituted the superpowers’ mutual role
identities of deterring (and deterred) actors.1 This identity of deterrer provided a substitute
for the superpowers’ previous role identities of aggressive “enemy,” and in this way
avoided a clash between “securing identity” and “physical security.” In other words, the
institutionalization of the ideas of deterrence (MAD) during the 1970s in the SALT agreements
demonstrated that actors could attain both physical and ontological security. However, I further
argue that this is the reason—the residue of deterrence identity attached to America’s
perception of itself as a superpower—that the perceived inability of the U.S. to deter al Qaeda
became not only a physical security problem but an ontological one. I suggest that this threat to
identity explains not only the American war in the Gulf following 9/11, but the contradictory
discourse regarding the need and feasibility of restoring the American deterrent posture.
 2AC Deterrence Solves War

All the flaws of deterrence come from actors not believing in it – promoting
the norm is a self-fulfilling prophecy that empirically dampens conflict
Lupovici, 8 – Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of
Toronto (Amir, “Why the Cold War Practices of Deterrence are Still Prevalent: Physical Security,
Ontological Security and Strategic Discourse”, Canadian Political Science Association Annual
Conference, https://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Lupovici.pdf)//RCU
3.2 What Is the Norm of Deterrence?
The implication of viewing deterrence strategy as a norm is twofold: decision makers
may be influenced by the norm, which thus makes the study of deterrence as a norm highly
relevant to a better understanding of actors’ strategies. This puzzle was recently articulated
by Lebow, who, although skeptical of deterrence strategy effects, claims that “The big question
for historians may not be why deterrence worked, but why so many leaders and lesser
officials on both sides thought it was so necessary, and how until the advent of Gorbachev,
they repeatedly confirmed this belief tautologically” (Lebow, 2005: 769).
Attempts to combine deterrence and norms are rare in international relations literature.
Freedman’s recent book Deterrence and the debate it has provoked in The Journal of Strategic
Studies is a good starting point for this discussion. Freedman implies that norms and deterrence
can have three possible types of connection. In the first, norms are seen as structures that
increase the chances of deterrence success (in Freedman, 2004: 67); in the second, deterrence
is a way to internalize norms (in Freedman, 2005: 791; Morgan, 2005: 753-5); and in the third,
deterrence itself is a norm (e.g., MAD) (in Freedman, 2004: 31-2, 42; Freedman, 2005: 793).14
Freedman however does not fully differentiate among these possible connections, nor does he
explain how the norms emerge. Here, I refer only to the third type, exploring the development of
deterrence as a norm and its effects on international politics.15
Although it is possible to study “deterrence norm” through a behavioral approach—according to
which individuals comply to norms and are punished when they do not (Axelrod, 1997: 47)—my
aim is to explore it within a constructivist framework. In contrast to the former, the constructivist
approach may provide a deeper explanation and understanding of the practices of deterrence
as well as their emergence.
I argue that the norm that has been developed is that the threat of violence deters
engagement in war. I define “deterrence norm” as the avoidance of violence based upon
(rational) collective expectations that the practice of violence will lead to a bigger loss
than any achievable benefit. In this sense, deterrence strategy is a norm according to
which actors expect to implement rational choice calculations in order to avoid war . At
the same time, the implementation of rational choice calculations may itself strengthen the
norm.
Mutual expectations have an important role in this process. For deterrence strategy to
“work” in the short run, the actors must have mutual expectations of each other’s credibility
(Schelling, 1960). Over time, mutual expectations that deterrence strategy will work may
reproduce the practices suggested in the norm . Mutual expectations then may become an
outcome of the actors’ attempts to influence each other through teaching and
socialization. Such processes may lead to a convergence of ideas and expectations of the
best strategy for handling conflict, and may lead to the creation of common knowledge. In
this way, the implementation of deterrence strategy and its “successful” outcome may
become a self-fulfilling prophecy . This mutual understanding can also be empowered by the
creation of reassurance measures between the actors. These measures in combination with
mutual expectations ensure that actors, while not disregarding the capabilities of the other, will
not consider them as the source of a potential first strike threat.16
The process of norm internalization has an important impact not only on the interaction of
actors but also on their internal behavior. Adoption of a deterrence norm makes deterrence
strategy a tool of public discourse that can affect the selection of foreign policy goals and
strategies. Such selection can further reinforce deterrence practices and the deterrence
norm. In addition, deterrence norm may not only regulate actors’ behavior but can constitute the
actors’ identities. In the next section, I aim to elaborate on the connections between deterrence
and identity and to demonstrate the imporance of such exploration.
 2AC/1AR Collective Identity Solves Security

Institutional internalization of deterrence norms creates a “collective

identity” between adversaries – that actively combats the security dilemma
Lupovici, 8 – Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of
Toronto (Amir, “Why the Cold War Practices of Deterrence are Still Prevalent: Physical Security,
Ontological Security and Strategic Discourse”, Canadian Political Science Association Annual
Conference, https://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Lupovici.pdf)//RCU
Since deterrence can become part of the actors’ identity, it is also involved in the actors’ will to
achieve ontological security, securing the actors’ identity and routines. As McSweeney explains,
ontological security is “the acquisition of confidence in the routines of daily life—the essential
predictability of interaction through which we feel confident in knowing what is going on and that
we have the practical skill to go on in this context.” These routines become part of the social
structure that enables and constrains the actors’ possibilities (McSweeney, 1999: 50-1, 154-5;
Wendt, 1999: 131, 229-30). Thus, through the emergence of the deterrence norm and the
construction of deterrence identities, the actors create an intersubjective context and
intersubjective understandings that in turn affect their interests and routines. In this context,
deterrence strategy and deterrence practices are better understood by the actors, and
therefore the continuous avoidance of violence is more easily achieved. Furthermore,
within such a context of deterrence relations , rationality is (re)defined, clarifying the
appropriate practices for a rational actor , and this, in turn, reproduces this context and
the actors’ identities.
Therefore, the internalization of deterrence ideas helps to explain how actors may create
more cooperative practices and break away from the spiral of hostility that is forced and
maintained by the identities that are attached to the security dilemma, and which lead to
mutual perception of the other as an aggressive enemy. As Wendt for example suggests, in
situations where states are restrained from using violence—such as MAD (mutual assured
destruction)—states not only avoid violence, but “ironically, may be willing to trust each
other enough to take on collective identity ”. In such cases if actors believe that others have
no desire to engulf them, then it will be easier to trust them and to identify with their own needs
(Wendt, 1999: 358-9). In this respect, the norm of deterrence, the trust that is being built
between the opponents, and the (mutual) constitution of their role identities may all lead to
the creation of long term influences that preserve the practices of deterrence as well as the
avoidance of violence. Since a basic level of trust is needed to attain ontological security,21
the existence of it may further strengthen the practices of deterrence and the actors’ identities of
deterrer and deterred actors.
 Legislation k Norm

Individual pieces of legislation can facilitate deterrence norm

internalization and clarity of intentions – that’s the [plan/CP] – Cold War
proves
Lupovici, 8 – Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of
Toronto (Amir, “Why the Cold War Practices of Deterrence are Still Prevalent: Physical Security,
Ontological Security and Strategic Discourse”, Canadian Political Science Association Annual
Conference, https://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Lupovici.pdf)//RCU
The norm of deterrence was institutionalized in the “norm internalization” stage,
demonstrated in the convergence of both superpowers towards a strategy of MAD in the
SALT agreements (1972) and mainly in the ABM (anti-ballistic missiles) treaty. (Garthoff,
1978: 126, 133; Buzan, 1987: 150-1; Nye, 1987: 389; Weber, 1991b: 794-5, see also in Blacker,
1991: 442; Freedman, 2003: 254; Garthoff 1994: 647, 849-52).43
The diffusion of the American ideas of deterrence (Adler, 1992: 135-9) led to the Soviet
learning process, which then led to the assimilation of related concepts such as arms
control and parity. It also led to the to the Soviet acknowledgement of the implications of
“sufficiency” as well as of the problems with superiority (Tyushkevich, 1979: 449; Trofimenko,
1980: 19; Weber, 1991b: 800; Garthoff, 1994: 215-6). The institutionalization of the norm and
the intersubjective knowledge created clarified for the superpowers that superiority is
useless and that deterrence is the rational alternative .44 Furthermore, both superpowers,
rather than attempting to achieve superiority, were now satisfied with parity and equality.45
The institutionalization of deterrence was exhibited not only through the SALT I
agreements between the superpowers but in their individual domestic arenas . Compliance
with the principles of the agreements became part of their framework of interests (Blacker:
1991, 455; Adler, 1992: 133-9). As such, the SALT agreements also became an instrument of
further enhancing and institutionalizing deterrence ideas (Weber, 1991b: 803-4).46
The adoption of the deterrence norm by both superpowers created force structures
compatible with the norm, but more importantly it formed internalized mutual collective
expectations for handling relations. While it was not impossible to break the norm, its
internalization restrained such a shift . The norm created an interpretative environment in
which the actions of the superpowers could be understood not as a direct threat to the other’s
security but as a way of maintaining deterrence. Such understandings further helped to
repeatedly reproduce the normative structures and actions that were compatible with the
deterrence norm.
As Adler suggests, the mutual expectations that deterrence would work encouraged the
superpowers’ policy makers to act as if these expectations were true (Adler, 1992: 108;
see also Jeonniemi, 1989: 45). Thus, they implemented and deployed strategic doctrines
and weapons systems compatible with the norm. Attempts to implement strategies that
deviated from the norm met with counter measures to keep the norm. It was thus argued, for
example, that the institutionalization of MAD ideas significantly constrained the Strategic
Defense Initiative (Morgan, 1990: 136; Weber, 1991b: 806).47 Moreover, beyond domestic
pressure in the U.S., the Soviets also made efforts to turn American strategy back toward MAD
(Booth, 1979: 44; Garthoff, 1994: 466-7).48 These Soviet efforts further demonstrate both the
strategic change that occurred in the Soviet Union and the change in the level of
institutionalization of MAD ideas. The fact that the Soviets tried to shift American strategy rather
than merely acquire additional military capabilities to achieve strategic balance also
demonstrates the power of the deterrence norm, which had “found” an agent who could
maintain it.

Berlin and Cuba don’t undermine our theory, they prove it

Lupovici, 8 – Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of
Toronto (Amir, “Why the Cold War Practices of Deterrence are Still Prevalent: Physical Security,
Ontological Security and Strategic Discourse”, Canadian Political Science Association Annual
Conference, https://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Lupovici.pdf)//RCU
In this manner, the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis can be seen not only as
deterrence failure,42 but as a demonstration of the (violent) effects of the lack of
institutionalized deterrence norm and the absence of intersubjective understanding of
deterrence. Hence, for example, moderate messages sent by Khrushchev to placate the
Americans in the Berlin crisis were considered threats (Trachtenberg, 1991: 219-20).
Likewise, the Soviets misinterpreted American messages, which aimed only to enforce
deterrence, and in this way forced the Americans to present harder and harder lines (Betts,
1987: 104-6; Trachtenberg, 1991: 220-1; Freedman, 2003: 161). The limited effect of the
American warnings on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis can also be explained by using this
line of argument (Taubman, 2004: 554). In other words, the context of warfighting strategy,
especially within the Soviet Union, made it difficult to implement a successful strategy of
deterrence.
However, although the conclusions drawn from these crises in the early 1960s highlighted the
importance of conventional weapons, in the long term these incidents strengthened the
idea of mutual deterrence . These crises, and especially the Cuban missile crisis,
emphasized the dangers of a nuclear war by making the threats much more tangible,
demonstrating the superpowers’ vulnerability (George and Smoke, 1974: 458-9; Weber,
1991b: 796-8; Gaddis, 1997: 261, 278; Allison and Zelikow, 1999: 355). As opposed to earlier
abstract and general references to deterrence, the occurrence of these crises contributed to
the superpowers’ practical understanding of the need to establish “rational” deterrence
relations, and the need to decrease the dangers associated with nuclear war. The solution—
the implementation of a “cities avoidance” doctrine (Freedman, 2003: 225-6)—demonstrates
that the superpowers came to acknowledge the need to make nuclear weapons a source of
security and not a source of insecurity, all through the development of the intersubjective
knowledge of mutual deterrence.
 2AC/2NC Security (Deterrence Adv/DA)

Permutation do both – applying securitization theory to deterrence is a

corrective to both bodies of literature
Lupovici, 18 – Amir Lupovici is a senior lecturer in the School of Political Science,
Government, and International Affairs at Tel Aviv University. He is also a research fellow in the
Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center (ICRC) at Tel Aviv University (Amir, “Toward
a Securitization Theory of Deterrence”, International Studies Quarterly, 2018,
https://academic.oup.com/isq/article-abstract/63/1/177/5265229)//RCU
Conclusion

There are a number advantages that follow from studying practices of deterrence
through the lens of securitization theory . Doing so advances emerging interpretative
approaches to deterrence; it provides a way to better understand and explain deterrence
practices. Securitization theories capture material elements (hard power and violence),
language (threats), and social attributes (identity and culture) that provide direction for
exploring deterrence practices. Moreover, studying these practices in terms of
assemblages of securitizing moves calls attention to processes involving a broader array of
relevant actors, such as publics, elites, challengers, and allies. It captures the different political
effects of, and interplay among, related securitizing moves, such as issuing deterrent
threats, enhancing credibility, and using force.
I conclude with two broader points on the implications of this note for future research. First,
applying securitization theory should help us to evaluate the normative aspects of
deterrence practices—not only because of the important normative implications of securitizing
moves (see, Wæver 2011, 473; Floyd 2011; Hansen 2012; see also Aradau 2004), but also
because we can directly relate these normative aspects to strategic questions and
outcomes . For example, securitizing moves justify nuclear deterrent threats, thus normalizing
extraordinary measures, such as when actors adopt MAD postures. Continuing securitizing
moves justify increasing levels of violence, as seen in the case of Israel and Hamas, where the
two sides, among other things, fought over the definition of the existential threat.
Second, using securitization scholarship to study deterrence should help us to explain
and understand relevant practices. Indeed, securitization theory has lagged when it
comes to the study of “traditional” security issues. Scholars may develop similar
frameworks to explore other traditional security practices—including military interventions,
lower-level militarized disputes among states, and alliance politics—that are securitized
in different ways, at different stages, and for different audiences.
Cyber Reps
 2AC Cyber Reps = Binding Agreements
Cyber threat reps are good – fear strengthens an international stigma that
solidifies into binding agreements
Mazanec and Shamai, 16 – Brian M. Mazanec, PhD, is with George Mason University.
Patricia Shamai, PhD, is with the University of Portsmouth (Brian and Patricia, “Stigmatizing
Cyber War: Mission Impossible?”, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2016,
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7836623)//RCU
VII. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Cyber warfare is still in its relative infancy, and there are multiple possibilities for how this
new mode of warfare will evolve over the coming decades. Major CNA-style cyberattacks
pose a real and growing threat to the US and its allies. Policymakers must look at all
available options to contain this threat, including non-material solutions such as
developing constraining norms for cyber warfare through fostering an international
stigma associated with cyber weapons . After all, active efforts to condemn all three WMD
modalities through negative imagery , awareness, and demonstration led to strong
international norms and eventually binding international arms control agreements.
However, norm evolution theory for emerging-technology weapons and a careful analysis of the
emergence of WMD stigma, when applied to cyber warfare, lead one to conclude that
emergence of a meaningful cyber stigma is unlikely, at least in the near-term. As a result, we
recommend that policymakers recognize that stigma is unlikely to be a particularly effective tool
in dealing with the cyber threat. That said, there are steps that can be taken to begin to build the
foundation of a future stigma associated with CNA-style cyber-attacks. We recommend
policymakers and academics focus on efforts to increase the discussion and transparency
of CNA in order to increase awareness and demonstration of the serious damage that can
be caused by these weapons. Cyber warfare must move out of the shadows for a stigma
to develop. Additionally, we recommend policymakers and academics work to develop a more
precise and accurate lexicon and associated understanding of the broad continuum of cyber
threats so as to avoid watering down CNA by lumping it with more perpetual and relatively
mundane cyber “attacks” that dilute or water down CNA’s potential perceived abhorrence. Broad
differentiation and appreciation of the diverse range of cyber threats is essential for a stigma to
take root. While we predict, at present, grim prospects for the evolution of constraining cyber
norms, unfortunately the threat of cyber warfare is not diminishing. Leaning from the WMD
stigma example and realizing that cyber stigma constraining norms are unlikely to develop into a
regime that could successfully manage and contain the threat is helpful as it allows
policymakers to instead focus on more fruitful strategies for addressing this growing cyber
warfare threat and provides further knowledge and understanding of this increasingly
important subject.
 1AC/2AC Threat Risk High/Reps Good

The 1AC employs communication ethics with regard to the cyberspace –

their insistence that we’re exaggerating overlooks the wicked nature of the
threat and its incomparability with the physical world – their
misunderstanding makes us more vulnerable
Mancino, 19 – Ph.D candidate for Doctor of Philosophy at McAnulty College and Graduate
School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University (Matthew, “The Dialectics of Cyberspace:
Communication Ethics as First Response to Cyber Attacks”, Duquesne Scholarship Collection,
5/10/2019, https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2781&context=etd)//RCU
The final section of the project concludes with implications that emerge from this study. This
chapter has proceeded by situating cyberbullying, cyber theft, and cyber terrorism and
cyber war as wicked crises . Each of these attacks was established within the three
characteristics of wicked crises: (1) they are unpredictable, ill-defined, and swiftly mutating;
(2) they require clumsy solutions; and (3) they reduce trust in public institutions. The
project suggests that to uncover coordinates for these clumsy solutions, a
communication ethics analysis can announce the contending goods that are protected
and promoted within these dialectics. The second segment of the chapter proceeded with
this analysis of the goods that ground the dialectics of cyberspace: public, private, anonymity,
identity, national, and global. When one of these goods is protected and promoted in insolation
from the other, one loses a holistic understanding of cyberspace and opens room for cyber
threats of bullying, theft, terrorism, and war. This project finds six implications:
1. Definitional problems surround current understandings of cyber attacks. As noted in the first
section of this chapter, contemporary understandings of cyberbullying, cyber theft, and
cyber terrorism/cyber war are ill-defined. Without publicly agreed upon standards for
identifying what activities constitute each form of attack, we are left in the midst of
confusion about how to respond. Determining coordinates for identification will assist
individuals, corporations, and governments as they navigate the clumsy solutions
necessitated by these wicked crises.
2. Current understandings of cyberspace are reductive and partial rather than
representative and holistic. As we try to understand cyberspace, we apply a wide variety of
physical world metaphors to conceptualize the space. However, each of these metaphors is
reductive of the whole. The particular metaphor shapes our understanding and, while
important for navigating cyberspace, must never be substituted for cyberspace—“this” is not
“that.” However, each of these metaphors lends a perspective that lends insight to our
understanding of the overall development of the whole. In actuality, these metaphors are all
valid for understanding cyberspace, but cyberspace is distinct from them all.
3. The dialectics of cyberspace render it wholly other than the physical world; we cannot
confuse our familiarity with “this” (physical spaces and contexts) with the constantly
evolving nature of “that” (cyberspace). The dialectical terms that collide in cyberspace—
public/private, anonymity/identity, and global/national—create something radically other; each
term is forever changed as a result of their collision. Any attempt to understand or engage
cyberspace as solely or primarily characterized by one of these terms completely
misunderstands this platform and thus opens vulnerabilities to various cyber threats.
4. Communication ethics uncovers goods for the attackers and their targets. The goods at stake
in cyber attacks illuminate how people conceive of cyberspace and thus the practices they
engage in to protect and promote the space as such. A belief that cyberspace is exclusively
public or private, offers either anonymity or identity, and is only national or global shapes how
users will engage the space. Attentiveness to these goods and the dialectical recognition that
cyberspace is all of them can provide lasting, adequate responses to cyber attacks.
5. Cyber attacks occur through the Internet and have drastic effects on cyberspace or the user
experience with Internet and information and computer technologies. The Internet is distinct
from cyberspace. While technological infrastructure is connected through the Internet, damage
to these systems through a cyber attack will have severe implications on human health and well
being through cyberspace. A conflation of these terms contributes to further misunderstandings
of how to frame adequate, lasting responses.
6. Sebastian Mahfood, Ralph Olliges, Angela Astuto, and Betsy Suits (2005) offer an early
“canon” of literature on cyberethics73 (pp. 14–16). This canon introduces coordinates for
understanding the intersections between cyberspace and ethical considerations emerging within
Web 1.0. This canon primarily includes resources for considering how to navigate the onset of
the digitalized computer age in an ethical manner. To understand ethics within an era of Web
2.0, scholars should attend to ethicists who acknowledge cyberspace as a wholly other
space and who understand cyberspace fundamentally as users’ experiences with computer
technologies. These recognitions would include communication ethicists, media ecologists, and
philosophers attentive to phenomenology and existential hermeneutics. These additions
maintain attentiveness to and appreciation of difference as it guides online action and
emphasizes the experiential and interpretive frameworks that distinctively mark
cyberspace. These approaches guide an understanding that cyberspace is other than the
physical world and, likewise, do not confuse the experiential nature of cyberspace with
technological terminology (e.g., the Internet, the World Wide Web, or social media).
As cyberspace continues to evolve, new threats will undoubtedly emerge that necessitate
further work on pertinent dialectics and their corresponding attacks. This project stands as a first
attempt to represent the dialectical nature of cyberspace as distinctively other than physical
world contexts. Misunderstandings about these dialectics produce misconceptions that
make one vulnerable to cyber attacks . As these cyber attacks grow in intensity and severity,
they act as wicked crises that lack clear and undisputed solutions. Instead, cyber attacks as
wicked crises call forth clumsy solutions. Communication ethics analysis provides insight for
uncovering these clumsy solutions with attentiveness to dialectical goods that acknowledge
cyberspace in its distinctiveness. Communication ethics thus guides a first response to
cyber attacks .
 Securitization k

Securitization of cyber threats prevents them from being forgotten – that

translates into governance initiatives
Christou, 18 – George Christou is Professor of European Politics and Security at the
University of Warwick, UK, a Senior Associate Fellow of the UK Cyber Policy Centre, a member
of the Global Internet Policy Observatory (GIPO, European Commission) Advisory Group, and a
member of the Information Assurance and Advisory Council (UK) Academic Liaison Panel. His
is the author of The European Union and Cybersecurity: Adaptation and Resilience in
Governance Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). His work on the EU, cybersecurity and security
governance has appeared in European Politics and Society, European Security, Journal of
Common Market Studies, Comparative European Politics, European Foreign Affairs Review,
Journal of European Public Policy, Political Geography and Cooperation and Conflict. (George,
“The collective securitisation of cyberspace in the European Union”, West European Politics,
12/3/2018, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402382.2018.1510195?
src=recsys)//RCU
Conclusion
The CSSEU – reviewed and updated in September 2017 by the European Commission –
signalled a securitisation move which was the culmination not of a one-off event, but rather
cumulative threats to European networks and information systems. Annual cyber-threat
landscape reports from ENISA indicate how such threat narratives have been sustained
in order to ensure such issues do not fall down the EU’s agenda . The same goes for
European Council Conclusions, and the Commission’s reviews of the EU’s cybersecurity
initiatives and relevant cybercrime and cybersecurity agencies. More broadly, we can see how a
changing security environment has given rise to a perception that networks and
information systems are increasingly vulnerable. This has promoted the development of
security governance platforms, instruments and agencies to address perceived threats to
the digital ambitions of the EU. EU policy towards cyber-related crime and networks and
information system protection, whilst framed broadly within a security threat narrative, have also
emanated from legal and economic logics (which are still very much present).
A central task of this article has been to demonstrate the visibility of collective securitisation
within the EU cybersecurity policy space. The focus has been on the NIS and cybercrime
specifically given the EU’s shared competence in these areas. Consistent with collective
securitisation we have seen securitising moves by authoritative EU institutional actors as a
result of a series of events and trends, in this case followed by member state agreement to new
legal frameworks, mechanisms and instruments. Further to this, it can be argued that in the
areas of cybersecurity there is evidence of actorness – in the sense that the EU has been
able to speak and practice security with competence and authority – and, indeed, shape
its identity as a cybersecurity actor. EU actorness remains anchored to an aggregating
function in that the member states retain important national prerogatives in cyberspace, but
aggregation has meant a significant movement toward EU autonomy, thus indicating the
tentative development of the thick version of collective securitisation.
The collective securitisation of cyberspace has clearly enabled the EU to carry out the
functions of security governance in terms of patterned, stakeholder and regulatory
interaction, even if in terms of policy outputs and national transposition it is not possible to
judge at the time of writing, how far new practices have evolved and been
implemented/routinised. In cybercrime, the broader EU legal frameworks that have been
agreed (for instance, directives on combating the sexual exploitation of children online, child
pornography and attacks against information systems) have led to the implementation of
collaborative practices at national levels between relevant stakeholders, and also
transnationally – albeit asymmetrically and with problems remaining relating to consistency,
legal clarity and capacity. We can also observe how perceptions of threat , from
cybercriminals or in relation to cyberattacks, can result in novel and new governance
initiatives (such as the EC3 and J-CAT) alongside the renewal of agencies such as ENISA
that deal with the security of networks and information systems in Europe. Indeed, the review of
ENISA is indicative of the circular nature of the collective (re)securitisation process. Its
continuing utility is seen in a context of increasing threat trends (often perpetuated and
maintained by the agency as well as other authoritative EU institutional actors) giving rise to a
call for an enhancement of its mandate in the EU cybersecurity ecosystem. The implication in all
of this is that going forward we need further consideration of differentiated and perhaps also
fragmented security governance practices.
Predictions Good
 Predictions = Action

Qualitative expressions to convey probability make effective action

impossible – Bay of Pigs proves
Friedman et al, 18 – Jeffrey A. Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Government at
Dartmouth College Joshua D. Baker is a Ph.D Candidate in Psychology & Marketing at the
University of Pennsylvania Barbara A. Millers is the I. George Heyman University Professor at
the University of Pennsylvania Philip E. Tetlock is the Leonore Annenberg University Professor
at the University of Pennsylvania Richard Zeckhauser is the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of
Political Economy at Harvard University (Jeffrey, “The Value of Precision in Probability
Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament”, International
Studies Quarterly, 2018, https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/62/2/410/4944059)//RCU
Before President John F. Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, he asked
the Joint Chiefs of Staff to evaluate the plan. The Joint Chiefs found it unlikely that a
group of Cuban exiles could topple Fidel Castro’s government. Internally, they agreed that
this probability was about 30 percent. But when the Joint Chiefs conveyed this view to the
president in writing, they stated only that “[t]his plan has a fair chance of success.” The
report’s author, Brigadier General David Gray, claimed that “[w]e thought other people would
think that ‘a fair chance’ would mean ‘not too good.’” Kennedy, by contrast, interpreted the
phrase as indicating favorable odds. Gray later concluded that his vague language had
enabled a strategic blunder , while Kennedy resented the fact that his military advisers did not
offer a clearer expression of doubt (Wyden 1979, 88–90).1
This kind of aversion to clear probabilistic reasoning is common throughout foreign
policy analysis (Lanir and Kahneman 2006; Dhami 2013, 3–5; Marchio 2014; Barnes 2016,
328–39). Figure 1, for example, shows how the US Intelligence Community encourages
analysts to communicate probability using qualitative phrases. US military doctrine
instructs planners to identify courses of action that minimize risk and that offer the highest
chances of success, but not necessarily to identify what those risks and chances are.2 From
2003 to 2011, the US Department of Homeland Security communicated the probability of
terrorism to the public using a vague, color-coded scale (Shapiro and Cohen 2007; McDermott
and Zimbardo 2007). Many scholars and pundits are just as reluctant to describe the uncertainty
surrounding their judgments when debating foreign policy in the public sphere. Phrases like “a
fair chance of success” would often be more precise than the language that policy advocates
use to justify placing lives and resources at risk (Tetlock 2009; Gardner 2011, 118–41).
Foreign policy analysts typically defend these practices by arguing that world politics is
too complex to permit assessing uncertainty with meaningful precision.3 In this view,
clearer probability estimates convey arbitrary detail instead of useful insight.4 Some
scholars and practitioners even see explicit assessments of uncertainty as counterproductive,
imparting illusions of rigor to subjective judgments, enabling analysts’ natural tendencies toward
overconfidence, or otherwise degrading the quality of foreign policy analysis.5 The notion that
foreign policy analysts should avoid assessing subjective probabilities holds implications for
writing any intelligence report, presenting any military plan, or debating any major foreign policy
issue. But does making such judgments more precise, in fact, also make them more accurate?
To our knowledge, no one has tested this claim directly
This article employs a data set containing 888,328 geopolitical forecasts to examine the
extent to which analytic precision improves the predictive value of foreign policy
analysis. We find that coarsening numeric probability assessments in a manner consistent
with common qualitative expressions consistently sacrifices predictive accuracy . This
result does not depend on extreme probability estimates, short time horizons, particular scoring
rules, or question content. We also examine how individual-level factors predict a forecaster’s
ability to parse probability assessments. Contrary to popular notions that this ability hinges on
attributes like education, numeracy, and cognitive style, we find that a broad range of
forecasters can reliably parse their forecasts with numeric precision. Our analysis indicates
that it would be possible to make foreign policy discourse more informative by supplementing
natural language-based descriptions of uncertainty with quantitative probability estimates.
 Predictions = Decision-Making
Our use of numerical precision is good even if we’re wrong – qualitative
ambiguity results in bad decision-making – proven by latest analysis of
millions of predictions
Friedman et al, 18 – Jeffrey A. Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Government at
Dartmouth College Joshua D. Baker is a Ph.D Candidate in Psychology & Marketing at the
University of Pennsylvania Barbara A. Millers is the I. George Heyman University Professor at
the University of Pennsylvania Philip E. Tetlock is the Leonore Annenberg University Professor
at the University of Pennsylvania Richard Zeckhauser is the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of
Political Economy at Harvard University (Jeffrey, “The Value of Precision in Probability
Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament”, International
Studies Quarterly, 2018, https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/62/2/410/4944059)//RCU
Uncertainty surrounds every major foreign policy debate. As of this writing, for example, the
US public is sharply divided in assessing the extent to which restricting immigration from
Muslim-majority countries could reduce (or potentially exacerbate) the risk of terrorism. One of
the foremost controversies facing the United Nations Security Council concerns the extent to
which economic sanctions can reduce the probability that North Korea will continue expanding
its nuclear arsenal. Debates over policy responses to climate change revolve around different
perceptions of the risks that climate change poses and of the extent to which regulations could
feasibly reduce those risks. At the broadest level, it is logically impossible to support a high-
stakes decision without believing that its probability of success is large enough to make
expected benefits outweigh expected costs. For that reason, it makes little sense to ask
whether foreign policy analysts should assess probability. The question is rather how
they can assess probability in the most meaningful way possible.
We have seen throughout this article how many scholars and practitioners are deeply
skeptical of probability assessment. It is easy to understand why this is the case. Many of
the events that have shaped world politics over the past two decades—such as the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks, mistaken judgments of Iraq’s presumed weapons of mass destruction
programs, the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS, Brexit, and the election of
Donald Trump—were outcomes that most political analysts failed to see coming or cases in
which experts confidently stated that the opposite would be true. Our ability to predict world
politics is clearly less accurate than we would like it to be.
This article nevertheless shows that it is a mistake to believe that probabilistic reasoning is
meaningless in world politics or to think there is no cost to leaving these judgments vague.
By examining nearly one million geopolitical forecasts, we find that foreign policy
analysts could consistently assess probability with numeric precision . We find that
rounding off these forecasts into qualitative expressions— including qualitative expressions
currently recommended for use by US intelligence analysts—systematically sacrifices
predictive accuracy . We see no evidence that these returns to precision hinged on extreme
forecasts, short time horizons, particular scoring rules, or question content. We also see little
indication that the ability to parse probabilities belonged primarily to respondents who possess
special educational backgrounds or strong quantitative skills.
These findings speak to both academic and practical concerns. Great scholars such as Popper,
Keynes, and Mill have all expressed doubts about the value of assessing subjective probability.
Aristotle himself argued that justifiable precision declines as questions become more complex.
Yet, even if that is true, it does not tell us where the frontier of justifiable precision lies in foreign
policy analysis or in any other discipline. That is ultimately an empirical question, and to our
knowledge, this article represents the first attempt to address that question directly. The results
of our analysis are relevant not only for intelligence analysts and military planners, but
also for scholars, pundits, and any other participants in the broader marketplace of ideas. In
short, our data indicate that it is possible to improve the quality of foreign policy discourse
on a widespread and immediate basis, simply by raising standards of clarity and rigor
for assessing uncertainty.
Of course, improving assessments of uncertainty will not always improve the quality of
decisions. When considering drone strikes or Special Forces missions, for example, decision
makers continually wrestle with whether the available evidence is sufficiently certain to justify
moving forward. In many cases, shifting a probability estimate by a few percentage points
might not matter. But when policy makers encounter these decisions many times over,
these shifts will inevitably prove critical in some instances. The fact that we cannot always
know in advance where these differences will be most important is exactly why analysts should
avoid discarding information unnecessarily. Refining standards for assessing uncertainty is
also far less costly than the kinds of controversial organizational overhauls that the US
government regularly undertakes to improve the quality of foreign policy analysis (Rovner,
Long, and Zegart 2006; Betts 2007, 124–58; Bar-Joseph and McDermott 2008; Pillar 2011,
293– 330).
Finally, while our article focuses on the domain of international relations, similar
controversies about the value of precision surround assessments of uncertainty in almost
any other area of high-stakes decision-making. For example, one of a physician’s most
important responsibilities is to communicate with patients about uncertain diagnoses and
treatment outcomes. Yet medical professionals, like foreign policy analysts, often prove
reluctant to express probabilistic judgments explicitly (Braddock, Edwards, Hasenberg, Laidley,
and Levinson 1999, 2318). Climate scientists similarly debate the value of precision in
communicating predictions to the public (Budescu, Broomell, and Por 2009). The application of
criminal justice in the United States revolves, in large part, around the ways in which jurors
interpret the vague probabilistic standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (Tillers and
Gottfried 2006).
General Security Answers
 2AC Perm Stuff

The permutation solves best – the alt alone fails but a combination of IR
strategies fosters transformative solutions
Chen 10 – associate professor in the Department of Global Studies at Ryukoku University, Kyoto and currently a
visiting research fellow in the Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at the New School, New York.
[Ching-Chang Chen; International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Volume 11 (2011) 1–23 doi:10.1093/irap/lcq014
Advance Access published on 28 September 2010] mp
Contrary to its proclaimed mission, the discipline of IR is a fundamental source of the world’s problems, not its solutions. Dominated by Western
modernity that is premised upon a self-other binary in which the other’s identity must be negated and agency be denied ,
IR privileges the
claims of state sovereignty over all other kinds of political community and places overwhelming emphasis
on the ‘universalization’ of state-b6uilding processes, where the liberal, capitalist First World becomes the role
model for all. Moreover, the Gramscian hegemonic status of Western IRT precludes one from questioning
the West’s assumed right to determine which ways of producing knowledge are legitimate (or
not) and to use the standards of a particular kind of knowledge-making enterprise (i.e.
positivism) for judging the legitimacy of all other different ways of creating knowledge. This
makes the construction of alternative sites of knowledge production in world politics all the

more important and pressing. However, as this paper has shown, most intellectual endeavors to
construct non-Western IRT in Asia run the risk of inviting nativism – the mirror image of universalism –
which do not involve a critical selfreflection and questioning of the a priori assumptions,
procedures and values embedded in the modernization and development enterprise.
Following the historicist trajectory laid down by the West, attempts to ‘catch up’ with Western IR make the
discipline turn neither post-Western nor democratic. Indeed, they can never catch up and
will remain stuck ‘in the transition narrative that will always remain grievously
incomplete’ (Chakrabarty, 2000b, p. 1510; cited in Behera, 2007, p. 359). How, then, can we reorient IR toward a
more democratic, less hegemonic direction (in terms of disrupting the structural hierarchies between Western and non-
Political scientists need an
Western perspectives)? To borrow from Shih (2007b, p. 212),

epistemology of democracy that does not assume a fixed ontology or

a fixed teleology . This democracy should enable people to resist fixation by any ideology,
regime, tradition, or self-consistency. Its form and meaning cannot be determined in
advance because the nature of suppression is never fixed. A step forward may involve
analyzing actual practices of such fluid resistance or subversion in various, often inconsistent, tracks of
theorizing. How the subaltern intellectuals actually engage in activities pertaining to IR theorizing thus deserves more comprehensive
treatment.24 Shih’s remark on democratic theorizing brings us back to Said’s observation that cultural discourses/ideologies are
complicit in the formation of empire and that the metropolitan center’s subjectivity is
constituted through its power relations with the colonial periphery. From this perspective, empire
will never collapse without its core’s cultural decolonization (Chen, 2006). In the same vein,
the IR discipline will remain undemocratic if decolonization only takes place in non-
Western IR. Western IR needs to acknowledge its direct involvement in the lives of those whom
it studies and to jointly create non-hegemonic spaces where different perspectives of IR can co-
exist and learn from each other .25 Without such efforts (albeit difficult and even painful), it will be
impossible for the discipline to cultivate a political re-imagination that recognizes,
understands and encourages differences, and fosters alternative ontological
possibilities of social and political spaces for interactions within and between political
communities at all levels. Although linking the democratization of IR to its decolonization is not an entirely novel claim (Ling, 2002;
Jones, 2006) and some important correctives of the booming non-Western IRT projects have been proffered (Shani, 2008; Shimizu, 2010),26 this
paper has sought to show why critical IR scholarship cannot afford to lay down its guard, considering the immense difficulty in counter-hegemony as
seen in Japan’s past failure to escape from the Hegelian trap. Such caution should not lead one to conclude that the ‘oriental subject’ simply does not
have any indigenous voice (Shani, 2008, p. 727), for that would deny ‘Orientals’ agency in entering into a productive dialogue between civilizations,
the way non-Western IR is promoted in
including the West, which is in itself a Huntingtonian fallacy. Nevertheless, because
the discipline has largely worked to cast the ‘burden of proof ’ onto those IR scholars
who live and work in the non-Western periphery rather than propel those who do
Western IR to reflect upon the epistemological/political implications of their approach
and to communicate with the former,27 our concern is both warranted and immediate. After
all, if IR scholarship outside the West were effectively turned into the ‘local informants’ for the Western center, that would mean the installation of a
bridgehead in the center of the periphery (Galtung, 1971), hence reinforcing the dominance relationship.28 Whether the emergence of Asian national
schools of IR will end up traversing this road remains to be seen.

Binaries DA – their homogenization of Western and non-Western IR

scholarship being dichotomous is wrong and overlooks the reciprocal
empowerment they receive – only the permutation accesses this
complementarity
Qin, 18 – Professor of International Relations at China Foreign Affairs University (Yaqing, “A
Multiverse of Knowledge: Cultures and IR Theories”, The Chinese Journal of International
Politics, 2018, https://academic.oup.com/cjip/article-abstract/11/4/415/5162675)//RCU

The expression of West and non-West is no dichotomous binary . To define a dualistic

bifurcation, we need to satisfy two conditions. The first is the presentation of two terms or
forces, such as ‘West’ and ‘non-West’, male and female, or China and the United States.
However, the presence and presentation of two forces does not constitute a binary, for it
is a mere description of a factual phenomenon highlighting their existence and
difference. Only when such a statement also tells the nature of the relationship between the
two terms, do we have the conditions necessary and sufficient for defining a binary structure.
Here follows the second condition, or the sufficient condition. If, and only if, the two terms are
taken as discrete, disconnected, and impenetrable opposites, and if, and only if, the relationship
between the two is defined as confrontational and irreconcilable does it qualify as a dualistic
binary. The key to defining a dichotomous binary is, thus, whether or not it contains the
‘either-or’ logic. In other words, the real danger of the dichotomy lies in separating the two into
discrete entities and juxtaposing them in dualistic and irreconcilable opposition. To distinguish
between West and non-West is not in itself a dichotomous binary but to say that the two shall
never meet is.
Thus, the expression of ‘West and non-West’ does not constitute a binary, while that of ‘West vs
non-West’ does. When we say that we want to develop non-Western IR theory, or even
when we use the national label to indicate its distinctiveness for the purpose of dialog,
complementarity , and enrichment ,46 it does not signify a binary mindset . Rather, it is
precisely a pluralistic way of thinking. Samuel Huntington, for example, does not demonstrate
a binary way of thinking when he presents the multiple civilizations and cultures in the world.
Indeed, his recognition of them is the most inspiring part of his work. But, he does reveal a
deeply embedded binary way of thinking when he juxtaposes these civilizations with the
nightmare of inevitable clashes.47 Western and non-Western IR theories can be understood
as a binary if they aim to replace each other and establish one as the dominant narrative by
overpowering the other. If they are treated as communicative, complementary, and as
competing benignly with each other for reciprocal empowerment , however, they can also
be understood as plural forms of global life and complementary to each other.
Universes of cultures and civilizations do exist and coexist to constitute a multiverse. Even at
the height of modernity, Isaac Newton said, And since Space is indivisible in infinitum, and
Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow’d that God is able to create Particles
of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of
different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make the Worlds of
several sorts in several Parts of the Universe. As least, I see nothing of Contradiction in all
this.48
Indeed, quantum physics now tells us that there are infinitely possible worlds; life science
reveals that mutation generates multiple forms of life, paving the way for cooperation and
success. Only when there is genuine plurality and multiplicity can we have energetic
development, sustainable prosperity, and healthy evolution. If we describe the temporal space
of IR knowledge as a multiverse, then theories developed in various geocultural and
geocivilizational settings constitute the diverse but related universes that together
constitute this multiverse. This is definitely true of a genuinely global IR endeavor.
 2AC – Permutation – Epistemology
The permutation is the first step in a transition to a concert power dynamic
– combining radical epistemological critique with material drawdowns on
military power has the power to facilitate a global transition towards a more
equitable liberal order which turns every link and solves war with China
and Russia, econ decline, and environmental destruction
Pampinella 19 (Stephen, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations
at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. His research interests include US
state building interventions, hierarchy in international relations, race and postcolonialism, US
grand strategy, and national security narratives. “The Internationalist Disposition and US Grand
Strategy” in The Disorder of Things published 1/23/19
https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/23/the-internationalist-disposition-and-us-grand-
strategy/)NFleming
The internationalist disposition clearly illustrates why old US strategies are incompatible with the progressive internationalism of the
US left. However, contra Colás, progressives should not avoid developing of a positive vision for
foreign policy due to the diverse range of radical perspectives. To do so would cede pro-
restraint arguments to structural realist and libertarian advocates of offshore balancing
who offer no template for global engagement or institutional cooperation . What
progressives must do is articulate a grand strategy , or a plan that mobilizes all elements of national power
and influence, grounded in a relationalist ontology that combines restraint with internationalism. This strategy must be
post-hegemonic (a term even Ikenberry has flirted with), post-statist, and supportive of intense international
cooperation based on the diversity of identities and values otherwise ignored by the
universalist pretenses of Anglo-American liberalism. If our very existence is mutually
dependent on others, then we need a foreign policy based on solidarity in response to
collectively experienced threats . I think there is a strategy consistent with the international
disposition: great power concert. A concert strategy requires that all great powers pursue mutual
accommodation and recognize each other’s interests as part of a larger commitment to
maintain international stability. Patrick Porter and Amitav Acharya argue that a great power concert
strategy is the best suited to adapt to the transfer of wealth and power to Asia along with
the “multiplex” nature of world politics (not to mention a global perspective on international relations). The
emergence of a diverse range of state and non-state actors bound together by extreme interdependence makes it impossible for
any one actor, such as the United States, to establish rules for global governance which can mobilize all others. On this basis, a
concert strategy would lead the United States to collaborate with others on the basis of
mutual co-existence and embrace joint decision-making at the global level for coping with
macrostructural processes that threaten all peoples around the world. In this way, a concert
strategy is firmly grounded the international disposition and can serve as the realization
of progressive internationalism. Security and The Balance of Power A concert strategy can do what
establishment foreign policy cannot, namely de-escalate great power competition by giving up US hegemony. If
adopted, the United States would treat other great powers, like Russia, China, and Iran, as equal partners
in the maintenance of global stability and incorporate their interests into regional
security agreements. The United States would give up its self-assumed role as an unrivaled global hegemon and seek a
balance of power based on mutual respect with other great powers as partners rather than enemies. This kind of international
posture would result in a more horizontal great power system, one that Stacie Goddard as identified as being productive of status
quo rather than revisionist intentions. It would be compatible with recognition of the great power
identities of other states and provide them with ontological security . Transitioning from a
hegemonic security strategy to a balance of power one will require that the United States engage in some degree of retrenchment
from its already expansive commitments. But supporters of hegemony are wrong when they claim that retrenchment will encourage
great power aggression and lead to the abandonment of our allies.
The United States can engage in moderate
forms of retrenchment consistent with great power recognition while still maintaining
commitments to allies that strive to uphold human dignity. For example, were the United States to
support a moratorium on NATO expansion, as Michael O’Hanlon suggests, it would signal that the United States is no longer
interested in moving the frontiers of its influence to the gates of Moscow and remove the sense of threat experienced by Russian
leaders. By recognizing the validity of Russian security interests as well as its great power identity, the equal relationship made
possible by a concert strategy will better deal with the threat of interstate conflict compared to US hegemony. Reviving Global
Governance A concert strategy informed by the internationalist disposition can further
enable more robust forms of global governance. Rather than attempt international cooperation based on a
priori liberal normative templates, the United States would accept the validity of all claims made by
collective actors in world politics in an open-ended and inclusive process of deliberation.
The result would be less of a hegemonic order and more of a constitutionalist one, in which
the United States binds itself to a truly democratic process of decision-making at the global level. The emergence of global
governance norms would be a function less of hegemonic socialization and more of a right held by all actors to contest the validity of
standards of expected behavior. In other words, a concert
strategy would enable the United States to
accept processes of norm contestation as the motor of transnational cooperation and
generate more legitimate rules for regulating global governance. It would expand the US
order building project initially identified by Ikenberry on the basis of restraint and institutional self-binding, but without
retaining its own hierarchical position in world politics or engaging in hypocritical forms
of dominance. The implications for economic governance are profound: the United States would no longer exclude from
consideration the notion of social democratic regulation of global capitalism and instead promote non-capitalist perspectives on the
economy. Todd Tucker provides one great example of this approach when he argues that ISDS arbitration should include labor
leaders and social justice advocates rather than international lawyers chosen by multinational firms which initiate legal action
against sovereign states. It would also enable the United States to seriously consider Piketty’s call for a global wealth tax, Palley
and Chow’s call for minimum wage floors, and a binding multilateral treaty that regulates global business activities on the basis of
human rights. And finally, it would enable the drastic shift away from fossil fuels necessary to
avoid climate apocalypse. In Search of a Global Public Naysayers might argue that all this degree of international
cooperation sounds idealist, but all are possible in a context of declining great power competition. Once the United States
recognizes the equal membership of all others in world politics on the basis of our extreme interdependencies, it can make possible
what Mitzen has referred to as collective intentionality, or the emergence of a plural subject composed of several individuals who
make and uphold joint commitments to each other and demand adherence as members of a global public. This kind of action is
what the internationalist disposition can help us conceptualize, and even realize, through a concert strategy. The Sanders Institute
event for Progressives International. Source: Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona (in the picture). If progressive internationalists want
to realize their objectives, they should be willing to turn away from the US establishment and embrace a concert strategy. By
prioritizing cooperation on non-state issues and resolving great power competition through equal recognition, they can realize
security for their own citizens as well as others. However, IR constructivists remind us that no foreign
policy can be enacted by policymakers without a legitimating national security narrative.
Progressive internationalists must continue to develop a new story about the United
States that rationalizes a concert strategy and renders US national identity compatible
with the pluralism we find in both world politics and US domestic politics. To develop this
narrative, progressive internationalists should engage radical critiques of democracy, like those offered by Chantal Mouffe, which
seek maximal inclusion of others and accept difference and conflict as irreducible elements of political life. A pluralist strategic
narrative can thereby serve as the basis for mutual respect of others and enable the democratization of world politics.
Settler Colonialism
 2AC – PERM
Effective forms of resistance are only valuable insofar as they include
Western knowledges – it’s a net benefit to the permutation
Held 19 – Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada [Mirjam B. E. Held;
Decolonizing Research Paradigms in the Context of Settler Colonialism: An Unsettling, Mutual,
and Collaborative Effort; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1609406918821574] mp

Research does not take place in a vacuum but is guided consciously or unconsciously by a set of
philosophical assumptions about how the world is; how knowledge is produced,
acquired, valued, and shared; the moral aspects of the research; and how the latter is to
be executed (Mertens, 2015). These research paradigms are constantly evolving . In the process, the
transformative paradigm and Indigenous paradigms have come to share an increasing
number of philosophical underpinnings. Yet their merging can only be an effective agent
in the decolonization project if it is done in partnership, for decolonization is a mutual
endeavor that involves the formerly colonized and the former colonizer . An equitable
collaboration will further help validate decolonizing research so that such inquiry can be
undertaken with more confidence and more often, eventually becoming the norm . In the past, and ongoing,
academia has legitimized and perpetuated the dominance of the Eurocentric worldview. Thus, decolonization will not only have to saturate all aspects
of the academy but furthermore spur it on to become an agent of change by critiquing and challenging colonial agendas and acknowledging the
legitimacy of Indigenous and other previously marginalized knowledges (McDowell & Herna´ndez, 2010). The West has to come to
terms with the fact that there is more than just one worldview (understood here in the broader sense of a
conception of the world, not as a synonym for research paradigm) and that no one worldview is better than the other. They all have something to
contribute, and we should embrace this diversity rather than shut it out.
Other Stuff
Neg Ev
 War on Terror non-knowledge k
Non-knowledge/framework defense/war on terror k
Daase and Kessler 7 (Christopher, professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich,
Germany, and Oliver, Professor at Bielefeld University, Germany. “Knowns and Unknowns in
the ‘War on Terror’: Uncertainty and the Political Construction of Danger” Security Dialogue vol.
38, no. 4, December 2007)NFleming
A second political ignorance lies in Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to be deaf to the warnings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to fight
the war with the inadequate number of soldiers that he deployed. In fact, given US tactics, it is surprising that the Iraqi Army was
unable to profit from the self-induced vulnerabilities, in particular the securitization of US supply lines. The reason for this blind spot
was Rumsfeld’s determination to direct the Iraq War as an example of modern warfare. Behind this was the idea that the so-called
Revolution in Military Affairs19 allows wars to be fought with maximum hi-tech equipment and minimum manpower. As far as that
goes, Rumsfeld might be right. But, the military victory was simply worthless as soon as it became obvious that, in order to ‘win the
peace’, far more than technology was needed. What was needed most of all was a political plan and the personnel to secure the
policing function. In addition, there
is an institutional ignorance on the part of the US military
machinery – it seemingly was unable to systemically learn from its experience in
irregular warfare (Daase, 1999: 107–151). The USA has a remarkable short memory when it
comes to how to fight insurgencies. The reason for that might be the predominance of a
strategic culture that regards irregular warfare as a deviant form of war and Christopher Daase &
Oliver Kessler Uncertainty and the Political Construction of Danger 429 18 ‘Projected Iraq War Costs Soar’, Washington Post, 27
April 2006. 19 See the discussion on the Rumsfeld Commission above. Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY &
CKM on March 15, 2015 glorifiesthe conventional, hi-tech-driven war. It might also have its causes in the
‘political questions’, which seems to be rooted in the history of
traditional contempt of the military for
the US military (Huntington, 1957). It is this disregard of political questions that has its roots in
the variety of knowledge – and non-knowledge – structures that has made the US army
appear ill-suited for the current situation, as it is forced to relearn small-warfare tactics, which results in
exorbitant costs (Weighley, 1973). The current war-after-the-war situation, we think, provides support
for our argument that both knowledge and non-knowledge are constitutive for the
formulation of security policy . Conclusion This article has argued that non-knowledge is crucial for
understanding different logics of security policies and thus the understanding of social
processes . It particularly wants to convey the idea that political questions need to address the form
and type of non-knowledge that would actually prevail in particular situations . Consequently,
issues of non-knowledge cannot be reduced to some ‘lack’ of knowledge that could be
solved by looking harder at the facts or processes of conjecture and refutation. Equivalently, obvious
insufficiencies associated with the current ‘fight against terrorism’ are not simply of an
empirical nature . They cannot be solved by a simple increase of knowledge, data and
transparency, or better models . The ‘fight against terrorism’ is characterized by the
interplay of rather distinct logics and forms of non-knowledge. The consequence for international
relations and security policy is that they cannot concentrate on ‘objective’ threats . Rather, both theories
and practices of international relations increasingly need to come to terms with their own
non-knowledge. This does not only imply that one has to accept that threats can be over- or underestimated, or even
sometimes ignored. However, a position that would take nonknowledge seriously needs to
observe and incorporate its own contingency (or probability), the contingency of its particular point of
view, to examine the form of non-knowledge that is used to frame threats. This brings us back to
Rumsfeld’s little poem. Rumsfeld’s neglect of the fourth kind of non-knowledge points to the very reason why he crafted
those verses in the first place. It reveals the very episteme of the current ‘fight against terrorism’ :
by hiding the things we do not want to know, Rumsfeld hides ‘epistemic’ non-knowledge
and therefore any inquiry into the historical or social context of terrorism. He is thereby in a

position to present terrorism as a threat that can be deterred. However, a s a consequence of epistemological
and ontological underpinnings, the ‘fight against terrorism’ is presented in terms of
necessity and urgency – a fight where inaction 430 Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 4, December 2007

Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 15, 2015 would be irresponsible, in spite
of the insufficient information at hand. What is neglected is the contingency of one’s own
position , and thus any selfreflection that an acknowledgement of one’s own, but contingent, position would require.