Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: West RM | Judge: Sean Fee
Prolif is an epistemological excuse for violence – their discourse wrecks alternative approaches – and trades off with structural violence
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.
Environmental apocalypticism causes eco-authoritarianism and mass violence against those deemed environmental threats – also causes political apathy which turns case
Buell 3 Frederick—cultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at Queens College and the author of five books, From Apocalypse To Way of Life, pages 185-186
Looked at critically, then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to have become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a "total solution" to the problems involved— a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich’s infamous "final solution."55 A total crisis of society—environmental crisis at its gravest—threatens to translate despair into inhumanist authoritarianism; more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite- and expert-led solutions are possible.56 At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one’s back on the environment. This means, preeminently, turning one’s back on "nature"—on traditions of nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature—a conclusion that, as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of how deeply "nature" has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not greater concern with them. But what quickly becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the difficulties of crisis discourse is that all of these liabilities are in fact bound tightly up with one specific notion of environmental crisis—with 1960s- and 1970s-style environmental apocalypticism. Excessive concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse as a whole has significantly changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious reflection on environmental crisis only if one does not explore how environmental crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place. The apocalyptic mode had a number of prominent features: it was preoccupied with running out and running into walls; with scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions that promised and temporally predicted imminent total meltdown; and with (often, though not always) the need for immediate "total solution." Thus doomsterism was its reigning mode; eco-authoritarianism was a grave temptation; and as crisis was elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature, temptation increased to refute it, or give up, or even cut off ties to clearly terminal "nature."
Vote negative to reject the 1AC’s enframing and reevaluate problematisation
Cheeseman and Bruce 96 (Graeme Cheeseman, Snr. Lecturer @ New South Wales, and Robert Bruce, 1996, Discourses of Danger and Dread Frontiers, p. 5-9)
This goal is pursued in ways which are still unconventional in the intellectual milieu of international relations in Australia, even though they are gaining influence worldwide as traditional modes of theory and practice are rendered inadequate by global trends that defy comprehension, let alone policy. The inability to give meaning to global changes reflects partly the enclosed, elitist world of profession security analysts and bureaucratic experts, where entry is gained by learning and accepting to speak a particular, exclusionary language. The contributors to this book are familiar with the discourse, but accord no privileged place to its ‘knowledge form as reality’ in debates on defense and security. Indeed, they believe that debate will be furthered only through a long overdue critical re-evaluating of elite perspectives. Pluralistic, democratically-oriented perspectives on Australia’s’ identity are both required and essential if Australia’s thinking on defense and security is to be invigorated. This is not a conventional policy book; nor should it be, in the sense of offering policy-makers and their academic counterparts sets of neat alternative solutions, in familiar language and format, to problems they pose. This expectation is itself a considerable part of the problem to be analyzed. It is, however, a book about policy, one that questions how problems are framed by policy-makers. It challenges the proposition that irreducible bodies of real knowledge on defense and security exist independently of their ‘context in the world’, and it demonstrates how security policy is articulated authoritatively by the elite keepers of that knowledge, experts trained to recognize enduring, universal wisdom. All others, from this perspective, must accept such wisdom to remain outside of the expert domain, tainted by their inability to comply with the ‘rightness’ of the official line. But it is precisely the official line, or at the least its image of the world, that needs to be problematised. If the critic responds directly to the demand for policy alternatives, without addressing this image, he or she is tacitly endorsing it. Before engaging in the policy debate the critics need to reframe the basic terms of reference tradition of democratic dialogue. More immediately, it ignores post-seventeenth century democratic traditions which insist that a good society must have within it some way of critically assessing its knowledge and the decisions based upon that knowledge which impact upon citizens of such a society. This is a tradition with a slightly different connotation in contemporary liberal democracies, which during the Cold War, were proclaimed different and superior to the totalitarian enemy precisely because they were institutional checks and balances upon power. In short, one of the major differences between ‘open societies’ and their (closed) counterparts behind the Iron Curtain was that the former encouraged the critical testing of the knowledge and decisions of the powerful and assessing them against liberal democratic principles. The latter tolerated criticism only on rare and limited occasions. For some, this represented the triumph of rational-scientific methods of inquiry and techniques of falsification. For others, especially since positivism and rationalism have lost much of their allure, it means that for society to become open and liberal, sectors of the population must be independent of the state and free to question its knowledge and power. One must be able to say ‘why’ to power and proclaim ‘no’ to power. Though we do not expect this position to be accepted by every reader, contributors to this book believe that critical dialogue is long overdue in Australia and needs to be listened to. For all its liberal democratic trappings, Australia’s security community continues to invoke closed monological narratives on defense and security. This book also questions the distinctions between policy practice and academic theory that informs conventional accounts of Australian security. One of its major concerns, particularly in chapters 1 and 2, is to illustrate how theory is integral to the practice of security analysis and policy prescription. The book also calls on policy-makers, academics and students of defense and security to think critically about what they are reading, writing and saying; to begin to ask, of their work and study, difficult and searching questions raised in other disciplines; to recognize, no matter how uncomfortable it feels, that what is involved in theory and practice is not the ability to identify a replacement for failed models, but a realization that terms and concepts – state sovereignty, balance of power, security, and so on – are contested and problematic, and that the world is indeterminate, always becoming what is written about it. Critical analysis which shows how particular kinds of theoretical presumptions can effectively exclude vital areas of political life from analysis has direct practical implications for policymakers, academics and citizens who face the daunting task of steering Australia through some potentially choppy international waters over the next few years. There is also much interest in the chapters for those struggling to give meaning to a world where so much that has long been taken for granted now demands imaginative, incisive reappraisal. The contributors, too, have struggled to find meaning, often despairing at the terrible human costs of international violence. This is why readers will find no single, fully formed panacea for the world’s ills in general, or Australia’s security in particular. There are none. Ever chapter, however in its own way, offers something more than is found in orthodox literature, often by exposing ritualistic Cold War defense and security mind-sets that are dressed up as new thinking. Chapters 7 and 9, for example, present alternative ways of engaging in security and defense practice. Others (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8) seek to alert policymakers, academics and students to alternative theoretical possibilities that might better serve an Australian community pursuing security and prosperity in an uncertain world. All chapters confront the policy community and its counterparts in the academy with a deep awareness of the intellectual and material constraints imposed by dominant traditions of realism, but they avoid dismissive and exclusionary terms which often in the past characterized exchanges between policy-makers and their critics. This is because, as noted earlier, attention needs to be paid to the words and the thought process of those being criticized. A close reading of this kind draws attention to underlying assumptions, showing they need to be recognized and questioned. A sense of doubt (in place of confident certainty) is a necessary prelude to a genuine search for alternative policies. First comes an awareness of the need for new perspectives, then specific polices may follow. As Jim George argues in the following chapter, we need to look not as much at contending policies as they are made for us but challenging ‘the discursive process which gives ~favored interpretations of "reality"~ their meaning and which direct ~Australia’s~ policy/analytical/ military responses’. This process is not restricted to the small, official defense and security establishment huddled around the US-Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It also encompasses much of Australia’s academic defense and security community located primarily though not exclusively within the Australian National University and the University College of the University of New South Wales. These discursive processes are examined in detail in subsequent chapters as authors attempt to make sense of a politics of exclusion and closure which exercises disciplinary power over Australia’s security community. They also question the discourse of ‘regional security’, ‘security cooperation’, ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘alliance politics’ that are central to Australia’s official and academic security agenda in the 1990s. This is seen as an important task especially when, as it revealed, the disciplines of International Relations and Strategic Studies are under challenge from critical and theoretical debates ranging across the social sciences and humanities; debates that are nowhere to be found in Australian defense and security studies. The chapters graphically illustrate how Australia’s public policies on defense and security are informed, underpinned, and. This book, then, reflects and underlines the importance of Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said’s ‘critical intellectuals’. The demand, tacit or otherwise, that the policy maker’s frame of reference be accepted as the only basis for discussion and analysis ignores a three thousand year old tradition commonly associated with Socrates and purportedly integral to the Western legitimized by a narrowly-based intellectual enterprise which draws strength from contested concepts of realism and liberalism, which in turn seek legitimacy through policy-making processes. Contributors ask whether Australia’s policy-makers and their academic advisers are unaware of broader intellectual debates. Or resistant to them, or choose not to understand them, and why? To summarize: a central concern of this book is to democratize the defense and security theory/practice process in Australia so that restrictions on debate can be understood and resisted. This is a crucial enterprise in an analytical/ policy environment dominated by particularly rigid variants of realism which have become so powerful and unreflective that they are no longer recognized simply as particular ways of constituting the world, but as descriptions of the real-as reality itself. The consequences of this (silenced) theory-as-practice may be viewed every day in the poignant, distressing monuments to analytical/policy metooism at the Australian (Imperial) War Memorial in Canberra and the many other monuments to young Australians in towns and cities around the country. These are the flesh and blood installments of an insurance policy strategy which, tragically, remains integral to Australian realism, despite claims of a new mature independent identity in the 1990s. This is what unfortunately, continues to be at stake in the potentially deadly debates over defense and security revealed in this book. For this reason alone, it should be regarded as a positive and constructive contribution to debate by those who are the targets of its criticisms.
Crawford 02 — Neta, PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at boston univ. Argument and Change in World Politics, p. 19-21
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 re-present 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 possibities. 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 representation- how 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.
