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	1	+Ethical shaming of Taiwan is a psychological tool to reaffirm the moral superiority of West – this othering is the root of colonial logic and reproduces endless cold wars
	2	+Pan 12 ChengXin, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University, “Knowledge, Desire And Power In Global Politics: Western Representations of China’s Rise”, pg 48-51, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2012 AW
	3	+The ‘China threat’ paradigm is a discursive construct closely linked with Western/American colonial desire and historical experience. It reflects the inability or at least unwillingness of the Western/American self to make sense of China beyond their own fear and realpolitik trajectories. In doing so, its ethnocentric representation of China provides the West with a measure of strategic familiarity and moral certainty, thus reaffirming the self-imagination of the West. The imagination of an external ‘threat’ or Other has long been instrumental to the formation and maintenance of self-identity.” In the logic of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call ‘colonialist representations', the difference of the Other, first having been pushed to the extreme, ‘can be inverted in a second moment as the foundation of the Self. In other words, the evil, barbarity, and licentiousness of the colonized Other are what make possible the goodness, civility, and propriety of the European Self’. They go on to say that ‘Only through opposition to the colonized does the metropolitan subject really become itself.” The threatening imagery of ‘wilderness’ in the early periods of American nation-building served a similar purpose in that it helped maintain America’s “New World mythology’. As James Robertson notes, “there is no New World without wilderness. If we are to be true Americans (and thus part of that New World and its destiny), there must be wilderness. The symbol is an imperative for our real world’.” The construction of self-identity through the discourses of threat, Otherness and wilderness perhaps culminated in the poetics and politics of the Cold War, “an important moment in the (re)production of American identity'.” In this process, discourses of international relations and foreign policy played a central role. They helped create and police boundaries and Otherness so that a unified self could be identified and protected. As Campbell notes, “The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy is thus not a threat to a state's identity or existence: it is its condition of possibility. While the objects of concern change over time, the techniques and exclusions by which those objects are constituted as dangers persist’.” In this sense, although the Cold War was a pivotal moment in the Western/American construction of threat, such a discursive practice is not confined to the Cold War.” It is, as noted before, embedded in the modern quest for certainty, and the Cold War mentality is only a historically specific manifestation of that ongoing modern colonial desire. Not surprisingly then, the Cold War's end did little to disrupt the discursive ritual of constructing Otherness. If anything, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the ‘Evil Empire’ demanded more threats, simply because their very absence would become a threat to the coherence and unity of the West/the US. Without clearly identifiable enemies, ‘there can be no overarching ontology of security, no shared identity differentiating the national self from threatening others, no consensus on what—if anything— should be done.” For this reason, Mearsheimer quite accurately predicted that “we will soon miss the Cold War'.” Mearsheimer’s prediction certainly rang true within a number of US government agencies and institutions, most notably the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose very identity and institutional certainty had hinged on fighting the Cold War Communist “Other’. If the ‘Communist threat' no longer existed, the Pentagon would find it a lot harder to justify its massive military spending, if not its very raison d'être. More importantly, if history had indeed been won and there was little left to fight for, would the moral leadership of the US ‘as a force for good in the world’ still be in demand?” In the words of Huntington: ‘if there is no evil empire out there threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and what becomes of American national interests?” Would the West, a ‘highly artificial’ construct, be able to survive?" Worse still, might the rest of the world, now no longer in need of the ‘indispensable nation', break loose or even turn around and resent the latter’s hegemony? In this context, it became imperative for the West to continue invoking threat, which would also help counter the internal danger of ‘declining strength, flagging will and confusion about our role in the world’.” Hence the persistent colonial desire for a threatening Other, which by now is not only a source of paranoia, but also one of secret fascination. Clearly mindful of this Western paradoxical affection for enemy, Georgi Arbatov, Director of a Moscow think tank, told a US audience the year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall: “We are going to do something terrible to you—we are going to deprive you of an enemy'.” Arbatov was no doubt correct to imply that for the US living without an identity-defining enemy would be terrible indeed, but he only got half right. For the “enemy’ qua enemy to the US is often not determined by that “enemy' itself. Rather, as noted before, it is primarily a category in the colonial desire built into the modern American selfimagination. Consequently, ‘To prove that we are menaced is of course unnecessary... it is enough that we feel menaced’.“That is, it is not up to the “enemy' to decide whether or not it can cease to be an enemy. While the USSR as a specific threat might have gone, the ‘emotional substitute' of fear in the Western/American self-imagination lived on, always eager and able to find its next monster to destroy. As a consequence, the post-Cold War period witnessed a proliferation of freshly minted threats, ranging from Robert Kaplan's famous ‘Coming Anarchy’ thesis through Mearsheimer’s ‘Back to the Future' scenario to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations' prediction.” Meanwhile the emergence of the Iraq threat in the waning days of the Cold War temporarily allowed George Bush Snr. to regain ‘a whole plateful of clarity’ about ‘good and evil, right and wrong’. “Yet, for many anxious strategic planners, to best demonstrate why the US should remain an indispensable nation, the most indispensable enemy had to be China. The “beauty' of this mega threat lies in its apparent ability to satisfy the colonial desire of Western/American self on both strategic and moral grounds. Strategically, China's vast size would be the most obvious and convenient justification for the often expensive strategic programmes pursued by Washington. This was true even in the midst of the Cold War when America's main obsession was with the Soviet Union. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to build an antiballistic-missile (ABM) system. McNamara was personally opposed to such a system, believing that it could be easily countered by a slight increase in the number of Soviet offensive missiles. But unable to challenge the President's order, McNamara gave a speech, which, after stating all the reasons why an ABM was a bad idea, concluded that the US still needed one to defend against an attack by China. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke walked into McNamara's office later that day and asked, ‘China bomb, Bob?” McNamara simply replied: ‘What else am I going to blame it on?” The end of the Cold War has only further cemented China's role as the indispensable threat. Representing a most suitable strategic target for the tools at hand, China, as Bruce Cumings explains, has basically become “a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings since the end of the Cold War) and that requires a formidable “renegade state” to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weight)’.“Only in the aftermath of ‘September 11’ was China temporarily let off the hook, when terrorism in general, and the more tangible ‘Axis of Evil' in particular, served an essentially similar function of reassuring American self-identity and certainty.” As well as helping sustain the military-industrial complex, the China threat also has moral and political utility for the vitality of Western self-image. Beijing's continued existence as an authoritarian regime contributes both to the self-congratulatory image of ‘democratic peace’ in the West in general, and to the need for American leadership and moral authority in particular. Insofar as China reminds us that ‘history is not close to an end’,” the US-led West can continue to be called upon by the oppressed for moral leadership. Facing a China-led coalition of the world's despotic regimes, the enlargement of the Western self to form a league of democracies can be relatively easily justified, perhaps even with a measure of urgency. * In short, the moral challenge posed by China serves as a valuable discursive site where the Western/American self can continue to be coherently imagined, constructed and enacted.
	4	+American liberalism and humanitarian efforts are a ruse – they undergird broader cultural imperialism and hegemonic domination – “doing the right thing” is wrong
	5	+Gauding 14 (Madonna, freelance writer, illustrator and book designer living in St. Louis, “Dangerous beliefs: US moral superiority and our right to world hegemony,” Occasional Planet, June 19, 2014, http://www.occasionalplanet.org/2014/06/19/our-dangerous-belief-in-our-moral-superiority-and-our-right-to-economic-and-military-hegemony/, Accessed 9/17/16)
	6	+In the windowless rooms of American corporate media, the assumption of U.S. hegemony is echoed on the alphabet TV channels and in the main U.S. government propaganda source—the New York Times. We are an “exceptional” nation—the underlying narrative goes, repeated recently by President Obama and Vice President Biden at their respective West Point and Naval Academy graduation speeches. We have an obligation to dominate the world because we are the most humanitarian people on Earth. We are the only true defenders of freedom and democracy. Therefore, when we invade a country we live out our destiny. We depose “evildoers,” liberate nations, and generously gift them with our superior way of life. America’s right to world hegemony is assumed in every foreign policy article in the New York Times, because total economic and military domination is the core mission of American foreign policy. The current administration’s overt and covert military actions—in Africa, Ukraine, Russia, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and now the Far East, in at least 134 countries—are supported without question, mostly because there’s not a lot of journalism going on in corporate media. The world is jealous of us As proof of our consummate narcissism and sense of national superiority many of us bought the absurd idea that terrorists attacked us on 9/11 because they were “jealous of our way of life.” The Bush cabal surely laughed themselves sick at how easy it was to manipulate the gullible American public. Of course it’s easy when most Americans, deep down, believe we are the envy of the world—even those of us dwelling in doublewides and living on food stamps. What is frightening to me is not the jingoistic narcissism, which is bad enough, but that most of us have a seriously distorted and deluded view of our country. We don’t have a clue what our government is doing in the shadows, in our name—and on our dime—and we don’t really care. We are happy to go to air shows and watch a thundering display of military might. We feel good to be associated with, and to be part of, such raw power—the largest and most lethal military in the world. If presented with a detailed history of the violence and bloodshed perpetrated by the United States since the end of World War II, most of us will reject it because it doesn’t support our fantasy of our innate goodness and moral superiority. If we are killing someone somewhere in the world, we argue, it must be for a good reason. Because we are good people—the best. Our faith based politics Most Americans have, what I call a “faith-based” politics. They “believe” in their country, and they “believe” in President Reagan, President Clinton, President Bush(s), or President Obama—fill in the blank. When liberal Democrats are faced with the reality that President Obama is using drones to bomb the shit out of adults and children in the Middle East and Africa, including American citizens, they believe he is “protecting us from terrorists,” “terrorists” being the anonymous, politically useful bogeymen invented by the Bush administration and the CIA. Those unlucky children and adults who were attending a wedding are unfortunate “collateral damage.” We ponder for a second and conclude that Obama has made a wise and rational decision. It’s “worth it,” we decide, if we can be comfortable and safe at home, and we don’t have to “put our troops in harms way.” We remain comfortable because we never have to look at a gruesome image of a shellshocked mother holding the bleeding, mutilated body of her child who was alive just minutes ago. When it is revealed (not in mainstream media) that Obama is backing an illegal, Nazi infested, Neocon inspired coup in Ukraine, and providing the newly installed U.S. puppet government with money and weapons with which to kill its own people, the administration falsely justifies its actions (in the mainstream media) as necessary to thwart Vladimir Putin who is depicted as a madman, threatening to overrun Ukraine and possibly even Europe itself. The New York Times is the main reporter of these fabrications which depict Putin as an evil cartoon character. The public generally buys these lies because they “believe” in Obama, or they “believe” Russians and Putin are evil, or both. Those who believe in Obama decide “He must have a good reason.” “I believe in his wisdom and judgment,” they say. It’s super easy to sell Americans on the existence of “evildoers” as Bush liked to call them. For White House spin-doctors, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Cut your cable—rock your world It’s amazing how irrational we are. We filter reality through our belief systems, and reject out of hand any information that contradicts the myths we cling to. Obama understood this well, noting that some rural folks “cling to their guns and their religion.” He was vilified for having this truthful insight. We all, at times, find ourselves clinging to something instead of facing reality, because, often, reality is too overwhelming, too frightening, too difficult to handle. Our ignorance and myopic view of the world exists in an era when there is a massive amount of alternative, independent, and non-corporate media available online, both within this country and without. If you like to read books, no problem, you can find alternative views at your local library where left leaning librarians still stock the shelves with good stuff. I cut my cable (best thing I ever did) and have been spending a lot of time learning about current events outside the echo chamber of U.S. mainstream media. I’ve read and watched left-leaning news accounts from within the United States and Canada, and from many other countries, including Russia, France, Australia, Iran and the UK. I’ve been enlightened by credible reporting from scholars, independent journalists, and news sources from areas of the world where the United States is trying to dominate and control. It’s not surprising that they often radically contradict the reporting and analysis in U.S. corporate media. In corporate media, the massive U.S. military budget, and blanket domestic surveillance is sold to the exceedingly gullible American public as necessary to KEEP YOU SAFE™. The bloated military industrial complex is enriching corporations, and that massive surveillance is being used to keep corporations and banks safe from you—as potentially desperate, angry, unemployed citizens or an anti-corporate, anti-Wall Street, anti-war political activists. Wall-to-wall, domestic surveillance exists to quell domestic unrest, as does the increasingly disturbing militarization of the police. No doubt, with Too-Big-To-Fail, insolvent banks still running amok, DHS is getting ready for the next Big One—a financial meltdown that will dwarf that of 2008. R2P If we invade other countries, the official line goes, it is because we have a “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)” those who are being oppressed by evil “bogeymen.” The “humanitarian” R2P is to liberal democrats what the Project for the New American Century is to Neocon Republicans. Both are cover stories for attacking another country to achieve economic and geopolitical hegemony. We label these countries “rogue nations” because they refuse to accept U.S. corporate and military dominance, and—more importantly—they refuse to accept the dollar as their reserve currency. And of course it doesn’t hurt that those “rogue nations” may be sitting on a shitload of oil or natural gas. Up until its recent failed attempt to eject Russia out of Crimea, the US has invaded, raped and pillaged and taken what it wants around the world—in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Now we have our sights set on Africa, Eurasia and China. That the current rogue dictator du jour might oppress his own people is really of no concern to this administration or any other, whether Republican or Democrat. But it provides good cover and plays well at home. In reality, there’s never been a compliant dictator that the U.S. didn’t like—Suharto in Indonesia, Saddam Hussein (before he was non-compliant), both Duvaliers in Haiti, Noriega in Panama, Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Phillipines, King Abdullah of Saudia Arabia, Karimov of Uzbekistan, Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, Déby of Chad, Hosni Mutbarak in Egypt—you get the idea. The big secret is that the United States government really doesn’t like democracy. We prefer iron fists who keep the people in line, while the nation’s wealth is siphoned off for the price of a generous monthly deposit in a Swiss or London bank account. We are told we have a massive military and hundreds of bases around the world, because we have to protect “American interests.” But, we are never quite sure what those interests are, so we mentally fill in the blanks. But it’s not our interests that are being protected, it’s their interests—the tiny fraction of the population, the elites, who choose our presidents, and run our country (and often, as we have experienced, run it into the ground).
	7	+Moreover, the illusion of debate as an ethical, liberal curriculum is what renders invisible the enormous history of violence that makes the convergence of this space possible – their sentimental rhetoric is a double standard
	8	+UC Berkeley ‘10 (“The University, Social Death, and the Inside Joke,” Anonymous UC Berkeley student, http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100220181610620) m leap
	9	+Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does not detract from the great deal of military and corporate research, economic planning and, perhaps most importantly, social conditioning occurring within their walls. Furthermore, they serve as intense machines for the concentration of privilege; each university is increasingly staffed by overworked professors and adjuncts, poorly treated maintenance and service staff. This remains only the top of the pyramid, since a hyper educated, stable society along Western lines can only exist by the intense exploitation of labor and resources in the third world. Students are taught to be oblivious to this fact; liberal seminars only serve to obfuscate the fact that they are themselves complicit in the death and destruction waged on a daily basis. They sing the college fight song and wear hooded sweatshirts (in the case of hip liberal arts colleges, flannel serves the same purpose). As the Berkeley rebels observe, “Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning.”43 Our conception of the social is as the death of everything sociality entails; it is the failure of communication, the refusal of empathy, the abandonment of autonomy. Baudrillard writes that “The cemetery no longer exists because modern cities have entirely taken over their function: they are ghost towns, cities of death. If the great operational metropolis is the final form of an entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is a culture of death.”44 By attempting to excel in a university setting, we are resigning ourselves to enrolling in what Mark Yudoff so proudly calls a cemetery, a necropolis to rival no other. Yet herein lies the punch line. We are studying in the cemeteries of a nation which has a cultural fetish for things that refuse to stay dead; an absolute fixation with zombies. So perhaps the goal should not be to go “Beyond Zombie Politics” at all. Writes Baudrillard: “The event itself is counter-offensive and comes from a strange source: in every system at its apex, at its point of perfection, it reintroduces negativity and death.”45 The University, by totalizing itself and perfecting its critiques, has spontaneously generated its own antithesis. Some element of sociality refuses to stay within the discourse of the social, the dead; it becomes undead, radically potent. According to Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body, “zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism’s logic of endless consumption and ever expanding accumulation, precisely because they embody this logic so literally and to such excess.”46 In that sense, they are almost identical to the mass, the silent majorities that Baudrillard describe as the ideal form of resistance to the social: “they know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization.”47 Zombies do not constitute a threat at first, they shamble about their environments in an almost comic manner and are easily dispatched by a shotgun blast to the face. Similarly, students emerge from the university in which they have been buried, engaging in random acts of symbolic hyperconsumption and overproduction; perhaps an overly enthusiastic usage of a classroom or cafeteria here and there, or a particularly moving piece of theatrical composition that is easily suppressed. “Disaster is consumed as cheesy spectacle, complete with incompetent reporting, useless information bulletins, and inane attempts at commentary:”48 Shaviro is talking about Night of the Living Dead, but he might as well be referring to the press coverage of the first California occupations. Other students respond with horror to the encroachment of dissidents: “the living characters are concerned less about the prospect of being killed than they are about being swept away by mimesis – of returning to existence, after death, transformed into zombies themselves.”49 Liberal student activists fear the incursions the most, as they are in many ways the most invested in the fate of the contemporary university; in many ways their role is similar to that of the survivalists in Night of the Living Dead, or the military officers in Day. Beyond Zombie Politics claims that defenders of the UC system are promoting a “Zombie Politics”; yet this is difficult to fathom. For they are insistent on saving the University, on staying ‘alive’, even when their version of life has been stripped of all that makes life worth living, when it is as good as social death. Shaviro notes that in many scenes in zombie films, our conceptions of protagonist and antagonist are reversed; in many scenes, human survivors act so repugnantly that we celebrate their infection or demise.50 In reality, “Zombie Politics are something to be championed, because they are the politics of a multitude, an inclusive mass of political subjects, seeking to consume brains. Yet brains must be seen as a metaphor for what Marx calls “the General Intellect”; in his Fragment on Machines, he describes it as “the power of knowledge, objectified.”51 Students and faculty have been alienated from their labor, and, angry and zombie-like, they seek to destroy the means of their alienation. Yet, for Shaviro, “the hardest thing to acknowledge is that the living dead are not radically Other so much as they serve to awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already latent within our own selves.”52 In other words, we have a widespread problem with aspiring to be this other, this powerless mass. We seek a clear protagonist, we cannot avoid associating with those we perceive as ‘still alive’. Yet for Baudrillard, this constitutes a fundamental flaw: "at the very core of the 'rationality' of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death."53 In Forget Foucault, we learn the sad reality about biopower: that power itself is fundamentally based on the separation and alienation of death from the reality of our existence. If we are to continue to use this conception, we risk failing to see that our very lives have been turned into a mechanism for perpetuation of social death: the banal simulation of existence. Whereas socialized death is a starting point for Foucault, in Baudrillard and in recent actions from California, we see a return to a reevaluation of society and of death; a possible return to zombie politics. Baudrillard distinguishes himself as a connoisseur of graffiti; in Forget Foucault, he quotes a piece that said “When Jesus arose from the dead, he became a zombie.”54 Perhaps the reevaluation of zombie politics will serve as the messianic shift that blasts open the gates of hell, the cemetery-university. According to the Berkeley kids, “when we move without return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.”55 Baudrillard’s words about semiotic insurrectionaries might suffice: "They blasted their way out however, so as to burst into reality like a scream, an interjection, an anti-discourse, as the waste of all syntatic, poetic and political development, as the smallest radical element that cannot be caught by any organized discourse. Invincible due to their own poverty, they resist every interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything."56
	10	+
	11	+Reject the 1AC’s moral superiority as a thinly veiled instance of cultural imperialism – imposition of a universal model of humanity is deployed in racialized global counterinsurgencies that eventually purge all life for inevitable imperfections
	12	+Evans 10 Brad Evans, Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds and Programme Director for International Relations, “Foucault’s Legacy: Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century,” Security Dialogue vol.41, no. 4, August 2010, pg. 422-424, sage
	13	+
	14	+Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be a continuous recourse to war. While the militarism associated with liberal internationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008), Foucault was concerned more with the continuation of war once peace has been declared.4 Denouncing the illusion that ‘we are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored’ (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out to disrupt the neat distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism and times of peace/civic normality. War accordingly now appears to condition the type of peace that follows. None have been more ambitious in map-­ ping out this war–peace continuum than Michael Dillon and Julian Reid (2009). Their ‘liberal war’ thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality of making live. Liberalism today, they argue, is underwritten by the unreserved righteousness of its mission. Hence, while there may still be populations that exist beyond the liberal pale, it is now taken that they should be included. With ‘liberal peace’ therefore predicated on the pacification/elimination of all forms of political difference in order that liberalism might meet its own moral and political objectives, the more peace is commanded, the more war is declared in order to achieve it: ‘In proclaiming peace . . . liberals are nonetheless committed also to making war.’ This is the ‘martial face of liberal power’ that, contrary to the familiar narrative, is ‘directly fuelled by the universal and pacific ambitions for which liberalism is to be admired’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused here of universalizing war in its pursuit of peace: However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in the pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 7). While Dillon and Reid’s thesis only makes veiled reference to the onto-­ theological dimension, they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a certain religiosity in the sense that war has now been turned into a veritable human crusade with only two possible outcomes: ‘endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul-­ tures’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a new set of problems. Unlike Clausewitzean confrontations, which at least provided the strategic comforts of clear demarcations (them/us, war/peace, citizen/soldier, and so on), these wars no longer benefit from the possibility of scoring outright victory, retreating, or achieving a lasting negotiated peace by means of political compromise. Indeed, deprived of the prospect of defining enmity in advance, war itself becomes just as complex, dynamic, adaptive and radically interconnected as the world of which it is part. That is why ‘any such war to end war becomes a war without end. . . . The project of removing war from the life of the species becomes a lethal and, in principle, continuous and unending process’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 32). Duffield, building on from these concerns, takes this unending scenario a stage further to suggest that since wars for humanity are inextricably bound to the global life-­chance divide, it is now possible to write of a ‘Global Civil War’ into which all life is openly recruited: Each crisis of global circulation . . . marks out a terrain of global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities of life itself. . . . What is at stake in this war is the West’s ability to contain and manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means (Duffield, 2008: 162). Setting out civil war in these terms inevitably marks an important depar-­ ture. Not only does it illustrate how liberalism gains its mastery by posing fundamental questions of life and death – that is, who is to live and who can be killed – disrupting the narrative that ordinarily takes sovereignty to be the point of theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by a globally ambitious biopolitical imperative (see below). Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to justify their use of military force (Ignatieff, 2003). War, if there is to be one, must be for the unification of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favour. More recently it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation, which has become biopolitical (‘hearts and minds’) in everything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While criticisms of these strategies have tended to focus on the naive dangers associated with liberal idealism (see Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested nature of all the tactics deployed in the will to govern illiberal populations. Foucault returns here with renewed vigour. He understood that forms of war have always been aligned with forms of life. Liberal wars are no exception. Fought in the name of endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its most meaningful expression through the battles waged in its name: At this point we can invert Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means. . . . While it is true that political power puts an end to war and establishes or attempts to establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed in the last battle of war (Foucault, 2003: 15). What in other words occurs beneath the semblance of peace is far from politically settled: political struggles, these clashes over and with power, these modifications of relations of force – the shifting balances, the reversals – in a political system, all these things must be interpreted as a continuation of war. And they are interpreted as so many episodes, fragmentations, and displacements of the war itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions (Foucault, 2003: 15). David Miliband (2009), without perhaps knowing the full political and philo-­ sophical implications, appears to subscribe to the value of this approach, albeit for an altogether more committed deployment: NATO was born in the shadow of the Cold War, but we have all had to change our thinking as our troops confront insurgents rather than military machines like our own. The mental models of 20th century mass warfare are not fit for 21st century counterinsurgency. That is why my argument today has been about the centrality of politics. People like quoting Clausewitz that warfare is the continuation of politics by other means. . . . We need politics to become the continuation of warfare by other means. Miliband’s ‘Foucauldian moment’ should not escape us. Inverting Clausewitz on a planetary scale – hence promoting the collapse of all meaningful distinctions that once held together the fixed terms of Newtonian space (i.e. inside/outside, friend/enemy, citizen/soldier, war/peace, and so forth), he firmly locates the conflict among the world of peoples. With global war there-­ fore appearing to be an internal state of affairs, vanquishing enemies can no longer be sanctioned for the mere defence of things. A new moment has arrived, in which the destiny of humanity as a whole is being wagered on the success of humanity’s own political strategies. No coincidence, then, that authors like David Kilcullen – a key architect in the formulation of counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgency paradigm without too much controversy. Viewed from the perspective of power, global insurgency is after all nothing more than the advent of a global civil war fought for the biopolitical spoils of life. Giving primacy to counter-­ insurgency, it foregrounds the problem of populations so that questions of security governance (i.e. population regulation) become central to the war effort (RAND, 2008). Placing the managed recovery of maladjusted life into the heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined-­up response in which sovereign/militaristic forms of ordering are matched by biopolitical/devel-­ opmental forms of progress (Bell and Evans, forthcoming). Demanding in other words a planetary outlook, it collapses the local into the global so that life’s radical interconnectivity implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance. While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a more humane recovery to the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation, warfare has not in any way been removed from the species. Instead, humanized in the name of local sensitivities, doing what is necessary out of global species necessity now implies that war effectively takes place by every means. Our understanding of civil war is invariably recast. Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of civil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonized peoples have never fully accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopian prolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly became dependent. Neither have they been completely passive when confronted by colonialism’s own brand of warfare by other means. Foucault was well aware of this his-­ tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue that alternative histories of the subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization of political terms – not least ‘civil war’ – for Foucault in particular there was something altogether more important at stake: there is no obligation whatsoever to ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what some scholars may insist, politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the sovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to help make sense of reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here to engage fully with the implications of our global civil war paradigm, it should be pointed out that since its biopolitical imperative removes the inevitability of epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily dangerous simply because location dictates. With enmity instead depending upon the complex, adaptive, dynamic account of life itself, what becomes dangerous emerges from within the liberal imaginary of threat. Violence accordingly can only be sanctioned against those newly appointed enemies of humanity – a phrase that, immeasurably greater than any juridical category, necessarily affords enmity an internal quality inherent to the species complete, for the sake of planetary survival. Vital in other words to all human existence, doing what is necessary out of global species necessity requires a new moral assay of life that, pitting the universal against the particular, willingly commits violence against any ontological commitment to political difference, even though universality itself is a shallow disguise for the practice of destroying political adversaries through the contingency of particular encounters. Necessary Violence Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal a distinct biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making life live – selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design – inevitably writes into that very script those lives that are retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order (Bauman, 1991). Racism thus appears here to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002). This takes us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When ‘life itself’ becomes the principal referent for political struggles, power necessarily concerns itself with those biological threats to human existence (Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life becomes the author of its own (un)making, the biopolitical assay of life necessarily portrays a commitment to the supremacy of certain species types: ‘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’ (Foucault, 2003: 61). Evidently, what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensions aside, racial problems occupy a ‘permanent presence’ within the political order (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely through the internalization of threat – the constitution of the threat that is now from the dangerous ‘Others’ that exist within – that societies reproduce at the level of life the ontological commitment to secure the subject, since everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt, for political modernity to function one always has to be capable of killing in order to go on living: 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. . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to become capable of killing in order to go on living – has become the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When Foucault refers to ‘killing’, he is not simply referring to the vicious act of taking another life: ‘When I say “killing”, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on’ (Foucault, 2003: 256). Racism makes this process of elimination possible, for it is only through the discourse and practice of racial (dis)qualification that one is capable of introducing ‘a break in the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault, 2003: 255). While kill- ing does not need to be physically murderous, that is not to suggest that we should lose sight of the very real forms of political violence that do take place in the name of species improvement. As Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted, when notions of security are invoked in order to preserve the destiny of a species, when the defence of society gives sanction to very real acts of violence that are justified in terms of species necessity, that is when the capacity to legitimate murderous political actions in all our names and for all our sakes becomes altogether more rational, calculated, utilitarian, hence altogether more frightening: When a diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the ‘bio-­power’ or ‘bio-­politics’ of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death, but allows itself to produce all the more hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of ‘biological danger’. Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful example of necessary killing – the violence that is sanctioned in the name of species necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one of the most ‘essential characteristics’ of modern biopolitics is to constantly ‘redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside’, it is within those sites that ‘eliminate radically the people that are excluded’ that the biopolitical racial imperative is exposed in its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be the defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is a ‘space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media-­ tion’ (Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking Agamben’s intellectual sophistry, such a Schmittean-­inspired approach to violence – that is, sovereignty as the ability to declare a state of juridical exception – has certainly gained wide-­ spread academic currency in recent times. The field of international relations, for instance, has been awash with works that have tried to theorize the ‘exceptional times’ in which we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007; Kaldor, 2007). While some of the tactics deployed in the ‘Global War on Terror’ have undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of understanding violence they are limited. Violence is only rendered problematic here when it is associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the invasion of Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate. Precluding any critical evaluation of the contemporary forms of violence that take place within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices, there is a categorical failure to address how necessary violence continues to be an essential feature of the liberal encounter. Hence, with post-interventionary forms of violence no longer appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature of the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberal occupations is removed from the analytical arena.
	15	+Fiat is illusory, reps come first as they affect the way we think about the world and shift policy outcomes
	16	+Crawford 2 Neta Crawford, PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at Boston University, “Argument and Change in World Politics”, p. 19-21
	17	+Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some level, agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-arguments regarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); and the nature of the situation at hand (the proper frame or representation) must occur before specific arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, occur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the nature of the world and how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are more frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the “good” are contests over what it is good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of “good” so that we know good when we see it and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More common are meta-arguments over representations or frames about how we out to understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More often there are different possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger Karapin suggest, “Argument and debate occur when people try to gain acceptance for their interpretation of the world”. For example, “is the war defensive or aggressive?”. Defining and controlling representations and images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case. An actor fighting a defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting forward representations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends by drawing vivid pictures of the “reality” through exaggeration, analogy, or differentiation. Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively represent situations in a way that makes sense. “mimesis is a metaphoric or ‘iconic argumentation of the real.’ Imitating not the effectivity of events but their logical structure and meaning.” Certain features are emphasized and others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a “constraint on reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific organization of conceptual knowledge.” The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be considered legitimate, framing how actors see possibilities. As Roxanne Doty argues, “the possibility of practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be in place.” If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, “politics involves the selective privileging of representations, “it may not matter whether one representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames articulate accurate or inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of representationhow frames affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over representation are thus crucial elements of political argument because an actor’s arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne suggests, “No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling.” Hence framing is a meta-argument.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-10-14 20:03:50.367

Judge

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	1	+Martin Sigalow

Opponent

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	1	+Gilmour SW

ParentRound

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	1	+4

Round

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	1	+1

Team

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	1	+Lexington Balachundhar Neg

Title

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	1	+SEPOCT- K- Orientalism

Tournament

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	1	+Bronx