Tournament: Loyola Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: La Reina AC | Judge: John Overing
Prolif is an epistemological excuse for violence – their discourse wrecks alternative approaches – and trades off with structural violence – there is already a diplomatic solution in place – their refusal to acknowledge alternative approaches to their understanding of IR as violent ensures endless war
Woods 7 Matthew, PhD in IR @ Brown - Researcher @ Thomas Watson Institute of International Relations Journal of Language and Politics 6.1“Unnatural Acts: Nuclear Language, proliferation, and order,” p. 116-7
It is important to identify, expose and understand the successful creation of 'proliferation' as the inevitable, uncontrollable and dangerous spread of nuclear arms because it changed the world in innumerable ways. On one hand, it is the chief motivation for a wide array of cooperative endeavors among states and the central rationale for the most successful arms control agreement in modern history, the NPT. It inspired sacrifices that led to faith in our regard for others and stimulated confidence in international law. On the other hand, it is the reason for an unparalleled collection of international denial and regulatory institutions and it is the omnipresent and ineliminable threat at the heart of our chronic, unremitting suspicion of others. It is a cause of global inequality and double-standards among states and the progenitor of the name and identity 'rogue state' (states that reject the whaling ban are not 'rogue states'). It is a central element in world-wide toleration for human misery, such as starvation in North Korea, and in public toleration for the clear deception and dissembling of government elites, such as in the US. It is a vehicle in some media for racial stereotypes. The existence of 'proliferation' is a primary rationale among nuclear states for preserving and improving their nuclear arsenals. And faith in the existence of 'Proliferation’: most recently, brought about invasion, war and continuing death in the Middle East. Every individual that fears it, organization that studies it and state that strives to prevent it embraces 'proliferation' as a real and known thing and, in part, orients their identity and behavior according to it. The successful creation of 'proliferation' represents the creation of our common sense, our everyday life and our natural attitude toward the nuclear world 'out there.' It is uncontestable and to suggest otherwise that nuclear states might be to blame for any spread of nuclear arms, or that it has actually been rare and so far benign or that it may even be beneficial (see a critical review of this literature in Woods 2002) - is to invite derision and ostracism. The reality of 'proliferation' is so massive and solidified that the essential role of (cell) proliferation in maintaining life and health is virtually forgotten, overwhelmed, its positive meaning restricted to the doctor's office and biology lab. In short, the creation of 'proliferation' is a textbook example of what some term hegemony, the creation by a dominant group of a world that realizes its ideological preferences while marginalizing other possibilities and co-opting subordinates.
They frame Iran as irrational and incapable of good policymaking – the aff is an instance of the nuclear apartheid, a manifestation of racism—ensures genocide and war is inevitable
Batur 07 Pinar, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide, Handbook of The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-3
War and genocide are horrid, and taking them for granted is inhuman. In the 21st century, our problem is not only seeing them as natural and inevitable, but even worse: not seeing, not noticing, but ignoring them. Such act and thought, fueled by global racism, reveal that racial inequality has advanced from the establishment of racial hierarchy and institutionalization of segregation, to the confinement and exclusion, and elimination, of those considered inferior through genocide. In this trajectory, global racism manifests genocide. But this is not inevitable. This article, by examining global racism, explores the new terms of exclusion and the path to permanent war and genocide, to examine the integrality of genocide to the frame-work of global antiracist confrontation. GLOBAL RACISM IN THE AGE OF “CULTURE WARS” Racist legitimization of inequality has changed from presupposed biological inferiority to assumed cultural inadequacy. This defines the new terms of impossibility of coexistence, much less equality. The Jim Crow racism of biological inferiority is now being replaced with a new and modern racism (Baker 1981; Ansell 1997) with “culture war” as the key to justify difference, hierarchy, and oppression. The ideology of “culture war” is becoming embedded in institutions, defining the workings of organizations, and is now defended by individuals who argue that they are not racist, but are not blind to the inherent differences between African-Americans/Arabs/Chinese, or whomever, and “us.” “Us” as a concept defines the power of a group to distinguish itself and to assign a superior value to its institutions, revealing certainty that affinity with “them” will be harmful to its existence (Hunter 1991; Buchanan 2002). How can we conceptualize this shift to examine what has changed over the past century and what has remained the same in a racist society? Joe Feagin examines this question with a theory of systemic racism to explore societal complexity of interconnected elements for longevity and adaptability of racism. He sees that systemic racism persists due to a “white racial frame,” defining and maintaining an “organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate” (Feagin 2006: 25). The white racial frame arranges the routine operation of racist institutions, which enables social and economic repro-duction and amendment of racial privilege. It is this frame that defines the political and economic bases of cultural and historical legitimization. While the white racial frame is one of the components of systemic racism, it is attached to other terms of racial oppression to forge systemic coherency. It has altered over time from slavery to segregation to racial oppression and now frames “culture war,” or “clash of civilizations,” to legitimate the racist oppression of domination, exclusion, war, and genocide. The concept of “culture war” emerged to define opposing ideas in America regarding privacy, censorship, citizenship rights, and secularism, but it has been globalized through conflicts over immigration, nuclear power, and the “war on terrorism.” Its discourse and action articulate to flood the racial space of systemic racism. Racism is a process of defining and building communities and societies based on racial-ized hierarchy of power. The expansion of capitalism cast new formulas of divisions and oppositions, fostering inequality even while integrating all previous forms of oppressive hierarchical arrangements as long as they bolstered the need to maintain the structure and form of capitalist arrangements (Batur-VanderLippe 1996). In this context, the white racial frame, defining the terms of racist systems of oppression, enabled the globalization of racial space through the articulation of capitalism (Du Bois 1942; Winant 1994). The key to understanding this expansion is comprehension of the synergistic relationship between racist systems of oppression and the capitalist system of exploitation. Taken separately, these two systems would be unable to create such oppression independently. However, the synergy between them is devastating. In the age of industrial capitalism, this synergy manifested itself imperialism and colonialism. In the age of advanced capitalism, it is war and genocide. The capitalist system, by enabling and maintaining the connection between everyday life and the global, buttresses the processes of racial oppression, and synergy between racial oppression and capitalist exploitation begets violence. Etienne Balibar points out that the connection between everyday life and the global is established through thought, making global racism a way of thinking, enabling connections of “words with objects and words with images in order to create concepts” (Balibar 1994: 200). Yet, global racism is not only an articulation of thought, but also a way of knowing and acting, framed by both everyday and global experiences. Synergy between capitalism and racism as systems of oppression enables this perpetuation and destruction on the global level. As capitalism expanded and adapted to the particularities of spatial and temporal variables, global racism became part of its legitimization and accommodation, first in terms of colonialist arrangements. In colonized and colonizing lands, global racism has been perpetuated through racial ideologies and discriminatory practices under capitalism by the creation and recreation of connections among memory, knowledge, institutions, and construction of the future in thought and action. What makes racism global are the bridges connecting the particularities of everyday racist experiences to the universality of racist concepts and actions, maintained globally by myriad forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Batur 1999, 2006). Under colonialism, colonizing and colonized societies were antagonistic opposites. Since colonizing society portrayed the colonized “other,” as the adversary and challenger of the “the ideal self,” not only identification but also segregation and containment were essential to racist policies. The terms of exclusion were set by the institutions that fostered and maintained segregation, but the intensity of exclusion, and redundancy, became more apparent in the age of advanced capitalism, as an extension of post-colonial discipline. The exclusionary measures when tested led to war, and genocide. Although, more often than not, genocide was perpetuated and fostered by the post-colonial institutions, rather than colonizing forces, the colonial identification of the “inferior other” led to segregation, then exclusion, then war and genocide. Violence glued them together into seamless continuity. Violence is integral to understanding global racism. Fanon (1963), in exploring colonial oppression, discusses how divisions created or reinforced by colonialism guarantee the perpetuation, and escalation, of violence for both the colonizer and colonized. Racial differentiations, cemented through the colonial relationship, are integral to the aggregation of violence during and after colonialism: “Manichaeism division of the universe into opposites of good and evil goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes” (Fanon 1963:42). Within this dehumanizing framework, Fanon argues that the violence resulting from the destruction of everyday life, sense of self and imagination under colonialism continues to infest the post-colonial existence by integrating colonized land into the violent destruction of a new “geography of hunger” and exploitation (Fanon 1963: 96). The “geography of hunger” marks the context and space in which oppression and exploitation continue. The historical maps drawn by colonialism now demarcate the boundaries of post-colonial arrangements. The white racial frame restructures this space to fit the imagery of symbolic racism, modifying it to fit the television screen, or making the evidence of the necessity of the politics of exclusion, and the violence of war and genocide, palatable enough for the front page of newspapers, spread out next to the morning breakfast cereal. Two examples of this “geography of hunger and exploitation” are Iraq and New Orleans.
Oil Links
Energy security militarizes energy – justifies intervention and causes serial policy failure
Ciuta 10 -- Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Centre of European Politics, School of Slavonic and East European Studies @ University College London, UK (Felix, 2010, "Conceptual Notes on Energy Security: Total or Banal Security?" Security Dialogue 41(123), Sage)
Even casual observers will be familiar with the argument that energy is a security issue because it is either a cause or an instrument of war or conflict. Two different strands converge in this logic of energy security. The first strand focuses on energy as an instrument: energy is what states fight their current wars with. We can find here arguments regarding the use of the ‘energy weapon’ by supplier states (Belkin, 2007: 4; Lugar, 2006: 3; Winstone, Bolton and Gore, 2007: 1; Yergin, 2006a: 75); direct substitutions in which energy is viewed as the ‘equivalent of nuclear weapons’ (Morse and Richard, 2002: 2); and rhetorical associations that establish policy associations, as exemplified by the panel ‘Guns and Gas’ during the Transatlantic Conference of the Bucharest NATO Summit. The second strand comes from the literature on resource wars, defined as ‘hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable resources’ (Victor, 2007: 1). Energy is seen as a primary cause of greatpower conflicts over scarce energy resources (Hamon and Dupuy, 2008; Klare, 2001, 2008). Alternatively, energy is seen as a secondary cause of conflict; here, research has focused on the dynamics through which resource scarcity in general and energy scarcity in particular generate socio-economic, political and environmental conditions such as population movements, internal strife, secessionism and desertification, which cause or accelerate both interstate and intrastate conflict (Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994, 2008; Solana, 2008; see also Dalby, 2004). As is immediately apparent, this logic draws on a classic formulation that states that ‘a nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able . . . to maintain them by victory in such a war’ (Lippmann, 1943: 51). The underlying principle of this security logic is survival: not only surviving war, but also a generalized quasi-Darwinian logic of survival that produces wars over energy that are fought with ‘energy weapons’. At work in this framing of the energy domain is therefore a definition of security as ‘the absence of threat to acquired values’ (Wolfers, 1952: 485), more recently reformulated as ‘survival in the face of existential threats’ (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, 1998: 27). The defining parameters of this traditional security logic are therefore: (1) an understanding of security focused on the use of force, war and conflict (Walt, 1991: 212; Freedman, 1998: 48); and (2) a focus on states as the subjects and objects of energy security. In the war logic, energy security is derivative of patterns of international politics – often captured under the label ‘geopolitics’ (Aalto and Westphal, 2007: 3) – that lend their supposedly perennial attributes to the domain of energy (Barnes, Jaffe and Morse, 2004; Jaffe and Manning, 1998). The struggle for energy is thus subsumed under the ‘normal’ competition for power, survival, land, valuable materials or markets (Leverett and Noël, 2007). A key effect of this logic is to ‘arrest’ issues usually not associated with war, and thus erase their distinctive characteristics. Even the significance of energy qua energy is abolished by the implacable grammar of conflict: energy becomes a resource like any other, which matters insofar as it affects the distribution of capabilities in the international system. As a result, a series of transpositions affect most of the issues ranked high on the energy security agenda. For example, in the European context, the problem is not necessarily energy (or, more precisely, gas, to avoid the typical reduction performed by such accounts). The problem lies in the ‘geopolitical interests’ of Russia and other supplier states, whose strength becomes inherently threatening (Burrows and Treverton, 2007; Horsley, 2006). Energy security policies become entirely euphemistic, as illustrated for example by statements that equate ‘avoiding energy isolation’ with ‘beating Russia’ (Baran, 2007). Such ‘geopolitical’ understanding of international politics also habituates a distinct vocabulary. Public documents, media reports and academic analyses of energy security are suffused with references to weapons, battles, attack, fear, ransom, blackmail, dominance, superpowers, victims and losers. It is therefore unsurprising that this logic is coterminous with the widely circulating narrative of the ‘new’ Cold War. This lexicon of conflict encourages modulations, reductions and transpositions in the meanings of both energy and security. This is evident at the most fundamental level, structuring encyclopaedic entries (Kohl, 2004) and key policy documents (White House, 2007), where energy security becomes oil security (security modulates energy into oil), which becomes oil geopolitics (oil modulates security into geopolitics). Once security is understood in the grammar of conflict, the complexity of energy is abolished and reduced to the possession of oilfields or gas pipelines. The effect of this modulation is to habituate the war logic of security, and also to create a hierarchy between the three constitutive dimensions of energy security (growth, sustenance and the environment). This hierarchy reflects and at the same time embeds the dominant effect of the war logic, which is the militarization of energy (Russell and Moran, 2008), an argument reminiscent of the debates surrounding the securitization of the environment (Deudney, 1990). It is of course debatable whether this is a new phenomenon. Talk of oil wars has been the subject of prestigious conferences and conspiracy theories alike, and makes the headlines of newspapers around the world. A significant literature has long focused on the relationship between US foreign policy, oil and war (Stokes, 2007; in contrast, see Nye, 1982). The pertinence of this argument cannot be evaluated in this short space, but it is worth noting that it too reduces energy to oil, and in/security to war. The key point is that this logic changes not only the vocabulary of energy security but also its political rationality. As Victor (2008: 9) puts it, this signals ‘the arrival of military planning to the problem of natural resources’ and inspires ‘a logic of hardening, securing and protecting’ in the entire domain of energy. There is, it must be underlined, some resistance to the pull of the logic of war, as attested for example by NATO’s insistence that its focus on energy security ‘will not trigger a classical military response’ (De Hoop Scheffer, 2008: 2). Yet, the same NATO official claims that ‘the global competition for energy and natural resources will re-define the relationship between security and economics’, which hints not only at the potential militarization of energy security policy but also at the hierarchies this will inevitably create. New geographies of insecurity will thus emerge if the relationship between the environment, sustenance and growth is structured by the militarized pursuit of energy (Campbell, 2005: 952; Christophe Paillard in Luft and Paillard, 2007).