Biopower K

UQ: Mindset to wage war and do as the US deems necessary for other countries and
populations
Link: Arm sales related to Biopower/Necropolitics
I/L: Biopower/Necropolitics lead to impact
Impact: The impact of Biopower/Necropolitics
 1NC rough Draft
The United has written and consented to US wielding its influence with war and arm
sales
Yoo, John. The Powers of War and Peace: the Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11. University of
Chicago Press, 2006.
The post 1777 state constitutions carried forward, rather than rejected, the progress in New York, Massachusetts, which adopted its
constitution in 1780, and New Hampshire, which ratified a similar document in 1784, both provided for strong executive power in
shall be commander in chief of the arm and navy and all the
war: the president of this state for the time being,
military forces of the state, by sea and land; and shall have full power by himself… to train, instruct,
exercise and govern the militia and navy; and for the special defense and safety of this state to assemble
in martial array, and put in warlike posture, the inhabitants thereof, and to lead and conduct them, and
with them to encounter, expulse, repel, resist and pursue by force f arms, as well by sell as by land,
within and without the limits of this state; and also to kill, means all and every such person and persons
as shall, at any time hereafter, in a hostile manner, attempt or enterprise the destruction, invasion, detriment, or
annoyance of this state; and to use and exercise over the army and navy, and over the militia in actual service, law-martial in
time of war, invasion, and also rebellion, declared by the legislature to exist…and in fine, the president hereby entrusted with all
other powers incident to the office of captain-general and commander in chief ad admiral. These war powers provision not only gave
the governor the commander-in-chief power, they also assumed that the governor had authority to make war. These provisions do
not just limit executive war making authority to defensive responses to attack, they
also explicitly provide for offensive
operations under the direct authority of the executive, who may use any means he sees fit (“kill, slay,
destroy, if necessary, and conquer by all fitting ways, enterprise and means”) to achieve his war aims. While
Congress never declare war in Korea or Vietnam, among many other places, it had every opportunity to
control those conflicts through its funding powers. That is did not was a reflection of a lack of political will rather than
a defect in the constitutional design…Recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo were constitutional, even
though in none of them was there a declaration of war and Kosovo received no statutory authorization, because congress had the full
opportunity to participate in decision making elsewhere. This chapter explores the interaction between the Constitution’s system of
war powers and the demands of international cooperation, as reflected in the questions surrounding international justifications for
the use of force and multilateral military commands. Other foundational documents of the period demonstrate that the Framers
though of the power to begin hostilities as different form the power to declare war. Under the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s
framework of government until the ratification, Congress operated as the executive branch of the United States. As we have
seen Article IX vested Congress with “The sole and exclusive right and power of determining on peace and war.”
A more flexible approach to the allocation of war power shows that, rather than violating the Constitution, the American way of war
during the last decade has complied with the constitutional design. It is worth taking a closer look at recent conflicts to show that
Congress has had an ample opportunity to consider and to check presidential initiatives in war making. In 2001 Afghanistan and
2003-4 Iraq, no declaration of war issued, but Congress did enact statues “authorizing” the president to engage in
armed combat. In response to the September 11, 2001 attacks for example, Congress quickly enacted Senate Joint Resolution 23
“to authorize the recent attacks launched against the United States.” It found not only that the September 11 attacks constituted and
“unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States but also declared that “the
President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United
States, “an admission, it seems of the president’s inherent authority to use force without congressional permission. Congress then
authorized the president to use military force against “those enations, organizations, or person he determines planned, authorized,
committed, or aided the terrorist attack” of September 11 or “harbored such organizations or person.” In the course of enacting this
legislation, Congress had a full opportunity to debate the merits of using military force abroad, particularly in Afghanistan. Even if
Congress had several other moments to block presidential efforts to
such legislations had never been consider,
wage war against al Qaeda, Military operations in Afghanistan have required additional funds, which
President Bush initially request as part of a $20 Billion emergency appropriations bill in October of 2001, which was granted by
The expense of modern war has required ongoing demands for appropriations with another bill
Congress.
enacted on July 23, 2002 that appropriated more than $4 billion for continuing operations in
Afghanistan. Even before the war in IRaq, military operations in Afghanistan and around the world generated approximately $2.5
Billion in additional costs per month that require periodic supplemental appropriations to refill the Pentagon’s coffers. In the fall of
2001,Congress also enacted a Defense Department authorization bill that determines the military’s size,
force structures, and weapons systems. IF Congress had wanted to prevent the war in Afghanistan, or if it had disagreed
with the continuing role of American trios there, it could have refused to provide the funs needed to pay for the personnel, material,
and operational expenses of waging the war. War went ahead without a declaration, and Congress had every chance consider the
merits of the conflict and to prevent it.

In 1998, Serbia launched a crackdown in Kosovo that killed dozens of Albanians and led thousands of others to flee. In March 1999,
Serbian military forces began a broad offensive aimed at driving the Albanian population out of the province. Most Albanians went
into hiding, fled to neighboring countries or were killed or detained… The
Senate passed a concurrent resolution
authorizing the president to “conduct military air operations and missile strikes in cooperation with our
NATO allies against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia … air strikes were necessary to protect innocent Albanians, to
prevent the conflict from spreading to the rest of Europe, and to act with our European allies in maintaining peace.

Notwithstanding the benefits of multilateral action, recent American wars raise a second set of difficult questions concerning the
interaction of international organizations with domestic constitutional structures: whether the president can send American troops
to serve under foreign command. During the Kosovo operations, for example, overall command of the intervention remained in the
hands of General Wesley Clark, and American officer who served both as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe…While the
conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq remained under direct US Control, situations there may not remain so clear cut.

Our arms trade is based on the idea to exert influence and provides many weapons to
unethical areas for their own benefit at the expense of others.
“Risky Business: The Role of Arms Sales in U.S. Foreign Policy.” Cato Institute, 13 Mar. 2018,
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/risky-business-role-arms-sales-us-foreign-policy.

S. arms sales policy is out of control.

Since 2002, the United States has sold more than $197 billion worth of
major conventional weapons and related military support to 167 countries . In just his first year in office,
President Donald Trump inked arms deals at a record pace, generating hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of potential sales.
Though the president trumpets each deal as a victory for the United States, an analysis of American arms sales since 2002 reveals
the arms trade is a risky business. The United States has repeatedly sold weapons to nations
that
engaged in deadly conflicts, and to those with horrendous human rights records, under conditions in which it
has been impossible to predict where the weapons would end up or how they would be used. On repeated occasions, American
troops have fought opponents armed with American weapons.Advocates argue that arms sales bolster American security by
enhancing the military capabilities of allies, providing leverage over the behavior and policies of client nations, and boosting the
American economy while strengthening the defense industrial base. We argue that the economic benefits of arms sales are dubious
and that their strategic utility is far more uncertain and limited than most realize. Arms sales also create a host of negative,
unintended consequences for the United States, for those buying the weapons, and for the regions into which American weapons
flow.Washington’s historical faith in arms sales is seriously misplaced. The United States should revise its arms sales policy to
improve the risk assessment process, to ban sales to countries where the risk of negative consequences is too high, and to limit sales
to cases in which they will directly enhance American security. What role should arms sales play in American foreign policy? Though
major deals — like Trump’s $110 billion agreement with Saudi Arabia announced in 2017 or the decision to sell arms to Ukraine —
provoke brief periods of discussion, there is no real debate in Washington about the wisdom of exporting vast quantities of weapons
Congress, which has the authority to cancel arms deals, has not impeded a
around the globe to allies and nonallies alike.
deal since the passage of the 1976 Arms Export Control Act created the framework for doing so. Since 9/11
the pace of sales has increased. From 2002 to 2016, the United States sold roughly $197 billion worth of weapons and related
military support to 167 countries.1 In just his first year Donald Trump cut a deal worth as much as $110 billion to Saudi Arabia alone
and notified Congress of 157 sales worth more than $84 billion to 42 other nations.2 Despite losing market share over the past two
decades because of increasing competition, the United States still enjoyed the largest share of the global arms trade between 2012
Arms sales create a host of negative, unintended consequences that warrant a much
and 2016 at 33 percent.3
more cautious and limited approach, even in support of an expansive grand strategy like primacy or
liberal hegemony. From the perspective of those who would prefer a more restrained American foreign policy, the prospective
benefits of engaging in the arms trade are even smaller. Even in cases where the United States wants a nation to arm itself, there is
rarely a need for the weapons to come from the United States. Moreover, the United States would generate significant diplomatic
flexibility and moral authority by refraining from selling arms. Given these outsized risks and nebulous rewards, the United States
should greatly reduce international arms sales.To develop our argument we begin in section one with a quantitative analysis of U.S.
arms sales since 9/11 in order to illustrate the dangerous track record of recent sales . We then provide a brief history of
U.S. arms sales policy to provide a context for the current process in section two. Section three outlines the advocates’ case for arms
sales and section four outlines the case against. We conclude with a brief discussion of the current politics of the arms trade and a
series of policy recommendations. Moreover, the United States has a long history of selling weapons to nations where the immediate
the United States sold small arms and light weapons to 59 percent and
risks were obvious. From 1981 to 2010,
major conventional weapons to 35 percent of countries actively engaged in a high-level conflict. The
United States sold small arms to 66 percent and major conventional weapons to 40 percent of countries actively engaged in a low-
level conflict.7 As one author noted,
in 1994 there were 50 ongoing ethnic and territorial conflicts in the world
and the United States had armed at least one side in 45 of them. Since 9/11, the United States has sold weapons to
at least two dyads in conflict: Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and Turkey and the Kurds.8 o produce a risk assessment of American arms
recipients since 2002, we consulted previous research to identify the risk factors most commonly associated with both short- and
long-term negative outcomes. Unfortunately, there are no hard data on the precise relationship between many of these risk factors
and the probability of negative outcomes. We also lack data entirely for certain risk factors that we would otherwise have included. A
nation’s previous use (and misuse) of American weapons, for example, is clearly among the most important factors to assess. Neither
the government nor academic research, however, exists to inform such an assessment. As a result, we take a conservative approach,
creating an index of overall riskiness based on straightforward assumptions about the correlations between risk factors and negative
outcomes on data that are available, rather than attempting to make precise predictions about the impact of each specific risk factor,
or speculating about the impact of factors we cannot measure. The first risk factor we consider is the stability of the recipient nation .
We assume that fragile states with tenuous legitimacy and little ability to deliver services and police
their own territory, or those that cannot manage conflict within their borders, pose a greater risk for the
dispersion and misuse of weapons. Research also indicates that military aid can increase the likelihood of a
military coup, an outcome even more likely in the case of a fragile state.9 To measure this factor, we take the most recent score
for each nation on the Fragile States Index, which determines a state’s vulnerability by looking at a range of economic, political, and
social factors.
The second inflection point in U.S. arms sales history was the passage of the American Export
Controls Act (AECA) and the establishment of the modern arms sales process. Wary of getting involved in future Vietnams but
determined to retain America’s global leadership role, President Richard Nixon turned to arms transfers as a way to
“wield force and exert influence” without sending American troops abroad.19 In the absence of legislation
regulating the president’s use of arms sales, Nixon was able to ramp up arms sales quickly and quietly, in most cases without
notifying Congress or the public. Nixon’s embrace of this strategy led to a tenfold expansion in arms sales in the early 1970s as the
administration shipped weapons to Iran, Cambodia, and Laos.20 As with the War Powers Act and other reforms from the 1970s
aimed at curbing presidential power, however, the AECA looks more significant on paper than it has proved to be in practice. In
reality, the act does very little to limit the White House’s arms sales efforts. Most fundamentally, despite the fact that the
Constitution clearly identifies Congress as the lead branch of government with respect to the regulation of foreign commerce,
Congress did not give itself a significant enough role in arms sales policy. Rather than structure the process to require active
congressional approval of each major deal or to require annual congressional review and approval of ongoing deals, Congress
instead abdicated its authority almost entirely.24 The terrorist attacks of 9/11 marked the most recent inflection point for U.S. arms
sales policy. In response to the attacks, both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations oversaw a boom in arms sales,
providing foreign governments with unprecedented access to the American arsenal. Since 9/11, the United States has delivered more
than $197 billion worth of weapons to 167 countries — not counting Trump’s $110 billion in potential sales to Saudi Arabia, or an
additional $84 billion in potential arms sales announced by the administration, to date. Predictably, the urgency of the
Nations that had
counterterrorism mission meant that the risk assessment process, never stringent, was weakened further.
previously been banned from buying American weapons, whether because of human rights violations or
their participation in ongoing conflicts, became customers after 9/11, as long as they claimed the
weapons would help fight terrorism.34 Both administrations also increased sales to Afghanistan and Iraq, and to a number
of other nations in the region, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan, on the theory that it would help
promote regional stability and aid counterterrorism efforts. During its first year, the Trump administration continued this trend,
with an added emphasis on economic opportunities and even less regard for the human rights records of American clients.35 Figure
1 shows the countries that have purchased American weapons since 9/11. Under the right circumstances, we agree that arms sales
can be a useful tool of foreign policy. More often, however, we argue that the benefits of U.S. arms sales are too uncertain and too
limited to outweigh the negative consequences they often produce. Though presidents like them because they are relatively easy to
use, in most cases arms sales are not the best way to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives. The strategic case
for radically reducing arms sales rests on four related arguments. First, arms sales do little to enhance American
security. Second, the nonsecurity benefits are far more limited and uncertain than arms sales advocates
acknowledge. Third, the negative and unwanted consequences of arms sales are more common and more dangerous than most
realize. Finally, the United States would enjoy significant diplomatic benefits from halting arms sales.
That is a form of biopolitics
The Concept of Biopower: The Use of Terror as a Political Technique of Controlling and Governing
Citizens Preechaya Kittipaisalsilpa Institute of Diplomacy and International Study, Rangsit University,
Pathumthani, 12000 Thailand Email: preechaya.k@rsu.ac.th Submitted 15 October, 2016; accepted in
final from 14 November 2016

2 Biopower and Biopolitics as the Use of Terror as Political Techniques The notion of biopower and biopolitics, for
Foucault, are commonly used to describe a form of power over bodies and lives . These two concepts are closely
related (Genel, 2006). The concept of biopower for Foucault is used “to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the
realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life ” (Calhoun,
Gerties, Pfaff, & Virk 2007). It is coined by the relations of a set power-knowledge reproduced by the government to manage people
in a wider extent through state discipline. Foucault explains further as: By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to
the human species became
be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of
the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century,
modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I have called
biopower. (Foucault, 2007) RJSH Vol. 4, No. 1, January - June 2017, pp.83-92 KITTIPAISALSILPA 88 Biopower thus underlines
the practice of modern supranational organisms and nation states which uses to govern their
populations through diverse of techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of
entire populations. Biopower signifies the power or abstract force which is produced, exercised and realized through practices
associated with the body and the mechanism of biopolitics such as strategies to affect particular things that depend on the human
life in its biological dimension. The concept biopolitics, in return, signifies the specific set of techniques and knowledge by which one
aims to produce the biological in a specific form of the techniques where biopower is exercised in its many forms of applications
(Foucault, 2008). Foucault sees how the biopower being exercised through different kinds of series of techniques that control and
circuitously operate within the societal body where the populations are victims. According to Foucault, he emphasizes
governmentality method recreate individuals as docile of bodies to be reproduced and controlled by the political governing.
Agamben (1998) also notes governmentality reproduces a “bare life” in which the species as a simple body
becomes “what is at stake in a society’s political strategies”. Therefore, biopolitical techniques designate the way
through which biopower is continually reproduced and sustained through life. Life here must be understood as a process
comprising forces and desires by which the life of the species grows and reproduces. However, the actual structure of biopolitics is
dependent upon particular political rationalities according to which one aims to rationalize the phenomena characteristic to the
body of the population (Foucault, 2008). Biopolitics can be understood as three different ways to control and govern citizens: as a
technique shaping good elements from bad, biopolitical territorial borders, and the biopolitical framework of representability.
Firstly, as Foucault claims, the biopolitical technique is designed ‘‘to make live and let die’’, which later enabled a new form
of governance (Foucault, 2003a). Instead of disciplining individual bodies, biopolitics seeks to maximize circulation, flows, and
movement of people by shifting ‘goods’ elements of populations from ‘bad’ and giving a misidentification to people (Werbin, 2009).
In the context of governmentalized power, the biopolitical production of fear features of the population became the target of political
strategies. As Foucault claims, governmental agents always reproduce ‘fear’ in order to establish control.
Through a series of governmentalized techniques fear has been made beneficial. For instance, biopower according to the concepts of
Foucault can be seen in mass genocides of Jews during Second World War by Hitler and more recently in Sudan and Kosovo where
the governments use the difference in beliefs and races to control the population by creating the fear of each other to destroy their
the concept of biopower can explain the use of terror as a political tactic
enemy (Castells, 2004). Furthermore,
not only within its state but also the within the wide range of a continent (Marks, 2006) As can be seen in the
studies of the aftermath of the Second World War, the discipline of security studies shares the standard interpretation of Second
World War as a ‘good war’ where “the war is seen as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, freedom and tyranny, good
and evil, in which the “good guy won.” (Barkawi & Laffey, 2006). During this period the tension between two competing sides also
creates the fear that the citizens have framed in their mind (Butler, 2009). In a similar manner during the Cold War and Cuban
Missile Crisis, Russia and Cuba are accounted for as evil and communist where they aim to take away the freedom from democratic
countries (Columba & Vaughan-Williams, 2010). Furthermore, in the Vietnam War the state is divided into two sides: North
Vietnam supported by the Soviet Union, China as a communist power and the government of South Vietnam supported by the US as
democratic (Hardt & Negri, 2004). This type of biopower is justifiable according to the concepts of Foucault. the framework of the
biopolitical. According to Foucault (2008), the subject-object of biopolitics is framed at the focal point of knowledge and power: the
populations are characterized precisely by their ability to experience the terror that works together with survival mechanisms. Put
otherwise, the state in the emergency form that replaces laws with norms should not be considered as the notion of exception
(Schmitt, 2007; Agamben, 2005), which is defined as a feature of the modern state in totalitarian forms. It should be, instead,
examined in its biological senses (Dillon & Reid, 2009). Dillon and Reid have stressed how biopolitics today maintains the
kind of permanent state of emergency that promotes lives of the emergency of its emergence. This is
implemented by administering life through contingency, which also encompasses fundamentally the promotion of death, more
precisely, the death of those elements that threaten life’s capacity for emergence. Thirdly, the war images can be taken as
evidence that there is a close kinship between biopolitics and war. It shows how the biopolitical framework is
formed by governmentality tactics; creating and reproducing the very experience of fear is seen as essential to the life of the
organism by recurring flashbacks or hallucinations that finally end up devouring external perception (Butler, 2004; Barkawi &
Laffey, 2006). In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the live images of the twin towers collapsing have become the iconic visual
It has been interpreted as providing evidence of the link between
representation of the ‘War on Terror’.
terrorism and violence (Tripathy, 2013). The war photos show how our dominant cognitive interpretative structures delimit
our vision and what fragments of reality are already interpreted for us. Peter van Agtmael, a well-known documentary photographer
that war images not only demonstrate the constant complex
on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, also argues
relations between what reality of fear is produced and represented, but that it also displays a ‘biopolitical frame
of representability’ that consists in facilitating and privileging modes of representation according to various forms of preservation,
the enhancement of human lives and bodies, and human self-preservation (Debrix & Barder, 2011). For instance, the photo includes
three different identifications between war victims, the soldiers, and terrorists, and we can see that there are lives being threatened
while others are being the victors and also how life itself is being defined and regenerated. The image brings the notion that the body
can be destroyed or killed through the operation of state sovereignty. Taking Foucault’s turn, (2003b), the biopolitical framework of
representability also opens up two problems within the predominant perspective on political modernity. First, this framework
intervenes at the level of sovereign power. Within the state, biopower seeks to build the new form of power, which is
power over life that then leads to a reconsideration of a traditional model of centralized sovereign power by Hobbes and Machiavelli.
Secondly, biopolitics indicates different relationships between sovereignty, violence, and death (Campbell, 2011). In the above
example of war images, death does not disappear from the biopolitical frameworks. Instead, it functions within the
relationship between life and fear of death. Therefore, the concept of biopolitics helps to bring into focus a series of
strategies and interventions of power, authority, and control at the level of population life that connect life to the
war.

Arm sales cause war and oppression. Leading to us deciding and influencing who lives
and who dies. Any arm sales still exert this flawed influence.
“Risky Business: The Role of Arms Sales in U.S. Foreign Policy.” Cato Institute, 13 Mar. 2018,
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/risky-business-role-arms-sales-us-foreign-policy.

arms sales can make conflict more likely.79 This may occur because
Instability, Violence, and Conflict. First,
recipients of new weapons feel more confident about launching attacks or because changes in the local
balance of power can fuel tensions and promote preventive strikes by others. A study of arms sales from 1950
to 1995, for example, found that although arms sales appeared to have some restraining effect on major-power allies, they had the
opposite effect in other cases, and concluded that “increased arms transfers from major powers make states
significantly more likely to be militarized dispute initiators.”80 Another study focused on sub-Saharan Africa from
1967 to 1997 found that “arms transfers are significant and positive predictors of increased probability of
war.”81 Recent history provides supporting evidence for these findings: since 2011, Saudi Arabia, the leading buyer of American
weapons, has intervened to varying degrees in Yemen, Tunisia, Syria, and Qatar. Second, arms sales can also prolong and
intensify ongoing conflicts and erode rather than promote regional stability. Few governments, and fewer
insurgencies, have large enough weapons stocks to fight for long without resupply.82 The tendency of external powers to arm the
side they support, however understandable strategically, has the inevitable result of allowing the conflict to continue
at a higher level of intensity than would otherwise be the case. As one study of arms sales to Africa notes,
“Weapons imports are essential additives in this recipe for armed conflict and carnage.”83 Finally, because
of their effects on both interstate and internal conflict , arms sales can also erode rather than promote regional
stability. As noted in the previous section, where the United States seeks to manage regional balances of power , arms sales
often create tension, whether because the American role in the region threatens others or because
American clients feel emboldened. The Middle East, for example, has seesawed between violence and tense standoffs for
the past many decades, at first because of Cold War competition and more recently because of the American war on terror. The
notion that increased U.S. arms sales since 9/11 made the Middle East more stable is far-fetched to say the least. Similarly, though
many argue that American security commitments to countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have produced greater stability,
there is a strong case to be made that the opposite is now true. American support of South Korea has driven North Korea to develop
nuclear weapons; the presence of U.S. missile defense systems in South Korea has aggravated China, and American support of
Taiwan produces continual tension between the two powers.85 Regime Effects. Finally, arms sales can also have
deleterious effects on recipient nations — promoting government oppression, instability, and military
coups. As part of the war on drugs, America inadvertently enabled the practice of forced disappearances. In the cases of Colombia ,
the Philippines, and Mexico, American weapons feed a dangerous cycle of corruption and oppression
involving the police, the military, and political leaders.94 Though the United States provides weapons to Mexico
ostensibly for counternarcotics operations, the arms transferred to the country often end up being used by police to oppress citizens,
reinforcing the “climate of generalized violence in the country [that] carries with it grave consequences for the rule of law.”95
Similarly, in Colombia and the Philippines the United States has supplied arms in an effort to support governments against external
threats or internal factions and to combat drug trafficking, but with mixed results. A study of military aid to Colombia found that “in
environments such as Colombia, international military assistance can strengthen armed nonstate actors, who rival the government
over the use of violence.”96 Recent research reveals that American assistance programs, like foreign military officer training, can
increase the likelihood of military coups. U.S. training programs frequently bought by other nations, most notably International
Military Education and Training (IMET), gave formal training to the leaders of the 2009 Honduran coup, the 2012 Mali coup, and
the 2013 Egyptian coup.97 In these cases, the training that was supposed to stabilize the country provided military leaders with the
tools to overthrow the government they were meant to support.

The affirmative’s focus on arm reduction, in order to mitigate nuclear war, turns case
Schwartz and Derber 1991
William A., Boston Nuclear Study Group, and Charles, BNSG and professor of political economy and
sociology at Boston College, online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/424411.pdf?
ab_segments=0%2Fdefault-2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=search
%3A94f6b620c5328933de55bae51655be32 //EN

There are two central theses of The Nuclear Seduction. The first is that the nuclear arms race, while
producing an end- less succession of technologically sophisticated and frightening weaponry, is itself not
the major factor determining the likelihood of nuclear war. Hence peace movements on the left, arms
controllers in the center, and nuclear hawks on the right, have all been victims of 'the nuclear seduction'
- the belief that the characteristics and specific numbers of weapons matter most when it comes to
the issue of nuclear war. In the authors' view far too much of the nuclear debate has focused on
hardware, on which weapons should be deployed, or opposed. This obsession with weapons, or
'weaponitis', has obscured a central truth:

.. . short of near-total nuclear disarmament, we believe that no change in the arms race can in fact make
a profound difference. MX, Star Wars, INF, a freeze, or even a 90 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals
cannot reliably change the horror of a nuclear war. They cannot much affect the risk that the nuclear
states will plunge us onto that horror. They cannot make the world much safer or more dangerous than
it already is (p.1)
 Weaponitis Cards
The affirmative’s focus on arms reductions is a flawed approach to understanding
violence and war – it distracts us from more systemic analysis
William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber 91, Boston Nuclear Study Group, and Charles, BNSG and
professor of political economy and sociology at Boston College, “Does Nuclear Arms Race matter?”:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/424411.pdf?ab_segments=0%2Fdefault-
2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=search%3A94f6b620c5328933de55bae51655be32 //EN

The second major thesis is that the real threat of nuclear war is not to be found in the instruments of
destruction, but in the periodically reckless behavior of nuclear superpowers in fueling the flames of
violence and intervening in conflicts around the world, especially in the Third World . For Schwartz and
Derber the most signifi- cant chronology of the nuclear age is not that of the deployment and counter-
deploy- ment of weapon systems, but the series of crises and confrontations that came close - in some
cases perilously close - to crossing the 'firebreak' into nuclear war. Thus the most effective steps that can
be taken to reduce the risk of nuclear war involve pri- marily political, versus technological, issues. Most
important here would be development of a politics making it difficult or impossible for the
superpowers to intervene in external conflicts, intervention which is not only morally unjustifiable,
but which inherently runs the risk of escalation (by design or acci- dent) into nuclear confrontation. It
is here that certain kinds of arms control could make a real difference, especially measures that reduced
the forward deployment of tac- tical and intermediate-range nuclear wea- pon systems, including the
provocative and dangerous projection of nuclear naval forces. The authors find it ironic that these kinds
of arms control measures have gener- ally received the least attention. In considering the arguments put
forward in support of these theses I will indicate where these are likely to encounter the most debate. It
should be noted at the outset that a central objective of the many bold conten- tions in The Nuclear
Seduction is to provoke precisely this kind of debate. Whether or not one agrees with their conclusions,
readers will benefit from the acuity of their arguments and the wealth of documenta- tion. 2.
Remembering the Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution Part I, 'Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter',
presents a series of interrelated arguments to support the claim that the increment in weapons and
technology has little relationship to either the likelihood or outcome of nuclear war. (Schwartz and
Derber are not arguing the arms race doesn't matter in social, economic, or moral terms. It does, and
they are well aware of the social costs in these dimensions.) First, and perhaps most important, we are
reminded of the awesome destructive power of thermonuclear weapons. The nuclear revolution put an
end to the weapons paradigm, where the quantitative increment in weaponry could represent
significant mili- tary advantage, and which governed war- making for millennia. Hydrogen warheads
numbering in the tens can inflict vast des- truction on societies. Since the 1950s, cer- tainly by the early
1960s, both superpowers have possessed nuclear arsenals guarantee- ing a situation of 'existential
deterrence', by which is meant that no foreseeable alter- ation in strategy, technology, or increase in
weapons can alter the fundamental reality of mutual vulnerability to nuclear destruction.
The focus on war as a singular event ignores the larger process of structural violence –
adopting a broader understanding of violence is a prerequisite to real solutions
Dr. Laksiri Fernando 3, Director of the Centre for Democracy and Development (“Transforming
negative peace to positive peace,” Daily News, April 2,
http://archives.dailynews.lk/2002/04/02/fea01.html //EN

However, the ceasefire is not enough.

All ceasefires are fragile by nature whatever the monitory mechanisms that
are in place. War is only the symptom. Ethnic conflict is the ailment. Ceasefire or negative peace is like
treating the symptoms without addressing the ailment . Unless and until solutions are sought to resolve the ethnic conflict in a
reasonable manner, and reasonable to all ethnic communities to mean the Tamils, the Sinhalese and the Muslims, the ailment will not be cured.

The United Nations observed the year 2000 as the "International Year for the Culture of Peace." In its declaration announcing the year, the
following definition was given for us to contemplate.

"Peace is not only the absence of conflict, but requires a positive, dynamic and participatory process
where dialogue is encouraged and conflicts are resolved in a spirit of mutual understanding and
cooperation."

Clear distinction

Following from the above definition there is a clear distinction between negative peace and positive peace .
What we have achieved so far is
negative peace, the absence of war for the time being. The ceasefire itself is fragile. There is still the
readiness and capacity on both sides to wage war in case of a major disagreement. There is no firm
commitment on both sides to resolve disputes and disagreements permanently on a peaceful and
democratic manner. The fire of the gun has temporarily ceased, but the guns are still aimed at each
other. This is the fragility of the present peace.

If there is firm commitment to resolve the disputes through peaceful and democratic manner, then the
necessary steps in a positive peace process should commence. That means decommissioning, demobilization and
disarmament at least on an incremental manner. What we have achieved so far is the disarmament of other parties and de-mining on a limited
scale. A positive peace process also implies primarily the resurrection of democratic institutions and holding of elections by allowing people to
enter the democratic main stream in the affected areas. The steps towards positive peace also mean the re-establishment of the justice system
with firm safeguards particularly for human rights.

Positive peace in its broadest sense means many more things than even the above measures. No one should be asking all these overnight. But
there should be a vision and a direction towards achieving positive peace in its fullest possible meaning in the future. Otherwise, there will be
no future for our society. There is endemic violence in our society - violence at home, work place, university and elections. Societal violence
undoubtedly breeds into ethnic violence and war. Curtailing violence at micro level obviously is necessary to curtail violence at macro level and
vise versa.

Positive peace in its ultimate objective means not only the absence of direct violence, but also the structural
violence in its all forms. It means a full measure of justice, equality and social harmony in all respects. The negative peace is like "negative healthiness,"
the mere absence of sickness. But healthiness should be a positive one. Not only the absence of sickness, but also the physical fitness and good muscle tone. Peace
should be like that, a positive one.

Johan Galtung is the person who made the distinction between what we normally call violence (physical violence) and
structural violence. Structural violence might not harm the victims directly. But the people are harmed, victimized and
violated through institutional means and structures . Discrimination, inequality and social marginalization are some forms of
structural violence on the ethnic front. Poverty, malnutrition, and economic marginalization are several forms of structural violence on the social front . If peace

is the absence of violence, it should mean the absence of violence including structural violence as well.
Peace means not only the absence of war and violence but also the absence of causes of war and
violence.
Their focus on “negative peace” ignores structural violence—this outweighs the case.
Michael E. Nielsen, Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgia Southern University, 2004
(“Mormonism and Psychology: A Broader Vision for Peace,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought,
Volume 37, Issue 1, Spring, Available Online at http://www.psychwww.com/psyrelig/peace.htm,
Accessed 08-02-2010)
 Structural violence refers to aspects of society that limit people’s ability to reach their potential.
Economic stratification, which occurs when one segment of society has difficulty finding adequate
shelter or food while other segments of society do not, is an important factor in structural violence.
When there are great differences in the educational facilities available to students in different locales,
based on funding formulas and other socio-economic structures, structural violence has been
committed. Because it is interwoven with the society’s economic system, structural violence is seen as
a normal part of living in society, an inadvertent consequence of “the way things are.” Thus, features
of an economic or political system that limit human potential for some while enhancing life for others
are considered structural violence.[30] In contrast to direct violence, structural violence kills slowly,
unintentionally, and indirectly.[31] It shortens people’s lives by chronic exposure to difficult living
conditions, rather than by a specific, direct act. Globalization adds to structural violence because it
fuels tremendous differences between people in terms of their wealth and resources, making some
suffer at the expense of others. For example, when economic sanctions are placed on a country, the
effect on the leadership of that country is slight relative to that experienced by the general populace. If
we define peace in terms of what it is—“the presence of qualities, values and approaches in human
relationships that build greater harmony”[32]—rather than what it is not—the lack of war or conflict
—then the scope of peace broadens substantially . At least two things are gained by doing this. First, if
we are truly concerned about peace and the prevention of violence, we must address its root causes.
Some causes, such as anti-social personality disorder, greed, and lust for power, are classically
“psychological” and reside within the individual. Others are broader, systemic conditions that lie outside
the scope of the individual but nevertheless affect his or her actions.[33] In order to lessen war,
violence, and conflict effectively, we must recognize and utilize multiple levels of analysis , and not
limit our efforts simply to individuals, groups, or societies. By improving oppressive living conditions,
we may reduce the likelihood of direct violence and improve people’s quality of life.[34] A second
benefit from using a broader, more positive definition of peace is moral consistency. It seems
inconsistent to claim to seek peace, while at the same time endorsing practices that harm children
and others particularly affected by structural violence.[35] A morality that opposes direct violence
while supporting structural violence would be inhumane at best. From an LDS perspective, charitable
concern and action on behalf of others is inextricably linked to peace.[36] From the perspective of
psychology, an interesting question regarding structural violence is how people who aspire to live good,
moral lives, can do so while ignoring social ills and the problems of structural violence.[37] They appear
to do this by limiting their scope of justice so that it applies only to certain people, drawing some people
within and leaving others outside their circle of justice.[38] We care for members of our own groups,
disregarding the welfare of others. Although societies often have laws and religious prohibitions against
direct violence, structural violence is less likely to result in punishment. Indeed, even “Good Samaritan”
laws designed to encourage citizens to intervene in emergencies remain a controversial form of
legislation. Because the targets of structural violence are those people with less power in society,
children, women, and minority group members are disproportionately represented. Structural
violence toward children manifests itself in many ways. Social policies punish children for their parents’
actions; more subtly, children being raised under conditions of economic distress have lower levels of
cognitive development due to their parents’ limited time and resources to provide cognitive and
linguistic stimulation to their children.[39] Structural violence also disproportionately affects mothers
worldwide through a systematic denial of access to health care and other resources, and even by
 denying women legal status and rights of citizenship.[40] Similar problems affect minority groups
throughout the world.

Alt: start to challenge the war system holistically and addressing war in such a way by
voting neg.
Challenging the war system holistically is key- weapons focus cuts off movements
Martin 90 (Brian-, Uprooting War, http://uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw02.html; Jacob)

Focussing on the roots of war, such as political and economic inequality, suggests that war
should be seen as only one of a range of social problems, and that the elimination of war must
go hand in hand with elimination of other problems . In terms of strategies, this means that war should
not be given undue attention compared to other social problems. Campaigns to oppose sexism,
heterosexism, economic exploitation, racism, poverty, political repression, alienation and environmental
degradation are also a contribution to the overall antiwar effort in as much as they are oriented
to challenge and replace oppressive social structures.
An implication of this principle is that campaigns of different social movements should be linked at
the level of strategy, and should be mutually stimulating and provide mutual learning. This already happens to
some extent, for example when feminists emphasise the fostering of aggressiveness in men as a factor in war, or
when antiwar activists support environmentalists opposed to nuclear power.
On the other hand, antiwar movements, like other social movements, often adopt strategies or
demands which have little relevance to other social problems. One example is the demand for a
nuclear freeze, promoted heavily in the United States in the 1980s. This demand, that the United States
and Soviet governments halt new developments in or additions to their nuclear arsenals, has
little immediate relevance to other social problems . This is no coincidence. The nuclear freeze
campaign, which is based on influencing state elites by public pressure, has worked through
existing structures rather than attempting to transform them .
To claim that the problem of war, or nuclear war in particular, is so pressing that it should be given
priority over other issues is bad politics. It cuts the antiwar movement off from other social
movements vital to opposing war-linked structures. And it often leads to strategies such as the
nuclear freeze which do not address the roots of war. The aim should not be to set up
hierarchies of oppression, but to link social issues and movements in theory and action.
An orientation towards structural change is often connected with awareness of the connections
between social issues. For example, the British journal Peace News, which has the subtitle 'for nonviolent
revolution' and is oriented to structural change, features articles on Third World problems, feminism, workplace
democracy and many other issues.
The judge should endorse our non-violent discursive move as an antidote to the
affirmative’s representations. Silence is violence—only the critical approach
manifested in our alternative offers a way out.
William C. Gay, Professor of Philosophy at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1998 (“The Practice
of Linguistic Non-Violence,” Peace Review, Volume 10, Issue 4, December, Available Online to
Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Elite)
From a pacifist perspective or, even more generally, from a nonviolent perspective, much discourse that
calls for an end to violence and war or that calls for the establishment of peace and social justice
actually places a primacy on ends over means. When the end is primary, nonviolence may be
practiced only so long as it is effective. For the pacifist and the practitioner of nonviolence, the
primary commitment is to the means. The commitment to nonviolence requires that the achievement
of political goals is secondary. Political goals must be foregone or at least postponed when they
cannot be achieved nonviolently. Various activities promote the pursuit of the respect, cooperation
and understanding needed for positive peace and social justice and for the genuinely pacific discourse
that is an integral part of them. Linguistically, these activities go beyond the mere removal from
discourse of terms that convey biases based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Open
dialogue, especially face-to-face conversation, is one of the most effective ways of experiencing that the
other is not so alien or alienating. Beyond having political leaders of various nations meet, we need
cultural and educational exchanges, as well as trade agreements among businesses and foreign travel by
citizens. We can come to regard cultural diversity in the expression of race, gender, class, and sexual
orientation as making up the harmonies and melodies that together create the song of humanity. Just as
creative and appreciated cooks use a wide variety of herbs and spices to keep their dishes from being
bland, so too can we move from an image of a culture with diverse components as in a melting pot to
one of a stew that is well seasoned with a variety of herbs and spices. A pacific discourse that expresses
such an affirmation of diversity needs to be an understood language of inclusion. While linguistic
violence often relies on authoritarian, monological, aggressive and calculative methods, a positively
nonviolent discourse is democratic, dialogleal, receptive, and mediative. A positively nonviolent
discourse is not passive in the sense of avoiding engagement; it is pacific in the sense of seeking to
actively build, from domestic to international levels, lasting peace and justice. A positively nonviolent
discourse provides a way of perceiving and communicating that frees us to the diversity and open-
endedness of life rather than the sameness and senselessness of violence. A positively nonviolent
discourse can provide the communicative means to overcome linguistic violence that does not
contradict or compromise its goal at any point during its pursuit. The first step is breaking our silence
concerning the many forms of violence. We need to recognize that often silence is violence;
frequently, unless we break the silence, we are being complicitous to the violence of the situation .
However, in breaking the silence, our aim should be to avoid counter-violence, in its physical forms
and in its verbal forms. Efforts to advance peace and justice should occupy the space between silence
and violence. Linguistic violence can be overcome, but the care and vigilance of the positive practice
of physical and linguistic nonviolence is needed if the gains are to be substantive, rather than merely
formal, and if the goals of nonviolence are to be equally operative in the means whereby we
overcome linguistic violence and social injustice.
 Arm sales A2: Net benefit
Arm sales have more negatives than positives
“Arms Sales: Pouring Gas on the Fires of Conflict.” Cato Institute, 2 July 2018,
https://www.cato.org/blog/arms-sales-pouring-gas-fires-conflict.

Critics of arms sales often argue that selling weapons abroad

Do arms sales cause war? Or do wars cause arms sales?
fuels conflict. And indeed, one can point to one or more sides using American weapons in many recent
conflicts including Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. Skeptics argue, on the other hand, that weapons don’t start the fire and that
conflicts would arise whether or arms exporters like the United States sell weapons abroad. The debate has important implications
for foreign policy. If selling or transferring weapons abroad makes conflict more likely, or intensifies conflicts already in process,
then the United States should rethink its long-held policy of selling weapons to pretty much any nation that wants them. If, on the
other hand, arms sales have no impact on conflict or make conflict less likely, then the Trump administration’s intention of
expanding arms sales should be seen as a positive move. As it turns out, several academic studies have looked at this question .
The
primary conclusion of these works is that although arms sales do not create conflicts out of thin air , they do make conflict
more likely when the conditions for conflict are already present. But despite the straightforward logic behind the
arms sales/conflict connection, most work on the topic to date has relied on case studies, which are wonderful for highlighting
potential causal mechanisms but not much use for establishing whether those mechanisms hold across the time and space. Until
recently there had not been any work using statistical methods that would allow scholars to state with confidence which direction the
causal mechanism actually flows – that is, do arms sales precede conflict or do impending conflicts lead to
increased arms sales? Happily, the most recent article on arms sales by Oliver Pamp and his colleagues in the January 2018
issue of the Journal of Peace Research entitled, “The Build-Up of Coercive Capacities: Arms Imports and the Outbreak of Violent
Intrastate Conflict,” uses a simultaneous equations model to overcome this problem .
Looking at the relationship between
arms sales and the outbreak of civil conflicts, the authors confirm the general thrust of previous
research, concluding that:“…while arms imports are not a genuine cause of intrastate conflicts, they
significantly increase the probability of an onset in countries where conditions are notoriously conducive
to conflict. In such situations, arms are not an effective deterrent but rather spark conflict escalation.”

Arms Sales Provide Little Direct Benefit to U.S. National Security

the United States inhabits such an extremely favorable security environment in the
At the strategic level,
post–Cold War world that most arms sales do little or nothing to improve its security. Thanks to its
geography, friendly (and weak) neighbors, large and dynamic economy, and secure nuclear arsenal, the United States faces
very few significant threats. There is no Soviet Union bent upon dominating Europe and destroying the United States. China,
despite its rapid rise, cannot (and has no reason to) challenge the sovereignty or territorial integrity of the United States. Arms sales
Nor are arms
— to allies or others — are unnecessary to deter major, direct threats to U.S. national security in the current era.47
sales necessary to protect the United States from “falling dominoes,” or the consequences of conflicts
elsewhere. The United States enjoys what Eric Nordlinger called “strategic immunity.”48 Simply put, most of what happens in
the rest of the world is irrelevant to U.S. national security. The United States has spent decades helping South Korea keep North
Korea in check, for example, but division of territory on the Korean peninsula does not affect America’s security. Likewise, civil wars
in the Middle East and Russia’s annexation of Crimea might be significant for many reasons, but those events do not threaten the
ability of the United States to defend itself. As a result, a decision to sell weapons to Ukraine, Taiwan, or South Korea could
significantly affect those nations’ security; doing so is not an act of ensuring U.S. national security . Nor does the threat of
transnational terrorism justify most arms sales. Most fundamentally, the actual threat from Islamist-inspired terrorism
to Americans is extraordinarily low. Since 9/11, neither al Qaeda nor the Islamic State has managed an attack on the American
homeland. Lone wolf terrorists inspired by those groups have done so, but since 9/11 those attacks have killed fewer than 100
Americans, an average of about 6 people per year.
There is simply very little risk reduction to be gained from any
strategy. The idea that the United States should be willing to accept the significant negative effects of
arms sales for minimal counterterrorism gains is seriously misguided.49 Moreover, even if one believed that the
benefits would outweigh the potential costs,
arms sales still have almost no value as a tool in the war on terror for
several reasons. First, the bulk of arms sales (and those we considered in our risk assessment) involve major conventional
weapons, which are ill suited to combatting terrorism. Many U.S. arms deals since 9/11 have involved major
conventional weapons systems such as fighter jets, missiles, and artillery, useful for traditional military operations, but of little use
in fighting terrorists.
Insurgencies that hold territory, like the Islamic State, are one thing, but most terrorist
groups do not advertise their location, nor do they assemble in large groups. Second, there is little
evidence from the past 16 years that direct military intervention is the right way to combat terrorism.
Research reveals that military force alone “seldom ends terrorism.”50 This comports with the American experience in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and elsewhere in the war on terror to date. Despite regime change, thousands of air strikes, and efforts to upgrade the military
the United States has not only failed to destroy the threat of Islamist-
capabilities of friendly governments,
inspired terrorism, it has also spawned chaos , greater resentment, and a sharp increase in the level of terrorism afflicting
the nations involved.51 Given the experience of the United States since 2001, there is little reason to expect that additional arms
sales to countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Qatar, or the United Arab Emirates will reduce terrorism, much less anti-American
terrorism specifically. Relatedly,
many arms deals since 9/11, made in the name of counterterrorism, were
irrelevant to U.S. goals in the global war on terror because they provided weapons to governments
fighting terrorist groups only vaguely (if at all) linked to al Qaeda or ISIS. Although selling weapons to the governments of
Nigeria or Morocco or Tunisia might help them combat violent resistance in their countries, terrorist groups in those countries have
never targeted the United States. As a result, such arms deals cannot be justified by arguing that they advance the goals of the United
States in its own war on terror in any serious way. Just as clearly ,
the arms for influence strategy is a nonstarter when
the other state will never agree to comply with American demands. This category includes a small group of
obvious cases such as Russia, China, Iran, and other potential adversaries (to which the United States does not sell weapons
anyway), but it also includes a much larger group of cases in which the other state opposes what the United States wants, or in which
the arms
complying with U.S. wishes would be politically too dangerous for that state’s leadership.59 The second problem with
for influence strategy is that international pressure in general, whether in the form of economic sanctions, arms
sales and embargoes, or military and foreign aid promises and threats, typically has a very limited impact on state
behavior. Though again, on paper, the logic of both coercion and buying compliance looks straightforward, research shows that
leaders make decisions on the basis of factors other than just the national balance sheet. In particular, leaders tend to respond far
more to concerns about national security and their own regime security than they do to external pressure. Arms sales, whether used
as carrots or sticks, are in effect a fairly weak version of economic sanctions, which research has shown have limited effects, even
when approved by the United Nations, and tend to spawn a host of unintended consequences. As such, the expectations for their
utility should be even more limited.62 A recent study regarding the impact of economic sanctions came to a similar conclusion,
noting that, “The
economic impact of sanctions may be pronounced . . . but other factors in the situational
context almost always overshadow the impact of sanctions in determining the political outcome.”63 The
authors of another study evaluating the impact of military aid concur, arguing that, “In general we find that military aid does not
lead to more cooperative behavior on the part of the recipient state. With limited exceptions ,
increasing levels of U.S. aid are
linked to a significant reduction in cooperative foreign policy behavior.”64
 Necropolitics
Necropolitics
“Necropolitics.” The Anthropology of Biopolitics, 23 Feb. 2013,
https://anthrobiopolitics.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/necropolitics/.

The politics of death, termed ‘necropolitics’, is examined here through the work of several scholars, each of
whom is interested in differently understanding the forms that death takes under biopower. Specifically, these works delve deeper
In
into the question which asks, if biopolitics is about making live, then how do we explain the presence of so much death today?
the present neoliberal era of terror and insecurity, it seems that what we may be
witnessing is a new, unprecedented form of biopolitical governmentality in which
necropower, or the technologies of control through which life is strategically subjugated
to the power of death (Mbembe 2003), operates significantly with and alongside technologies of discipline, and the power
to make live, for an increasingly authoritarian politics which governs through economic, rather than social terms (Giroux 2006). In
what follows, I review four pieces of scholarship that deal variously with death as a field of [bio]power, and attempt to highlight the
we
differing conceptualizations of necropower they each focus upon. I ultimately conclude that, in reading these pieces together,
are drawn to the task of considering the powerful and generative ubiquity of “bare life”
as a fundamental aspect of biopolitics in the contemporary neoliberal era of normalized
insecurity and terror. According to Achille Mbembe, “To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control
over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (2003:12).
In his 2003 article, “Necropolitics”, Mbembe theorizes the enactment of sovereignty in cases
where “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material
destruction of human bodies and populations” is the central project of power, rather than autonomy (p.14).
Significantly, he takes up the philosophical project of conceptualizing the relationship between subjectivity and
death as the roots of political sovereignty, and the particular form sovereign power’s enactment has taken
through the historical process of linking together notions of modernity and terror. That is, taking seriously Schmitt and Agamben’s
notion of sovereignty as the state of exception, we see through Mbembe’s work how Taussig’s wedding of reason and violence
endless states of
becomes extended and reformulated in the colonial contexts of late-modern forms of occupation, where
terror are used to justify the “concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary,
biopolitical, and necropolitical” (p.29), for which military presence and regularized warfare
increasingly leads to totalizing forms of domination over human lives within a given
space, and one that is endlessly shifting. In a very different type of project, Orlando Patterson’s 1982 piece on
the power relations undergirding the institution of slavery throughout history looks at the politics of death in the form of social
the power over life and death, and the creation of ‘bare life’ and
death. Where Mbembe sees
sovereignty today through spaces of exception, Patterson’s study of historical examples argue that ‘bare life’
and the ‘state of exception’ are also produced through certain slave-to-master relationships of power, which create the slave through
to make/let die as
producing the slave’s social death. As such, an interesting parallel can be drawn here between the ability
the basis of sovereignty over the lives of human populations, and the sovereign-like authority acquired
by the slave master through ritually and institutionally reconstituting the slave’s social existence into one that represents a
permanent internal enemy life form, whose relationship to power was made always reducible to one of hostility and disposability.In
what might be seen as biopolitical ‘social disposability’ rather than ‘social death’, the work of critical educational theorist Henry
Giroux, in “Reading Hurricane Katrina” (2006), makes an assumption about biopower similar to Mbembe’s regarding the late-
modern era of perpetual terror and insecurity. However, in focusing on the United States, he is drawn more to what he sees as the
the particular form of necropower, rather than emphasizing the
‘politics of disposability’ as
power of death in relation to projects of sovereignty. For Giroux, the hyper-neoliberal racial state, since
Reagan, has silently governed in the interests of Corporate America at the expense of human lives, by utilizing the repressive power
of color-blind ideology to implement policy reforms which increasingly silently neglect disadvantaged populations further into the
margins, thereby permitting their disposability (letting them die). To demonstrate that the governmentality of the racial state has
changed in form from prior eras, Giroux compares the 1955 murder of Emmett Till (which helped spark civil rights movement
activity) with the deaths of over one thousand racial minorities caused (superficially, he would argue) by hurricane Katrina in 2005,
to show the difference in what these cases revealed about the racial state:       “Till’s body allowed the racism that destroyed it to be
made visible, to speak to the systemic character of American racial injustice. The bodies of the Katrina victims could not speak with
the same directness to the state of American racist violence but they did reveal and shatter the conservative fiction of living in a
color-blind society” (p.174).Of course, I have to wonder whether Giroux would still maintain his belief expressed here, that Katrina
shattered the imaginary reality of U.S. color-blindness- to which an abundance of evidence to support this ideology’s heightening
continuation today continues to surface at an ongoing rate. Nevertheless, the importance of the Katrina example, for Giroux, is to
highlight how the informed decision-making of the Bush administration’s actions leading up to and after Katrina hit reveal the racial
state’s knowing involvement in an anti-democratic project of sustaining insecurity in a particular fashion. That is, by knowingly
rendering already-marginalized groups vulnerable to natural disasters like Katrina, which were expected to hit and devastate the gulf
region of the U.S., the neoliberal state proved its complicity in the biopolitical project of not only letting die, but of actively disposing
what it had redlined as value-less portions of the U.S. population. In effect, by implementing a politics of disposability in the era of
neoliberal insecurity, the U.S. government was reducing its populace to a politics of “bare life”. Continuing with this important
notion of ‘bare life’ in relation to necropolitics today, amidst the perpetual exceptional states of terror and insecurity, Eugene
Thacker argues how it (bare life) is “constantly rendered in its precariousness, a life that is always potentially under attack and
therefore always an exceptional life” (2011:158). In Thacker’s “Necrologies” (2011), classical theorizations of what was called the
‘body politic’ are used to reconsider what we now think of as ‘biopolitics’, emphasizing the conceptual death of the body-political
order and its recurrent resurrections. In other words, Thacker compares the medicalization of the human body as parts in relation to
a whole, to the classical liberal notion of politics in society as the body-politic, whose proper functionality is always threatened by the
dysfunctionality of the multitudes, and is therefore always attempting to work against its own decomposition. Building off of this
comparison and through his developed idea of bare life’s relation to necrology, Thacker ultimately posits the contemporary
biopolitical notion of what he calls “whatever-life”, “in which biology and sovereignty, or medicine and politics, continually inflect
and fold onto each other. Whatever-life is the pervasive potential for life to be specified as that which must be protected, that which
must be protected against, and as those forms of nonhuman life that are the agents of attack” (p.159). In other words ,
bare life
is what the perpetually insecure terrorist state of today’s exceptionalism continually
produces under the threat and force of necropower, which dialectically then re-produces the ongoing need
or justification of such exceptional forms of rule over life. Moreover, it could be said that this dialectically-reproducing ubiquity of
bare life through the routinization of states of exceptional rule against “terror” ultimately comes to constitute the normalization of
necropower in the body politic, as the invisible shape governmentality has come to take in the present. As I have attempted to point
out through the reviews in this post, the politics surrounding death- whether of individual bodies, social existences, or whole
populations- have, in the present global era, grown increasingly regulated such that they become normalized as embedded in
invisible relations of power. As several of these authors have suggested, this fact would seem to present as imperative our
reconsideration of “bare life” as a concept possibly capable of describing all regulated life (as opposed to simply refugee life in
camps, for instance) under the current regimes of exceptional insecurity.
 Biopower impacts
Biopower is the root cause of racism
Mbembe Research Professor Institute of Social and Economic Research University of Witwatersrand
2008 Achille Foucault in an Age of Terror ed Morton & Bygrave page 156-157

In Foucault's formulation, biopower appears to function through dividing people into those who must
live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a
power defines itself in relation to a biological field - which it takes control of and vests itself in. This
control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population
into subgroups d the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is
what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism. 17 That race (or for that matter racism)
figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class
thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever-
present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the
inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever presence and the phantom-like
world of race in general, Hannah Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness
and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death. 18 Indeed, in Foucault's
terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, 'that old sovereign
right of death'. 19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of
death and make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, 'the condition for the
acceptability of putting to death'.20

Biopower bad
Berger 4/15, Author at the Foreign Policy Journal, “Empire, Biopower, Spectacle: Notes on Tiqqun,”
https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/empire-biopower-spectacle-notes-on-
tiqqun/

Today’s territory is the product of many centuries of police operations. People have been pushed out of
their fields, then their streets, then their neighborhoods, and finally and from the hallways of their
buildings, in the demented hope of containing all life between the four sweating walls of privacy. The
territorial question isn’t the same for us as it is for the state. For us it’s not about possessing the
territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of communes, of circulation, and of solidarities
that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory,
we want to be the territory.

Biopower !
Rabinow quoting Foucault 84 (Paul, Prof. of Anthropology at UC Berkeley; 12 November 1984; The
Foucault Reader, pg. 258-60; Quoting History of Sexuality vol. I)

For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and
death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that granted the father of
the Roman family the right to "dispose" of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had 'given
them life, so he could take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classical
theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form; It was no longer considered that this power of
the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and unconditional way, but only in
cases where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder he was
threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or contest his rights, he could then
legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without "directly
proposing their death," he was empowered to "expose their life" : in this sense, he wielded an "indirect"
power over them of life and death . 1 But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his
laws, then he could exercise a direct power over the offender' s life: as punishment, the latter could be
put to death. Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was
conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as
the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this
meant the death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the
formation of that new juridical being, the sovereign? 2 In any case in its modern form-relative and
limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one. The
sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he
evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was
formulated as the "power of life and death" was in reality the right to take life or let live . Its symbol,
after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referred to a historical type of society in
which power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelevement), a subtraction mechanism, a
right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood,
levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies,
and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it. Since
the classical age, the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of
power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element
among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it:
a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to
impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of
death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to
define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as
simply the reverse of the right, of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were
never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never
before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death-
and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has now greatly
expanded its limits-now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on
life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for
the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so
many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the
technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that
initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question
of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole
population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence .
The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-
has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer
the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is
indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it
is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population.

Biopower is strategically reversible—it can become a tool of resistance and

empowerment
Campbell, 98 (David, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, “Writing Security:
United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity,” pg. 204-205) TYBG

The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be
specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the “bio-power” discussed above.
In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in Western nations have been
increasingly directed toward modes of being and forms of life — such that sexual conduct has become
an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the family has
been transformed into an instrument of government— the ongoing agonism between those practices
and the freedom they seek to contain means that individuals have articulated a series of
counterdemands drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to
prosecute people according to sexual orientation, human rights activists have proclaimed the right of
gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and receive the same health and insurance benefits
granted to their straight counterparts. These claims are a consequence of the permanent provoca tion
of power and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as testament to the “strategic reversibility” of power
relations: if the terms of governmental practices can be made into focal points for resistances, then
the “history of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ is interwoven with the history of dissenting
‘counterconducts.”’39 Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major articulation of “the political”
has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they rule. State intervention in
everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to
the state and new claims upon the state. In particular, “the core of what we now call ‘citizenship’
consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their struggles over the
means of state action, especially the making of war.” In more recent times, constituencies associated
with women’s, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued claims on
society. These resistances are evidence that the break with the discursive/nondiscursive dichotomy
central to the logic of interpretation undergirding this analysis is (to put it in conventional terms) not
only theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination
so as to enlarge the categories through which we understand the constitution of “the political” has been
a necessary precondition for making sense of Foreign Policy’s concern for the ethical borders of identity
in America. Accordingly, there are manifest political implications that flow from theorizing identity. As
Judith Butler concluded: “The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it
establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.”
Biopower’s normalizing practices are the root cause of otherization
Saltes 13-Professor of Sociology @ Queens University [Natasha, “‘Abnormal’ Bodies on the Borders of
Inclusion: Biopolitics and the Paradox of Disability Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society 2013]

Ongoing debates about the relationship between bodies (biological life) and the state (politics) have
prompted scholars to revisit Foucault’s writings and lectures on biopolitics. Among the
competingarticulations, Lazzarato provides a useful contextualization of the parameters of biopolitics
noting that it can be ‘understood as a government-population-political economy relationship [that]
refers to a dynamic of forces that establishes a new relationship between ontology and politics’ (2002:
102). Scholars who have examined Foucault’s lectures have traced biopolitical themes in his genealogy
of race (Su Rasmussen 2011) showing how otherness emerges as a result of the construction of inferior
races (Fassin 2001). A parallel can be drawn between the otherness of racialization and the
‘abnormality’ of impairment in that both are the consequences of a biopolitical regime underpinned
by normalization. A common theme that weaves through diverging views of biopolitics is an emphasis
on the dyadic relationship between life and politics. What has been largely overlooked is the notion that
biopolitics is an active and reactive process that politicizes life by locating it within the polarizing
paradigm of normality and abnormality and thus categorizing life as either productive or unproductive
and therefore worthy or risky. In this way, biopolitics operates on its own paradoxical axis in that its
strategic aims and methods are carried out through a range of practices that, according to Esposito, can
on one hand be ‘affirmative and productive and on the other hand negative and lethal’ (2008: 46). To
illustrate the underlying rationalization of biopolitics it is fruitful to return to Foucault and his conception
of biopower and biopolitics in the context of the ‘normalizing society’. In his lectures at the Collège de
France in 1975-1976, Foucault (2003b) distinguishes between these two concepts noting that biopower
is a disciplinary technology of power aimed at the individualized body while biopolitics is a regulatory
technology of power aimed at the population. Foucault clarifies that while both are ‘technologies of
the body’ (2003b: 249), the trajectory of power differs for each. Biopower is exercised through
knowledge and power structures embedded within institutional arrangements that ‘discipline’ and
condition the individualized body through processes of surveillance and training while biopolitics is
concerned with the population as a biological and political problem and operates through
administrative and strategic arrangements of the state through ‘forecasts, statistical estimates, and
overall measures’ and intervenes in ‘the birth rate, the mortality rate, various biological disabilities,
and the effects of the environment’ (2003b: 245-246). According to Foucault (2003b), the concept that
underpins biopower and biopolitics is ‘the norm’ (253). It is the application of the norm to the body and
population that establishes the ‘normalizing society’ (2003b: 253). Foucault defines the normalizing
society as ‘a society in which the norm of disciplines [biopower] and the norm of regulation
[biopolitics] intersect…’ (2003b: 253). It is a society in which power dominates the ‘organic and the
biological’ through control over the life of both the body and the population (Foucault 2003b: 253).
Foucault (2003a) suggests that the ‘norm’ is a political concept wherein processes of power emerge and
are legitimized. He claims that the underlying principles of the norm are that of ‘qualification and
correction’ (2003a: 50). Mader observes that processes of ‘qualification and correction’ are contingent
on comparing and measuring bodies against ‘quantifiable qualities’ (2007: 6). Only when bodies are
inscribed with measurable attributes can they be ‘controlled and managed’ (2007: 6). Although
Foucault recognizes the repressive outcomes of political power exercised through processes of
normalization, he is averse to conceptualizing political power in strictly repressive terms and suggests
that repression is a ‘secondary effect’ (2003a: 52) and that the function of power that emerges in
accordance with the norm is not to ‘exclude and reject’, but is ‘a positive technique of intervention and
transformation, to a sort of normative project’ (2003a: 50). Foucault’s association of the normative
project with positive intervention might seem curious given the underlying themes of power and its
relation to social control that underlie much of his work. Yet, he contends that disciplines of
normalization that emerged in the eighteenth century produced a productive form of power aimed
toward ‘transformation and innovation’ (2003a: 52).

Biopower justifies holocaust

Keith Crome 2009, Keith Crome is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan university.
He is the author of Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry, and the co-editor of the Lyotard Reader and
Guide, “THE NIHILISTIC AFFIRMATION OF LIFE: BIOPOWER AND BIOPOLITICS IN THE WILL TO
KNOWLEDGE,” http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia06/parrhesia06_crome.pdf DS)

It is for this reason that Foucault posits a connection between biopolitics, biopower and the holocaust,
for as he remarks: “for the first time in history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known,
and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorise a holocaust.”41 It is in this sense
that Foucault can say that what are often regarded as the two pathological forms of power in the
twentieth century, Fascism and Stalinism, are, despite their historical uniqueness, “not quite original”,
for they “used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies [... and] in spite of
their own internal madness, they used to a large extent, the ideas and the devices of our political
rationality.”42 Certainly I do not want to be understood to be claiming that Fascism and Stalinism are
identical, or that the differences between them are irrelevant, nor do I want to be taken to be claiming
that Foucault would himself have been dismissive of the differences between them. Rather, what I am
claiming is that, on the one hand, Foucault’s genealogical attention to the effectiveness of power allows
us to distinguish the historical specificity of modern genocide. For rather than simply distinguishing it
by the quantity of those killed, and the means by which such quantities of people were killed, Foucault
allows us to grasp the essential transformation at issue, namely the political and philosophical
transformation of the relation to life itself. As he argues “if genocide is indeed the dream of modern
powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated
and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population
(Foucault, 137). On the other hand—and I take this to be equally important—here we find Foucault
expressly arguing that “our political rationality”—liberal governmentality—is not extrinsic to genocide,
totalitarianism, or despotism. Biopolitics is, then, intrinsically related to thanatopolitics. This is in sharp
contrast to Negri,43 who argues that “thanatopolitics is neither an internal alternative” to biopolitics,
nor “a biopolitical ambiguity”, but its exact opposite, “an authoritarian transcendence, an apparatus of
corruption”.44 If Negri can make such an affirmation it is not because he has misread Foucault: his
reading of Foucault is, in many respects, insightful and acute, and worthy of attention. Rather, it is
because he wants to claim that linking biopolitics to thanatopolitics as I have done here is to
“overestimate biopower whilst underestimating the possibility of resistance”.45 Yet, the possibility of
resistance is, for Negri, to be found in the spontaneous production of subjectivity that results from
biopolitics, a claim that itself fundamentally confuses praxis, practical activity, with production, and
which, as I have argued above, reproduces the nihilism of biopolitics as it tries to evoke some means of
combating it by collapsing the political into the economic.

Biopower caused the holocaust and the impacts of racism

Rabinow et al 12-01-2003, Paul Rabinow, professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, Along with Nikolas
Rose, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, “Thoughts on the
Concept of Biopower Today,” http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/pdf/rabinowandrose-
biopowertoday03.pdf DS)

Holocaust is undoubtedly one configuration that modern biopower can take. Racisms allows power to
sub-divide a population into subspecies known as races, to fragment it, and to allow a relationship in
which the death of the other, of the inferior race, can be seen as something that will make life in
general healthier and purer: as Foucault put it in 1976 ìracism justifies the death-function in the
economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically
stronger insofar as ones is a member of a race or a population (2003: 258). It is true that in this lecture
he suggests that it is the emergence of biopower that inscribes [racism] in the mechanisms of the
State as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. (2003: 254). But the Nazi
regime was, in his view, exceptional ñ ìa paroxysmal developmentî: ìWe have, then, in Nazi society
something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an
absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to killÖ to kill anyone, meaning not
only other people but also its own peopleÖ a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a
dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social bodyî (2003: 260).
). Biopower in the form it took under National Socialism was a complex mix of the politics of life and the
politics of death ñ as Robert Proctor points out, Nazi doctors and health activists waged war on tobacco,
sought to curb exposure to asbestos, worried about the over use of medication and X-rays, stressed the
importance of a diet for of petrochemical dies and preservatives, campaigned for whole-grain bread and
foods high in vitamins and fiber, and many were vegetarians (Proctor, 1999). But within this complex,
the path to the death camps was dependent upon a host of other historical, moral, political and
technical conditions. Holocaust is neither exemplary of thanato-politics, nor the hidden dark truth of
biopower.

Biopower allows for the destruction of all life

Foucault 1978-

Professor of the history of systems of thought, at the college de france

(Michel, “The History Of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1”, 1978, p. 143.)

If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the
processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate
what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-
power an agent of transformation of human life. It is not that life has been totally integrated into
techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them. Outside the Western world,
famine exists. on a greater scale than ever; and the biological risks confronting the species are
perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the birth of microbiologv. But what might be
called a societv's "threshold of modernity" has been reached when the life of the species is wagered
on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a divine animal
with the additional capacity for a political existence: modem man is an animal whose politics places his
existence as a living being in question.

The impact is extinction

Szentes 8 [Tamas, Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest. “Globalisation and
prospects of the world society,” 4/22/08,
http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav.pdf]

It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without
peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous
local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the world, undermining security even in the most
developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended with the collapse of
the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and
misusing enormous resources badly needed for development, --many “invisible wars” are suffered by
the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness,
starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial
and other discrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or
regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities,
etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that --the “war
against Nature”, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources,
and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for
human life. Behind global terrorism and “invisible wars” we find striking international and intrasociety
inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international
tensions, thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars. It is a commonplace now that peace is not
merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within societies involve
not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual
elimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and
institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and
oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic
transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people,
sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a
pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the
world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict
management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the
contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in our
world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or
before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or
invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can
provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on
national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced
to the need for preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed
Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However, no ecological balance can
be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are
substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-
games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to
predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore,
the actual question is not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of
human life”, i.e. survival of [hu]mankind – because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism.
When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on
the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more
restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former
“socialist” countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional
(and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns
about natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even
instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make “survival studies”. While the
monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of the world
society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological,
behavioural, cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour
motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over
the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that great many
positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last century. Such as
decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some
former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of
international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation,
institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of
human rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the
militarised Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to
mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and deepened,
approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by
the final catastrophe or a common solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing
science and technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intra-
society and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated. Like a single spacecraft, the
Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-
educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other.
Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”) can hardly be played
any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies, the
apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and
positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long
as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and
democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more,
which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the coming years, because
of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to
irreversible changes in natural environment.

Biopower eliminates all value to life

Agamben 98 (Giorgio, U of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, p.139-40) LA

It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still
today, in certain countries, occupies a substantial position in medical debates and provokes
disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicaliry with which Binding declares himself in favor of
the general admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that the sovereignty
of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a threshold
beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the
commission of a homicide. The new juridical category of “life devoid of value” (or “life unworthy of
being lived”) corresponds exactly—even if in an apparently different direction—to the bare life of
homo sacer and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. It is as if every
valorization and every “politicization” of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the
individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond
which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only “sacred life,” and can as such be eliminated
without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society—even the most modern—decides who
its “sacred men” will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceprio of
natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history
of the West and has now— in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty—moved
inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a
definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.

Biopower is the root cause of war and conflict

Michel Foucault, Professor of History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France, 1978, The History
of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley, p. 135-137

For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and
death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that granted the father of
the Roman family the right to “dispose” of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given
them life, so he could take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classical
theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of
the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and unconditional way, but only in
cases where the sovereign’s very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were
threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or contest his rights, he could then
legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without “directly
proposing their death,” he was empowered to “expose their life”: in this sense, he wielded an “indirect”
power over them of life and death. But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws,
then he could exercise a direct power over the offender’s life: as punishment, the latter would be put to
death. Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was conditioned
by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer
to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the
death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the formation of
that new juridical being, the sovereign? In any case, in its modern form—relative and limited—as in its
ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one. The sovereign exercised
his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power
over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the
“power of life and death” was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the
sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referred to a historical type of society in which power was
exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelevement), a subtraction mechanism, a right to
appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the
subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately
life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it. Since the classical age
the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. “Deduction”
has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to
incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on
generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them,
making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least
a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself
accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the
reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as
bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did
regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death—and this is
perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its
limits—now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that
endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive
regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire popula tions are mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life
and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars,
causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars
has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the
one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic
situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the
underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s con tinued existence. The principle underlying the
tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle
that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of
sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of
modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of
population.
Biopower eliminates the value to life
Babcock 11 (David John, Brown University, BIOPOWER, PROFESSIONAL SUBJECTIVITY, AND
ANGLOPHONE POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY STUDIES: ISHIGURO, COETZEE, ONDAATJE,
http://repository.library.brown.edu:8080/fedora/objects/bdr:11224/datastreams/PDF/content) LA

The definition that Foucault himself gives for this ―life‖ that must be fostered and protected is open-
ended: life for biopower is ―understood as the basic needs, man‘s concrete essence, the realization of
his potential, a plenitude of the possible.15 Biopower makes ―life an impersonal, abstract
―plenitude‖ that is attached to no one in particular. Foucault writes about biopower not in terms of
―subjects but of ―forces. Biopower works to ―incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and
organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering
them‖ (HS 136). To ―disallow‖ these forces would be to rob them of their momentum, or to contain
their energy without disrupting future productivity. Many zones of state-driven violence or deprivation
are abandoned to a postcolonial outside that enters political discourse only as an abstract figure for
―human suffering.‖ What gets lost in such a figuration is the way in which these conflicts are brought
about by scarcities and divisions intrinsic to the biopolitical economy itself, to the way it manages the
movement of commodities and capital. In fact, these localized atrocities are tightly interwoven with
the legacies of colonialism and the international division of labor. Absolute violence still exists today,
but it no longer takes the form of genocide directly overseen by the totalitarian state; instead, it takes
the form of zones whose violence is not recognized by the global biopolitical order as its own. The
challenge is to uncover our hidden complicity in this violence. As long as these artificial disavowals exist
at the level of global discourse, the only way to disrupt them may be to look to the way these conflicts
manifest themselves symptomatically at the micro-political level, in the interactions between individual
subjects. Among its conclusions, Foucault‘s account of power maintains that every subject is
fundamentally complicit in its exercise. An apparent gap in his analysis, however, is to what degree the
subject should be held responsible for that complicity. One reason for this ethical gap may lie in the
nature of biopower itself. The subjects and juridical formations fostered by biopower inevitably lead
to a withering of individual responsibility even as it renders complicity universal. One example of this
is the subject of liberal humanism. According to Foucault, the subject of liberal humanism emerges
precisely to make intelligible the relationship between individuals and the biopolitical technologies of
state rule that emerged in the eighteenth century. This subject is known by the rights it claims: ―the
right‘ to life, to one‘s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the
oppressions or s,‘ the right‘ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this right‘...was the
political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the
traditional right of sovereignty‖ (HS 145). Foucault understands the rights of the liberal humanist
subject as direct outgrowths of the biopolitical form of power, which the modern nation-state was
charged with protecting.

Critiquing governmentality solves biopower

Hamann 9 (Trent H., St. John’s U, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics, Foucault Studies No6 Feb
2009) LA
Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that would subsume
particulars under a general rule, but as a specifically modern ”atti- tude” that can be traced historically
as the constant companion of pastoral power and governmentality. As Judith Butler points out in her
article “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”,39 critique is an attitude, distinct from
judgment, pre- cisely because it expresses a skeptical or questioning approach to the rules and ra-
tionalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular form of gover- nance. From its earliest
formations, Foucault tells us, the art of government has al- ways relied upon certain relations to truth:
truth as dogma, truth as an individualiz- ing knowledge of individuals, and truth as a reflective
technique comprising general rules, particular knowledge, precepts, methods of examination,
confessions, inter- views, etc. And while critique has at times played a role within the art of
government itself, as we’ve seen in the case of both liberalism and neoliberalism, it has also made
possible what Foucault calls “the art of not being governed, or better, the art of not being governed
like that and at that cost” (WC, 45). Critique is neither a form of ab- stract theoretical judgment nor a
matter of outright rejection or condemnation of specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical
and agonistic engagement, re- engagement, or disengagement with the rationalities and practices that
have led one to become a certain kind of subject. In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault
suggests that this modern attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain people, a way of acting and
behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of be- longing and presents itself as a task.40
Its task amounts to a “historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves
and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying” (WE, 125). But
how can we distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the endless calls to ”do
your own thing” or ”be all you can be” that stream forth in every direction from political campaigns to
commercial advertising? How is it, to return to the last of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault
does not simply lend technical sup- port to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On the one hand, we can
distinguish criti- cal acts of resistance and ethical self-fashioning from what Foucault called ”the Cali-
fornian cult of the self” (OGE, 245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed to assist in
discovering one’s ”true” or ”authentic” self, or the merely ”cosmetic” forms of rebellion served up for
daily consumption and enjoyment. On the other hand we might also be careful not to dismiss forms of
self-fashioning as ”merely” aesthetic. As Timothy O’Leary points out in his book Foucault and the Art of
Ethics, Foucault’s notion of an aesthetics of existence countered the modern conception of art as a
singular realm that is necessarily autonomous from the social, political, and ethical realms, at least as it
pertained to his question of why it is that a lamp or a house can be a work of art, but not a life. O’Leary
writes: Foucault is less interested in the critical power of art, than in the ‘artistic’ or ‘plas- tic’ power of
critique. For Foucault, not only do no special advantages accrue from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but
this autonomy unnecessarily restricts our possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is Foucault
aware of the specif- ic nature of aesthetics after Kant, he is obviously hostile to it.41

Rejecting governmentality solves biopower

Hamann 9 (Trent H., St. John’s U, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics, Foucault Studies No6 Feb
2009) LA

Whether neoliberalism will ultimately be viewed as having presented a radically new form of
governmentality or just a set of variations on classical liberalism, we can certainly recognize that there
are a number of characteristics in contemporary practices that are new in the history of
governmentality, a number of which I’ve al- ready discussed. Another one of these outstanding features
is the extent to which the imposition of market values has pushed towards the evisceration of any
autonomy that may previously have existed among economic, political, legal, and moral dis- courses,
institutions, and practices. Foucault notes, for example, that in the sixteenth century jurists were able
to posit the law in a critical relation to the reason of state in order to put a check on the sovereign
power of the king. By contrast, neoliberalism, at least in its most utopian formulations, is the dream of
a perfectly limitless (as op- posed perhaps to totalizing) and all-encompassing (as opposed to
exclusionary and normalizing) form of governance that would effectively rule out all challenge or op-
position. This seems to be the kind of thing that Margaret Thatcher was dreaming about when she
claimed that there is “no alternative”.34 Such formulations of what might be called “hyper-capitalism”
seem to lend themselves to certain traditional forms of criticism. However, critical analyses that
produce a totalizing conception of power and domination risk the same danger, noted above, of
overlooking the some- times subtle and complex formations of power and knowledge that can be
revealed through genealogical analyses of local practices. Important for any genealogical analysis is
the recognition that, while there is no ”outside” in relation to power, re- sistance and power are
coterminous, fluid, and, except in instances of domination, reversible. There is an echo of this
formulation in Foucault’s understanding of go- vernmentality as ”the conduct of conduct”.
Governmentality is not a matter of a dominant force having direct control over the conduct of
individuals; rather, it is a matter of trying to determine the conditions within or out of which
individuals are able to freely conduct themselves. And we can see how this is especially true in the case
of neoliberalism insofar as it is society itself and not the individual that is the direct object of power.
Foucault provides examples of this in “The Subject and Pow- er”, in which he discussed a number of
struggles of resistance that have developed over the past few years such as “opposition to the power of
men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the
popu- lation, of administration over the ways people live”.35 Despite their diversity, these struggles
were significant for Foucault because they share a set of common points that allow us to recognize
them as forms of resistance to governmentality, that is, ”critique”. Through the examples he uses
Foucault notes the local and immediate nature of resistance. These oppositional struggles focus on
the effects of power expe- rienced by those individuals who are immediately subject to them. Despite
the fact that these are local, anarchistic forms of resistance, Foucault points out that they are not
necessarily limited to one place but intersect with struggles going on elsewhere. Of greatest
importance is the fact that these struggles are critical responses to con- temporary forms of
governmentality, specifically the administrative techniques of subjectification used to shape
individuals in terms of their free conduct.36 These struggles question the status of the individual in
relation to community life, in terms of the forms of knowledge and instruments of judgment used to
determine the ”truth” of individuals, and in relation to the obfuscation of the real differences that make
individuals irreducibly individual beings.

Biopower causes genocide

Salter 2006 [Mark, “The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self:
Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,” Alternatives 31, pp. 167-189]
Foucault argues that we must progress from a theory of sovereignty, which “is bound up with a form of
power that is exercised over the land and the produce of the land, much more so than over bodies and
what they do,” toward a theory of a “disciplinary” society that constitutes and normalizes in addition to
rejecting and excluding.27 I would argue it is a crucial supplement to Agamben’s notion of sovereign
decision that we examine Foucault’s biopolitics and the disciplinary society, which helps us explain and
understand the way in which obedience and choice are structured through a power/knowledge
network. Zygmunt Bauman’s investigation of the Holocaust is crucial to my reading of obedience and
power in this respect: he argues that the rationality of Jewish collaborators was undone in the
asymmetrical environment of the Nazi state. The question of agency in this case cannot simply be
understood as collaboration: “Stakes and resources are manipulated by those who truly control the
situation: who are able to make some choices too costly to be frequently selected by those whom
they rule, while securing frequent and massive choices which bring closer their aims and reinforce
their control.”28 Power constructs the obedient subject but does not simply repress the disobedient:
resistances are possible. Thus, we must look not simply at the “choice” to enter a state, but at how
that condition of mobility is rendered such that travelers facilitate their own entry into this state of
exception where their rights are abrogated.

Biopolitics is what creates the necessity to exterminate all life without sacrifice
Gullì 13 (Bruno professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College “For the
critique of sovereignty and violence”
https://www.academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence)

We live in an unprecedented time of crisis. The violence that characterized the twentieth century, and
virtually all known human history before that, seems to have entered the twenty-first century with
exceptional force and singularity. True, this century opened with the terrible events of September 11.
However, September 11 is not the beginning of history. Nor are the histories of more forgotten places
and people, the events that shape those histories, less terrible and violent – though they may often be
less spectacular. The singularity of this violence, this paradigm of terror, does not even simply lie in its
globality, for that is something that our century shares with the whole history of capitalism and empire,
of which it is a part. Rather, it must be seen in the fact that terror as a global phenomenon has now
become self-conscious. Today, the struggle is for global dominance in a singularly new way, and war –
regardless of where it happens—is also always global. Moreover, in its self-awareness, terror has
become, more than it has ever been, an instrument of racism. Indeed, what is new in the singularity of
this violent struggle, this racist and terrifying war, is that in the usual attempt to neutralize the enemy,
there is a cleansing of immense proportion going on. To use a word which has become popular since
Michel Foucault, it is a biopolitical cleansing. This is not the traditional ethnic cleansing, where one
ethnic group is targeted by a state power – though that is also part of the general paradigm of racism
and violence. It is rather a global cleansing, where the sovereign elites, the global sovereigns in the
political and financial arenas (capital andthe political institutions), in all kinds of ways target those who
do not belong with them on account of their race, class, gender, and so on, but above all, on account of
their way of life and way of thinking. These are the multitudes of people who, for one reason or the
other, are liable for scrutiny and surveillance, extortion (typically, in the form of overtaxation and fines)
and arrest, brutality, torture, and violent death. The sovereigns target anyone who, as Giorgio Agamben
(1998) shows with the figure of homo sacer, can be killed without being sacrificed – anyone who can be
reduced to the paradoxical and ultimately impossible condition of bare life, whose only horizon is death
itself. In this sense, the biopolitical cleansing is also immediately a thanatopolitical instrument.

Democracy doesn’t check – biopower shapes life of polis to cry for blood – Nazis prove
Dunford 15 (David Tyler, States of Exception and Unlawful Combatants: Biopolitical Monstrosities or the
Return of the Sovereign?, 2015, Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Paper 5710, p. 5-7)

The main focuses of this thesis are longstanding issues in political criminology, the sociology of law,
political sociology, constitutional and international law, and human rights. This thesis explores matters
that are unfortunately all too often marginal in criminological literature and discussions of criminal
justice systems (See Rothe & Freidrichs, 2006; Rothe & Ross, 2008). Criminology and domestic criminal
justice systems, on the whole, direct inadequate attention to questioning and explaining the
longstanding license of high ranking government officials that violate criminal, constitutional, and
international human and legal rights (Iadicola, 2011. p. 123; Kramer & Michaelowski, 2011, p. 112;
Rothe, 2011, pp. 199-200). The concept of “state crime” is helpful in this respect. State crimes are “Acts
defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of their jobs as representatives
of the state” (Chambliss, 1989, p. 184). They can be committed “for ideological purposes” and
offenders believe they are following a “higher conscious”- i.e. usually dehumanizing the enemy -
(Hagan, 1997, p. 2). State crimes negatively impact the cultural, economic, political and legal
environments at the state and international levels (Hoofnagle, 2011; Rothe & Mullins, 2006). While
state crime can be measured at the micro (i.e. the individual), meso-levels (organization) and macro
level (state), this thesis largely concerns the state-structural analysis of criminality/wrongdoing whereby
executive officials systematically institutionalize policies that have the potential to dehumanize,
incarcerate and eliminate entire races of people (See Iadicola, 2011; See also Kramer & Michaelowski,
2011). High ranking foreign policy officials post-9/11 are exempt from0 prosecution and moral
condemnation precisely because they constitute and institutionalize discourses and policies that brand
their enemies as evil doers, criminals and/or terrorists while constituting themselves as democratic
liberators (See Bush 2001a; 2001b; 2002a). This can be exacerbated by the circumstance that law and
criminal justice is articulated, formulated and adjudicated by high level governmental authorities.
Criminology fundamentally fails as a discipline if it fails to attend to the illegalities, crimes, wrongdoings
and harms committed by state officials and instead narrowly concentrates on individual offenders (see
Bassiouni, 2011, pp. 27-28; See also Chambliss, 1989, p. 184). I believe that the suspension of existing
legal standards and the widespread regimes of torture are worthy of criminological consideration.

Public discourse, government officials and academics have no issue in declaring the systematic
extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany as being criminal and immoral (Friedrichs, 2011, pp. 55-60).
Considerable evidence from lasting documents demonstrates the German support for Nazi human
experimentation and extermination policies to “effectively address economic and political turmoil [and]
to restore law and order” (Friedrichs, 2011, p. 66). German jurisprudence privileged Nazi executive
decrees over formal legislative law by declaring that state preservation and necessity undermined
constitutional law (Friedrichs, 2011, p. 65; Ott & Buob, 1993). The Nazi party enacted “Article 48” of the
Weimar Constitution in 1933 and declared a “state of emergency” that lasted until 1945 (Agamben,
2005, p. 6; See also Schmitt, 1985). The enactment of “Article 48” gave the Nazi executive government
the authority in suspending all constitutional safeguards and protections (Kennedy, 2011; Schmitt,
1985). In doing so, the executive suspended the existing legal regime, initiated aggressive foreign
occupations and engaged in a systematic biopolitical eugenics program to rid Europe and the world of
“parasitic Jews” (See Foucault, 1978).

Academic literature and “western” governments condemn Nazi Germany’s Final Solution and
aggressive foreign occupations (Friedrichs, 2011, p. 58). Despite this, post- 9/11 American foreign policy
raises similar legal and moral concerns over the reach of “state power,” its scope, and what laws and
democratic checks may constrain it. The U.S. government post-9/11, much like the Nazis, dehumanize
the enemy to “produce reactions of apathy, indifference, and passivity” while engaging in aggressive
foreign invasions in violation of constitutional and international law (Bassiouni, 2011, p. 6),
institutionalized, battle lab torture experiments (See Denbeaux, Hafetz, Denbeaux et al, 2015) and rectal
force-feeding practices against purchased human test subjects (See Hutchinson et al, 2013; See also
Feinstein, 2014). Moreover, high ranking government officials’ post-9/11 constructed executive memos
and authorizations that systematically institutionalized discourses of preemptive war, retaliation and
torture against individuals, groups and states irrespective of past “wrongdoing” (Yoo, 2001, p. 1; 2005).
To demonstrate, just fourteen days after 9/11, the executive issued the Yoo-Flanigan Memo that gave
the President the “constitutional authority not only to retaliate against any person, organization, or
state suspected of involvement in terrorist attacks on the United States, but also against foreign States
suspected of harbouring or supporting such organizations” (Yoo, 2001, p. 1).

Rejection of biopower is vital to solve extinction and prevent the most devastating
wars – their impacts don’t matter at the point where they accept a state that can
decide who gets to live and who doesn’t
Bernayer 90 – Professor of Philosophy @ Boston College (James, 1990, “Michael Foucault’s Force of
Flight: Toward and Ethics of Thought”, p. 141-2)

This capacity of power to conceal itself cannot cloak the tragedy of the implications contained in
Foucault's examination of its functioning. While liberals have fought to extend rights and Marxists have
denounced the injustice of capitalism, a political technology, acting in the interests of a better
administration of life, has produced a politics that places human's "existence as a living being in
question."' The very period that proclaimed pride in having overthrown the tyranny of monarchy, that
engaged in an endless clamor for reform, that is confident in the virtues of its humanistic faith this
period's politics created a landscape dominated by history's bloodiest wars. What comparison is possible
between a sovereigns authority to take a life and a power that, in the interest of protecting a societys
quality of life, can plan, as well as develop the means for its implementation, a policy of mutually
assured destruction. Such a policy is neither aberration of the fundamental principles of modern politics
nor an abandonment of our age's humanism in favor of a more primitive right to kill; it is but the other
side of a power that is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-
scale phenomena of population. The bio-political project of administering and optimizing life closes its
circle with the production of the Bomb. "The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the
power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of a power to guarantee an individual's
continued existence."" The solace that Might have been expected from being able to gaze at scaffolds
empty of the victims of a tyrant's vengeance has been stolen from us by the noose that has tightened
around each of our own necks. That noose is loosened by breaking with the type of thinking that has led
to its fashioning, and by a mode of politic action that dissents from those practices of normalization that
have made us all potential victims. A prerequisite for this break is the recognition that human being and
thought inhabit the domain of knowledge-power relations (savoir-pouvoir), a realization that is in
opposition to traditional humanism. In the light of SP and VS, man that invention of recent date
continued to gain sharper focus. By means of that web of techniques of discipline and methods of
knowing that exists in modern society, by those minute steps of training through which the body was
made into a fit instrument, and by those stages of examining the mind's growth, the "man of modern
humanism was born.' The same humanism that has invested such energy in developing a science of man
has foisted upon us the illusion that power is essentially (repressive) in doing so, it has led us into the
dead end of regarding the pursuit and exercise of power as blinding the faculty of thought." Humanism
maintains its position as Foucault's major opponent because it blocks the effort to think differently
about the relations between knowledge and power. His weapon against this humanism continues to be
a form of thinking that exposes human being to those dissonant series of events that subvert our normal
philosophical and historical understanding.

A focus on biopower is key – exclusion on the basis of disability is fading as

surveillance otherizes people with disability as a threat to norms and the health of the
population
Anders 13 [Abram Anders, Assistant Professor of Business Communication, English PhD @ Penn State;
“Foucault and "the Right to Life": From Technologies of Normalization to Societies of Control”; Disability
Studies Quarterly; Vol 33 No 2; 2013; accessed 07/29/2015;
<http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3340/3268>.]

Bodies, through their history, development, and functionality are penetrated thoroughly and effectively
by force and are thereby enmeshed in relations of power. Through these relations of power, individuals
and eventually forms of subjectivity are constituted as objects to be studied and sites of the application
of techniques of power. If for Canguilhem norms are a polemical concept, then for Foucault they are a
"technique of intervention" (Foucault, Abnormal 50). In one of Foucault's most famous formulations, he
argues that the institutions of biopower do not primarily employ the model of the exclusion of lepers,
but rather the inclusive models of quarantine, surveillance, and regulation of the plague: "Rather than
the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations,
individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a
ramification of power" (Discipline and Punish 198). Under the quarantine model, the prohibitive
function of the law is increasingly replaced with a process of normalization that seeks to maximize the
life of both the individual and the species: Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, hierarchize,
rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that separates the
enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm …
(Foucault, The History of Sexuality 144) In the age of biopower, the oppressed, pathologized, and
criminalized are no longer excluded as enemies; they become necessarily integrated as endemic threats
to the health of the body politic. In administering the life of both the society and the individual, in terms
of both social deviance and pathological dysfunction, the norm is the common tool: "The norm is
something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to
regularize" (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 252-3).

Biopower causes extinction and racism – it requires the elimination of anything

deemed external to the model of society and tests the quality of a being by the degree
to which it adheres to the norm. Anything deemed abnormal is considered a threat to
society and is destroyed.
Adams 17 (Rachel Adams, Chief Researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa,
“Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biopower”, Critical Legal Thinking, 05/10/17,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2017/05/10/michel-foucault-biopolitics-biopower/) @ AG

This notwithstanding, biopolitics and biopower continue to hold significant purchase in and for
discussions on modern forms of governance and modes of subjectification. However, rather than taking
these concepts as standalone and independent theoretical contributions, it is – as I demonstrate here –
more productive to understand biopolitics and biopower as they function together with some of the
other ideas related to power and governmentality which Foucault develops over the same period (that
is, the 1970s). Biopolitics and Biopower Let us begin with a brief definition of biopolitics and biopower,
before situating these concepts within the broader context of Foucault’s oeuvre. In short, biopolitics can
be understood as a political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its
subject: ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order’.9 Biopower thus names the way in
which biopolitics is put to work in society, and involves what Foucault describes as ‘a very profound
transformation of [the] mechanisms of power’ of the Western classic age.10 In The Will to Knowledge,
Foucault writes of [A] power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer,
optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.11 Foucault
is speaking here of a power he later designates as “biopower”, a power which –significantly – has a
‘positive influence on life’ (my italics). This new biopower constitutes a ‘profound transformation of
[the] mechanisms of power’ insofar as it differs from what Foucault associates with ‘juridico-discursive’
conceptualisations of power as repressive and negative:12 a power whose ‘effects take the form of
limit and lack’.13 Indeed, Foucault conducts a lengthy critique of this repressive functioning of power in
both The Will to Knowledge14 and Society Must be Defended,15 demonstrating that such power
functions to hide other productive or ‘positive’ capacities of power that are also at play particularly,
for example, within the capitalist governmentality of the 19th century. The new biopower operates
instead through dispersed networks – what in Security, Territory, Population Foucault names the
dispositif.16 This dispositif of power works from beneath, from the ‘level of life’ itself,11 and, as
Foucault earlier described it in Society Must Be Defended, ‘[i]t was a type of power that presupposed a
closely meshed grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign’.18
Importantly, biopower did not replace repressive and deductive functions of power, but worked
together with such technologies of power. Foucault writes: “Deduction” has tended to be no longer the
major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control,
monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them
grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or
destroying them.10 However, significantly too, the structural functioning of biopower, as it operates
through the dispositif where lines of power triangulate outwards, enables new kinds of resistance;
resistance which can take place at the multiple points of contact which these lines of power traverse.20
Genealogy of Biopower In the last chapter of The Will to Knowledge entitled ‘Right of Death and Power
over Life’, Foucault provides a brief genealogy of biopolitics. His opening sentence recalls the Schmittian
view on the decisionism which determines sovereignty,21 speaking of how ‘[f]or a long time, one of the
characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death’.22 This sovereign
power was of a juridical form. It was a power over life which could only be attested ‘through the death
he was capable of requiring’.10 Thus, as Foucault notes, sovereign juridical power was in fact only a
power to ‘take life or let live’,10 whereas biopower constituted ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to
the point of death’.9 In the 17th century the sovereign-juridical form of power began to transform.
Foucault traces the evolution of two forms of power which ‘were not antithetical’ to each other,
constituting ‘two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations’.26
The first pole was disciplinary power, an analysis of which Foucault had developed in his previous
publication Discipline and Punish (1975),27 and which took the body as its focus of subjectification. The
second pole, Foucault describes as follows: The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species
body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes:
propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the
conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of
interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. (Italics in original).26 During this
period there was, as Foucault recounts, ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving
the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of
“biopower”’.29 Foucault’s genealogy continues as he observes that these two poles of power were ‘still
[…] clearly separate in the 18th century’,29 before starting to join together ‘in the form of concrete
arrangements that would go to make up the great technology of power of the nineteenth century’.29
One of these arrangements he names as the discourse on sexuality. At this point, Foucault states that
‘[t]his bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism’
which made possible ‘the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the
adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’.32 This is a theme Foucault picks
up from the Society Must be Defended lecture course of two years earlier, wherein he describes how
‘more general powers or economic benefits can slip into the play of these technologies of power, which
are at once relatively autonomous and infinitesimal’.33 He goes on to analyse how the bourgeoisie
grasped the disciplinary mechanisms of power – developed for example by the prison system – as a
technology for the production of docile bodies for capitalist labour, explicitly linking the biopolitical
rationality with the development of capitalism. State Racism Biopolitics marks a significant historical
transformation from a politics of sovereignty to a politics of society. Hence genealogically, Foucault
takes us from a ‘sovereign who must be defended’11 to – as the name of his earlier lecture series
affirms – a society (a species, a population) who must be defended. In The Will to Knowledge Foucault
describes how: Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.11 In Society Must be
Defended Foucault articulates this further: [A] battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a
race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the
norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the
biological heritage.36 It is in this shift from the defence of the sovereign to the defence of society as
the overriding political rationality of the state that Foucault’s notion of state racism is born. He
describes it as ‘a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own
products […] the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic
dimensions of social normalization’.37 State racism is thus for Foucault the essential characteristic of
the modern biopolitical state: it is both the function of the modern state and that which constitutes it.

The ‘War on Terror’ relies on the constructed image of the Other against the dignified
and moral force of US hegemony—recreates violence, biopower, and colonialism
Crowe, 7—researcher at York Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, (L.A., "The
“Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security - Interrogating dangerous myths
of Afghanistan and the ‘West’", www.eisa-net.org/be-bruga/eisa/files/events/turin/Crowe-
loricrowe.pdf)//twemchen

These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary
discourse has developed from and further perpetuates a particular ideology that emmanates from a
neo-liberal capitalist and imperial agenda that is founded upon neo-colonialist attitudes and
assumptions. “The US campaign to ‘fight terrorism’, initiated after September 11th” explains Nahla Abdo
“has crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of colonial and imperial policies towards the
constructed ‘other’.”82 This emerges in the “heroism” myth mentioned above; for example, Debrix
explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an ideological purpose in that it “contributes to
the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in ‘pathological’ regions of the international landscape.83 It also
emerges in the militarization myth, insofar as neoliberal globalisation relies on the institutionalization of
neo-colonialism and the commodification and (re)colonization of labor via militarized strategies of
imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out, “Neoliberal economics enables globalized
militarization”.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames are the elements of linearity
and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped up its role in direct combat
operations (which included an increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing
capacities85), Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on the ground in Afghanistan, stating: “Canada
and the international community are determined to take a failed state and create a "democratic,
prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions to the conflict(s) in Afghanistan
have been framed and justified not only as ‘saving backwards Afghanistan’ but also as generously
bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal age. Moreover, this element represents an continuity
of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emmanating from the ‘objective gaze’
of the ‘problem-solving’ Western world. Representations of Afghanistan present Western voices as the
authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the ‘East’ as naturally desirable. This
‘rationality’ also presumes an inherent value of Western methodology (including statistical analysis,
quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative epistemologies including those of the Afghan
people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It forecloses and discourages thinking “outside the
box” and instead relies upon the “master’s tools” which include violent military force, the installation of
a democratic regime, peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid – alternative strategies are
deemed “radical”, “unworkable”, and “anti-American”; 2) it prioritizes numbers and statitistics over
lived experiences. By relying on tallies of deaths, percetages of voters, and numbers of insurgents for
example, the experiences of those living in the region are obfuscated and devalued, and; 3)it reproduces
a colonial hierarchy of knowledge production. Old colonial narratives of have re-surfaced with renewed
vigor in the case of Afghanistan is contingent on and mutually reinforced by opposing narratives of a
‘civilized’ and ‘developed’ ‘West’. For example: “Consider the language which is being used…Calling the
perpetrators evildoers, irrational, calling them the forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying
civilization, intent on destroying democracy. They hate freedom, we are told. Every person of colour,
and I would want to say also every Aboriginal person, will recognize that language. The language of us
versus them, of civilization versus the forces of darkness, this language is rooted in the colonial
legacy.”87 This colonizer/colonized dichotomy is key to the civilisational justification the US
administration pursues (“We wage war to save civilization itself”88) which, as Agathangelou and Ling
explain, is motivated by a constructed medieval evil that threatens American freedom and democracy,
the apotheosis of modern civilization, and therefore must be disciplined/civilized. In his Speech to
Congress on September 21, 2001, Bush portrays the irrational Other as Evil and retributive seeking to
destroy the ‘developed, ‘secure’ ‘prosperous’ and ‘civilized’ free world: These terrorists kill not merely to
end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life…Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its
goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people
everywhere.”89 This production of othering and re-institutionalization of colonial discourse has been
enabled by and facilitated ‘culture clash’ explanations.90 The danger of such theories, warns Razack, lies
not only in their decontextualization and dehistoricization , but also on its reliance on the
Enlightenment narrative and notions of European moral superiority that justify the use of force. This is
evident in the unproblematic way in which outside forces have assumed a right of interference in the
region spanning from the 18th century when imperial powers demarcated the Durrand Line (which
created a border between British India and Afghanistan with the goal of making Afghanistan an effective
‘buffer state’for British Imperial interests91) to the American intervention that began in the Cold War,
followed by the Soviets in the 1980’s and the Americans, Canadians and British today. In fact, The West’s
practical engagement in Afghanistan reveals how it has served to reporoduce this neo-colonial myth as
well as the complexities and paradoxes which simultaneously de-stabilize that myth. During the cold
war, the Soviet and the Americans used Afghanistan as the battleground for power, choosing to sponsor
and condemn various regimes as they saw fit; this history of foreign engagement contributed to state
fragmentation, underdevelopment, and the self-sustaining war-economy that persist today. An example
of this is the use of rentier incomes during the early 1900’s that were used as a means of control and
coercion.92