K – Racial IR

1NC
 K—1NC
The Racial IR K.
Their theory of the world is wrong and racist---it relies on Western conceptions of
sovereignty, racializes depictions of anarchy absent Western values, and assumes a
White, rational neoliberal subject at the core of decision making.
Hobson ’22 [Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, PhD from
the LSE John, “Unmasking the racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy
theory,” Security Dialogue 2022, Vol. 53(1) 3 –20, Security Dialogue 2022, Vol. 53(1) 3 –20]
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose1: Racism as shapeshifter – The polymorphous cycles of racism in everyday life and world politics

While liberal conceptions construct a progressive-evolutionary vision of world politics wherein racism
gradually evaporates as the bright sunlight of modernity intensifies, nevertheless, numerous critical race
scholars point to a recurring dark cycle of racial control that marks the long history of modernity (e.g.
Alexander, 2012: 20–58; Bonilla-Silva, 2018: 17–52; Omi and Winant, 2014: 84–91; Perry, 2007). Focusing on the United States, Michelle
Alexander (2012: 21) asserts that
racial history . . . is highly adaptable [or polymorphous]. The rules and reasons the political
system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are
challenged. The valiant efforts to abolish slavery and Jim Crow and to achieve greater racial equality have
brought about significant changes in the legal framework of American society – new ‘rules of the game,’ so to speak.
These new rules have been justified by new rhetoric, new language, and a new social consensus, while
producing many of the same results. This dynamic, which legal scholar Reva Siegel has dubbed ‘[racist] preservation
through transformation,’ is the process through which white privilege is maintained, though the
rules and rhetoric change.
This ‘Groundhog Day’ cycle entails pyrrhic moments of black victory being subsequently rolled back by a
white backlash whereby white racial control is reasserted once more, albeit in a new guise, thereby
rendering the liberal conception of a temporal movement of linear progress towards black
liberation/justice as but a Whiggish construct. For racism is a polymorphous shapeshifter, crystallizing in different guises over
time but retaining its oppressive properties. Accordingly, it is not that racism is progressively undermined over time but
that its outward appearance becomes progressively more hidden, camouflaged or sublimated – at least in the eyes
of white people.
In the United States, the era of Reconstruction entailed the end of slavery in 1865, together with the 14th Amendment (prohibition of states
from denying due process and equal protection under the law), the 15th Amendment (the right to vote regardless of race) and the Ku Klux Klan
Acts (which declared interference with voting regardless of race as a federal offence). But these progressive initiatives led on directly to a white
backlash. In particular, the Southern states sought to circumvent these progressive initiatives while the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
backed up the states’ reactionary activities through the organization’s sustained campaign of racist terrorism. Woodrow Wilson (1901: 11)
typified this racist episteme when he argued that ‘the first practical result of the Reconstruction under the Acts of 1867 was the
disenfranchisement . . . of the better whites and the consequent giving over of the Southern governments into the hands of the negroes’.
Moreover, he dog-whistled to the KKK when he asserted that ‘the white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-
preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burdens of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and
conducted in the interests of [Negro] adventurers’ (Wilson, 1902: 58).
It was not long before the North retreated from the South to leave black people at the mercy of the white backlash via the Jim Crow era of
racial segregation. Nothing changed until after World War II, with the next transformational-moment-cum-pyrrhic-victory coming exactly 100
years after the 13th Amendment (the abolition of black slavery) through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the death of Jim Crow was followed
by a renewed white backlash that forged a New Jim Crow era that has remained up to the present (Alexander, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2018). And
this ‘new’ era gained its legitimacy by dressing racism in more neutral cultural clothing while maintaining racial oppression. Thus, in this New
Jim Crow era, the matrix of white power ensured that the black man would be held back not because of his inferior genes but by his inferior
culture, though the ‘invisible empire’ of the KKK remained intact, albeit much diminished.
This American racial cycle comprises a microcosm of the wider cycle that has played out across the
West. Thus, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the entwined discourses of scientific racism and manifest cultural
racism underpinned the identity of the West, with both developing during and especially after the Atlantic slave trade. Liberal
visions emphasize the ‘benign’ Western humanitarian drive, with the British termination of the slave trade in 1807 constituting the inception of
a long, progressive process of black liberation from racial oppression. But this is problematic because Britain is celebrated for in effect putting
out a fire that the British and other Europeans had started. Even so, the British did not put out the fire, because the ensuing white backlash saw
racism and racist imperialism deepen after the end of the British slave trade, while the latter morphed into the highly oppressive indentured
labour trade.
For many liberals at the time (e.g. Mitrany, 1933), the Paris Peace Conference and the creation of the League of Nations Mandate System was
viewed as another turning point in the progressive liberation of black and brown people. However, in addition to Woodrow Wilson’s well-
known rejection of the Japanese delegation’s proposal for a racial-equality clause, his prior enunciation of the principle of sovereignty in his
(1918) Fourteen Points speech that triggered emancipatory hopes in the hearts of the colonized peoples turns out to have applied only to
Eastern Europe and Wilson was categorically opposed to awarding sovereignty to non-Western polities. Surely, though, Wilson stood behind
the ‘humanitarian’ Mandate system? Indeed he did, but only because the system was founded on the racist-imperial idea of ‘trusteeship’ that
had first been explicitly conceived at the 1884 Berlin conference as the guiding principle of European imperialism in Africa. For this conception
rested on the paternalist-racist assumption that the uncivilized races were not yet ready to rule themselves and therefore must be held under
imperial trusteeship until they had ‘grown up’ (i.e. become Western). Once again, the Western mandate of racial-imperial oppression remained
fully intact during the interwar period.
The next key ‘turning point’ occurs in the 1945–1960 period, when decolonization was allegedly bequeathed by the gracious hand of the benign
West. Apart from the fact that decolonization was won by the nationalist movements against the resistance of the colonial powers, the
subsequent postcolonial era has witnessed a continuation of racist practices, albeit in the camouflaged guise of subliminal cultural-racist
concepts such as US hegemony and Western humanitarian intervention. But while one might anticipate that the task of (orthodox)
international relations/international political economy scholars should be to deconstruct such subliminal cultural racism, it turns out that they
have, albeit unwittingly, given it succour, as the next two sections explain.
Cycles of racism in orthodox international relations theory
The core point is that racism
is a shapeshifter in that its outward expression or modality changes over time
while its underlying structure remains the same. Before 1945 both scientific racism and ‘manifest’ cultural racism focused
explicitly on race as a core category, while after 1945 race disappears from international relations theory’s gaze and its conceptual repertoire. In
particular, 1945 is conventionally viewed as the watershed moment when international relations jettisoned scientific and manifest cultural
racism. In this narrative, the West’s ensuing ‘colonial racist guilt syndrome’ prompted the social sciences to ‘make
amends’ by replacing the dark old racist Weltanschauung with a bright new non-racist worldview in
which the post-1945 international relations discipline came to embrace a value-free, positivistic posture through
which the pernicious phenomena of racial hatred and imperialism are thought to have been finally and
mercifully exorcized. But the reality saw the creation of a brave new worldview in which explicit
racism (scientific and manifest cultural racism) indeed died out in the halls of the academy and were replaced not by ‘non-racist
cultural pluralism’ but by subliminal cultural-racist monism that appears on first blush as socially acceptable given that it no
longer talks about race and its associated tropes (Hobson, 2012: 185186, 319–322). Thus, in subliminal cultural racism, Western
academics did indeed distance themselves from the old explicit racist tropes but reaffirmed them in
whitewashed terms that dare not speak their name.
Thus, ‘white supremacism’ was replaced by the core modus operandi of Western universalism (a.k.a. ‘Western
superiority’) and, albeit implicitly, white normality; racial hierarchy alongside the racial standard of civilization were replaced by the
proxies of cultural-institutional hierarchy and the Western market standard of civilization; ‘civilization versus
barbarism/savagery’ was replaced by ‘tradition versus modernity’ or ‘developed versus undeveloped
economies’; ‘barbaric Oriental despotisms’ morphed into the tropes of ‘rogue states’ and the ‘axis of evil’ on
the basis that such states would not reciprocate according to the ‘civilized norms’ of (Western) international law and (Western-based)
‘international society’, while ‘savage anarchies’ morphed into ‘failed states’ on the basis that they could not reciprocate.
And last, but not least, the old colonial denial of non-Western state sovereignty was replaced by the construct of ‘conditional sovereignty’ in
the postcolonial era, while imperial
intervention was replaced by (the ‘civilizing mission’ of) US hegemony,
intervention by international financial institutions and humanitarian intervention.
Accordingly, orthodox international relations scholars have mistaken the shift from explicit racism to
subliminal cultural racism for one that marks the transition from racism to non-racist, value free
‘scientific positivism’. Critical race theorists view this transition as one in which cultural difference
masquerades as tolerant cultural pluralism but that, in reality, is ‘racism in disguise’ (Balibar, 1991; Barker, 1981;
Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Henderson, 2013; Hunt, 1987; McCarthy, 2009; Miles, 1993; Omi and Winant, 2014; Perry, 2007; Salter, 2002; Vitalis, 2000,
2015). Thus, speaking of the post-1945 substitution of cultural difference for racial difference, Richard Perry (2007: 216) concludes that ‘the
terms may change, perhaps giving the impression that the old [racial] problems have disappeared,
when in fact they have merely acquired protective coloration through semantic camouflage’. Or, again,
‘the demise of scientific racism in its evolutionary-biological form did not mean the end of racist
thinking in scholarly discourse altogether. A new, post-biological modality of neo-racism is now
widespread in social science’ (McCarthy, 2009: 91). This cultural modality has also been termed ‘racism lite’ or ‘colour-blind racism’
(Bonilla-Silva, 2018).
Thus, the evolution of international relations theory has mirrored the generic shifts in the practice of racism in
everyday life and in world politics given that the discipline’s racism has been hidden behind a non-racist
mask after 1945. Unmasking modern international relations theory reveals its emphasis on cultural
difference as a proxy for non-white racial inferiority and white Western superiority. Thus, white
international relations theorists often wear a ‘non-racist mask’ in order to make their cultural-racist
theories appear socially palatable in the so-called cultural-pluralist postcolonial era. Accordingly, all that has really
changed since 1945 is that the old racist Jim Crow laws that international theory originally conceptualized
became sublimated or ‘hidden in plain sight’ (Henderson, 2013; Rutazibwa, 2020; Vitalis, 2000), having morphed into
the ‘New (subliminal) Jim Crow laws’ of modern analyses of the global economy/interstate system.
Uncovering this long temporal passage that links the past with the present means that the discipline has a fabricated
detachment with the racist ghosts of its past (as Bryony Vince put it to me in private conversation). What, then, of the racist
double move that modern orthodox international relations theories perform when analysing world politics/global political economy?
Revealing the racist double move of orthodox international relations theory
The giveaway concerning the racist foundations of modern international relations theory lies not
simply in what it does say but as much in what it does not. Thus, to postcolonialism’s rhetorical question as to whether
racism has played an important role in structuring world politics past and present, the orthodox reply is simply ‘nothing to see here’. This
first racist move, which evacuates and whitewashes the presence of racism in world politics past and present, is
complemented by the second, in which international relations theory advances a racist analysis of
world politics/global political economy but in subliminal cultural language that appears as value-free
and ‘racially neutral’. To illustrate this double move, I shall draw on examples from my current research (Hobson and Odijie,
forthcoming) and from elsewhere.
The neorealist vision of the Cold War comprises a Western zone of relative peace and stability that ensues from bipolarity or US hegemony or
the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). But such ‘peace and stability’ was only rendered possible because of
the racist decision by the superpowers to outsource war to the ‘inferior’ and expendable ‘wastelands’ of
the Global South, which constituted a safety valve that could prevent direct nuclear conflict from
erupting between the USA and the USSR. Thus, ‘it appears that cold war history has a concentric conceptual
organization, consisting of a “formal” history of relative peace in the center and “informal” violence in
the periphery’ (Kwon, 2010: 155; see also Persaud, 2016). Moreover, ‘in a historical sense – and especially when seen from the South –
the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means. . . For the Third World, the continuum of
which the Cold War forms a part did not start in 1945, or even 1917, but in 1878 – with the [Congress] of
Berlin that divided Africa between European imperialist powers’ (Westad, 2007: 396). This Western neo-
imperialism also takes us back to the future of America’s racist-colonial drive in the 19th and early 20th
centuries (see Go, 2011; Hunt, 1987). But all of this necessarily flies under neorealism’s ontological radar scanner given its evacuation of social process through its reification of the structural logic of anarchy that is coupled with the deployment of the Eurocentric/racist method of ‘analytical bifurcation’, wherein racist-imperial processes are bracketed out and silenced in favour of focusing solely on intra-

Western white activities (Go, 2016: 89–92, 104–110). This first move is complemented by neorealism’s second, wherein a subliminal cultural-racist theory is applied to analysing world politics. Notable here is that European empires constituted subsystems hierarchies in which the dominant hyper-sovereign colonial power stood atop of the colonies that were denied sovereignty. But Waltz’s reification of international anarchy is triply problematic, first because this conception replicates the old scientific-racist conception of ‘tropical anarchy’ (Henderson, 2013; Sampson,
2002; compare Lynch, 2019: 277); second, because Waltz sanitizes or evacuates hierarchy from world politics, thereby conjuring Western colonialism and its practices of genocide, the Atlantic slave trade, land appropriation and labour exploitation together with its neo-imperialist successor into thin air (Hobson, 2012: 203–208; Sabaratnam, 2020); and, third, Waltz’s claim that sovereign states are the dominant form of polity under modern anarchy is undermined by the presence of colonial hierarchy before the very recent era of decolonization wherein the only sovereign
states that existed were Western. Accordingly, Waltz’s move serves to let Western imperialism off the moral hook, thereby reflecting an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ (Sabaratnam, 2020: 20–21; see also Mills, 2007). Interestingly, we find an evacuation and naturalization of Western empire in the classical realist work of Hans Morgenthau (Hobson, 2012: 188–190; Salter, 2002: 117) and other realists, which leads Nicolas Guilhot (2014) to talk of ‘imperial realism’. By contrast, Robert Gilpin’s neorealist hegemonic stability theory embraces a normative (direct) imperialism that
is dressed up in terms that dare not speak its name (Hobson, 2012: 193–203). Gilpin (1987) differentiates hegemons from empires, where the latter exploit non-Western states while the former help them through the hegemon’s self-sacrificial provision of global public goods. But the paternalist sign of US hierarchical hegemony is that it supposedly uplifts states around the world, with East Asian states singled out as the most egregious and ungrateful free riders that benefit most from hegemonic largesse. Thus, what Gilpin misses is that the conception of uplift reconvenes
Britain’s paternalist-imperial civilizing mission of the 19th century, though this elision is inevitable given that he re-visions the British Empire as a benign liberal hegemon. Significantly, Niall Ferguson (2004) effectively reconvenes Gilpin’s argument, though he talks explicitly about the benign liberal imperialism of Britain and America. Moreover, this benign conception that reflects an epistemology of ignorance effectively boils off the coercive side of empire in the subliminal cultural-racist distillation process, thereby providing an apologia for Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Similar
cultural racist logics play out in liberalism (see Hobson, 2012: 216–222, 285–310). While the normative (direct) imperialist posture that is found in John Rawls’s (1999) The Law of Peoples is a very obvious example (Hobson, 2012: 292–295), nevertheless the hard test-case here is that of neoliberal institutionalism. The received wisdom is that neoliberal institutionalism presents a genuinely ‘universal’ picture or flattened ontology of all states learning to cooperate in order to enhance their gains. But it turns out that, in After Hegemony, Keohane (1984) confines this process to
Western states (as did Norman Angell before him). Moreover, absent here is a historical sociological analysis that would reveal the hierarchical-imperial contexts that have driven both Western unity (Sabaratnam, 2020: 25) and the global process by which unequal gains accrue to the West at the expense of the non-West. Paradoxically, constructivists critique neoliberal institutionalism for its rational actor model by asserting that interests are not a priori but are formed through socialization. However, a close reading of Keohane’s book reveals that it is Western norms and
identity that socialize Western states into cooperating (Keohane, 1984: 5–7, 43, 182). Accordingly, Keohane not only looks specifically at Western states as the successful actors, but argues that they take specifically Western cultural values such as democracy and liberal capitalism to the table before they enter iterated prisoner’s dilemma games (Keohane, 1984: 182). One of several (direct) neo-imperialist cues in Keohane’s work emerges from his approval of US hegemonic intervention and intervention by international financial institutions in the Global South as a means of
extending complex interdependence across the world. But here the international financial institutions act as paternalist neo-imperial vehicles for the cultural conversion of non-Western states along Western neoliberal capitalist lines via the imposition of neoliberal conditionality and structural adjustment programmes. Moreover, the notorious resentment that these programmes have invoked in many non-Western states, all of which disappears in Keohane’s analysis, takes us back to the future of the ‘unequal treaties’ that emerged under Britain’s informal imperialism in
the 19th century, much as the paternalist role of the international financial institutions finds its historical parallel with the League of Nations Mandate System (Anghie, 2005: 245272). And, finally, Keohane’s approval of Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the 19th and 20th centuries returns us to the problems that I discussed above vis-a-vis hegemonic stability theory (see also Sabaratnam, 2020: 18–19). A notable example of an indirect imperialist approach is found in the neoliberal theory of globalization, which rehabilitates the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and his aversion to
empire (e.g. Friedman, 2000). But there are three subliminal neo-imperialist cues here, the first comprising Friedman’s (2000: 101–111) argument that non-Western states have no choice but to ‘don the golden straitjacket’, which requires them to adopt Western neoliberal-capitalist architectures. Having to become Western means that the theory smuggles informal imperialism in through the backdoor of its Western universalism. Second, by subscribing to the ontological proposition that ‘the world is flat’ (Friedman, 2007), the neoliberal theory of globalization conjures
Western imperial/neo-imperial hierarchy and racial capitalism into thin air, thereby naturalizing rather than problematizing these phenomena via the epistemology of white ignorance. And, third, because Friedman focuses on rational individuals whose interests are a priori and whose social identity is irrelevant to individual behaviour, racism and racialized capitalism are whitewashed from the global economy. Surely constructivism fares much better given its ability to highlight international racial norms? Not only has much of it ignored racism in world politics but the few
constructivists who have considered it argue that racism was left behind in world politics after 1945 (Finnemore, 2003; Klotz, 1995), much as imperialism was supposedly outlawed by the UN in 1960. This whitewashing of racism and imperialism from modern world politics not only reflects the illusion that subliminal cultural racism projects but is also a vital move because it allows liberal constructivists to portray Western humanitarian interventionism and liberal peacebuilding/state-building as a non-racist/ non-imperial project that saves oppressed non-Western peoples. It
is here that we encounter a subliminal cultural-racist paternalism that presents the West as the white saviour of the inferior non-Western societies – thereby rehabilitating the 19th-century conception of the white man’s burden and the civilizing mission – and where the West is (re)presented as the altruistic paternalist father of the non-West (Hobson, 2012: 302–305). Moreover, in this liberal imaginary of ignorance, the notion that peacebuilding/state-building is initiated as a means of eradicating the threat of the deviant non-Western Other disappears from view, as does
the legacy of Western empire that created some of the core problems in non-Western states that prompted intervention in the first place (for further postcolonial critiques of liberal constructivism, see Sabaratnam, 2020; Sampson, 2002; Vitalis, 2000). Liberal constructivism buys into the cultural-racist idea that all progressive actions in the world are initiated by the universal West ‘on behalf of global humanity’. For example, it is the benign West that has single-handedly brought human rights to the world via the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here
international relations’ ‘non-racist mask’ slips conspicuously, given that the Western great powers did their utmost at the United Nations to keep human rights off the global agenda for fear of diluting white supremacy and white normality in world politics and within Western societies. For it was various non-Western delegates at the UN that pursued human rights most fervently while their Western counterparts mobilized the defensive prerogative of sovereign independence to insulate their states from future criticism given that human rights were denied to minorities
within their constituent societies, particularly native Americans and black African Americans in the United States. Thus, Western racist motivations and the progressive role of nonWestern agency in advancing the cause of human rights in world politics have been airbrushed out of the liberal-constructivist picture. And, in turn, this serves to retain the chimera of the purely progressive non-racist West and the regressive non-West. Equally as egregious is that the role of the West in the denial of human rights to non-Western peoples in the first place is somehow written out of
the narrative. Still, much of this is perhaps unavoidable given that liberal-constructivist international relations tends ontologically to divorce power from norms in world politics and epistemologically segregates power from knowledge. Are orthodox scholars intentionally racist? Racist impact over intention The case for intentionality is that it is no coincidence that the shift from scientific racism to subliminal cultural racism in orthodox international relations/international political economy theory mirrored the trajectory of racism in everyday life and world politics. My hunch,
though, is that international relations theory’s racism is unintentional given that the overwhelming majority of orthodox international relations scholars are most probably non-racist (but not anti-racist) in their private lives. But orthodox international relations scholars have mistaken a critique of their implication in structural racism for an allegation of interpersonal racism. This epistemology of, or move to, innocence links directly to the self-deluded heart of the orthodoxy. For there are all manner of built-in cloaking devices that mask the racism and whiteness of orthodox
international relations theories from the eyes of their advocates. International relations’ ‘non-racist mask’ has at least four mystificatory layers. The first layer (or cloaking device) is that racism in orthodox international relations/international political economy theory is manifested in cultural rather than biological terms, thereby appearing as outwardly non-racist (given the mistaken popular belief that racism is inherently biological). The second layer of mystification is that cultural racism takes on a hidden or subliminal guise (which exorcizes race as an ontological category
from world politics), thereby making such racism much harder to detect. Aggregating these two layers together leads white international relations/international political economy scholars to buy into the self-deluded rhetoric that their theories are racist-free. Pertinent here is Blaut’s (1992: 296) characterization of the social sciences since 1950 as ‘so much [subliminal cultural] racism yet so few racists’ (see also Memmi, [1982] 2000: 3). This mystification is ultimately secured by the third layer of the mask that constitutes the problem of blindness to white privilege. For not
being on the end of racism’s pernicious effects means that, unlike non-whites, many white academics tend quite naturally to downplay its existence (see Lake, 2016). An obvious example of this lies with the everyday performance of driving from A to B. For the vast majority of white drivers are able to travel safe in the knowledge that they will not be stopped by the police unless they have been unlucky enough to have been caught breaking the speed limit. By contrast, many black drivers consider themselves lucky if they are not stopped by the police when they have
respected the speed limit. Such blindness to white privilege feeds directly into the unreflexive propensity to deny the presence of whiteness and racism in both the theory and practice of orthodox international relations/international political economy (Peterson, 2021; Sabaratnam, 2020: 5). For the ingeniousness of white privilege is that it renders such privilege invisible. Thus, white people are effectively taught not to notice racism and their role in reproducing it (McIntosh, 2020). Which, in turn, fuels the tendency of the privileged to reject, if not protest vehemently, the
accusation of racism in the social sciences – as in the aforementioned spat between Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson (see Mishra, 2011). All of which undermines the prospect of addressing, let alone redressing, the problem at stake. Thus, while a fifth great debate concerning the Eurocentric racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy is long overdue, unfortunately the chances of it occurring are slim to zero. This is partly because intradisciplinary dialogue between international relations’ orthodox and critical wings has completely broken
down (De Carvalho et al., 2011), and partly because a simmering ‘white silence’ of denial is the most likely ‘response’ (see, Ryde, 2019; Saad, 2020). Strikingly, it is now some two decades since Robert Vitalis (2000) wrote his seminal article, but still the tumbleweed of white silence blows deafeningly past my window. However, were an explicit response to be forthcoming, two entwined paradoxes might emerge here, the first being that it would most likely accuse my argument of being angry, hysterical and outlandish, wherein ‘Eurocentrism’ is deemed to be the
calm/rational ‘standard of common sense’ – the paradox being that rather than engaging with the substance of my critique, such a response would likely comprise an angry ad hominem attack on the accuser and the journal for publishing such an article. And the second paradox is that while most orthodox scholars abhor ‘cancel culture’, it turns out that engaging in an ad hominem attack serves merely to shut down debate on this vital issue. That is, an ad hominem attack on the accuser is merely another form of cancel culture. Still, both such ‘responses’ would reinforce

my argument given that ‘white silence’, ‘white rage’ and ‘white denial’ are manifestations of white privilege (see Ryde, 2019; Saad, 2020: 40–45; Sabaratnam, 2020; Peterson, 2021). A fourth cloaking device is that pre-1945 orthodox international theory has been put through an ahistorical deracination laundering process to reappear in whitewashed form, fit for consumption in the ‘cultural pluralist’ post-1945
era. And because post-1945 international relations theory is (re)presented as non-racist so the laundering of its
pre-1945 predecessor means that international theory in the last three centuries is (re)presented as
universally racist-free. In this sleight-of-hand manoeuvre, the racist underpinnings of pre-1945 liberal and realist
theories are filtered out or conjured away, leaving only their claims about states or geopolitics or
interdependence that are transmogrified into ‘objective universalist’ propositions . In the liberal pantheon, two
examples are pertinent. First is Norman Angell, who is (re)presented as a key theorist of liberal interdependence and the peaceful benefits it
provides rather than as the paternalist-Eurocentric/cultural racist that he was, given his fundamental belief in international hierarchy and the
positive need for the British Empire to promote harmonious global interdependence by acting as the civilizer of the barbaric and savage East
(see Hobson, 2012: 40–45). Second is the reconstruction of Woodrow Wilson, who is recast as the founding father of 20th-century progressive
liberal internationalism, based as ‘it is’ on anti-imperialism, sovereignty and self-determination for all states rather than on what ‘it was’ – a
Lamarckian racist vision comprising a pro-Western imperialist stance and a denial of nonWestern state sovereignty that was coupled with
strong racial immigration controls and anti-black initiatives at home (see Hobson, 2012: 167–175). Similarly, pre-1945 realists typically
mentioned in international relations textbooks include Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder and occasionally Nicholas Spykman, all of whom
are (re)presented as geopolitical-realist thinkers that analysed spatial conceptions of world power rather than as Lamarckian scientific racists
who advocated Western imperialism to contain the marauding ‘barbaric’ non-Western peril and whose mentor was the scientific-racist thinker
Friedrich Ratzel (see Hobson, 2012: 123–130, 156–158).

Critically, this laundering process extends across all aspects of pre-1945 international relations. Thus, it becomes (but should no longer be) a
revelation to learn that early international relations was primarily concerned about inter-racial relations; that the claim that international
relations emerged formally in 1919 with the noble desire to solve the problem of war elides its earlier origins, which revolved around
maintaining white Western global supremacy and racist empire together with the normative study of ‘effective’ colonial administration; that
the journal Foreign Affairs was originally called the Journal of Race Development; and that the International Studies Conference at the League
of Nations, which set up the subject matter of international relations in the 1930s under the leadership of Alfred Zimmern, grounded its syllabi
in normative Western imperialism and racism (see Acharya and Buzan, 2019; Ashworth, 2014; Bell, 2016; De Carvalho et al., 2011; Henderson,
2013; Hobson, 2012; Kristensen, 2021; Long and Schmidt, 2005; Lynch, 2019; Schmidt, 1998; Schmidt and Guilhot, 2019; Thakur and Vale, 2019;
Vitalis, 2000, 2005, 2015). That orthodox international
relations scholars persist in ignoring these arguments in the
face of a now substantial body of literature that has emerged over the last two decades means that this
pervading silence can no longer be excused as the product of an innocent ‘historical amnesia’. Rather,
this silence points clearly to the white denial of international relations’ racist origins wherein the non-
racist mask slips most conspicuously, thereby constituting an actual example of orthodox international
relations’ version of cancel culture.
However, except for in the above context, ‘intentionality’ is not the issue that the racist charge hinges upon given that most international
relations/international political economy theorists are unintentionally racist. What
matters, therefore, is racist impact
regardless of intention. And to conclude this article more generally, it would be folly to presume that if only the Eurocentric rather
than the racist charge were levied against the orthodox mainstream then ‘all would not be lost’. For the E-word cannot be used as a ‘get out of
racist jail free’ card.

Intellectual Property is part and parcel with Eurocentric logistics that displaces
indigeneity for the “inventive genius” as a method of self-dispossession.
Mgbeoji et al. ’10 [Ikechi; October; Claire Chun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic
Studies (with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies). She received her B.A. in
Politics and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Her research explores how modern
conceptualizations of “Korean” and “Asian” beauty, wellness, and aesthetics are shaped by overlapping
forces of US militarism, tourism, and humanitarianism, “Making Space for Grandma: The Emancipation
of Traditional Knowledge and the Dominance of Western‐Style Intellectual Property Rights Regimes,”
vol. 6 no. 9] /vishwa

Contrary to popular myth, the IPRs regimes we have today are not universal verities (Drahos, 1998), but products of
European political economy and history. The contemporary dominance enjoyed by modern IPRs regimes across
the globe is a product of the aggressive and often violent conquest and colonization of diverse cultures and
societies by European states in the past five centuries (Penrose, 1951; Helge, 1956). It is a historical fact that
modern IPRs such as copyrights, trademarks, and patents regimes have deep roots in European culture,
worldview, and imperial impulses (Lowenstein, 2002). Thus, modern IPRs, often portrayed as universal truths with global genetic
makeup are in fact originally local expressions of European thought and philosophy. The diffusion and spread of IPRs regimes
from Europe to other parts of the world followed distinct patterns of violence, suppression, and
outright dispossession. Therefore, the pre‐eminence of Western‐styled IPRs is a direct manifestation of the forceful imposition
of European economic, political, and cultural ideas on colonized parts of the globe. Very few erstwhile colonized
states chose and institutionalized modern IPRs on their own volition.
As a colonial construct and implant, Eurocentric IPRs were part of the cultural, economic, and legal instruments
for the control and subordination of colonized peoples and economies (Sagoe, 1992; Sklan, 1978). The colonization of the
Americas, the Oceania, Australia, Africa, Asia and other parts of the world was premised on two main grounds, namely, a
propaganda of European superiority over colonized peoples (Mgbeoji, ibid) and of course, economic exploitation of
the colonized (Lindley, 1969). Although the transplantation of Eurocentric IPRs (Abbott et al,1999) to colonized territories
has yielded mixed results in post‐colonial states (Mgbeoji, 2007), in the colonial encounter, Eurocentric IPRs successfully
crowded out TK in many aspects with baleful consequences (Adewopo, 2002).
With particular reference to patents, the dissonance has been astounding. The patent system is not new to controversy. Tracing its origins to
Brunelleschi’s “blackmail,” (Lippert, 1999) of the medieval Italian City ‐state of Florence, the patent system has waned and waxed to global
fame. As recounted by Bruce William Bugbee, in 1421, Filippo Brunelleschi, the Italian architect and painter, announced his invention of an
iron‐clad vessel, the “Badalone” which he claimed could carry marble across the lake Arno for the construction of the now famous cathedral of
Florence (Bugbee, 1961).3 Brunelleschi refused to disclose the “Badalone” to the public. In addition, he rejected the idea of putting the vessel at
the service of the city unless he was granted a limited right to an exclusive commercial exploitation of the vessel. Florence yielded to his
unprecedented demands and on June 19, 1421, the City issued him the first recorded patent in history. To Brunelleschi’s embarrassment, the
“Badalone” sank on its inaugural trip and the Florentine patent idea sank with it at least, for a long time.

It would appear that after the Florentine debacle, the concept of patents migrated to Venice where it acquired legislative imprimatur and in
addition, substantial refinement. For example, the Venetian patent law of 1474 provided for patent duration of ten years, examination of
patent applications for novelty, and punishment for infringement of patent rights (White, 1967). Italian artisans and craftsmen began a process
of migration to central and Western Europe (Macleod, 1988). Naturally, they did not leave the concept of patents behind them in Italy; they
took the patent concept with them: Netherlands in 1817, Spain in 1820, the Vatican in 1833, Sweden in 1834, Portugal in 1837. Thus, it is fair to
say that the modern patent concept owes its original inspiration to the Italian City ‐States of medieval times. From
central Europe, the
patent concept spread with European immigrants to North and South America; and by colonialism and
diffusion, to the rest of the world.
Akin to the debates on the definitions of TK, certain inferences may be made from the various definitions of patents. First, in spite of several
theories on patents, especially, attempts to couch the arguments for and against patents in the discourse of human rights, there is no such
thing as a human right to patents. Of course, an argument can be made on the fairness or otherwise of appropriating the intellectual product of
another person. But the fact is that a patent is a discretionary grant of a State on an invention which excludes unauthorized persons, for a
specified number of years, from making commercial use of a clearly defined and specified invention.4

Second, the patent system is anchored on a capitalist worldview of the economy. In recognition of these, particularly,
patent system, especially in Western societies, is ostensibly designed to recompense
the latter, the
investors by its offer of a temporary monopolization of the commercial benefits of a clearly defined invention. Third, the system of
patents purports to celebrate creativity or authorship as an individual effort. This approach discounts immense societal
contributions and the incremental basis of most inventions.

For TK on the other hand, the crux of the matter here is whether the patent system is inherently universal in its philosophy and if so, whether it
offers the best economic incentive for protecting and rewarding inventions in the realms of activities that are peculiarly communal and where
innovations occur in an incremental nature, for example, in plant genetic resources. Law, as most jurists have restated, is a mirror of societal
values. In other words, does the Euro‐ centric patent concept reflect non ‐European values? In resolving these difficult questions, certain factors
must be taken into consideration. Primarily, the passage of time and contemporary realities have modified the jurisprudence on property
ownership, the social nature of the inventive process, notions of legal personality, et cetera, which underpin the patent system. The crucial task
thus is to locate the areas of intractable difference.

The patent system may be malleable (Coulter, 1991; David, 1993) in some respects but the question remains whether decolonized states have
the political and economic clout to create doctrinal adaptations that best serve their own peculiar needs and aspirations. Unlike powerful
industrialized countries that can at will create new international IPRs regimes from the scratch,5 developing countries lack the economic and
political machinery needed to create effective but parallel global regimes on TK. Changes to the imperial order would have to be both
incremental and radical (Ewans, 2000). At this stage, the patent system has to be understood vis ‐à ‐vis TK to figure how the adaptations may be
made.

III. PART 2: THE EUROCENTRICITY OF THE PATENT SYSTEM

Before examining
in relative detail the main doctrinal obstacles to the full‐scale adaptation of the patent system to
decolonized peoples’ needs for appropriate IPRs regimes, it is imperative that the social and institutional
biases against traditional knowledge in general be addressed. The first socio‐cultural obstacle is the notion that bio‐
cultural knowledge is common knowledge possessed by all traditional and indigenous peoples. First, however, a working definition of TK would
be in order.6 It must be clarified at the outset that the notion of traditional knowledge as an antiquated and inferior body
of knowledge is clearly rejected.
A definition of TK cannot be done (Stenson et al, 1999) outside the context of the provisions of the CBD, Article 27 (3) of the TRIPs Agreement7,
and perhaps, other international instruments such as Food and Agriculture (FAO) Undertaking of 1983, and various ILO instruments. These
instruments and many others rightly locate TK within the context of traditional and indigenous peoples’ historical quest for cultural, political,
and economic self‐determination (Kloppenberg, 1988). The debate on the proper definition of TK is thus inherently complex, recondite and cuts
across issues that implicate indigenous peoples’ diverse approaches to the philosophical and ethical dimensions of property and personhood.

Further, in addressing this question, two misconceptions on the “traditionality” of TK deserve attention. First, references to the innovations and
knowledge of traditional societies, especially on the issue of biological resources
as “traditional” are often misconstrued to
imply or mean that such inventions and innovations are static, antiquated, and wrapped in mythology.
There is a pervasive but unfounded notion that TK is anti‐intellectual and a relic of a by‐gone era handed down to modern successors via
unreliable oral history.

As the Four Directions Council points out, [W]hat is ‘traditional’ about traditional knowledge is not its antiquity but the way it is acquired
and used. In other words, the social process of learning and acquiring which is unique to each indigenous group, lies
at the heart of its ‘traditionality.’ Much of this knowledge is actually quite new, but it has a social meaning and legal character,
entirely unlike the knowledge indigenous people acquire from settlers and industrialized.
The second common misconception about TK is that traditional knowledge of biological resources are mere discoveries of “natural phenomena.”As Gurdial Nijar (1996)points out,

[T]traditional uses, although based on natural products, are not ‘found in nature’; as such. They are products of human knowledge. To transform a plant into a medicine, for example, one has to know the correct species, its location, the proper time of collection (some plants are poisonous in certain seasons), the part to be used, how to prepare it (fresh, dried, cut in small pieces,
alcohol, the addition of salt, etc.), the way to prepare it (time and conditions to be left in the solvent). And finally the posology (route of administration and dosage.)

From the foregoing, it may be posited that TK refers to that body of knowledge, practices, innovations of traditional peoples regulating the ways by which knowledge is acquired, practiced, transferred, and shared among a given peoples in their traditional setting. The scientific merits of TK have been astounding (Isaac, 1970). Over the millennia, small ‐scale farmers and local peoples
have contributed to plant diversity by breeding assorted crop varieties to suit particular local conditions (Friends of the Earth, 1995; Johnson, 1992: 2).8 For instance, Indian farmers have grown over 30,000 different varieties of rice during the past century. The native Andeans have developed hundreds of species of tomatoes, potato, maize and beans. Indeed, scientists reckon that
the “the total genetic changes achieved by farmers over the millennia was [is]far greater than that achieved by the last hundred or two years of more systematic science ‐based efforts (Shiva, ibid at 259).”

Apart from developing new varieties, the knowledge of biological resources for medicinal and other uses by local farmers and healers are often phenomenal and pragmatic. For example, in Sierra Leone, local farmers can differentiate between 70 different varieties of rice based on several criteria including: length to maturity, ease of husking, proportion of husk to grain size and
weight, susceptibility to insect attack, behaviour in different soils and moisture levels, cooking time and qualities (Nijar, 1994:17).

TK is not merely of academic or theoretical importance; it often serves practical ends. For instance, in Rwanda, farmers have cultivated mixtures of beans that perform better in their poor soil conditions. The Aguarana Jivaro community in the Peruvian Amazon has developed 61 distinct cultivars of cassava and in the Philippines 123 rice varieties have been found at just five sites. In
both cases, the varieties are designed to suit certain specific requirements and needs. Thus, the abundance of multitudinous varieties and species of plant resources and the knowledge of the uses thereof among traditional societies are not merely dependent upon geographical quirks but partly a result of deliberate and cumulative intellectual efforts spanning thousands of years. In
order to achieve these sophisticated results in the improvement of plant varieties or cultivars, it has been observed that those farmers:

[E]mploy taxonomic systems, encourage introgression, use selection, make efforts to see that varieties are adopted, multiply seeds, field test, record data and name varieties [and in fact]... do what many Northern plant breeders do (Friends of the Earth, ibid: 4).

According to a report from the World Resources Institute,

[I]ndians dwelling in the Amazon River make use of some 1300 medicinal plants, including antibiotics, abortifacients, contraceptives, anti ‐diarrheal agents, fungicides, anesthetics, muscle ‐relaxants, and many other most of which has not been investigated by researchers (Panjabi, 1993; Scalise and Nugent, 1995; Merges, 1998).

Seventy‐four per cent of the pharmacologically active trees reported by an indigenous group correlated with laboratory tests whereas in contrast only 8 per cent of random samplings showed any activity. In short, absent “the aid of indigenous groups, it is estimated that for every commercially ‐successful drug, at least five thousand species must be tested (Jenks, 1995).” Michael
Ballick of the New York Botanical Gardens found that using traditional knowledge increased the efficiency of screening plants for medicinal properties by more than four hundred per cent (Nijar, ibid). It is therefore no coincidence that a decisive number of drugs derived from plant resources have been with the help of local peoples operating outside the dominant Western
framework of what constitutes “scientific knowledge (Roht‐Arriaza, 1996).

Modern international law has equally come to terms with the reality of traditional input into the improvement, conservation and diversification of biological resources.9 The preamble of the CBD recognizes the “close and traditional dependence of many indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles on biological resources.”10 Article 10 (c) of the CBD obliges
Contracting Parties to “protect and encourage customary use of biological resources in accordance with cultural practices that are compatible with conservation or sustainable use requirements.”11 Similar recognition is embodied in Article 8 (j) of the CBD which obliges Contracting Parties to:

[R]espect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of the
benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge, innovations and practices.12

The salient points from analyses above are that the links between rational human impact on and mutual interaction with plant resources is enormous and profound. Further, the notion that biological resources in the gene ‐rich countries are necessarily of a “wild” character devoid of human input is often generalized and exaggerated. A considerable portion of the so ‐called wild
biological resources and ecosystems are in fact products of centuries of human impact on the ecosystem and particularly, plants (Young, 1990; Hochberg, 1996; Kaufman and Mallory, 1993). Of course, the mischaracterization of TK as “raw materials” denies and seeks to delegitimize the enormous intellectual contributions made over the centuries by the so ‐called informal breeders,
farmers and other traditional peoples.

Yet, the intellectual feats of innovation by traditional and indigenous peoples wrought within the framework of traditional societies cannot be adequately protected by modern patent law and processes. The question is, why? A close examination of the doctrines of the patent system will illuminate this paradox. For the purposes of securing patent protection on biological resources,
for example, it is not enough that an innovation has been wrought. The threshold for legal protection under the patent regime is whether the invention has surpassed obvious or prior art in the field of that invention (De Valoir, 1995; Seay, 1998 ‐9). In attempting to apply patent ‐like protections to biological resources, the modified test is to ask: when do such innovations, private or
collective, surpass obvious knowledge or prior art? (Caillaux, 1994) And whose prior art is relevant?

It seems clear that the opposition by the “scientific and industrial” community to the scientific worth or merit of traditional bio ‐cultural knowledge has nothing to do with the innate inferiority of the latter but a reflection of a socially constructed relegated status for the epistemology and of innovations arising from the so ‐called traditional or informal sectors. As the environmental
activist Pat Mooney has stridently posited, “the argument that intellectual property is only recognizable when performed in laboratories with white lab coats is fundamentally a racist view of scientific development” (Shiva, 1992). Every bio ‐cultural innovation, regardless of the cultural framework from which it springs from deserves to be judged on its own merits and not to be
peremptorily categorized as “raw material” or automatically elevated to the status of an invention merely because of the respective cultural setting from it is made or derived.

The enduring Eurocentricity of the patent system manifests itself yet again in the fiction that inventions are invariably the
result of individual, spontaneous creativity and genius. A mythological but legally sanctioned concept of reward and
recompense upon the idea of individual inventiveness discounts the daily reality that most inventions are the
result of incremental insights into what already exists in society. In the extremely perverse manifestation of the Eurocentric
myth on inventive genius, the “inventive genius” and thus property in the inventions, belongs not to the
actual “inventor”, but to the capital investment made by a multitudinous number of corporate or public
stakeholders. This pandering to modern capitalism affords juridical basis for ownership by corporate entities of
thousands on inventions. For farmers and native healers in traditional and indigenous societies, the notion that inventorship is a
solitary exercise is a juridical and institutional impediment.

The myth of the inventor as a lone ranger leads to the common notion that the patent concept is inter
alia, incompatible with the inventive process in traditional and indigenous communities. The
communal/collective nature of the development and improvement of bio‐cultural knowledge in traditional social
structures and units has been posited as one of the grounds why such units of legal persona may not secure patent protection for their
intellectual contributions to biological resources (Gana, 1995). This school of thought points to the individualistic structure of
Western societies. The contention is that the patent system is partly predicated on the concept of the
inventor as an individual and the inventive process itself, as an exercise in solitude (Petersen, 1992; Hannig, 1996). In
addition to the obvious generalization inherent in this categorization of the inventive process in non‐Western societies, there
are problems of misapprehension of the modern social structure of the inventive process in Western societies.

The alternative is to reject the 1AC by de-centering and de-mythologizing Whiteness in

favor of a politics of hermeneutic suspicion. That’s key to any ethical research project.
Sabaratnam ’20 [Meera; 2020; Senior Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS University of
London, PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics in Senior Fellow of the Higher Education
Academy; Millennium: Journal of International Studies, “Is IR Theory White? Racialised Subject-
Positioning in Three Canonical Texts,” vol. 49 no. 1]
Beyond White Subject-Positioning in IR

Given this, what would it mean to re-imagine the study of IR in a way that attempted to overcome epistemologies of
immanence, ignorance, and innocence? While it is impossible to do justice here to the wide range of traditions that have alternative starting
points, as scholars of IR our priorities should be to (1) ‘de-mythologise’121 and (2) ‘de-centre’ this racialised standpoint.
Both require a more sophisticated awareness of epistemological situatedness, a better global-historical education
and a wider ethical and political vocabulary and universe. It requires an alertness not just to the
intellectual contours of Eurocentrism, but the interlocking moral and epistemological consequences of White subject-positioning.
They may be animated by the abolitionist principle that ‘treason to Whiteness is loyalty to humanity’.122 This principle
does not build the grounds for a ‘redeemed’ or ‘modified’ Whiteness but totally deconstructs it analytically and ethically.

A ‘de-mythologising’ strategy challenges epistemologies of immanence and ignorance – the specific racialised metahistorical narratives and myths about the exceptional, vanguardist, and progressive character of the ‘West’ and its
peoples as a point of departure for building international theory. Alternative accounts are already available to us which emphasise the uneven but interconnected ways in which the modern international system came to be. These
look at the contributions of the ‘non-West’ to the rise of the ‘West’,123 the role of transnational networks as drivers of development,124 the enduring role of hierarchies as an organising principle of global order,125 the colonial
origins of sovereignty practices126 and the transnational character of political thought.127 There is considerable scope for more historically oriented work which excavates in particular the relation between the ‘colonial’ and the
‘modern’.

Another way of ‘de-mythologising’ Whiteness in IR is to re-think the discipline’s constitutive distinction between ‘war’ and ‘violence’, particularly where the coding of historical events into one or another category have been as a
result of racialised categorisations and thinking about whose deaths count, thus enabling an epistemology of ‘innocence’.128 Withholding the assumption that ‘war’ (meaning wars as recognised by and between Western powers)
rather than ‘violence’ should be studied in IR – as in peace studies, for example129 – offers considerable scope for contemplating the rich web of interconnections and entanglements that constitute the international system, and
particularly its colonial, imperial and racialised inheritances. It is a particularly productive point of departure for conceiving of questions of consent and sovereignty under radical inequalities of power globally, and potential shared
forms of theorising among feminist approaches,130 critical environmentalisms,131 Indigenous political thought,132 and so on.

‘De-centring’ Whiteness means not only a regional expansion of IR’s gaze but more profoundly a re-locating of its intellectual and ethical centre of gravity away from its stories of ‘immanence’ and ‘innocence’. One way of doing this
might be, as Wynter does, to re-centre Blackness as the starting point for the embrace of the ‘human’ in all its multiple potentialities, given that Blackness has been historically overdetermined by experiences and epistemes which
locate it at the underside of humanity.133 This radical shaking-up of IR’s epistemological orientations would be particularly productive in dismantling the limits identified here. This could connect them to forms of worldly politics
rooted in experiences of diasporic connectivity and suffering, and creativity and solidarity.134 These signal different sites of sovereignty, rights, borders, and power,135 and open up questions of historical injustice, responsibility,
and reparations. It could conceive of more ‘conventional’ IR theory that began with African presence rather than absence.136 Finally, working with and through Blackness would give an important corrective to debates on the ‘post-
human’ which have not always contemplated the racialisation of humanity in depth.137 The point here is not simply to ‘replace’ White-centredness with Black-centredness as part of historical justice – but through re-positioning to
reveal what has been obscured about the organisation of authority, relationality, rights, obligations, materiality, and knowledge.

Would the kind of IR theory examined here be possible with such starting points? Absolutely. A
research programme focused on
‘Great Powers’ would still be possible but be explicitly a study of empires and other polities across time and
space. It would have to embrace rather than ignore their internal diversities and forms of interconnectedness – overall, this
might lead to an abandonment of the ‘anarchy’ problematique in favour of a more positive historical appreciation of diverse forms of authority
and sociality. For a research programme interested in international co-operation, it would have to take a wider understanding of the kinds of
co-operation which are possible, the kinds of political purposes that they underpin, and the forms of exclusion, collusion, and expropriation
which are likely involved in setting them up. This would make it impossible to study ‘institutions’ or ‘organisations’ among powerful actors in a
way which is disembedded from their political foundations. Similarly, for a research programme interested in the
emergence of forces of socialisation and collective identification, much more attention would need to
be paid to the political context and drivers of particular forms of sociality and the kinds of coercion enabled by productions of
Otherness. All such projects would be informed by that spirit of hermeneutic suspicion with which writers not
racialised as White have often greeted projections of Western civilisation.
However, it
is up to the field as a whole to uphold standards of rigour which make the persistence of
racialised ignorance, immanence, and innocence impossible. What has happened over the last several decades has been
a continued asymmetry in the practice of our ‘science’, such that the profound epistemological challenges presented for the field in a range of
critical writing have been sidelined through practices of training and citation which together reproduce a White subject-position in the
discipline. The vast bulk of references to ToIP, AH, and SToIP continue to treat them as authoritative texts. This is an institutional problem more
than an epistemological one in many respects and one that is unlikely to be solved in the near future, or at least by this generation. Identifying
the logics constitutive of Whiteness in IR theory is a necessary step towards institutional change, but no more than that. In the absence
of this change, IR theory will continue to be White.

Deviation from mainstream traditions is your ethical imperative---presence

marginalized voices over dominant meditations of IR.
Zondi 18 [Siphamandla is a Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations and
Acting Director of Institute for Pan-African Thought & Conversation at the University of Johannesburg,
“Decolonising International Relations and Its Theory: A Critical Conceptual Meditation,” 2018] etkin
On the conundrum of methodology

In navigating towards a decolonial turn, we must detox method and methodology because we have known for
sometime that they are contaminated with the ideological imports of epistemic imperialism . According to Ake
(1979, 125), this is evident in that the mainstream methodological traditions are founded on the negation of alternative
ways of understanding reality assumed to be inferior, unscientific, deviant, mythological and so forth. For this reason,
decolonial meditations as a methodological option risk being disqualified, discredited and liquidated on the
basis that it does not follow the dictates of Cartesian rationality and imperial reason (Sithole 2016a, 218 ).
Imperial reason as a dominant epistemic lens of mainstream science is in fact found and sustained by methods and
methodologies (Mignolo 2011, 56). This is because, as has been shown, methods and methodology are ‘epistemic and social constructs
whose intellectual, institutional, and ideological configurations are mediated and mapped by the unyielding demands of historical geography’
(Zeleza 2006, 1). For this reason, method excludes, disconnects and silences. The
options open should not be just on choosing a
suitable method, but also questioning, rebelling against, disrupting and challenging method as understood in
the mainstream. Methods are not holy cows therefore; neither are they automatically ethical routes to finding or
processing pure knowledge. But they are constructed in situations that are marked by power relations,
ideological agendas, class motivations, patriarchal considerations, imperial designs and other ethical
challenges.
Critical to the decolonial turn is to be open to taking a methodological position that Gordon (2010, 200) calls the paradox of method against
method, one that permits not just rethinking methods but also unthinking them. It is about finding ways of understanding hidden and complex
phenomena that dominant methodologies tend to conceal, hide or sanitise, as Sithole (2016a, 219) puts it. Decolonial
meditations
necessary for the decolonial turn imply disobedience against the mainstream’s fixation with conventions that hide
more than reveal, that complicate rather than simplify, deceive rather than explain, and that create formulae rather than ways
of liberating our ability to understand phenomena deeply and broadly. The demands of the decolonial turn pose the
question whether we may not exercise our methodological options on the basis that ‘the positionality of the unthought can only be imagined
through its affective dimension by those who are at the receiving end of subjection’ (Sithole 2016b). This makes epistemic
humility
necessary in order to hear the unheard and pay attention to the degraded and sidelined; the need to listen intently to
voices on the margins of society, even as the mainstream demand of us to also refer to its leftist voices and moderates. These are
deeply ethical questions that confront those who endeavour to think through the decolonial turn.

We therefore do not choose method against method for convenience or at mere will, but it arises out of the necessity
created by struggles for epistemic justice this author is committed. I therefore endeavour to write and speak from the
perspective of those for whom the progress of modernity has brought much pain, injustice and scandals. I
identify with the struggles of those who have been excluded, suppressed, denigrated, scorned, silenced,
muted, suffocated, exploited, killed, cursed and duped in the process of establishing modernity as the
superior way of living, managing power, arranging statehood, knowing, worshiping and so forth . I therefore
consciously speak from the dark underbelly of a system whose friends have extolled as a civilisation and a success when in fact also a barbarity.
I identify with the Biblical notion of a voice in the wilderness, a peripheral people, buried voices and a damned people. I speak not out of
cold, objective ‘rational’ choice of topics that make sense to the academy nor inn pursuit of subjects that are new niches for
those who want to stand out today. But I speak because someone has got to convey the messages of the voices of those
who live, work, study and think from the valley of the shadow of death. This is not to preach to anyone, but it is to
speak authentically from a position just declared rather than taken for granted Eurocentrism’s illusion of a zero-
point of enunciation or the scientific position that is a façade

The ability of Eurocentrism to police thoughts of others, decide who is rational and not, who is publishable or not, whose
work can be passed or failed, is one of the worst forms of injustice. It lends credence to this idea that mainstream
knowledge is a form of imperialism whose aim is to impose maintain this Eurocentric monoculture of
scientism. This means while we wish to choose to rebel against Eurocentric illusions and negations (including the idea that
disciplines have white fathers only or that IR began in Europe and that Europeans are emboldened to declare its beginnings and end, etc.),
there are terrible consequences that the centre is able to impose on us as a result . These include being kept out of
the publishing platforms, academic jobs; being cut off crucial network; and being labelled as outcast, the epitome of bad academic standards.
But if we don’t rebel and shout let me breathe, we still suffer the suffocation. There is therefore no real choice, but to try to live,
which is to combat in order to survive. This is a real experience of black colleagues in academia across the country and the world
today. All these pertain to IR as a discipline as well.

IR strives to pass the master of Eurocentric monoculture of scientific knowledge . The rebellious thoughts are
required to meet the conventions of Eurocentric rationality and science, a particular tradition of science. The thinkers of the south are
expected to sound like, write like and speak to the world through the language and conventions of the
north. There is a significant evidence of attempts to challenge this mainstream, from Marxists to Feminists, post-colonial and subaltern
thinkers, but realism-idealism family of thought remain firmly dominant without occasional acknowledgement
of the other. The other’s thought remains the other thoughts. Thus, we suggest that methodological considerations are not incidental to
the academic entreprise generally and the decolonial turn in IR in particular. Crucial for this turn is the understanding of the method as a
tool used to muzzle, to exclude, to denigrate, to silence, suffocate others and the potential to use method as a form
of combat with malestream, as a tool for liberating thought. There are hugely important methodological medications required as the
first step in exploring the decolonisation of knowledge and IR as a discipline. This article is framed by epistemic rebellion, a
demand to think as an ‘other’ in IR and related fields of study. It identifies other attempts to rebel involving such
figures as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Susan Strange, Ann Tickner, Spike Petersen, Cynthia Enloe, Laura Neack,
Ali Mazrui, Samir Amin and Partha Chatterjee. In spite of their huge contributions, the discipline remains a discipline
of Northern thinkers and their publications, a home for family feuds called theoretical debates and home for experiences of
the North or in the North rather than a product of experiences from everywhere.
Acknowledge coloniality in IR

Besides unthinking methodology and positionality in IR, this article also proposes, as a second strategy towards a decolonial turn, the
unmasking of coloniality at the heart of epistemological making of IR as a discipline. This entails looking closely
at who speaks and who does not speak in its definitive discourses. It is to look at which civilisations, cultures and
regions of the world are privileged to have a prominent or dominant position among the voices that speak on behalf of the discipline. It is not
hard to find evidence to support the suggestion that IR as a discipline is dominated and controlled by men from Western Europe
and other parts of the European diaspora, mainly North America and Oceania, commonly known as the global North. The fathers
of the
disciplines and their disciples come from the global North. From this vantage point, IR is thought to have its true genesis in
the observations of Thucydides in History of Peloponnesian War, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan and Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince. It evolved
through the development of its key schools of thought that have white men as fathers. The fathers of realism, include E.H. Carr, Hans
Morgenthau and John Mearsheimer; fathers of idealism include Immanuel Kant and recently J.M. Headley; fathers of neoliberalism include
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye; fathers of constructivism like Alexander Wedt to Ted Hopf; and fathers of the English School include Headley
Bull and Barry Buzan. There are no mothers and sisters in a discipline born out of imperialist patriarchal world
system. There are non-white fathers and brotherhoods at the heart of the discipline. It is a conversation of men from a small region of
the world, a region that acquired its privileged imperial position in world affairs through processes that include imperialism,
slavery and colonialism. Though almost 100 years now as a recognisable discipline, yet the voices of women and non-
Europeans remain faint and rare. As indicated, the hugely important attempts to bring into the equation something akin to
ecologies of knowledge based on experiences outside the centre of the world system have been overshadowed by the monotony of the
realism-idealism-constructivism-Marxism conversations, all fundamentally born of Western civilisation and its sciences. Some like Marxism have
been useful in helping challenge the mainstream, but they too are framed and constructed fundamentally from within the Eurocentric
epistemic world. This does not discount efforts by others to de-Eurocentrise Marxism, for instance, but to speak in terms of what epistemology
holds sway in both right and leftist fronts of the discipline.

The mainstream literature too easily narrates the history of the discipline as a European history, from ancient Greece to the
United States of America. The European experience, norms, values and rationality are therefore foregrounded as foundational
to the discipline at the expense of the truth of a more diverse evolution of IR practice and thought. This is in
spite of scholars like Jack Goody showing that the modern Eurocentric history of the world is a take-over of a history made of a variety of
continents and civilisations by conceptualising and presenting the past as being what happened in Europe, imposing it upon the rest of the
world, and thus forcing others to understand the world including where they live through Europe (Goody 2006). There is reluctance and
downright resistance to hear the other (Said 1979). The discipline continues to muzzle the voices outside the
global North while perpetuating the dominance of male voices from the North, their theories, their illusions and
their impressions of the world including the world outside the North. The realists, idealists, liberal, constructivist,
Marxist and post-modernist theories in IR are fundamentally Western voices framed by Europe’s usurping of world
history, even when mimicked and replicated by thinkers from the South. They remain founded on the
Western experience, its philosophical iterations and cultural underpinnings. There is no major problem with Europe telling its history
and celebrating its story, but the problem arises because the Western canon claims universal nature and
application. It is not that it is Western that is a problem, but that it is Eurocentric in the sense Jack Goody means by the theft of
history. It is that it claims to be universal that generates epistemicides and other forms of displacement of other
voices and ways of knowing. The universalist claims lead to epistemicides in that in order for it to thrive as ‘the knowledge’ other
epistemologies have to die.

Therefore, mainstream IR masquerades as international when in fact it is regional and sectional. It pretends to be about everyone, when it is an
ethnocentric view of the international, a Eurocentric construction of the international. Idealism, realism, constructivism, structuralism and post-
structuralism are theoretical options born in the centre of global imperialism, and this has implications for the fight for epistemic and cognitive
justice. It is not by accident that these men come from the region of the world that was also behind other forms of imperialism (political,
economic, cultural, environmental, etc.). It is no wonder that the mettle has since been inherited by current white men mainly, and black
people of anywhere remain a very minute part of this.

Texts and the voices: decolonise the IR’s archive

The third epistemic strategy in pursuit of the decolonial turn in IR is to grapple with the archive upon which the discipline is built and sustained.
The classical writings that form 6 the basis of the discipline, drawn in part from Europe’s ‘world history’, are of Mediterranean Europe. What
was written in ancient Greece, Italy and then modern western Europe form the essential archive of the discipline. Assessed closely, the bulk of
the material that justified the existence of the IR discipline was produced in and for Europe and its diaspora in North America in the main
(Wight 1966). This trend continues to this day, as almost all major pieces of IR literature are meditations of Western men in the main, sold to
the whole world as universal texts. Evan Luard’s magisterial work that identifies basic texts in IR confirms this enthnocentric archive on which
the discipline is based (Luard 1992).

The history that underpins IR assumes 1648 and the birth of the idea of national sovereignty as a sort of a major break between a world
(Europe) under feudal/religious authority and a secular modern world of nation states. This then evolves through the American and French
Revolutions in the eighteenth century in which a few key IR’s basic texts including John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government were written. This
story extends to the achievement of relative peace and emergence of balance of power in Europe in the nineteenth century after the 1815
defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. To the twentieth century belongs the rise of nationalism after the call of the Ottoman, Russian and Austria-
Hungarian empire, the rise of a liberal world order with the League of Nations and later the United Nations emerging as central institutional
scaffolds for this new order. This history culminates in the Cold War, what we regard as a family feud within Western civilisation, a contest
between Western ideas and ideologies – liberalism and communism – into which we the peoples outside the West were drawn (Mingst and
Arreguin-Toft 2010). The end of the Cold War is assumed to be the ‘end of history’, the exhaustion of ideological contestations, the dissipation
of competition challenging the Western civilisation, the victory of the Western idea (Fukuyama 1989). This echoes the assumptions about end
of ideology in the 1960s (Bell 1960). In line with this history, European thinkers have begun to see both the decline of IR and the end of IR today
(EJIR 2013)

Therefore, thehistory and memory on which students of the world including African students are meant to remember
their place in the world are those of the region of the world that recently dismembered, denigrated,
underdeveloped and oppressed Africa and other continents in the first place. The history that is taken for granted is that of the
oppressor, giving very little attention to the suffering of the oppressed and very little credit to the agency of the once colonised. The
denigrated are to epistemically travel to Europe in order to understand the foreign policies, diplomatic
practices, negotiation practices and international roles of their countries and region. This is the very nature of the
coloniality of knowledge, as explained by Ramon Grosfoguel in ‘Decolonial Approach to Political-Economy’, where he said: ‘Precisely,
the success of the modern/colonial world-system consists in making subjects that are socially located on the
oppressed side of the colonial difference, think epistemically like the ones in the dominant positions’ (2009, 13) On the
operations of this type of epistemic injustice embedded in universalist discourses pretending to be cosmopolitan, Mafeje (2011, 36) suggests
the following: ‘Before they have rediscovered themselves and have exorboured (sic) on the continent for so long, African scholars are
being invited to an extraverted contemplation about “our common future.” ’ The Eurocentric designs are invested
in creating an illusion that the discipline and its claims are universal in the sense that they represent everyone; it is to constantly claim that
IR is really international relations of everyone when in fact it is 7 IR of European tradition, a European gaze on the
world and a Eurocentric construction of the international.
The conversations are about globally common challenges and shared aspirations before there has been a reparation of historical injustice in the
construction of the discipline and the practice of IR. Questions about whose construction of the international, whose constitution of global
power, whose values and norms, whose notion of political economy, whose international society, whose history and story are included are not
being raised as sharply as Eurocentric concerns about world orders, international security, the responsibility of world powers, the obligations of
middle and emerging powers, and forth.

Fundamental to the decolonial turn therefore is to call into question the assumptions that the text and archive are ours when in fact they are
someone else’s. It is to unmask the illusion of a text for all when the text is the story of a province of the world and its diaspora. This is evident
in the main textbooks used to teach IR; they are generally Eurocentrically conceived, epistemologically Eurocentric,
ontologically European/North American and about world views from this province of the world. Of course, many now include this or that, in the
form of examples, textboxes and case studies from outside
the European world, but this too is undergirded by
Eurocentric epistemology, what Portugal’s academic, Boaventura de Sousa Santos quoted above calls the monoculture of scientific
knowledge which is Eurocentric.

It also means fighting for the presence of the marginalised in the remaking of the centre of the knowledge
production and dissemination of the texts born of the literature and orature of other civilisations and provinces of the world. This is not
just about addition of the other at the end of the list as a sort of an affirmative action, but it is about rethinking the
world, the international, the themes, the key questions, the actions on the basis of reading/listening effectively to
voices outside Eurocentrism, thus making the archive practically international rather than internationalised. On this basis, the golden
thread of IR as an area of discourse must represent a dialogue and debate beyond Eurocentrism, not
Eurocentrism plus others. The burning of libraries and the burning of books/texts that happened as coloniality expanded out of
Europe into other continents was a high mark of epistemicide and justice means bringing to life the knowledges about the world that were
burned and banned, denigrated and ignored. Decolonisemust mean reversing the injustice of colonising in the first place
and in respect of the
texts and voices that speak in IR, we will need to allow voices of Africa, Asia and other
ignored areas from time immemorial to fairly compete in defining what is international, what is IR and how does it function.]
Links---1NC
 IP---1NC
Fear of intellectual property theft fuels securitization and violence against nonwhite
bodies.
Halbert 14, [Debora Halbert is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, “Intellectual
property theft and national security: Agendas and assumptions” The Information Society,
[Link] Accessed 7-25-2024, 2014]//MCN

One possible justification for the securitization of IP is that it can help mobilize U.S. efforts to enhance
military budgets. For example, the Department of Defense now has a “cyber strategy” requiring a buildup of cyber
resources and personnel to address the growing threat posed by the cyber domain, including the theft of intellectual
property from state and nonstate actors (Carter 2015). In a March 2012 press release, the Department of Defense (DOD)
called for increased funding (to $3.4 billion for FY 2013) for a coordinated approach to cybersecurity that involves the DOD, the
Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and private industry (Daniel 2012). According to General Keith B. Alexander, “Cyber is
a team sport, it is increasingly critical to our national and economic security. … The theft of intellectual
property is astounding” (Daniel 2012, online para. 8). Thus, IP theft within the new cyberdomain can help justify
ongoing defense budgetary allocations. Despite these efforts to shore up military budgets, cybersecurity is an uneasy fit with the
conventional understanding of national security threats. While the reports just described assert unequivocally that the theft of IP is a national
security threat, toposition IP theft as a national security threat is questionable. For example, the Chinese hacking
incident(s) has been instrumental in helping justify increased cybersecurity to protect intellectual
property. As Clarke and Knake argue, “Even if a major cyberwar involving the U.S. never happens, Chinese cyber espionage and
intellectual property war may swing the balance of power in the world away from America. We need to
make protecting this information a much higher priority, and we need to confront China about its activities” (Clarke and
Knake 2010, 237). What “intellectual property war” might be in this context is a matter of speculation. What
information needs protecting is also unclear, but the concept is broad enough to establish any Chinese
knowledge acquisition as a threat. It is argued that the data theft undertaken by the Chinese is
specifically designed to improve their military and technological capacities to better compete with the
United States (Eun and Abmann 2014). This particular threat is not based upon superior weaponry, but upon superior use of information.
In other words, the fear is that China may be smarter than the United States and that the vast
downloading of information from U.S. computers will help them achieve international dominance . More
significantly, and what makes the securitization of IP a new rhetorical move worth remarking upon and raising concern about, the Chinese
state is now the culprit in this new narrative of IP war. The United States has pointed to China’s
intellectual property pirates for decades (Halbert 1997; Neigel 2000; Yu 2006; Yu 2005; Mertha 2005 ). However, the
focus has been on the lax enforcement of intellectual property rights that allowed Chinese pirates to
make illegal copies of U.S. movies, music, software, and designs. The shift from a failure of the Chinese
state to protect U.S. intellectual property (movies, software, music, etc.) to the public accusation by
American officials that the Chinese government itself is responsible for intellectual property theft is an
important new dimension in the evolution of international intellectual property conflicts. The state as IP
pirate makes for a different set of possible responses in the context of a threat politics—diplomatic
and military—and requires a far more vigilant system of surveillance on the part of the United States.
If the rhetorical effort to establish IP theft as a concern for American national security is to be taken seriously, where does this logic lead us in
terms of future international relations? If
virtually all policy treatments of cybersecurity point to the theft of IP as a
significant justification for more security, less sharing, and more national vigilance in protecting “our IP,”
then what kind of future battles does such logic set up? Among the first to call theft of information a type of warfare
was computer scientist Dorothy E. Denning, who included IP theft in her hierarchies of offensive operations that
could be conducted in cyberspace (Denning 1998). However, there remain serious questions about whether “cyber” fits the
concept of war at all. There is an ongoing debate in security circles on the potential of cyberwar and what it really means (Gartzke 2013; Gjelten
2013; Ophardt 2010; Rid 2012; Farwell and Rohozinski 2012; Sharma 2010; Stevens 2012; Stone 2013; McGraw 2013; Ventre 2011; Singer and
Friedman 2014). Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins argue that cyberwar is primarily hype produced by the growing
cybersecurity industrial complex, and they suggest that more clear definitions of the threat and more
realistic assessments need to be made (Brito and Watkins 2011). Rand senior policy analyst Martin C. Libicki also downplays the
significance of what remains primarily a theoretical threat (Libicki 2007). Rid argues that the concept of cyberwar is highly
problematic and that, in fact, cyberattacks actually significantly diminish violence instead of enhancing it
(Rid 2013). International law requires a state-actor as the instigator of an act of war, which may not be discernable in a potential cyberwar
(Ophardt 2010). The territory under attack, as well as the territory from where the attack originates, may also be unclear, a divide that
distinguishes cybercrime from cyberwar in contexts where the two are not deliberately blurred (Hollis 2011). According to Ophardt, we are
already seeing glimpses of tomorrow’s cyberwars in the dynamic between industry-hired mercenaries and file sharers. The
fact that file
sharing is being used as an example of the wars of the future does not bode well for demarcation of IP in
future conflicts. We have not yet gone so far as to claim IP theft as an act of war. In the aftermath of the Chinese
hacker scandal, the Pentagon issued a report on cybersecurity in which it recommended that some cyberattacks could be considered acts of
war, but noted that “routine theft of intellectual property” was “generally” not considered to be in that category (Michaels 2013). The widely
discussed Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare also explicitly excludes protection of private intellectual
property from consideration as an activity governed by the law of armed conflict (Schmitt 2013). It sees the law of armed conflict applicable
only when state–state actions are involved. Despite the implications intellectual property theft has for national security, Schmitt does not think
it belongs in this domain (Schmitt 2013). However, given that the shift in discourses over the threat to the national
security of American IP comes from other states, the lines between protection of commercial and
government IP assets are getting ever more blurry. Given the incessant ramping up of the threat posed
by IP theft, it is likely that claims regarding IP theft as an act of war are not too far in the future. Of
additional concern is the fact that by making IP theft a national security threat without being clear about what
actually constitutes intellectual property, not only does the U.S. government create a new reason for a
militarized Internet, but it also sets the stage for companies to assert that a range of other activities
from file sharing to producing counterfeit DVDs threaten national security and require further state
intervention. Already, private industry has sought to link IP theft to terrorism in an effort to deploy the
U.S. security state to defend its business practices (Treverton et al. 2009; Donahue and Hirschmann 2008). Whatever form
IP theft might take in the national security configuration, from the unauthorized download of an internal departmental memorandum to
counterfeit food production to illegal song downloads, the framing of the policy documents discussed here provides justification for further
restriction of the openness of the Internet.

The 1AC’s protection of IP rights is ensnared in a white cultural imaginary that

subordinates non-Western readings of intellectual creativity, codifying a hierarchy
between the “civilized” West who possess the “right form” of innovation and the
“savage” rest who can only “imitate.”
Turan ’21 [Pelin; December 2021; postdoctoral research fellow at Scuola Superiora Sant’Anna,
Institute of Law, Politics and Development (DIRPOLIS) and Lider-Lab, received PhD. in International
Business Law from Central European University for this dissertation; “Gazing at Intellectual Property Law
through the Lens of Critical Race Theory: The Interplay of Race, Power, and Intellectual Property Law,”
[Link]

The notion of IP and the global(ized) IP regimes, as already explained in the previous chapter, were invented by the
Western (European) imperial powers. Due to this, Western powers have been historically dominating the
(European)

global IP policy- and law-making processes, whereas the non-Western powers have been (and still are)
underrepresented, undermined, or unheard in the global IP fora. For the same reason, the legal concepts,
norms, and frameworks of IP were shaped and developed according to the dominant Western (European)
actors’ economic, political, and social agendas. As a consequence, the global(ized) IP regimes prioritize the
materialistic interests, needs, and expectations of Western States, intellectual creators, and market (European)

actors, whilst overlooking those of the non-Western stakeholders.

Nevertheless, the historical affiliation of the international IP law with discrimination cannot be reduced to the racialized power asymmetries
that have been governing the global IP policy- and law-making mechanisms. As rightfully articulated by Ruth L. Gana, ‘[ the
global IP
regime endorsed by] the TRIPs Agreement at best prioritizes intellectual property, and at worst, imposes a
model assumed to be objectively the “right form” of intellectual property protection.’ In fact, Gana’s statement
can be taken a step further. It can be argued that this ostensibly objective and value-neutral model has a clear and
racially-charged normative understanding of the potential right owners, legally protectable subject-
matters of IPRs, and the eligibility criteria for legal protection.

The existence of such subjective and race-based presumptions can be explained with the infusion of
Western-centric assumptions, primarily, of authorship into the global IP system.979 Indeed, the Western
(European) powers have historically, politically, and socially constructed the ‘author’ in the White man’s
image – from where the Western idea(l)s of intellectual creativity, intellectual work, IP, and IPRs have
flowed. Hence, and again as mentioned by Gana, this ‘global’ regime centered around the Western (European)
readings of authorship and intellectual creativity subordinates – or even excludes – the intellectual
creators and creations of the societies ‘whose intellectual and creative experiences have not been
formed around Gutenberg's printing press nor defined by printed works.’ Though it is self-evident in Gana’s statement, it shall
be clarified that the societies which are being pushed to the margins of the global IP regimes happen to be non-Western nations as well as non-
Western sub-nation communities.

Therefore, following up with the previous chapter’s investigation of the racialized power dynamics inherent in the global IP diplomacy, this
chapter in general, and this sub-chapter in particular, illuminates the consequences of such power asymmetries. It shall be noted that there is
harmony in the contemporary (and especially in the critical) IP scholarship on the acknowledgement of the inherent Western-favoritism of IP
norms and standards. Though the vast majority of this line of literature concentrates on the disempowerment of the Global South through the
WTO-administered TRIPs Agreement,982 there is also a group of scholars who mainly focus
on the Western (European) cultural
assumptions embedded in and carried along with the global(ized) IP norms and standards.983 This camp of
scholars seem to agree on the idea that ‘many elements of the current IP regime are grounded in the [taken-for-
granted and often unquestioned] Western cultural [assumptions]’984 that are widely-shared in Western
societies.985 These assumptions un/consciously influence IP law and integrate the implicit Western
(European) ideologies into the global(ized) IP regimes.986 A critical and particularly a race-conscious reading of these Western
cultural models reveal the racially-charged societal and cultural beliefs and ideologies imputed in notions such as civilization, culture, creativity,
science, and progress – which cumulatively derived from the race-based and racially-biased ideologies of the eighteenth-century Europe.

In this context, this sub-chapter argues that such Western-centric readings of culture, science, creativity, and progress are deeply-rooted in the eighteenth-century, especially in two
consecutive eras of Western (European) modernity that reshaped the European Continent: The Enlightenment and Romanticism. Before the investigation of the racial investments of these
eras and their ideologies in the realm of IP, it is worth to have a brief look at their historical origins and core values.

The Enlightenment emerged as a critical response to dogmatism, the scholastic thought it imposed on the society, and the political consequences stemmed therefrom. Thus, the Enlightenment
established its ideology on modernist debates regarding ‘the controversies about the arts and sciences and about ideas of progress and reason.’ It embraced liberal ideals and promoted
rational thought and human reasoning.989 In this regard, the use of reason was acknowledged as the key for humankind ‘to understand the universe and improve their own condition.’

However, the Enlightenment’s celebration of science, progress, and the methodical ways to construe the universe, eventually, paved the way to the invention of race and the classification of
humankind over a Western (European) scale. This reality, on the one hand, resulted in the positioning of the Western (European) race at the pinnacle of this racial hierarchy. On the other
hand, it not only enabled the construction of ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’ as projections of the reality of the Western (European) race, but it also ‘justified’ the colonial practices and the
‘civilizing’ missions inflicted upon the ‘lower’ races. In brief, it would not be wrong to argue that the Enlightenment ideology and scientific methods – once combined with colonialism – planted
the seeds of biological and cultural racism.

As to Romanticism, it can be portrayed, to some extent, as a reaction against the Enlightenment ideology, mainly because of its critique and rejection of purely rational thinking and the
rational order imposed by the Enlightenment. Indeed, the Romantic ideology was inspired by the ‘irrational’ – or, in other words, the imaginative and emotional. Due to this, Romanticism is
characterized predominantly with arts, literature, and architecture; given that its ideology revolved around notions such as the individual, personal intellect, creativity, and the genius of the
artist, who was depicted as ‘a supremely individual creator.’ Yet, Romanticism originated within an atmosphere of racial thinking that had been introduced by the Enlightenment. Hence, while
concentrating on and appreciating arts and science, it still focused on and appraised the European reality and intellectual creativity.998

Considering its appraisal of arts and literature, Western (European) Romanticism socially constructed several notions such as author, authenticity (or, originality), intellectual work, and
authorial property rights – which, even today, resonate in the fundamental tenets and principles of contemporary IP law. In this respect, this chapter argues that IP law takes such Western
(European) constructs as universal, objective, neutral, and globally valid frames, despite their cultural- and temporal-specificity. It is further argued that the legal system premised upon such
aesthetic values and subjective constructs not only rationalizes and legitimizes these subjective values, but also essentializes them as objective and value-neutral benchmarks to set the global
IP rules and principles.

Based on these, this sub-chapter focuses on, respectively, the Enlightenment and Romantic ideologies, and it exposes the racial investments of these Western (European) modes of thinking
into the seemingly objective and neutral construct of the global(ized) IP concepts, norms, and principles. In doing so, the sub-chapter demonstrates that these IP norms and principles create
racialized valorization schemes and cultural hierarchies in IP law, by giving primacy to Western models of creativity over those of the non-Western. This mechanism subordinates non-Western
actors, this time, not by silencing or suppressing the voices of the non-Western powers in the global IP diplomacy, but by largely allocating their cultural creations into the (Western) public
domain.

Before unraveling the Enlightenment’s investment in the racial baselines of contemporary IP law, it shall be clarified in advance that the
Western (European)
imperial powers’ endeavors to cast the foundations of an international IP system falls into the historical
era1000 which, according to Ivan Hannaford’s scholarly work, witnessed the peak of the idea of race and
the emergence of theories dedicated to contextualizing race: The time period between 1870 and 1914. It shall also be clarified
that the same era concurs with the (early) beginnings of the Enlightenment in Europe and extends to the proliferation of the modern thought in the eighteenth-
century.

As indicated earlier, this

transition from the scholastic thought to modernism not only celebrated science, but
also introduced a scientific approach to construe the universe. In fact, in 1619, René Descartes proclaimed that ‘the universe
was a material mechanism – a vast system explicable mathematically by the power of human reason.’ Dedicated to this ideology, the world-renowned

Enlightenment philosophers embraced a systematic approach to various philosophical paradigms, in

order to establish abstract, normative, and objective theories. Among these endeavors were the exploration and theorization of
human species and race – which Hannaford articulates as ‘an original and imaginative contribution to modernity.’

Race was initially coined as a term to refer to ‘a group of persons, animals, or plants connected by a common descent or origin.’ Nevertheless,
the idea of classifying living organisms into races had extended to humankind as well. Many Western (European) scientists, including but not
limited to François Bernier, Carolus Linnaeus, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, contributed to this modernist endeavor of categorizing human
beings over a scale from the superior to inferior groups. In doing so, each of these scientists identified disparate criteria, such as geography,
physical traits, skin color, morality, and cognitive faculties. Despite the discrepancies in the Considering that it is not the aim of this chapter to
map the evolution of the idea of race, but to shedlight upon the implications of such racial thinking on the
international IP norms and standards, this chapter focalizes the time period, which coincides with the drafting and negotiations
of the Paris and Berne Conventions of 1883 and 1886. criteria they used, their classifications shared a common ground: Ranking the
White European race at the highest rung of this hierarchical ladder; hence, constructing the Western
(European) and/or White race as the most advanced one, by associating the ‘White’ identity with literary,
artistic, technological, and religious superiority and achievements.

These hierarchies of modernity, which mirrored the Western (European) readings of civilization and progress, eventually, opened
a new terrain for racial thinking. The new ‘trend’ in racial classifications was no longer to be based on biological differences of
humankind, but on the cultural distinctions of groups of people. This shift from biological racism to cultural racism was triggered by Charles
Darwin’s evolutionary theory. With the help of Darwinian theory, modernist claims regarding the uniqueness of national cultures were
combined with ‘the contemporary [Western (European)] pride in technological progress arising from literacy and education.’1012 Due to this,
human history, or the history of human progress, was formulated as a single, linear, and gradual evolutionary
development that initiates from ‘savagery’ and aims to achieve (a Western-style) ‘civilization.’
Based on these assumptions, the White and/or European race was constructed as the most mechanical, the most scientifically- and culturally-
advanced group.1014 Yet, the
races labelled as ‘savage’ were depicted as the ones who lack the imagination
and cognitive abilities to invent. They were constructed as ‘imitators’ who borrow from the nature in
order to survive. Within this scheme, Australian Aboriginal people were ranked at the lowest level, whereas other indigenous peoples,
such as Polynesians and ‘Red Indians’, were above the Aboriginal people – but below African and Papuan races. In brief, whereas this rhetoric
subjectively portrayed the Western (European) and/or White creativity as an original and sophisticated one, it
reduced the
intellectual and creative capabilities of non-Western peoples to simplicity, purposeless creations, or
pure imitations of the nature.

These racial hierarchies of the modern thought – and even the exact racial categories forged by such racial thinking – were
projected upon the modernist readings of culture. Indeed, literacy has gained great importance; in fact, it was even
recognized as a yardstick to distinguish ‘civilized people from a herd of savages who are incapable of
knowledge.’1019 Ultimately, the promotion of literacy as a medium of ‘civilization’ transformed racism, in Hannah Arendt’s words, to ‘the
main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics’1020 which ratified not only colonialism, but also the ‘civilizing’ missions in colonized
territories. Therefore, it is asserted herein that the scientific methods of the Enlightenment philosophy and the racially-charged ideology of
Western (European) modernity established not only racialized power hierarchies, but also racialized cultural hierarchies.

Given the contextualization of the idea of race by reference to cultural and technical advancement of the racialized groups, the
interaction
of the modern racial thought with IP law gains a new dimension: IP law is the primary legal regime to
regulate the creative process, and to control the access to and use of knowledge. Thus, it would not be
wrong to present IP law as the gatekeeper of progress – which is the term that has been pivotal to
classify humankind and to construct race.

Regarding this, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa explains that the

racialized cultural hierarchies and the relative ranking of the
Western (European) and non-Western races have not only underscored the common beliefs held by the
society, but they also legitimized the interests of the dominant political actors and ‘justified’ the subordination of the
non-Western actors of IP law. In fact, the consolidation of Western (European) readings of culture, creativity,
and progress as such have been the main indicators to identify what is worth – or advanced enough – to be
protected by IP law.
 China---1NC
Framing the reception of the 1AC as “yellow asian subjects” projects a dystopian
anxiety for the racialization within the “Orient”.
Chun et al. ’20 [Claire; October; Claire Chun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies
(with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies). She received her B.A. in Politics
and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Her research explores how modern
conceptualizations of “Korean” and “Asian” beauty, wellness, and aesthetics are shaped by overlapping
forces of US militarism, tourism, and humanitarianism, “Yellow Peril and Techno-orientalism in the Time
of Covid-19: Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, and Techno-Economic Warfare,” vol. 23 no. 3]
/vishwa

The Contemporary Racial Repertoire of the “China/Chinese” Threat

The outbreak of the pandemic could not have had worse timing (as if it could be timed), but timing is critically important here. Its
emergence amid the ongoing intensive trade war between the United States and China is significant in that the
prevailing tensions between the two countries and the discourses of Chinese unfair trade competition,
scientific espionage, and technological surveillance frame the reception of the pandemic. One may argue that
President Trump’s insistence on blaming China for the spread of the deadly virus is yet another tactic in
his administration’s sustained attempt to quell China’s economic power at the same time that it provides a foil to
distract from—and a scapegoat to blame for—the economic and public health crisis in which we find ourselves.

At this particular juncture, we unfortunately have been inundated with media coverage of a plethora of accusations
and actions launched against China and Chinese Americans. Within the past two years, we have witnessed the
implementation of trade sanctions and tariffs against China, the removal of prominent Chinese American scientists from research
institutions, and the severing of nationwide economic transactions with certain China-based telecommunications
corporations, with Huawei Technologies Company being the most notable. All these have been advanced in the name of national security.
The discursive formation and the representational devices that have been used to justify these state directives play a critical role in
constructing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as culprit and as America’s enemy number one. These constructions, some of
which will be examined in this essay, are layered upon one another, each building and elaborating on the last, and
each invoking and simultaneously inciting a different set of anxieties that lie within the broader repertoire of China/ Chinese as threat. Indeed,
the inundation of media about China makes it difficult, if not impossible, to decipher truth from falsehood, myth from
reality, rhetoric from evidence. Our task here is not to weigh the truth-value of these representations but to treat
them as ongoing contests embedded in power and to draw out their material effects. It is worth noting that while the explicit
target of U.S. state aggression has been the mainland Chinese state or the PRC, the actual effects are much more wide-ranging and extend
into everyday aggressions against all those who present as East Asian American.
In our examination of the variegated representations of China/Chinese, we suggest that the longstanding ideology of “yellow peril” remains not
just pertinent, but extremely forceful in constructing a multifaceted repertoire of Chinese state threat and, by extension, of Chinese/Asian
American threat. What is particular about this recent iteration of yellow peril is its configuration through the lens of techno-Orientalism, a
framework that is primarily used to examine the explicitly fictional genres of novels, videogames, and films but that we now assert as being
actively deployed in this current historical conjuncture.

Yellow Peril and Techno-Orientalism

The term yellow peril emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to Japan’s arrival to the geopolitical stage as a formidable
military and industrial contender to the Western powers of Europe and the United States.9 The concept was
further elaborated and given a tangible racial form through Sax Rohmer’s series of novels and films that
provided the early content for the social imaginary of “yellow peril” along with its personification in the character of
Dr. Fu Manchu, the iconic supervillain archetype of the Asian “evil criminal genius,” and his cast of minions.10
Strikingly, Dr. Fu Manchu’s characterization as evil, criminal, and genius continues to inform the racial trope of the Asian scientist spy; and more
recently, we may add to the list the bioengineer, the CFO, the international graduate student, to name just a few. Moreover, the notion of
the non-differentiable “yellow” masses continues to function as a homogenizing and dehumanizing
device of Asian racialization, which makes possible the transference of Sinophobia to Asian
xenophobia.

In its inherent attempt to construct a racial

other, “yellow peril” is more a projection of Western fear than a
representation of an Asian object/subject, and in this sense, it may be better understood as a repository of racial affect
that can animate a myriad of representational figures, images, and discourses, depending on context. Indeed, the images and
discourses of yellow peril have surfaced multiple times throughout the twentieth century, capturing a
multitude of ever-shifting perceived threats that range from the danger of military intrusion (i.e., Japanese
Americans during WWII), economic competition (i.e., Chinese laborers in the late nineteenth century, Japan in the 1980s), Asian moral and
cultural depravity (i.e., non-Christian heathens, Chinese prostitutes, opium smokers), to biological inferiority (i.e., effeminacy, disease carriers).
As Colleen Lye observes, “the incipient ‘yellow peril’ refers to a particular combinatory kind of anticolonial [and anti-West] nationalism, in which
the union of Japanese technological advance and Chinese numerical mass confronts Western civilization
with a potentially unbeatable force.”11 Arguably, the yellow peril of today rep- resents heightened Western anxieties around
China’s combined forces of population size, global economic growth, and rapid technological-scientific innovation— all of which emerge
from a political system that is considered ideologically oppositional to ours. The current context, we suggest, is
best understood through the lens of techno-Orientalism.
When the idea of techno-Orientalism first appeared in David Morley and Kevin Robins’s analysis of why Japan occupied such a threatening
position in Western imagination in the late 1980s, techno-Orientalism offered a framework to make sense of the
technologically imbued racist stereotypes of Japan/the Japanese that were emerging within the context of Western fears and
anxieties around Japan’s ascendancy as a technological global power. They proposed that if technological advancement has been
crucial to Western civilizational progress, then Japan’s technological superiority over the West also
signals a critical challenge to Western hegemony, including its cultural authority to control representations of the West and
its “others.” They claimed that the shifting balance in global power—the West’s loss of technological preeminence—has
induced an identity crisis in the West. In response, techno-Orientalism, in which “[idioms of technology] become structured into
the discourse of Orientalism,” is produced in large part to discipline Japan and its rise to techno-economic power.12 The United States, for
instance, externalized its anxiety into xenophobic projections of Japan as a “culture that is cold,
impersonal, and machine-like” in which its people are “sub-human” and “unfeeling aliens.”13 Techno-Orientalism, born from the
“Japan Panic,” was effectively consolidated through and around political-economic concerns that frame Japanese and, by extension, Asian
techno-capitalist progress as dangerous and dystopian.

Extending Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism,14 techno-Orientalism marks a geo-historical shift where the West no longer has
control over the terms that define the East—the “Orient”—as weak, inferior, and subordinate to the
West. It marks a shift not only in political-economic power but also in cultural authority. Techno-Orientalism, then, is the expressive vehicle
(cultural productions and visual representations) by which Western and Eastern nations articulate their fears, desires,
and anxieties that are produced in their competitive struggle to gain technological hegemony through
economic trade and scientific innovation.15

Analogous to Japan’s position in the late 1980s, China

currently figures into the techno-Orientalist imaginary as a
powerful competitor in mass production, a global financial giant, and an aggressive investor in technological,
infrastructural, and scientific developments. At the same time, the increasing purchasing power of China
provokes American fear of a future global market that is economically driven by Chinese consumptive
desires and practices. It is this duality—the domination of both production and consumption across different sectors of the techno-
capitalist global economy—that undergirds American anxieties of a sinicized future.16
Further amplifying these anxieties around Chinesetechno-economic domination is our imagination of China/the
Chinese as the ultimate yellow peril, whose state ideology is oppositional to that of the United States and whose unmatched
population size combined with its economic expansion and technological advancements may actually pose a
real challenge to U.S. global hegemony. We turn now to examine how the ideology of yellow peril is manifesting in the
current context of techno-Orientalism, beginning first with an analysis of the racial trope of “Chinese as
contagion” and its connection to anti-Asian aggression.
 Climate---1NC
Stabilization is mythical, religious, and an ultimately incorrect relation to the climate.
Randalls et al. ’10 (Samuel Randalls is an associate professor in geography at University College
London; Professor Dave Frame is Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI)
at Victoria University of Wellington. He has a background in physics, philosophy and policy; Maxwell
Boycoff is Associate Professor in the Center for Science and Technology Policy, and Fellow in the
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado-
Boulder; Global Environmental Change Vol. 20, pg53–64, "Discursive stability meets climate instability: A
critical exploration of the concept of ‘climate stabilization’ in contemporary climate
policy", 2010, [Link]
%3A-A-Boykoff-Frame/85e5b073d49a671576c29248c18e58bf07a1852f)//z^2
A parallel logic can be found in the work of economists. In this paper we are not specifically concerned with economic models per se, or with the differences in adaptation, impacts and

economic analyses have broadly drawn from and supported climate stabilization
mitigation analyses. We suggest that these

discourses, usually as a heuristic that might guide decision-making. Within the framework outlined above, economists have
attempted to identify an optimal and efficient approach that could give rise to a climate policy that was focused as much on a
cost-effective stabilization target as reducing emissions to cause least harm. The economist William Nordhaus in 1977, for example, started to develop this now very familiar mode of reasoning

in 1977. Using a highly simplified, heuristic model of the climate, and assuming a doubling of CO2 concentration as a reasonable upper limit to
impose for the climatic response, Nordhaus (1977) examined the costs of controlling emissions that would meet this target. Indeed it is interesting that inasmuch as scientific work has

frequently been guided by doubling concentration scenarios, so has economic work (Azar, 1998). Nordhaus explicitly made clear that the calculations were fraught
with all kinds of uncertainties, but concluded that one could use a ‘best guess’ scenario since damages would be a roughly linear function of CO2 concentrations
(Nordhaus, 1982).8 Bach, likewise, called for ‘‘[a] broad systems approach . . . to help define some ‘threshold’

value of CO2-induced climate change beyond which there would likely be a major disruption of the
economic, social and political fabric of certain societies . . . An assessment of such a critical CO2-level
ahead of time could help to define those climatic changes, which would be acceptable and those that
should be averted if possible’’ (Bach, 1980, p. 4). Thus for an emerging set of economic formulations of the problem of climate change, the heuristic
that would guide policy action would be one that took a fixed concentration target as a proxy for a climate target, that could then
be used to analyze the costs and benefits of mitigating action to meet that target. A cost–benefit
analysis of climate change would thus be possible. It is notable that this re-frames the debates from one of the costs and benefits of cutting emissions,
to one that includes the costs and benefits of the resultant climate or as Oreskes et al. (2008) put it, the ‘‘carbon problem’’ becomes the ‘‘climate question.’’ Climates are to be

efficiently managed. This is reflected, as they illustrate, in the Changing Climate report (National Academy, 1983) and also in the growing quantity of economic work in the
early 1980s, especially as it related to energy and climate change. Boehmer-Christiansen (1994b) argues that climate policy has to be understood within changing energy politics. The late
1970s had seen rising energy prices fuelled by concerns about fossil fuel longevity of supply amidst a host of political interventions. A key question for energy politics in the 1980s was the
declining price of fossil fuels, which questioned the role of the state in controlling energy supply/demand. Climate change offered a new means to tackle the fossil fuel industries and carbon
constraints could highlight the need for nuclear solutions (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994b). From the late 1970s and early 1980s energy researchers were increasingly considering the
technologies and economics of managing CO2 emissions that might significantly influence the climate. There were debates over whether climate change would become the main limiting factor

for energy growth rather than peak oil scenarios (D’Arge and Kogiku, 1974; Nordhaus, 1974; Perry, 1982; Oreskes et al., 2008). Much depended upon assumptions
of future resource availability and energy efficiency. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) concluded in work in 1983 that
‘‘transition to fast breeder nuclear reactors, centralized solar and coal synfuels must be made . . .’’ (as discussed by Wynne, 1984, p. 285) to establish a secure energy supply in the future.

Climate change could offer an agenda for change (a lever) in the energy industry thus translating climate
stabilization targets through political negotiations about energy growth and fossil fuel use (Boehmer-Christiansen,
1994a,b). A different example comes from a study by the German Federal Environmental Agency that

examined energy efficiency, but concluded that growth could be disentangled from carbon emissions
(Lovins and Lovins, 1982). Their confidence in technological developments led them to suggest that energy

efficiency gains resulting in CO2 reductions would reduce the time pressure on climate scientists to find the climatic answer.
Assumptions about energy demand and efficiency thus filtered into the cost analyses that would suggest which climate targets might be feasible in terms of energy costs and which
stabilization targets were realistic in terms of energy growth. Climate stabilization discourse provided an interface (particularly for policy advice) between climate debates and energy debates,

Cost–
but the interface was increasingly vulnerable to the multiplicity of assumptions (climatic, economic and energy demand) being worked into them (see also Pielke et al., 2000).

benefit analysis does not provide a simple answer to climate change, because it inherently requires value
judgments about discounting, costs and uncertainties. This is particularly the case when estimating damages and adaptation costs (Demeritt and
Rothman, 1999), which is why some early climate economics separated out the cost–benefits of prevention and adaptation policies (Thompson and Rayner, 1998, p. 292). Cost–

benefit analysis inherits the uncertainties from the climate components, but has additional uncertainties
resulting from the assumptions in the costs of mitigation pathways and impacts. But as Cohen et al. (1998) point out, the
aggregation of global mean climate changes serves a technocratic agenda focused on emissions
controls, an agenda whose social science the economists have most readily filled. Further, Cohen et al. (1998), using the
example of the US, suggest that it is difficult to pose questions about ethics, development, aid, trade and responsibility to future generations, when the analysis is framed by balancing the

economic benefits of releasing carbon versus the potential GDP costs and risks of environmental change. Or, Azar (1998, p. 312) suggests that alternative
interpretations of the need to avoid dangerous climate change must be made rather than trying to solve
the puzzle of the ‘‘optimal level of climate change.’’ The economic justification for climate action has
therefore further embedded the approach to climate stabilization within climate policy. While this was
acknowledged as a heuristic this had few repercussions, but useful heuristics can rapidly be translated into direct policy guidance. Climate stabilization was taken

up in policy statements and analyses from the late 1980s as a prescriptive goal for climate policy and an aim for the
campaigning of environmental non- governmental organizations (ENGOs). Partly this was borrowed from similar policy logics that had been applied to controlling ozone and nitrous oxides
(Franz, 1997; Grundmann, 2006; Oppenheimer and Petsonk, 2005). There is also similarity with arms issues whereby one controls both the total stock of arms as well as the location of those
arms (Prins and Rayner, 2007). Here we select just a few examples to illustrate the rise of climate stabilization as a policy goal (more recent examples were given in the introduction). A Dutch
Ministry of Environment funded project concluded in 1988 with the need for climate stabilization, preferably at just 1 8C above pre-industrial temperatures, but certainly a maximum target of

400ppm CO2 concentration (Krause, 1988). Drawing from Irving Mintzer’s work a Common- wealth Group of Experts the following year also agreed that while there
were uncertainties it was important to make substantial emission cuts to a level that would achieve
‘approximate stability’. They suggested that doubling CO2 concentrations should be postponed beyond
2075 thus restricting temperature increases in the order of 0.6–1.7C by 2060 on top of warming already committed to (Holdgate et al., 1989). An OECD report in 1992 also concluded with
the need to identify appropriate targets for policy concluding that there were three possible science-based targets: stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at current levels; not
allowing global mean temperature to rise more than 2C; or not allowing a rate of change faster than 0.1C per decade (Barrett, 1992). Indeed the report pointed out the problems of inferring
emissions targets in the latter two cases given the uncertainties in extrapolating from temperature targets to emissions. Yet the latter two became the focus of discussions for the European
Union (EU) and since 1996, the EU has put forward a maximum temperature target of 28C, which was originally approximated to a 550 ppm CO2e concentration target (cited in European

climate
Environment Agency, 1996). Tol (2007) amongst others has disputed this figure as being weakly supported by cost–benefit analysis, but regardless of the figures it is clear that

stabilization is politically appealing in part because of the promise of reward for (potentially costly)
actions taken now. The growing numbers of ENGOs since the 1970s, spurred on by ‘Earth Day’ in the US (Gottlieb, 1993), have assimilated these ideas into their discussions of
climate change too. Partly this can be associated with a ‘quasi-religious’ ideal of stability (Kwiatkowska, 2001) that holds

discursive power for engaging public and government attention to ‘save the planet’. A guiding ethos of
climate stabilization is the imagined future, safe, secure, stable climate, which can be engineered by
our actions now; but the flipside of this myth is that if action is not taken the future will be insecure,
unsafe, and unstable.9 These equilibrium and stability myths thus share static responses and polarizing
dynamics that are counterposed to an approach based upon resilience and the incorporation of
surprise (Timmerman, 1986; see also Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998). They reflect a project of bringing order to our existence and resonate
with other environmental debates in the 1970s including that of population, not least in their demands for global management (Buttel et al., 1990; see also
Sayre, 2008).10 Several examples of this polarized strategy can be highlighted. The ‘Stop Climate Chaos Coalition’ explicitly draws on an either/or approach to future climatic states in its
declaration of a 2 8C threshold (climate chaos or calm—Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, 2009), while organizations such as Greenpeace have repeatedly made claims about the necessity of
stabilizing global mean temperature, a figure frequently taken to be 2 8C (e.g. Kelly, 1990; see also Doyle, 2007). This is manifested directly in contemporary ENGOs such as [Link], which is an

international campaign to mitigate climate change through reducing and keeping atmo- spheric CO2 concentrations below 350 ppm. Climate stabilization has thus
become an enduring myth, providing an easily graspable understanding of climate change , even
though there are many questions about the framing of the problem, the accuracy of the figures and the
implications for management. It has provided a ready interface between scientists, economists,
policymakers and environmentalists, and it is this collective weaving that makes it so hard as a concept
to disentangle from. Forsyth states that ‘‘assessments of frames should not just be limited to those that are labeled as important at present, but also seek to consider
alternative framings that may not currently be considered important in political debates’’ (2003, p. 78). Considered in this way, climate stabilization – as a framing

concept – has focused attention for political and policy engagement in particular ways; among them are
a broad focus on mitigation rather than adaptation, and on static quantification of an equilibrium
response rather than more dynamic goals of decarbonizing energy systems. Our work here traces how this discourse
has developed, and how it has been fixed (or stabilized) for policy aims; yet we argue that such a discourse is problematic in that
it has been consistently resisted and contested by ‘unstable’ bio-physical processes. As climate
stabilization has become a guiding concept for political action on climate change, it has encased policy in
areas of intractable scientific uncertainty that create all kinds of problematic assumptions and
prescriptions, which influence both climate science and environmental economics. Climate stabilization presents a good example of how Levy et al. (2001) describe issue
development and policy in accumulating stages from early simple, but rigid unscientific goals that are effective in anticipating policy, but which inevitably outlive their usefulness and are
difficult to replace with more sophisticated goals because of the enduring socialization in the former. Scientists desiring action on climate change might have been concerned about any
possible destabilization of the dominant framing, particularly as the reactionary discourses of vested interests opposed to decarbonization became stronger. With scientists and policymakers
focused on the more immediate task of establishing the reality and (rough) magnitude of the problem, the stabilization-focused science-policy debate became an attractive approach and has
guided many scientists, economists and policymakers into these modes of thinking. Tony Blair, in the quote at the start of the paper, suggests that stabilization provides a concept that has

stabilization is perhaps better conceived as a concept that

appealed to the instincts of scientists and economists. In terms of its historical genesis, however,

emerged through an uneasy connecting of physical science, economics and policy thereby offering a framing of the
question in a specific way that was amenable to these analyses. Climate stabilization became an intuitively
reasonable heuristic during the 1980s because of a wide variety of intersecting intellectual heritages, a lack of alternatives, and model
inadequacies. It has been valuable in that it has focused attention on diminishing negative human contributions to the changing climate; however, in so doing, it has
encouraged policy to focus on considerations of long-term equilibrium targets, that may have posed comfortable
predicaments for political and policy cycles, but have stymied short term action as policymakers wait for the answers that will

solve all the questions about scientific, political, and economic uncertainty. Collectively, the recent 2008 UN COP14 provided numerous illustrations where climate
negotiations have thus been lulled into contradictory unnerving comfort. For instance, former US Vice President Al Gore garnered rapturous applause when he ‘upped the ante’ of long-term
promises by declaring ‘‘the truth is that the goals we are reaching toward are incredibly difficult, and even a goal of 450 parts per million, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate. We will
soon need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million’’ (Gore, 2008). Yet, at this meeting in Poznan, Poland, short-term agreements and actions remained a scarcity. A number of conclusions

can therefore be drawn from this paper. First, we suggest that stabilization discourse has proved valuable for supporting particular
scientific approaches to ‘solving’ climate change. Second, we argue that the focus on finding a scientific answer to the question
of climate policy might be misplaced and that we also need a broader engagement with the ethics and
politics of the science–economics hybrid of climate stabilization. Third, we posit that climate stabilization discourses may have led to unrealistic public expectations
that leave open the possibility of future public and political critique. First, some research communities may actually benefit from the focus on

stabilization since it gives their research agendas an apparent policy relevance that would otherwise be
hard to defend. For instance, paleoclimate modeling – while valuable as a part of fundamental research programs and process understanding in geophysics, biodiversity and
ecosystems research – perhaps benefits from a prominence accorded it by its claims to help constrain climate sensitivity (Hegerl et al., 2006; Schneider von Deimling et al., 2006; Crucifix, 2006)
that would be hard to sustain if the global policy community were to reframe the question in terms of the relationship between 20th century attributable warming (Stott and Kettleborough,
2002) and expected 21st warming (Frame et al., 2006). Thus, from this perspective one might not expect some researchers to embrace the sort of reframing conversation we have in mind
here. Scientific centres institutionalize these conceptualizations by organizing research groups to study the specific problem of the equilibrium response, such as, for example, the Climate
Sensitivity group within the Hadley Centre. The establishments of groups primarily focused on climate sensitivity is a sensible response to explicit policy direction, but focus on climate
sensitivity is, in turn, a response to the fact that stabilization and its attendant notions have become ‘obligatory passage points’ (Latour, 1987) in previous scientific enquiries and policy

The recurring and somewhat unreflectively accepted theme of climate stabilization in proposed
documents.

policy frameworks is the thing that should be questioned. The levers open to today’s policymakers are primarily related to current and future
sources of emissions, and very little of the infrastructure that provides those anthropogenic sources (or sinks) will be around on equilibrium response timescales. Natural sources and sinks in a
new equilibrium are subject to considerable uncertainty. Thus, the policy focus needs to move from focusing on a more static quantification of the details of the equilibrium response –
stabilization – to more dynamic formulations that seek to decarbonize energy systems on multi-decadal timescales. While establishing and subsequently meeting long-term climate targets may
be one of a set of sufficient conditions for mitigating the worst outcomes of anthropogenic climate change, over the next several decades a much more important task is to achieve substantial
decarbonization goals. Moreover, the present lack of enforcement mechanisms to curb carbon-based energy habits makes the achievement of long-term emissions reduction proposals even
less likely. Second, the focus on long-term stabilization targets places scientific certainty and uncertainty at the centre of considerations of decarbonization and distinct from political
perspectives. By framing action in such a way, further scientific inputs regarding links between GHG concentrations, emissions and temperature change can unearth more questions to be
answered, rather than settling already existing ones (Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998). Therefore, greater scientific inputs actually can contribute to more complicated policy decision-making by
offering up a greater supply of knowledge from which to develop and argue varying interpretations of that science (Sarewitz, 2004). The allure of the scientifically focused ‘climate stabilization’
discourses distracts attention from open political debate about the timescale, respective burdens and objectives of climate policy. Instead of posing these challenges and/or objections to
particular actions as scientific ones, they can more effectively be treated as political ones (too), as well as ethical ones. Rayner notes, however, that ‘‘for good or ill, we live in an era when
science is culturally privileged as the ultimate source of authority in relation to decision-making’’ (2006, p. 6); often, the focus on securing scientific certainty can effectively obstruct effective
policy action (see also Oreskes, 2004). Also, as mentioned before, it contributes to dominant considerations of mitigation policies, often to the detriment of considerations for policy action on
adaptation. Thus, assessments of anthropogenic climate stabilization have prema- turely foreclosed around fixed international policies on mitigation (e.g. Kyoto Protocol) and associated

the stabilization-
proposals/practices (e.g. targets and timetables, temperature rise ceiling of 2 8C and 450–550 ppm CO2 atmospheric concentration caps). Third, while

based discourse may have been valuable in building broad policy actor and public engagement in climate mitigation, it has also fostered sub-optimal aims
and unrealistic expectations. For instance, the ‘Stop Climate Chaos Coalition’ based in the UK has now involved over 11 million citizens, spanning a wide range of
environmental and labour organizations as well as development charities and faith-based groups. However, their mission statement includes a call to support activities that

‘‘keep global warming below the two degrees (Celsius) danger threshold to protect people and the planet’’ (Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, 2009). While

those claims-makers – barring medical science breakthroughs – will not be alive to defend their claims, there is irony in claiming intergenerational equity as the

ethical requirement to stabilize the climate, when the attention remains focused on stability instead of
preparing our grandchildren for new relations with their future climates (through already existing commitments to a certain amount of climate change).
By critiquing stabilization we are not critiquing long-term thinking per se; we posit that this should be an open engagement rather than
one tied predominantly to scientific targets and notions of stability . More- over the name Stop Climate Chaos has a strange Canute-
ishness about it, as though we either could or should stand together on a beach and command, in the name of good

climate governance, that change and variability cease. If climate can be stabilized in this sense, then clearly the level of DAI or

stabilization target becomes an intensely political and ethical question, as the future global climates will effectively be determined by
actors living in the early years of this century who design and implement such a policy (in this regard an international agreement is vital). It thus privileges and

instantiates their conceptions of safe, dangerous and tolerable, silencing both current and future
discontents.11 It also suggests some rational basis by which certain impacts are allowable, raising the opportunity for
populations to demand either protection or compensation for a stable climate that has destabilized their livelihoods. Therefore any mitigation options pursued that aim to suck carbon

out of the atmosphere cannot merely be seen as technologies to benignly stabilize the climate, but rather must

be seen as active and heavily politicized interventions. Critical ethical and political dilemmas are
therefore obscured within the technocratic calculability of climate stabilization policies. In this paper we have
argued that the elegant attraction of ‘climate stabilization’ discourses has culminated in a focus on long- term mitigation targets and a cost-

effective climate policy that does not address broader political and ethical questions about the timescale, actors and costs involved. It seems

appropriate, scientifically, historically and socially, to question this discursive hegemony and open up debates on more

productive and effective framings of climate policy. This paper therefore argues that while the climate stabilization discourse (and associated ways
of thinking/proposing/acting) has been valuable in drawing greater attention to human influences on the global climate, it is time to explicitly move to more productive ways of considering
minimizing detrimental impacts from human contributions to climate change.
 Econ---1NC
Their attempts at economic reconstruction re-entrenches loopholes that fortify
imperial violence on queer black bodies that reifies only as “becoming”.
Agathangelou ’13 [Anna; December 17; Lecturer at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and Director
of Global Change Institute, Nicosia Cyprus; International Feminist Journal of Politics, “Neoliberal
Geopolitical Order and Value: Queerness as a Speculative Economy and Anti-Blackness as Terror,” vol.
15 no. 4] /vishwa

The call to protect the queer from Africans by ‘the West’ in Clinton’s speech and the queer from the
savage Muslim in the Human Rights Report, then, is a violence that orders the world, constituting competing formations of
value in these projects, while sublimating the empire’s ineluctable terrorization of blackness by analogizing (a major
strategy of the redistribution of global and sexual power) the suffering of slaves with that of queers, the
colonized subjects and queers, the US and Africa. In the normalizing discourse of this double move, the pursuit of desire in the
present must be postponed for the sake of a putative future expressed in the institution of reproduction. A queer futurity, predicated
on choice, must necessarily undermine the symbolic order of civil society. Edelman urges us to accept queerness as
inauthentic, insubstantive, a ‘structural position’ working to undermine identities promised through the advancement of futurism. As such,
‘queerness can never be described in the language of progression – of "being or becoming" – but must be
elucidated in the materiality of the body: queerness embodies’ (Edelman 2004 cited in Pak 2012: 172). In this view, queerness is ‘the site
outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism ... queerness ... figures outside and beyond its
political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive’ (Edelman 2004: 3 emphasis mine).
Yet, the psychic space of queerness that Edelman imagines is constituted by the conditions of a sovereign power and the displacement of violence onto queers of colour, people of colour, queer blacks and blacks, who are not one
and the same in the unfolding of global power and capital formation. Therefore, while Edelman’s view escapes the rights discourse that plagues Clinton’s speech and the Human Rights Report, it is challenged by Afro-pessimists and
others who suggest that such formations and understandings of queer subjectivity are a key condition of possibility of queerness in the neoliberal social order (Keeling 2009: 568).

In this view, queer futurity remains imbued with the condition of subjectivity as a source of speculation and the accumulation of value. The ontology of Africa and blackness is such that the world pivots on the order of antiblackness
penetrating with impunity. By this I mean that the non-existence of blackness (understood as inert matter) is precisely what makes the rest of the world legible; the non-radicalness of Africans (‘proved’ by ‘gay rights’ failures or
some other way) is the foil against which ‘the West’ and whites measure their legitimacy and value. Mbembe comments: ‘It is in relation to Africa that the notion of absolute "otherness" has been taken farthest’ (Mbembe 2001: 2).
Africa not only ‘stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence”, “lack” and “non-being” of identity and difference’ (Mbembe 2001: 4); it has also been
consigned: To a special unreality such that the continent becomes the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is: the very expression of that nothing whose special feature is to be nothing at
all. (Mbembe 2001: 4)

Against this order of compulsive value, I contend that a queer future, no matter how despondent, is one which is still possible, perhaps not
equitable, but available nonetheless, to ‘the queer’. In this theorization the speculative encounter is the symbolic creation of the subject
marked by gender and sexualized difference. This
interpretation stretches dominant understandings of moribund
neoliberal capitalism and ‘radical’ theories of queerness to argue that the slave, disfigured in the world
order, is the inert matter that relays the emergence of a subject with different kinds of properties and legal capacities
including gay/lesbian/queer sexuality (see Ferguson 2004).

Moribund capitalist white colonial and slave supremacy formation draws on queerness to stake out its
possibility and generate profits for the new emerging imperial markets. The bodies and consequently, the sexual
organs of the racial other are the sites of exchange and other ventures making possible the betting on the future price of difference and desire
in markets; these could be gay marriage and transgressive intimacies, to pick two speculative assets centralized in the current US debates, but
blackness still only amounts to no signs of relationality either in the form of reproduction or property. To borrow from Sexton, ‘racial difference
issues from direct relations of force – the scales of coercion – and it is only elaborated or institutionalised within relations of power – the scales
of consent’ (Sexton 2008: 9). Both libidinal and global economies’ sexual expression is ordered as a form of value. Sexuality’s function as a site
of conflict, as it becomes animated by value, is
to establish borders between different kinds of sexualities and the
order and hierarchy of their relations. Importantly, it acts as a site of antagonism, an elaborately crafted dispositif of
displacement and terror in which Africa and anti-blackness is the inert matter that sutures and orders sexual intimacies, trade,
reproduction of social value, and makes possible a flight away from the anarchic plurality of erotic
expression towards the higher realm of the universal, the eternal one, the always shifting socius seeking
flesh to source the jouissance of having slaughtered the other instead of having been slaughtered.
This configuration of value as privilege sutures the international order in the form of multiple-world-value projects. For instance, within (Western) foreign policy, queerness maintains a futurity in the global social order that
blackness cannot. It is simultaneously a futurity that invests in motherhood (the relationality of a child and a mother; empathic labour by taking care of one’s kin; same-sex marriage) and one whose bases are the regenerative
capacity procured through transactional relations and risky ventures. The futurity of this new speculative economy is predicated not only on loss and segregation of queerness as speculation from other sexualities, but also on the
suturing of economies of blackness and terror perpetrated on black flesh. In Edelman’s work, queerness and not wanting to procreate is connected to a non-futurism (2004: 58) that presumes a split between motherhood as
subject position (Gumbs 2010) and forced mothering ‘to arrive at queer definitions of mothering ... not linked to the reproduction of an heteropatriarchal family unit’ (Gumbs 2010: 56). While Edelman forces us to think of the
relation as one of temporality, his analogy shows that the reproduction of the global order still depends on conflict to alter and structurally adjust the racialized other (i.e., a profitable lack), and on terror and antagonism to
disfigure Africa, the black, the inert matter, flesh which does not register in the order of the ontologically living and, yet, is captured, or eaten by the other in order to regenerate power, capital and ‘free’ ‘radical’ life.

CONCLUSION

In saving the queer from the ‘African’ and the slave, the leadership of imperialism engages in a
reconstruction of the new neoliberal entrepreneurial self that requires more than biopolitics: the US and
certain European states turn against the populations that rupture their attempts to reconstruct a necroeconomic-political
order whose foundations depend on sustaining a material and metaphorical matrix and mobilizing
militias to eliminate ‘white but not quite’ (Agathangelou 2004) queer corporealities.

A conjunction and tracing of the tensions in the debates of queer theory and theories of necropolitics and blackness highlight that
‘queer subjects [are] intelligible from within different systems of valuation’, punctuating ‘[a] temporality of a
present sense of political possibility’ (Keeling 2009: 569). In Clinton’s speech and the Human Rights Report, queerness is the secret
possessor of a commitment to a capacity, whose suturing and forms of futurity depend on
experimentation and slaughtering as modes of surplus value (i.e., profits) generation: queer sexuality finds itself
transcending towards the higher realm of a universal subject by colluding in the erection and reconstruction of
terror structures. Such a reconstruction is ultimately death.

It is only possible to see this relationship between queerness and death, this anatomization of the violence and
terror, by recognizing the interplay between race and sex as productive of (and a product of) market
activity, financial speculation and liquidity as well as the changing vision of the future around which leaders speculate and plan. The
importance of queerness is not that it enters at the limits of race, as Foucault has claimed, or the death drive as Edelman argues. Rather, the
way queers are constituted
through the US leadership as flexible corporeality makes them simultaneously a
commodity and a technology, whose value lies in imperial aims that draw on the queer as the
entrepreneurial self to mark the US as the most progressive site of legal progress and human rights facilitating
the structural adjustment of racialized gays and lesbians into an entrepreneurial matrix of capital in Iraq and continents like Africa.

Both the restructuring of ‘homo’ sexuality as a radical queer subjectivity of value and queerness as a
speculative economy may enable the incorporation and leverage of some in the struggle for human rights and equal
citizenship. This move though is an ontological turn away from democracy that happens in a specific way. It is a move that depends on the
fungibility of racialized and queer subjects while necessitating violence against racialized subjects and
fungibility as terror and slaughtering of the slave. Furthermore, using the queer as the proxy for a racially adjusted forward
subsidy carries forward slavery’s chattel’s events, discussions and practices into the ‘now’ and the future. In
conversations with diverse archives of world-value-making-projects the displacement of racialized gays and lesbians (beyond the visible
transgression of queerness) becomes visible. These archives erase fungibility as terror. Conjuncting this fungibility with the one that
erects value as form highlights how the particular and all-encompassing ethico-political and economic
character of capital is value, ‘[an] explanan of all other entities’ (Bryant 2011: 131). This erasure is a dominant fallacy, a ‘difference that
makes all the difference’ (Bryant 2011: 131).

In the end, theonly means of object relations – of entry into civil society, history and temporality – still
depends on fungibility as slaughter enacted within structures of violence that hold Africa, blackness and
queer blackness at bay. The new call for ‘queer legal protections’, ‘human rights norms’ and ‘gay rights’ is an
example of speculation in freedom, whereby bodies and states are turned into experiments and literally made to die in the
name of a queer freedom, even as this process of experimenting and dying constitutes value-added
capacity. In sum, in a fungible order, queerness as freedom is a fantasia of and a strategy of bodily and spatial capture. This techno-neo-
imperial and military fantasia demands a deterritorialization and reterritorialization of bodies, states, matters,
inert matters and energies; this catalyzes massive bodily productions, both living and dead, out of which flexible sustainable topographies,
bodies and intimacies may emerge.
 Global Health---1NC
Their framing of Global Health Security is Whiteness. The idea we should understand
disease via utilitarian calculability produces racism in both disease research and the
way we respond to outbreak.
Elbe 22 – Professor of International Relations and Director, Centre for Global Health Policy at
University of Sussex, PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics [Stefan, “Who
Owns a Deadly Virus? Viral Sovereignty, Global Health Emergencies, and the Matrix of the
International,” International Political Sociology (2022) 0, 1–18, DKP]

The Whiteness of Global Health Security

This international axis of economic inequality is entangled with a second axis of racial inequality. That is because the
uneven geographic
distribution of biomedicine is historically closely bound up with the legacies of racialized colonial
expansion, extraction, and capitalism (see Bhattacharyya 2018; see also Jones 2008). Throughout those histories, biological resources central to the
advancement of scientific knowledge, medicine, and commerce were taken from indigenous and
colonized peoples and then brought back home to metropoles of European empires, frequently without
explicit consent (Schiebinger 2007, 6). Many of these practices were carried out on the basis of the constructed
racial inferiority of the people from which those resources were taken (Quijano 2000; 2007b). Land appropriation from
indigenous communities in the so-called New World, for example, was catalyzed by their perceived racial and cultural “otherness,” which meant that they were not
recognized as having “true” possession of these lands (Harris 1993, 1721–22; see also Grovogui 1996). Those
experiences of colonialism still
resonate within the contemporary context of global health emergencies (King 2002; Packard 2016; Richardson 2020).

The ongoing practices of international virus sharing continue to exhibit a dominant “whiteness”—
understood here not as a simplified marker of “ethnicity” or skin color but as “a “standpoint” rooted in structural
power” (Sabaratnam 2020, 5). The philosopher George Yancy argues that whiteness can be conceived of as a particular power–
knowledge nexus “inextricably linked to a (white) regime of truth and modalities of power” (Yancy 2004a, 108),
which places whites in positions of power vis-à-vis non-whites by virtue of their whiteness (Yancy 2004b,6;see
also Abímbo.´lá and Pai 2020). Such white normativity manifests during global health emergencies when, for instance,

outbreak countries are not perceived as having equally legitimate ownership rights over biological
materials located inside their territories, and it therefore appears acceptable to remove such samples from their countries. “Each time I
looked into the past,” the Indonesian health minister observed during the H5N1outbreak, “I saw the shadow of imperialism that had

taken the most resources of my country because we had no technology to take the benefits from our
resources” (Supari 2008, 10). During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, several of the outbreak countries
became similarly concerned that thousands of biological samples were being transferred out of their
countries amidst the chaos of the initial response (Yozwiak, Schaffner, and Sabeti 2015). With public concern growing that international
researchers were effectively “stealing African populations’ biological property,” several governments enhanced
export restrictions around such biological samples (Abramowitz et al. 2018, 105). As one observer puts it: “Everyone knows it’s a holy mess. At the moment, it
means all sharing [of samples] is on hold” (quoted in Freudenthal 2019).

The whiteness of global health emergency management is further reflected in discussions about the
security considerations surrounding those lethal virus specimens. Here, too, outbreak countries are
frequently cast in an inferior position when foreign experts remind them that they lack the capacity to
handle such dangerous pathogens safely, and it would therefore be better to transfer them to countries owning such facilities. Very few
countries in the world possess the high-security biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories needed to securely handle dangerous pathogens. Yet, this comparative
“underdevelopment” of many outbreak countries is no mere accident of history. A more diachronic perspective would suggest that this
is often also
grounded in the longer histories of colonialism that sanctioned—politically, economically, and socially—
the underdevelopment of other parts of the world through practices of extraction and colonialism (Rodney
2018). This historical legacy leaves many outbreak countries confronting a difficult dilemma: should they oblige to foreign requests to hand over their samples,
destroy them, or retain the samples with all of the attendant biosecurity risks that entails (Rizk et al. 2020, 30)? They
must make these
deliberations, moreover, against the backdrop of long-standing suspicions that powerful foreign
countries may covertly steal such pathogen samples from them anyway in the name of national security
(Rizk et al. 2020, 30).

Finally, the
whiteness of global health emergency management is also evident when interactions with
outbreak countries do not afford their official representatives a level of recognition befitting countries of equal standing.
One report of the Yellow Fever outbreak in Angola notes how the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) “came under considerable fire by
Angolan public health officials, for having sent young, inexperienced personnel who were simply using the epidemic as an opportunity for experience” (Abramowitz
et al. 2018, 59). During the MERS outbreak, the government of Saudi Arabia felt similarly aggrieved by the practice of foreign researchers “parachuting” into their
country without properly engaging or collaborating with government officials and without seeing the need to engage the local authorities (Katz and Phelan 2018b,
5). Entangledwith the more prominent global axis of economic inequality is , therefore, also a second axis of
racial inequality reflected in the ways that outbreak countries and populations of color are frequently
construed as inferior in relation to established white norms and power structures—because their
ownership claims over such samples are not recognized as being equally legitimate, because they are
construed as being incapable of handling such pathogen samples safely, and because they are assigned a
subaltern position in the research practices surrounding such novel pathogens.
Epistemological Extractions and Erasures

Science does not stand outside of this entanglement of economics and race and forms yet a third global axis of epistemological inequality traversing virus-sharing
practices. Throughout history, the epistemic practices of the natural sciences have frequently been put into the economic service of the powerful and have
contributed to the international projects of imperialism and colonialism (see Harding 2011; Adas 2016). The
entanglements of science and
race are likewise attracting greater attention from historians of science, especially in relation to overt
acts of scientific racism unfolding during scientific research as well as its contribution to the
biologicization of race (Robinson 1983, 76; Saini 2019). Comparatively less attention, however, has been paid to what Michelle Murphy calls “the
inverse subject of racialized disadvantage—the work of racialized privilege” and “to the work of racialization in scientific practices not explicitly about race, in
practices we would call normal science” (Murphy 2006, 112).

Although many of thescientific practices mobilized during global health emergencies are not thematically
concerned with race, they nevertheless resonate with such epistemic privilege. The setting of research
priorities during outbreaks, for example, often favor the scientific interests of powerful countries. During the
Ebola outbreak in Africa local researchers felt that research priorities were mostly driven by the interests of
foreign researchers rather than by local needs. Priority was given to research on biological specimens instead of focusing on questions
about local transmission patterns, natural reservoirs, ecosystems, and diagnostics (Abramowitz et al. 2018, 89). These were the key questions for outbreak
countries, but “[n]ot much has been done in this way, unfortunately. Only the samples were transported outside ….” (quoted in Abramowitz et al. 2018, 89). More
recent revelations by investigative journalists underscore the significance of this problem. They detail how thousands
of blood samples from
West Africa were subsequently exported abroad and that scientists from Sierra Leone, Guinea, and
Liberia are now frustrated because they cannot access these samples for research benefitting their countries, even
though some of those scientists put their lives at risk to obtain the samples (Freudenthal 2019).

Epistemic privilege is further reflected in the way that researchers from outbreak countries are often
marginalized in, and excluded from, processes of scientific knowledge production. Researchers working in LMICs can
confront powerful obstacles to satisfying their own research aspirations because they lack access to sophisticated laboratory facilities, cannot find sufficient time
amidst their existing employment to conduct research projects, or do not have access to the funds required (Crane 2013, 131, 132). Again, such comparative
scientific “underdevelopment” cannot just be construed as a natural state of affairs but is again also linked to longer histories of colonialism and racism (Rodney
2018, 14); it can leave scientists in outbreak countries with little choice but to cooperate with foreigners if they want to undertake research. As one African
researcher put it: “When you have a really powerful team and a weak [one]… you can’t speak of sharing. This is an abuse of language. Either we share nothing, or
give and others exploit, or keep back and nothing is done. But sharing, that means that each person has a capacity to do something … It is difficult for me to hear
this word ‘sharing.’ It isn’t sharing when it’s a question of ‘I give’ or ‘I keep’” (quoted in Abramowitz et al. 2018,25). The very language of “sharing” itself already
masks the deeper inequalities often at play in this field.
Scientists from high-income countries finally also occupy a privileged epistemic position regarding the allocation of rewards, prestige, and other career benefits
resulting from research on novel pathogens. The international standing of scientists, and the funding they can attract for their research teams, is closely tied to
publications and citations. Scientists’ careers can benefit substantially from publishing research about dangerous new pathogens at the forefront of international
attention. Yet, LMIC scientists report experiences in which scientific analyses derived from samples they have shared in the past (because they lacked the powerful
molecular research capacity of laboratories in high-income countries) were subsequently presented at international meetings and conferences without proper
advance notification or without including those who had shared the samples in the authorship arrangements (Sedyaningsih et al. 2008;seealsoElbe and
BucklandMerrett 2017). Lisa Tilley highlights the problematic nature of such “ piratic”
research more generally, understood “as
methodologies which do not value knowledge until processes of extraction, commodification and value
addition have been applied through academic refinement, generally in the Global North” (Tilley 2017, 27–28; see
also Chivalán Carrillo and Posocco 2020). An extensive array of academic value production surrounds the epistemological study of lethal viruses, culminating in a
global health science “that paradoxically embodies and even benefits from the very inequalities it aspires to redress” (Crane 2013,7;seealsoKim 2021). In the end,
international virus-sharing practices are also traversed by a third axis of global epistemological inequality whereby the roles, research priorities, and contributions of
researchers from LMICs can become marginalized and even erased at times.
 IPR---1NC
Intellectual Property is part and parcel with Eurocentric logistics that displaces
indigeneity for the “inventive genius” as a method of self-dispossession.
Mgbeoji et al. ’10 [Ikechi; October; Claire Chun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic
Studies (with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies). She received her B.A. in
Politics and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Her research explores how modern
conceptualizations of “Korean” and “Asian” beauty, wellness, and aesthetics are shaped by overlapping
forces of US militarism, tourism, and humanitarianism, “Making Space for Grandma: The Emancipation
of Traditional Knowledge and the Dominance of Western‐Style Intellectual Property Rights Regimes,”
vol. 6 no. 9] /vishwa

Contrary to popular myth, the IPRs regimes we have today are not universal verities (Drahos, 1998), but products of
European political economy and history. The contemporary dominance enjoyed by modern IPRs regimes across
the globe is a product of the aggressive and often violent conquest and colonization of diverse cultures and
societies by European states in the past five centuries (Penrose, 1951; Helge, 1956). It is a historical fact that
modern IPRs such as copyrights, trademarks, and patents regimes have deep roots in European culture,
worldview, and imperial impulses (Lowenstein, 2002). Thus, modern IPRs, often portrayed as universal truths with global genetic
makeup are in fact originally local expressions of European thought and philosophy. The diffusion and spread of IPRs regimes
from Europe to other parts of the world followed distinct patterns of violence, suppression, and
outright dispossession. Therefore, the pre‐eminence of Western‐styled IPRs is a direct manifestation of the forceful imposition
of European economic, political, and cultural ideas on colonized parts of the globe. Very few erstwhile colonized
states chose and institutionalized modern IPRs on their own volition.

As a colonial construct and implant, Eurocentric IPRs were part of the cultural, economic, and legal instruments
for the control and subordination of colonized peoples and economies (Sagoe, 1992; Sklan, 1978). The colonization of the
Americas, the Oceania, Australia, Africa, Asia and other parts of the world was premised on two main grounds, namely, a
propaganda of European superiority over colonized peoples (Mgbeoji, ibid) and of course, economic exploitation of
the colonized (Lindley, 1969). Although the transplantation of Eurocentric IPRs (Abbott et al,1999) to colonized territories
has yielded mixed results in post‐colonial states (Mgbeoji, 2007), in the colonial encounter, Eurocentric IPRs successfully
crowded out TK in many aspects with baleful consequences (Adewopo, 2002).
With particular reference to patents, the dissonance has been astounding. The patent system is not new to controversy. Tracing its origins to
Brunelleschi’s “blackmail,” (Lippert, 1999) of the medieval Italian City ‐state of Florence, the patent system has waned and waxed to global
fame. As recounted by Bruce William Bugbee, in 1421, Filippo Brunelleschi, the Italian architect and painter, announced his invention of an
iron‐clad vessel, the “Badalone” which he claimed could carry marble across the lake Arno for the construction of the now famous cathedral of
Florence (Bugbee, 1961).3 Brunelleschi refused to disclose the “Badalone” to the public. In addition, he rejected the idea of putting the vessel at
the service of the city unless he was granted a limited right to an exclusive commercial exploitation of the vessel. Florence yielded to his
unprecedented demands and on June 19, 1421, the City issued him the first recorded patent in history. To Brunelleschi’s embarrassment, the
“Badalone” sank on its inaugural trip and the Florentine patent idea sank with it at least, for a long time.

It would appear that after the Florentine debacle, the concept of patents migrated to Venice where it acquired legislative imprimatur and in
addition, substantial refinement. For example, the Venetian patent law of 1474 provided for patent duration of ten years, examination of
patent applications for novelty, and punishment for infringement of patent rights (White, 1967). Italian artisans and craftsmen began a process
of migration to central and Western Europe (Macleod, 1988). Naturally, they did not leave the concept of patents behind them in Italy; they
took the patent concept with them: Netherlands in 1817, Spain in 1820, the Vatican in 1833, Sweden in 1834, Portugal in 1837. Thus, it is fair to
say that the modern patent concept owes its original inspiration to the Italian City ‐States of medieval times. From
central Europe, the
patent concept spread with European immigrants to North and South America; and by colonialism and
diffusion, to the rest of the world.
Akin to the debates on the definitions of TK, certain inferences may be made from the various definitions of patents. First, in spite of several
theories on patents, especially, attempts to couch the arguments for and against patents in the discourse of human rights, there is no such
thing as a human right to patents. Of course, an argument can be made on the fairness or otherwise of appropriating the intellectual product of
another person. But the fact is that a patent is a discretionary grant of a State on an invention which excludes unauthorized persons, for a
specified number of years, from making commercial use of a clearly defined and specified invention.4

Second, the patent system is anchored on a capitalist worldview of the economy. In recognition of these, particularly,
the latter, the patent system, especially in Western societies, is ostensibly designed to recompense
investors by its offer of a temporary monopolization of the commercial benefits of a clearly defined invention. Third, the system of
patents purports to celebrate creativity or authorship as an individual effort. This approach discounts immense societal
contributions and the incremental basis of most inventions.

For TK on the other hand, the crux of the matter here is whether the patent system is inherently universal in its philosophy and if so, whether it
offers the best economic incentive for protecting and rewarding inventions in the realms of activities that are peculiarly communal and where
innovations occur in an incremental nature, for example, in plant genetic resources. Law, as most jurists have restated, is a mirror of societal
values. In other words, does the Euro‐ centric patent concept reflect non ‐European values? In resolving these difficult questions, certain factors
must be taken into consideration. Primarily, the passage of time and contemporary realities have modified the jurisprudence on property
ownership, the social nature of the inventive process, notions of legal personality, et cetera, which underpin the patent system. The crucial task
thus is to locate the areas of intractable difference.

The patent system may be malleable (Coulter, 1991; David, 1993) in some respects but the question remains whether decolonized states have
the political and economic clout to create doctrinal adaptations that best serve their own peculiar needs and aspirations. Unlike powerful
industrialized countries that can at will create new international IPRs regimes from the scratch,5 developing countries lack the economic and
political machinery needed to create effective but parallel global regimes on TK. Changes to the imperial order would have to be both
incremental and radical (Ewans, 2000). At this stage, the patent system has to be understood vis ‐à ‐vis TK to figure how the adaptations may be
made.

III. PART 2: THE EUROCENTRICITY OF THE PATENT SYSTEM

Before examining in relative detail the main doctrinal obstacles to the full‐scale adaptation of the patent system to
decolonized peoples’ needs for appropriate IPRs regimes, it is imperative that the social and institutional
biases against traditional knowledge in general be addressed. The first socio‐cultural obstacle is the notion that bio‐
cultural knowledge is common knowledge possessed by all traditional and indigenous peoples. First, however, a working definition of TK would
be in order.6 It must be clarified at the outset that the notion of traditional knowledge as an antiquated and inferior body
of knowledge is clearly rejected.
A definition of TK cannot be done (Stenson et al, 1999) outside the context of the provisions of the CBD, Article 27 (3) of the TRIPs Agreement7,
and perhaps, other international instruments such as Food and Agriculture (FAO) Undertaking of 1983, and various ILO instruments. These
instruments and many others rightly locate TK within the context of traditional and indigenous peoples’ historical quest for cultural, political,
and economic self‐determination (Kloppenberg, 1988). The debate on the proper definition of TK is thus inherently complex, recondite and cuts
across issues that implicate indigenous peoples’ diverse approaches to the philosophical and ethical dimensions of property and personhood.

Further, in addressing this question, two misconceptions on the “traditionality” of TK deserve attention. First, references to the innovations and
knowledge of traditional societies, especially on the issue of biological resources
as “traditional” are often misconstrued to
imply or mean that such inventions and innovations are static, antiquated, and wrapped in mythology.
There is a pervasive but unfounded notion that TK is anti‐intellectual and a relic of a by‐gone era handed down to modern successors via
unreliable oral history.

As the Four Directions Council points out, [W]hat is ‘traditional’ about traditional knowledge is not its antiquity but the way it is acquired
and used. In other words, the social process of learning and acquiring which is unique to each indigenous group, lies
at the heart of its ‘traditionality.’ Much of this knowledge is actually quite new, but it has a social meaning and legal character,
entirely unlike the knowledge indigenous people acquire from settlers and industrialized.
The second common misconception about TK is that traditional knowledge of biological resources are mere discoveries of “natural phenomena.”As Gurdial Nijar (1996)points out,

[T]traditional uses, although based on natural products, are not ‘found in nature’; as such. They are products of human knowledge. To transform a plant into a medicine, for example, one has to know the correct species, its location, the proper time of collection (some plants are poisonous in certain seasons), the part to be used, how to prepare it (fresh, dried, cut in small pieces,
alcohol, the addition of salt, etc.), the way to prepare it (time and conditions to be left in the solvent). And finally the posology (route of administration and dosage.)

From the foregoing, it may be posited that TK refers to that body of knowledge, practices, innovations of traditional peoples regulating the ways by which knowledge is acquired, practiced, transferred, and shared among a given peoples in their traditional setting. The scientific merits of TK have been astounding (Isaac, 1970). Over the millennia, small ‐scale farmers and local peoples
have contributed to plant diversity by breeding assorted crop varieties to suit particular local conditions (Friends of the Earth, 1995; Johnson, 1992: 2).8 For instance, Indian farmers have grown over 30,000 different varieties of rice during the past century. The native Andeans have developed hundreds of species of tomatoes, potato, maize and beans. Indeed, scientists reckon that
the “the total genetic changes achieved by farmers over the millennia was [is]far greater than that achieved by the last hundred or two years of more systematic science ‐based efforts (Shiva, ibid at 259).”
Apart from developing new varieties, the knowledge of biological resources for medicinal and other uses by local farmers and healers are often phenomenal and pragmatic. For example, in Sierra Leone, local farmers can differentiate between 70 different varieties of rice based on several criteria including: length to maturity, ease of husking, proportion of husk to grain size and
weight, susceptibility to insect attack, behaviour in different soils and moisture levels, cooking time and qualities (Nijar, 1994:17).

TK is not merely of academic or theoretical importance; it often serves practical ends. For instance, in Rwanda, farmers have cultivated mixtures of beans that perform better in their poor soil conditions. The Aguarana Jivaro community in the Peruvian Amazon has developed 61 distinct cultivars of cassava and in the Philippines 123 rice varieties have been found at just five sites. In
both cases, the varieties are designed to suit certain specific requirements and needs. Thus, the abundance of multitudinous varieties and species of plant resources and the knowledge of the uses thereof among traditional societies are not merely dependent upon geographical quirks but partly a result of deliberate and cumulative intellectual efforts spanning thousands of years. In
order to achieve these sophisticated results in the improvement of plant varieties or cultivars, it has been observed that those farmers:

[E]mploy taxonomic systems, encourage introgression, use selection, make efforts to see that varieties are adopted, multiply seeds, field test, record data and name varieties [and in fact]... do what many Northern plant breeders do (Friends of the Earth, ibid: 4).

According to a report from the World Resources Institute,

[I]ndians dwelling in the Amazon River make use of some 1300 medicinal plants, including antibiotics, abortifacients, contraceptives, anti ‐diarrheal agents, fungicides, anesthetics, muscle ‐relaxants, and many other most of which has not been investigated by researchers (Panjabi, 1993; Scalise and Nugent, 1995; Merges, 1998).

Seventy‐four per cent of the pharmacologically active trees reported by an indigenous group correlated with laboratory tests whereas in contrast only 8 per cent of random samplings showed any activity. In short, absent “the aid of indigenous groups, it is estimated that for every commercially ‐successful drug, at least five thousand species must be tested (Jenks, 1995).” Michael
Ballick of the New York Botanical Gardens found that using traditional knowledge increased the efficiency of screening plants for medicinal properties by more than four hundred per cent (Nijar, ibid). It is therefore no coincidence that a decisive number of drugs derived from plant resources have been with the help of local peoples operating outside the dominant Western
framework of what constitutes “scientific knowledge (Roht‐Arriaza, 1996).

Modern international law has equally come to terms with the reality of traditional input into the improvement, conservation and diversification of biological resources.9 The preamble of the CBD recognizes the “close and traditional dependence of many indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles on biological resources.”10 Article 10 (c) of the CBD obliges
Contracting Parties to “protect and encourage customary use of biological resources in accordance with cultural practices that are compatible with conservation or sustainable use requirements.”11 Similar recognition is embodied in Article 8 (j) of the CBD which obliges Contracting Parties to:

[R]espect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of the
benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge, innovations and practices.12

The salient points from analyses above are that the links between rational human impact on and mutual interaction with plant resources is enormous and profound. Further, the notion that biological resources in the gene ‐rich countries are necessarily of a “wild” character devoid of human input is often generalized and exaggerated. A considerable portion of the so ‐called wild
biological resources and ecosystems are in fact products of centuries of human impact on the ecosystem and particularly, plants (Young, 1990; Hochberg, 1996; Kaufman and Mallory, 1993). Of course, the mischaracterization of TK as “raw materials” denies and seeks to delegitimize the enormous intellectual contributions made over the centuries by the so ‐called informal breeders,
farmers and other traditional peoples.

Yet, the intellectual feats of innovation by traditional and indigenous peoples wrought within the framework of traditional societies cannot be adequately protected by modern patent law and processes. The question is, why? A close examination of the doctrines of the patent system will illuminate this paradox. For the purposes of securing patent protection on biological resources,
for example, it is not enough that an innovation has been wrought. The threshold for legal protection under the patent regime is whether the invention has surpassed obvious or prior art in the field of that invention (De Valoir, 1995; Seay, 1998 ‐9). In attempting to apply patent ‐like protections to biological resources, the modified test is to ask: when do such innovations, private or
collective, surpass obvious knowledge or prior art? (Caillaux, 1994) And whose prior art is relevant?

It seems clear that the opposition by the “scientific and industrial” community to the scientific worth or merit of traditional bio ‐cultural knowledge has nothing to do with the innate inferiority of the latter but a reflection of a socially constructed relegated status for the epistemology and of innovations arising from the so ‐called traditional or informal sectors. As the environmental
activist Pat Mooney has stridently posited, “the argument that intellectual property is only recognizable when performed in laboratories with white lab coats is fundamentally a racist view of scientific development” (Shiva, 1992). Every bio ‐cultural innovation, regardless of the cultural framework from which it springs from deserves to be judged on its own merits and not to be
peremptorily categorized as “raw material” or automatically elevated to the status of an invention merely because of the respective cultural setting from it is made or derived.

The enduring Eurocentricity of the patent system manifests itself yet again in the fiction that inventions are invariably the
result of individual, spontaneous creativity and genius. A mythological but legally sanctioned concept of reward and
recompense upon the idea of individual inventiveness discounts the daily reality that most inventions are the
result of incremental insights into what already exists in society. In the extremely perverse manifestation of the Eurocentric
myth on inventive genius, the “inventive genius” and thus property in the inventions, belongs not to the
actual “inventor”, but to the capital investment made by a multitudinous number of corporate or public
stakeholders. This pandering to modern capitalism affords juridical basis for ownership by corporate entities of
thousands on inventions. For farmers and native healers in traditional and indigenous societies, the notion that inventorship is a
solitary exercise is a juridical and institutional impediment.

The myth of the inventor as a lone ranger leads to the common notion that the patent concept is inter
alia, incompatible with the inventive process in traditional and indigenous communities. The
communal/collective nature of the development and improvement of bio‐cultural knowledge in traditional social
structures and units has been posited as one of the grounds why such units of legal persona may not secure patent protection for their
intellectual contributions to biological resources (Gana, 1995). This school of thought points to the individualistic structure of
Western societies. The contention is that the patent system is partly predicated on the concept of the
inventor as an individual and the inventive process itself, as an exercise in solitude (Petersen, 1992; Hannig, 1996). In
addition to the obvious generalization inherent in this categorization of the inventive process in non‐Western societies, there
are problems of misapprehension of the modern social structure of the inventive process in Western societies.
 IR---1NC
Western modernity is constructed on the prospect of eternal existential threats. 21st
century security policy relies on a revolving door of terroristic threats that stretch
western moral rules to ‘protect the homeland’ above all else.
Baker & Jones 20, [Natalie D. Baker (Associate Professor of Strategy at National War College, PhD
from UC Irvine in Planning, Policy, and Design, Masters degrees in International Development & Tropical
Medicine from Tulane University, Bachelors from the University of Central Florida in Psychology) and
Nathan Jones (Senior Fellow with the Small Wars Journal El Centro focusing on Latin America, scholar in
drug policy and Mexico studies at the Baker Institute, associate professor of security studies at Sam
Houston State University in the College of Criminal Justice), “A snake who eats the devil’s tail,” Media,
War, and Conflict, [Link] accessed 6-28-2024, 12/20] suits

It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and
defeated. (George W Bush – State of the Union Address – commencement of the ‘War on Terror’, September 2001)

September 11, 2001 had a profound affective impact on American society and transformed practices of
domestic protection as demonstrated in the quote above. This evolved security culture includes many practices
ranging from war to mass surveillance tasked to protect the US from a seemingly perpetual state of
potential terror. Landscapes of security since 9/11 have produced new forms of insecurity – where
cyber threats, bioterror, and mass murder shape a belief that the US, or the West in general, is eternally
and existentially at risk from enemies, when arguably, it is not (Masco, 2014; Mueller and Stewart, 2015). National
security practices are built on inaccurate risk assessments of threats such as climate change, and
choose instead to focus massive resources on the wars on terror and drugs (Masco, 2014). This security
state depends on threats as always looming.

The post-9/11 focus on US national security is not new. Rather, it has been built on and repurposed
from Cold War defense rhetorics and practice. Powerful imaginations of nuclear apocalypse were
reconstituted into terror as an existential threat that always evolves and evades defeat (Masco, 2014). This is
no surprise given the context of modern US society; scholars such as Anthony Giddens (1991) and Ulrich Beck (1992, 1999) have argued
for decades that Western modernity has been constructed, in part, on the prospect of eternal
existential threats. As Mooney and Young (2005: 120) claim:

… the recent Western imagination of warfare, particularly that of the United States, is that it is
an instrument of modernity; it brings democracy instead of dictatorship, the rule of law rather
than oppression, order rather than chaos, equality rather than ethnic rivalry and female
subservience, the free market rather than corruption or state subsidy.

Within this moral frame, normally immoral actions within the principles of democracy become
permissible as a way to both extend and protect the ‘homeland’. Or, ‘here, beyond good and evil the
bigger monster wins’ (Linnemann, 2017a: 7; see also Anker, 2014). This point suggests something sinister about the
institutions of security, and those that extend to foreign lands by extension (e.g. ongoing conflict
justified through the threat of terrorism).
 Nuclear---1NC
The nuclear taboo is endemic of a colonial hegemony of time that reinforces
civilizational mantras of the West vs. Rest while advancing logics of race science that
castigate colonized peoples as technologically backwards.
Mathur ’20 [Ritu, Associate Prof. Poly Sci & Geography @ UT-San Antonio, PhD Poly Sci @ York
(Canada), [Link] Disarmament Studies and M.A. Int’l Relations @ Jawaharlal Nehru University (New
Delhi), author of Red Cross Interventions in Weapons Control (Lexington Press, 2017): “Time and
Weapons Control,” Chapter 1 in Civilizational Discourses in Weapons Control (Palgrave Macmillan,
2020). ISBN: 978-3-030-44943-8]//AD

It is with
these questions and disposition that a postcolonial understanding of time is now acutely conscious
of ‘the timing of decisions to acquire nuclear power’ and willing to complicate ‘our usual linear assumptions
about the influence of the past on present and future.’226 A postcolonial understanding of time is willing to engage with
the problem of heterotemporality.227 Thapar contends,

[T]ime concepts and historical change interact in as much as change can be projected as either repetitive, recurrent or periodic,
pointing to a wide stretch of time concepts, ranging from what are viewed as the cyclical to the continuously progressive and
directional, suggesting a linear form, with many in-between positions such as a wave or a spiral.228

Postcolonial scholars grappling with the problem of change in arms control and disarmament struggle to ‘dismantle fictions based on
linear narrations’ and emphasize a need to ‘historicize the present.’229 But this effort to ‘historicize the present’ is critical of practices
of historicism, as a mode of thinking, articulated in the temporal structure of the statement ‘First in the West,
and then elsewhere.’230 These practices of historicism seek to provide ‘a frame of a single and secular
historical time that envelops other kinds of time.’231 They produce ‘a zero point in history … a tabula rasa’ that prevents us
from engaging with the problem of ‘temporal heterogeneity’ and ‘reduces the past to a nullity.’232

According to postcolonial scholars, this form of historicism has pernicious effects.233 These effects can be summarized as follows: First,
it posits ‘historical time as a measure of cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was
assumed to exist between the West and the non-West.’ Second, this denial of coevalness became the
ground for legitimating ‘the idea of civilization’ in the colonies. Time management understood in terms
of ‘the Victorian fetishes of discipline, routine and order management’’ are ‘now extolled as critical to the civilization of
the country.’234 Third, it encouraged ‘internalist histories of Europe’ in which Europe became the site of
‘first occurrence’ with respect to each and every event of any historical significance. 235 Fourth, it promoted the
view that ‘to understand anything it has to be seen as a unity and in its historical development.’236 As a result, this form of

historicist consciousness serves a ‘recommendation to the colonized to wait’ and

encourages a ‘way of saying “not yet” to somebody else.’237 Fifth, this ‘not yet’ is reinforced with practices of
anachronism that ‘circulate only in a mood of frustration, despair and resentment’ that seek to reify the past in terms of the West and the Rest.

A postcolonial critique of contemporary practices of historicism encourages us to problematize ‘dominant historical

discourses’ and question ‘calcified nuclear histories.’238 The urgency of this task is articulated by Itty Abraham in the following
words:

[A] discourseof “control,” authored by the overlapping narratives of academic proliferation studies and
US antiproliferation policy, has come to dominate our understanding of nuclear histories. This
discourse, with its primary purpose of seeking to predict which countries are likely to build
nuclear weapons and thereby to threaten the prevailing military-strategic status-quo, has
narrowed the gaze of nuclear historians.239
Abraham argues against practices of historicism that ‘desire to discipline,’ exhibit a ‘tendency to isolate’ and fail to
appreciate any ‘excesses of meaning’ that might ‘flow’ from ‘ideas, rules, procedures and techniques’ that might give us ‘another
history of nuclearism.’240 There is a further insistence that any endeavor to ‘open up nuclear history’ be willing to ‘explore its intimate
relationship with the state project of legitimacy in the modern era.’241

In acknowledging this struggle for legitimacy and modernity, a critical disposition toward contemporary practices of historicism further
encourages us to pause and recollect ‘politics as war’ discourses based on race not only radicalize differences between different identity groups,
they also question ‘the purportedly inclusive and universalistic discourses on modern politics’ as being ‘partisan.’242 These politicsas war
discourses based on race serve as a ‘direct attack on the institutions and rationalizations of the modern
sovereign state, including modern understandings of law.’243 The ‘political legitimacy’ of modern ‘laws
and rights’ is not necessarily always based on the strength of one group over another, but on ‘pacified universality’ which
can be denounced if we recognize discourses of law and rights as instruments of ongoing war by other
means.244 To quote Julian Reid, ‘political sovereignty invests and takes over the decentering discourses of race struggle and turns it to its
own universalizing ends.’245 To contest these universalizing claims, postcolonial time has to be cognizant of
postcolonial science to interrogate ‘broad, cultural or civilizational conceptual frameworks limiting certain
kinds of knowledge-seeking projects.’246

Sandra Harding observes that the

West has ‘a problem figuring out how to refer to the science and technology
tradition of other cultures.’247 It has tried to address this problem by conceptualizing and contrasting
modern science and the ‘rational man’ (European) by castigating,

non-European cultures’ magic, witchcraft, pre-logical thought, superstitions or pseudosciences;

with “folk explanations” or ethnosciences that are embedded in religious, anthropomorphic,
and other only local belief systems; with merely technological achievements or merely
speculative claims about the natural world; or with “precursors” to true sciences.248
She insists that efforts be made to study how ‘the epistemic status of sciences and technologies are always socially negotiated.’249 This will
help cultivate an
alternative ‘conceptual framework of postcolonial science and technology studies’ which is
‘organized from the standpoint of other, non-European cultures and the great masses of the world’s
economically and politically most vulnerable people who live in them.’250 It will then be possible to ‘detect features
of different cultures’ scientific and technological thought and practices that are not visible from within the familiar western accounts of
science.’251 In other words, the effort here is to present an alternative account of ‘past, present, and future possibilities than were visible in
the older, eurocentric “Tunnel of time” accounts of European and other scientific and technological traditions.’252
 Patent---1NC
Patents assimilate cultural knowledge through eurocentrism under the guise of the
“public domain”.
Mgbeoji et al. ’10 [Ikechi; October; Claire Chun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic
Studies (with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies). She received her B.A. in
Politics and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Her research explores how modern
conceptualizations of “Korean” and “Asian” beauty, wellness, and aesthetics are shaped by overlapping
forces of US militarism, tourism, and humanitarianism, “Making Space for Grandma: The Emancipation
of Traditional Knowledge and the Dominance of Western‐Style Intellectual Property Rights Regimes,”
vol. 6 no. 9] /vishwa

Further, just like the modern patent law created the fiction of corporate “creative or inventive” genius to
serve social and economic imperatives, non‐Western jurisprudence has legal personalities serving same or similar ends. These
artificial legal personas or juridical entities are usually designed for the regulation of diverse functions including land ownership,
succession, inheritance, et cetera. Indeed, the category of legal persons is not closed. Yet, domestic laws in several decolonized
states have largely maintained colonially inspired categories of legal personalities, thus further enabling the
irrelevance of the patent system to local needs and realities.

Another Eurocentric aspect of the patent regime is the conception of what constitutes public domain for
the purposes of evaluating novelty. The prevalent notion is that TK is a matter of common knowledge and resides in the public
domain. It is argued that this tenet of patent law when uncritically applied to traditional and indigenous
settings is flawed on at least, three grounds. First, not all TK is in the public domain. For instance, native healers, in particular, hardly reveal
the secrets of their medicinal knowledge and herbal remedies. Secrecy of their knowledge guarantees their power and
influence in the local communities. Indeed, the rituals, magic and spirituality which often surrounds the practice of traditional
healing is, in addition to their other myriad societal functions, a critical aspect of the “secrecy regimes” (WIPO Report, ibid in
footnote) imposed on such bio‐cultural knowledge by herbalists and healers.

Second, assuming, but not conceding that all TK is in the public domain, placement of such knowledge in the public domain
by overzealous researchers without the consent of native healers, does not ipso facto, extinguish a right of
ownership to intellectual property. This principle is the rationale for the regime of prior informed consent (PIC) in contemporary
international law on access to traditional and bio‐cultural knowledge. Ironically, it is often the same information or knowledge
construed to be in the “public domain” in the so‐called traditional societies, which affords the basis for some
patents on bio‐cultural resources in some other countries, particularly, Japan and the United States. Third, the concept of public
domain is an occidental legal principle which should not be foisted on traditional societies without informed consent.

Beyond the problem of what constitutes public domain, another aspect of the problem of novelty is the mistaken assumption by many policy‐
makers that there is a universal consensus on the concept of novelty as a criterion in granting patents. A careful analysis of international patent
law and practice does not support the notion of absolute global novelty in the determination of what constitutes a patentable invention. As the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) recently observed, “there is no agreed international standard of absolute
novelty and, within limits, member countries may apply the different approaches recognized in domestic patent laws.”15

In addition to the definitional anarchy on novelty, an international juridical bifurcation arising from the United States and European patent law
jurisprudence on novelty and prior art has not yet been bridged. This technical and geographically ‐relative approach to construing the concept
of novelty and prior art is hardly dissimilar to the medieval and eighteenth ‐century patent policies of the fledgling European industrial States;
yet it has legislative force by virtue of section 102 of the United States Patent Act.16

Given that innovations in the informal paradigm are largely conducted in traditions where the keeping of formalized data in books is the
exception rather than the rule, the seeming triteness of such TK in such societies would not debar such bio ‐cultural knowledge from being
construed as “novel” in another country like the United States (Oddi, 1989). The paradox is that such bio ‐ cultural knowledge would be
ineligible for patent protection in the home country. Hence, what is an obvious invention or prior art in India, as the controversy over Neem
derivatives and Turmeric patents demonstrate (Jain, 1999), may be construed as a novel art in the United States of America for the purposes of
obtaining a patent grant. Yet, in both cases, the TK were unjustly patented in the United States. Consequently, the blurring of the law on
novelty permits, or even encourages some biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms to privatize traditional bio ‐ cultural knowledge through a
cosmetic re‐packaging of those resources and knowledge.

Thus, it is evident
that at the doctrinal level, the ideological values and worldview encoded in the IPRs of the colonizing
European powers were often alien to indigenous and traditional peoples ethos and economic traditions
(Farley, 1997‐98).
 Temporality---1NC
The 1AC’s ahistorical dream is wedded to an ontology of change that universalizes
temporal progression for all bodies without evidence. Refuse their speculative
vampirism that compels repetition of black labor for civil pleasures.
Warren ’21 [Calvin; 2021; Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy
(College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies
from Yale University; “Abandoning Time: Black Nihilism and the Democratic Imagination,” American
Studies 66.1 (2021):]

Samuel A. Chambers defines the imagination as a “synthetic power of creation and re-creation—an ability to combine the
uncombinable, to surpass binaries without merely collapsing them, to fashion something new” (620). And from such synthesis,
we are told that a democratic imagination is possible, since we would “think the limits (and their transgression) of democratic theory and of
democracy as well” (620). Here, we see that the democratic imagination recasts limits as possibilities rather than complete failures. Limits
become the resource for creation and re-creation rather than evidence of destruction and uselessness. A couture Kantianism / Hegelianism
(mixed with a splash of deconstruction) salvages democracy from the perils of its absurdity, devastation, and brutality. Why this investment in
democracy’s “intrinsic” creative power? Can this creativity finally bring an end to anti-Black violence and Black suffering? Or is the
knowledge of democracy’s fabulousness enough to sustain Blacks through police terrorism, environmental racism, re-
enslavement through incarceration, and food / housing insecurity and discrimination? I would suggest that what makes such creative synthesis
possible is an unacknowledged dependence on time. For proponents of democracy, it is time that is malleable for creative
enterprises of re-imagination, of progress fetishization, and an “ontology of change” that need not justify (or prove) itself,
declaration of change seems to be enough (Badiou, “Ontology”). What if, however, democracy is clinging to a depleted resource?
What if time is no longer enough to orient existence, especially for those inhabitants of an abyss—within which time, space, ethics, and law are
weaponized against existence?

Put somewhat differently, democracy has exhausted the imagination. It

is a speculative vampire that drains the imagination of
any vital resource for its own survival. This speculation is an outrageous expenditure of energy, an enjoyment without
end, a scholarly surplus-pleasure requiring an incessant (and useless) political repetition (Johnston). I would describe
this speculation—the conjoining of time, democracy, and the imagination—as an interminable quest, or a certain “stuckness” in a scene of
failure (a constant encircling of political and legal vacuity). This repetition is most dramatically demonstrated, for me, in Black political
participation—voting, protesting, keeping hope alive, returning to the kernel of authoritarian violence (i. e., anti-Blackness) with unbridled
hope, temporal determination, and an investment in the ontology of change (Warren; Farred). Time mocks Blacks, requiring historical déjà vu
to be re-imagined, redeemed, rethought, or ignored, rather than accepting time as anti-Black enmity and democracy as permanence of anti-
Blackness. Chants of “yes we can!” “your vote matters!” “we have power!” “we’re moving forward,” etc., serve to neglect the failure of Black
political participation and to imprison the imagination within futurity.

As I am writing these remarks, I am witnessing the absurdity of this democratic imagination and its unrelenting time. On one news program, I
hear that police shot unarmed Andre Hill, a forty-seven-yearold Black resident of Columbus, Ohio, without cause, and rather than offering him
medical assistance, decided to handcuff him (just in case the supine, dying man finds a gun, magically, I guess). On the other news program, I
hear Black politicians importuning, begging, and guilting Blacks into voting for change. Black political pundits assure voters that the ontology of
change is realizable if you just exercise your right to vote. “Never again!” “We will transform police practices!” “This time will be different!” Did
Blacks not vote when police shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice as he was playing with his toy gun on the playground? (By the way, no federal
charges will be brought against the police officers who shot him). Did Blacks not vote when Sandra Bland lost her life in police custody? Did
Blacks not vote after police deprived Eric Garner and George Floyd (and apparently 70 other people) of breath (Baker et al.)? In answer to my
inquiry “why should we continue to vote if anti-Black violence is not changing?” I am told, “Just keep believing, we can vote people in that can
change things!” When I then ask, “But I voted for President Obama (suspending my nihilism in an intoxication of hopeaffect), I thought things
were going to change for Blacks? I feel just as unsafe and endangered post-Obama as pre-Obama,” I am told, “Obama wasn’t a ‘magic Negro.’
He did the best he could.” Then I ask, “So why vote if it will take an act of magic to address the existential threat of anti-Blackness?” Time mocks
the cyclical movement of such inquiries, they are, indeed, unanswerable within the creative, synthetic, and powerful democratic horizon.
Voting becomes the premier instrument of the democratic imagination—supposedly, it activates the imagination with futurity, avoids paralysis
with action, and can be repeated. What type of creativity will finally eradicate anti-Black brutality? And could such creativity even operate
within time? Could we still call such creativity democracy? Must we abandon time to enable the imagination to perform
the mystical, the magical, and the ineffable?
If we have understood nihilism as the entrapment (and misery) of metaphysics, the reduction of Being to value circulation (axio-ontology) and
Being’s forgottenness, and the neutralization of various hierarchies of existence and legitimacy (Vattimo), then Black nihilism would suggest
that time is not a natural right or intrinsic resource. Time is a supreme onto-metaphysical value that traffics in anti-Black violence, subjugation,
destruction, and must also be reduced to myth, fantasy, and displaced. Rather than providing the resource for creativity and power, time is a
racial privilege that embeds itself in Being and metaphysics— it anchors the human and engenders extreme brutality and destructive pleasure.
It is impossible, then, to de-link time from the anti-Black violence saturating it. Enterprises such as Black politics and democratic imagination
reproduce the “same” rather than introducing a break in violence. Put differently, the democratic imagination takes time for granted as a
natural right or unquestioned condition of existence, rather than bringing this condition under investigation and suspicion; reproducing time, as
a creative and synthetic activity, is its primary preoccupation. Black existence exposes time as an unreliable lure, one vested in certain onto-
metaphysical fantasies. I would add to Vittorio Possenti’s remarkable anatomizing of nihilism—theoretical, moral, theological, technological,
and judicial—spatio-temporal nihilism, since both space and time provide problems for Black thinking in the abyss and demand a protocol of
thinking (or imagination?) that is released from the preconditions of Being and ethics. Black nihilism de-idealizes both space and time as
offering anything intrinsically or potentially transformative. Thus, the limit of space and time, for Black existence, cannot be re-worked into
anything life-affirming or synthesized into anything meaningful.

To put a finer point on this reflection: Anti-Blackness is a problem of time and the democratic imagination. Police shootings and COVID-19
deaths, for example, foreground the failure of time to alleviate Black suffering. Time is not curative; it is a weapon of tremendous violence.
Despite the optimism of Black political theorists, time entraps Black thinking in a web of contradictions, absurdities, and impasses. The pathetic
theorizing of Melvin Rogers, for example in his “Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing,” presents an incredibly
impoverished, unreliable, and inept reading of Black pessimism and the crisis of Black existence—it links democratic action to the imagination
and clings to an “ontology of change” despite all evidence to the contrary in Black life. His work, however, represents a
coterie of Black political optimists so blinded by democracy’s promise that they consider Black pain a form of political possibility. It is a
perverse enterprise capitalizing on what we might call black jouissance—futurity constitutes the “temporal material” for surplus-
pleasure in Black suffering, travail, and political failure.
If there is any hope for the imagination and its endless circulation in contemporary Black thought, it will need to abandon time and refuse its
seductions. The future is but one temporal value we must de-idealize and insert into an anti-Black will to power—one wreaking havoc across
the globe. In these desperate times, Black existence needs a liberated imagination, an imagination liberated from formal thought, the world,
destructive transcendence and immanence, and dogmatic preconditions. So, why continue to expend energy re-imagining the future and
democracy? Let us focus Black imagining on enterprises that sustain us blacks in the abyss. Outlining and presenting such
enterprises requires tremendous spiritual and intellectual energy—but such investment is all we have.
 Trademark---1NC
Trademarks are a conception of “moral aims” that is nothing but a racialized script of
international inequality.
Murray ’22 [Kali; April; Professor Kali Murray is a Professor of Law at Marquette University Law
School. Professor Murray's research agenda is focused on the "politics of participation" in patent,
property and administrative law, “Intellectual Property Liberation,” vol. 18 no. 3] /vishwa

Sometimes, then, intellectual property law can be a net bad. An intel- lectual property good, like a copyright or trademark,
can be implicated in systems of inequality, which can reinforce specific social identities, and promote discrimination and
violence based on that social identity. A trade- mark can be registered for a stereotyped image; Aunt Jemima stands as a
probably. . . will endeavour to take [the S/R mark] out, or deface them." But other horrors are present as well. Peter, a human,
was a good; he, a human, was used in commerce, that is, a nationwide marketplace that was organized around
the sale of human bodies. In fact, we only can under- stand the fugitive advertisement as a genre-this story was replicated over and
over again because these advertisements were a considerable source of revenue for newspapers during the
antebellum period. famous example of this reality.

The Ku Klux Klan copyrighted its Constitution and Laws in 1921,27 and in Article V, Section 3 of the Constitution, granted the Emperor of the
Invisible Empire the ability to "create and cause to be promulgated all countersigns, passwords, ritualistic or kloranic work and secret signs,
symbols and work of this Order."

Indeed, as intellectual
property goods are often conceived, the moral aims of the intellectual property
good may not be part of the assessment. For instance, in Juicy Whip, Inc. v. Orange Bang, Inc. ,29 a case which ex- amined a
potentially deceptive patented slushie machine, Judge William Curtis Bryson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit wrote:

Of course, Congress is free to declare particular types of inven- tions unpatentable for a variety of reasons, including deceptive- ness. Cf 42
U.S.C. @ 2181(a) (exempting from patent protection inventions useful solely in connection with special nuclear mate- rial or atomic weapons).
Until such time as Congress does so, however, we find no basis in section 101 to hold that inventions can be ruled
unpatentable for lack of utility simply because they have the capacity to fool some members of the public. Beyond the fact that
intellectual property protection can be offered when its goals are immoral, even intellectual property "done
right" can still be a "net bad." Anjali Vats asserts trademark and copyright law relies on resonant racialized
scripts to draw lines between creators and infringers within each field. 1 Kevin Greene and Tuneen Chisholm have identified
the ways doctrinal components of copyright law have fostered systematic discrimination.

I add to this scholarship that emphasizes the potential net bad of intel- lectual property by advancing two claims. First, our understanding
of intellectual property law, in both its historical development and its current forms, should be situated
against other potential legally protected forms of information. I have contended in other work, that intellectual
property law both absorbs and reacts to other areas of information law, including: prop- erty, free speech, classification regimes, and right to
information law. Sec- ond, understanding this process of absorption and reaction can be deepened not only
through juxtaposition of intellectual property to other doctrinal ar- eas, but also thinking about intellectual property law as a
doctrinal space where we can examine other issues fundamental to understanding political and constitutional theory, such as the provision
of social goods or in con- tests over the equality within in a political order. I am not alone in this project; the work
of Madhavi Sunder and Janewa Osei-Tutu examines how intellectual property goods serve to achieve the goal of human dignity and
development, and Jessica Silbey explores the ways in which intellectual
property law is in dialogue with fundamental
constitutional values such as possession of African-Americans within the musical industry. equality, privacy, and community
welfare.
 Realism---1NC
Realism is founded on a racial animus that determines white psychological
interpretative analyses of threat construction.
Freeman et al. 22, [Bianca, D.G Kim, David A. Lake, University of California, “Race in International
Relations: Beyond the ‘Norm Against Noticing,’” 2022] etkin
The Second Face of Racism: Racial Hierarchy and Foreign Policy

The recent worldwide surge in anti-Asian hate at the height of the pandemic calls for renewed attention on how race
and racism connect to international politics. Fueled by inflammatory elite rhetoric, deep-seated racial animus has
far-reaching implications for not only domestic racial relations but also interstate, and most importantly, great power
relations (Dionne 2020; Kim 2020, 2021; Reny & Barreto 2020). As we shall see, race and racism can affect the way foreign threats are
perceived, competing visions of national interest are deliberated, and foreign policy responses are selected. Having elucidated international law
as a projection of racial deficiency, we now turn to the second face of racism, namely the perception of racial others as potential threats.
Notions of deficiency and hostility, though seemingly contradictory, straddle a key feature of racial hierarchy.
Subordinate racial groups are considered not only inferior but potentially threatening to the status quo. Dominant actors
within a racialized international order, in other words, perceive racial others as a latent threat to their own interests, and by
extension, their identity. Racial hierarchy thus directly conditions how state actors interpret the behavior of racial
others, assess their own interests, and cope with felt challenges to their status. Understanding this element of racial
hierarchy can help us reexamine the overlooked role of race and racism in shaping a wide range of foreign policy
preferences and decision making.

In the language of Reus-Smit (2017, p. 879), though he avoids explicit reference to race, an international order is a configuration of political
authority in which the need for legitimacy requires complex heterogeneity to be converted into authorized forms of cultural—including racial—
difference. Racial hierarchy, by extension, provides a key source of legitimacy for an unequal global order,
engendering “intersubjective understandings about…the appropriateness of its constituent role identities” (Reus-Smit 2017, p. 879). Under such
prevailing “diversity regimes,” subordinate groups are perceived as a latent existential threat with potentially revisionist intent and
incompatible interests. Sociological and psychological understandings of racial hierarchy also suggest that it is through
the effect of racialprejudice that dominant groups evaluate threats from racial others and formulate their
behavioral responses. Building on Blumer's (1958) group position theory of prejudice, Bobo (1999) posits that racial prejudice
involves more than negative feelings or stereotypes and instead derives more fundamentally from a felt challenge to the
sense of relative group position. The long tradition of social dominance theory also attributes the source of racial prejudice and
violence to the human predisposition to maintain group-based social hierarchies (Sidanius & Pratto 1999). Conceived in this way, racism is
related to but goes beyond social identity theory, which posits an innate human tendency toward in-group favoritism and out-group
discrimination (Tajfel & Turner 1979). By socializing
state actors into constituent identities and interests, racial
hierarchy turns attention away from simple out-group tensions to threats to group status and, thus, shows how racism can play a
deeper role in shaping perceived foreign threats, national interest, and ultimately foreign policy
behaviors (see Hanania & Trager 2020).
Foreign security policy.

First, racial hierarchy, through “colored” perceptions of foreign threats and national interest, has direct
implications for how
countries conduct foreign policy on a wide range of security and military issues, including alliance politics, regional
order building, and territorial expansion. A few exceptional works on race in IR have emphasized that racial identity can be
an important factor in the formation, stability, and durability of alliances in international politics. Focusing on the case of
the Anglo-Japanese alliance (1902–1923), Búzás (2013) proposes that racial prejudice inflates perceptions of threat and aggressive intentions
from racially dissimilar countries. He finds through extensive archival research
that racial difference came to inflate British threat
perceptions of Japan, predisposing the two allies toward discord and eventually the termination of the alliance at the 1921
Washington Conference. At the same time, Anglo–American racial similarity saved the United States and Britain from such
racialized fears, despite frequent military tensions including the Venezuela crisis of 1895–1896. The dominant racial discourse of
the trans-Atlantic Anglo-Saxon brotherhood drew the two countries toward foreign policy cooperation to a greater extent “than any other
comparable pairs of states” (Vucetic 2011a, p. 403). Bell (2013) further notes that this prevailing White supremacist vision undergirded the fin
de siècle discussion of racial utopianism—the claim that an Anglo-Saxon security community would eliminate all forms of interstate conflict (see
also Vucetic 2011b).

Racialized beliefs can also have

far-reaching effects on other types of foreign security and military policies such as regional
institution-building and territorial expansion. Hemmer & Katzenstein (2002) argue that perceived racial identity, among other
components of collective identity, played an important yet underappreciated role in shaping starkly different American approaches to regional
orders in postwar Europe and Asia. Despite a hugedisparity in material capabilities between the United States and its regional
allies in both regions, American
policy makers established multilateral security institutions in Europe while
opting for a hub-and-spokes system of bilateral alliances in Asia. Postwar foreign policy elites viewed their potential Asian
partners as part of an inferior race who were less trustworthy and thus ineligible for membership in a NATO-like
multilateral security community. Maass (2020) shows that the perception of the native population as racially inferior, dangerous, and thus
inherently unsuited for republican governance also explains the limited American territorial expansion in Mexico.

Foreign economic policy.

The effects of race and racism can also be found in foreign economic policy. Critical race scholarship in IR has long pointed out the enduring
legacies of colonialism as manifested, for instance, in the global labor regime. Immigrant laborers continue to be subject to the racialized
practices of labor exploitation (Persaud 2001). Racialized global inequality also permeates other domains such as North–South trade relations
and aid regimes. Rosenberg (2019) provides systematic evidence of how racism affects global migration flows, showing that migrants from
majority-Black states migrate significantly less than they would under a racially blind hypothetical scenario. Focusing on the role of more subtle
forms of modern-day racism, Singh (2017) shows that the global North continues to offer unfavorable trade terms to the global South. Scholars
have also placed racism at the center of the global aid regimes, finding that paternalism (Baker 2015, Baker & Prather 2021) and racial
resentment (Simon & Moltz 2019) play a large role in garnering public support for foreign aid.

One particularly promising area of research centers on the increasing racialization of international trade, engaging conventional
theories of trade policy preference in international political economy. Utilizing survey experiments and multiyear public opinion
surveys, a group of scholars finds that the racial identity of a potential trading partner has become increasingly important
for American public support for overseas trade, often at the cost of the respondent's material self-interest. These
recent studies find that such racial considerations are most prominent among White Americans who have become far more protectionist than
other racial groups in the country (Guisinger 2017). Supported by evidencefrom multiple surveys, Mutz et al. (2020) point to
higher levels of racial prejudice among Whites as one potential source of the growing race gap in trade
attitudes. As the United States comes closer to becoming a “majority-minority” nation, future research might further investigate the sources
and political consequences of the race gap in trade and other foreign policy issues.

Power shifts.

As Reus-Smit (2017) notes, challenges to prevailing regimes of cultural stratification become most pronounced in the face of
shifting material balances of power. Racial prejudice, after all, is activated by perceived competition with subordinate racial others
in order to maintain the status quo hierarchy (Bobo 1999). Racialized threat perceptions, in other words, can have the most palpable effects on
world politics under the condition of major power shifts. In conjunction with their newfound material capabilities, rising but racially
subordinate states can trigger racialized fears and foreign policy aggression from declining but racially
dominant states. As Adler-Nissen & Zarakol (2021) point out, the current challenge to the liberal international order partly comes from
rising non-Western powers such as China who seek to redress their grievances against what they perceive to be a Western-centric, and thus
White-dominant, global order. Historically, Japan's revisionist foreign policy in the early 1930s has also been explained as motivated
in large part by the rising power's frustration with the then more explicitly racialized Western-dominated international
order (Ward 2013). Dominant powers simultaneously tend to perceive such challenges with a racial lens, giving rise to racialized foreign policy
narratives, most famously exemplified by the still popular “Yellow Peril” discourse (Búzás 2013, Ward 2013). Perceived racial affinity, on
the contrary, appears to substantially ameliorate fears and uncertainty under power shifts , again as suggested by the
fin de siècle Anglo–American rapprochement (Vucetic 2011a,b; Edelstein 2017). Future research should investigate whether racial fears
inflate threats from a rising China, produce public support for hawkish policies, and potentially aggravate military
tensions. More studies are needed, for example, on the extent to which contemporary public opinion on China is racialized, how top-down
anti-China rhetoric can activate racial fears, and the potential mechanisms by which racial prejudice affects actual policy making and crisis
management (see Miller & Taylor 2017; Dionne 2020; Han & Marwecki 2020; Kim 2020, 2021; Ebner & Medenica 2021). In parallel, researchers
can pay more attention to how a rising China produces and manages its own racialized narratives as it promulgates the discourse of the century
of humiliation by the West (see Cheng 2011, Zhang 2020).
 Fairness---1NC
Calls for fairness are an attempt to retreat from epistemic discomfort and render
indigenous relationality legible to settlers which reproduces colonial epistemologies.
Dwelling within discomfort instead of rejecting it is productive and uniquely disrupts
colonial subjectivities.
Slater 22, [Lisa Slater is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong,
“Fieldwork in Discomfort”, Borderlands, [Link]
Accessed 7-25-2024, 2022]//MCN
It was December—after four months of lockdowns and the cautionary month or so that followed, we could finally travel again. When it was
deemed safe, I drove to Tumut for a week of community engagement, to undertake interviews, meet with the team and, importantly,
reconnect with each other and place. After only a few days at home, I was back in Tumut, invited to spend a few days with researchers from the
Australian National University (ANU) who are also involved in a project with the Brungle-Tumut Wolgalu/Wiradjuri community.6 Extended
lockdowns had compressed fieldwork opportunities to the few weeks before the Christmas break. Over these ten days or so, I spent time on
Country, talking to Elders and community about what they wanted from the project and, more broadly, their aspirations to manage and care
for their own Country. The busyness and demands of everyday university life were supplanted by a slower pace: one thing at a time. Over the
three days with our ANU colleagues, Shane took us to various sites, telling us stories of place, their cultural and ecological significance, and
colonial histories, and we shared ideas and connected. We were a small convoy of 4WDs. I was the passenger in Shane’s vehicle: an opportunity
for extended conversation, to ask the questions that came late to mind or to think through an idea, to rearticulate a thought, for the back and
forth that can lead to understanding or at least greater connection. One of the great pleasures of a driving companion. It was during one of
these drives that Shane spoke about the need for balance. And I felt off kilter. My conceptualisation of balance felt not
only insubstantial—barely considered— but out of place, which in turn produced in me a sense of being
unanchored: ontologically and epistemologically flimsy. Mine was a concept without a practice. I was feeling,
borrowing again from Verran, a ‘sharply felt encounter with difference’ (2013, p. 144). What she calls ‘epistemic
disconcertment’: one’s ‘taken-for-granted account of what knowledge is has somehow been upset or
impinged upon, so we begin to doubt or become less certain’ (2013, pp. 144-5). These moments of epistemic
discomfort are felt in the body, she writes, and although they are personal, they do not only concern individuals and
their responsibilities. Rather, they are an ‘expression of our solidified collective institutional habits’ (2013,
p. 145). ‘We’ become comfortable with our common-sense ways of ordering and understanding the
world, so much so that they do not feel like categories but reality itself (Verran, 2013, p. 145). Thus, other
knowledge traditions are perceived as not reality, as such, but rather as beliefs. A key point is that we
need to recognise our inherited knowledge practices as particular traditions, which take great collective
effort to maintain (Verran 2013, p.146). In my case, I was unaware of my own scientific categorisation that the frog is a species. My
discomfort should, or could, alert me to how de-sensitised I was to my own epistemic comfort (Verran 2013,
p. 146)—arguably, a form of white privilege and possessive logic (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Verran advocates for applying
such collective effort in alternative ways; to do something other than re-substantiate one’s tradition . Rather than dismissing,
denying or overriding one’s discomfort, she advocates for becoming sensitised; indeed, for collectively
cultivating epistemic disconcertedness as an analytical and methodological tool. She is calling for going deeper
inside encounters with difference. Notably it is not a mode of translating difference—making equivalences—but a
deliberative process of mutual interrogation to ‘reveal “our” traditions to ourselves’, and thus each
other (Verran 2013, p. 146). A genuine encounter with different epistemic practices requires an interest in, for example, how ‘I’ and, in this
case, my Wolgalu/Wiradjuri colleagues come to know. Verran refers to her method as ‘burrowing’ (2013, p. 154). Conspicuously, my knowledge
practices felt like an imposition: holding me in a place that prevented movement and connection. I want to harness
my discomfort as
a method to disrupt the security of what I know and my desire to know and understand . A more just
future requires keeping alive the generative tension of difference and ‘contingently going on together’
(Verran, 2013, p. 146). The temporality of discomfort Discomfort bewilders, and such minor affects are important, Ngai
theorises, because they are ambivalent and confusing. Ambivalence obstructs or suspends agency; it is the sudden, however
momentary, realisation of powerlessness and uselessness. Such negative emotions can evoke pain or displeasure, make you feel passive in the
face of something significant, or what Ngai refers to as ‘powerful powerlessness’ (2005, p. 1; also see Slater 2020). Thus, minor affects are
‘explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release’ (Ngai, 2005, p.
6). Lingering in discomfort does not feel good. Discomfort does not reflect back at white settlers their/our
own goodness. If one sticks with discomfort, there is little room for white righteousness, innocence,
and ignorance. Such ‘comforting emotions’ afford a sense of selfmastery, familiarity, and virtue. In contrast, staying with
discomfort is unsettling, which potentially opens a space for progressive settlers to question and
meditate upon our complicity and enmeshment in practices that reproduce colonialism (Mackey, 2014;
Macoun, 2016; Regan, 2010; Slater, 2019). Building on the work of Julietta Singh, Poppy de Souza and Tanja Dreher argue that ‘ cultivating
discomfort is a vital decolonial and feminist practice’; however, they advocate for ‘inhabiting discomfort—dwelling rather
than simply cultivating’. They continue: The sustained engagement of dwelling in discomfort describes the
necessary, difficult and durational work of sticking with what is uncomfortable and unsettling as
Indigenous-settler relations are renegotiated—with justice as the shared goal, even when the form and shape of justice is not
yet known (2021, n.p.). They propose that it is the durational, ongoing commitment to be in the space of discomfort that affords potential
relational adjustments. Dwelling
or inhabitation ‘press us to resist both the impulse to quickly move through or
retreat from discomfort’ (de Souza and Dreher, 2021, n.p.). The academic impulse to know is a mode of making a quick retreat from
the realisation of one’s powerlessness and uselessness. This might appear to be a contradictory statement in the context of arguing for how
colonial power is reproduced through research. My claim is that the
colonial practice of possessive logic’ (Moreton-Robinson,
2015) that lays claim to knowledge itself—by re-instating and revalidating ‘western’ knowledge and
invalidating and making invisible Indigenous knowledges—performs two key roles (Blaser and de la Cadena,
2017, Hokowhitu, 2020, Moreton-Robinson, 2015). One, it ‘protects’ settlers from feeling how small and vulnerable we
are in the world by anchoring us in the time and place of sovereignty and authority. Secondly, it avoids a
confrontation with how we are implicated in ongoing ontological violence by normalising the ongoing
dispossession of Indigenous people (Rifkin, 2014). In this case, through investments in settler colonial knowledge production. The
renegotiation of Indigenous-settler relations with justice as a shared goal calls upon settlers to validate and make visible Indigenous knowledges
—yet not make equivalence from divergence. Discomfort’s
capacity to bewilder, suspend agency and create a sense
of uselessness makes it a productive emotion for interrupting white settler privilege . Conceptual discomfort
Shane’s concept of balance recalls for me Aboriginal scholars’ theorisation of relationality and reciprocity. Back at my desk, I want to continue
to think along with Shane, not so much to understand but to push up against my epistemic limits. To learn without the end game of knowing.
There are different categories operating between myself and Shane: we don’t share the same divisions between the human and more-than-
human. My dis-ease is not only because I can’t comprehend my colleague’s concepts and I feel the constraint of my own epistemic practices.
The intensity of my discomfort is driven by trying to ‘go on together’—to learn, connect, alter my thinking—whilst not rendering our discussion
intelligible to me by reinstating settler colonial epistemologies. To revise my stake in knowledge production seems to involve a triple move: a
reaching for understanding, while being uncertain if I understand, and getting to know my own taken-for-granted knowledge practices. Given
that certainty
is central to the reproduction of settler colonial authority, to re-state Quiggin, settlers need to
accept and welcome discomfort. Thus, I want to continue to pay attention to my moments of doubt and uncertainty as a mode of
unsettling my theories of the world. My mind returns to trawlwulwuy scholar Lauren Tynan’s article on relationality (2021). To burrow deeper
into different knowledge practices, I will attend to Tynan’s thinking. Tynan is advocating for research that is driven by a relational ethos. She
writes that to ‘work with a relational ethos means responding to and listening to Country, and her timeframes…’ (2021, p. 599). To elucidate on
the concept of Country, she writes: Country inhabits all relationality and is used widely across Australia to describe how all land is Aboriginal
land, Aboriginal Country; Country is agentic and encompasses everything from ants, memories, humans, fire, tides and research. Country sits at
the heart of coming to know and understand relationality as it is the web that connects humans to a system of Lore/Law and knowledge that
can never be human-centric (2021, p. 597). Many settler Australians are familiar with the Aboriginal term Country; nonetheless, this does not
mean there is shared understanding. Same word, different concept. Within
settler colonialism there is a common-sense
division between the natural and the social world. However, as Bruno Latour argues, scholars should not assume
to know what constitutes ‘society’ and what constitutes ‘nature’. Rather, he cautions that we need to proceed by
thinking of categories as the consequence of complex negotiations between people and things (and of course, as highly political) (Latour, 2005).
Or perhaps more so in the case of settler colonial Australia, a refusal to recognise and negotiate with different epistemic traditions. We
are
all embedded in particular worlds and hence our perspectives derive from and are inseparable from
those worlds. Relationality, Tynan emphases, is ‘learnt from stories and watching our Old People yarn or sitting with Country’
(2021, p. 597). A different social world than mine. As I fumble along, feeling a resonance but not comprehending, I am uneasy that I risk
drawing equivalences where there are differences. Relationality, she writes is ‘bound with responsibilities to kin and Country’ (Tynan, 2021,
p. 598). Kin includes the more-than-human. As I ponder these relational practices, I grow aware of how I attribute responsibility to
human agency, or more so to individuals. Even as I reflect upon a bird feeding its chicks, I imagine an individual parent responsible for its chicks.
I am not suggesting that I haven’t thought about the bird’s role in maintaining its species, and how species are in reciprocal relations with other
more-than-humans (again species). Although dwelling in discomfort, I am made starkly aware of my epistemic and ontological limits and
ignorance of my own knowledge traditions. Drawing upon a depth of Indigenous scholarship, Tynan writes: Dudgeon and Bray explain that
‘Indigenous relationality is recognized as the life force, and that which supports and nourishes life’.
Relationality is a central concept within Indigenous worlds, Alfred and Corntassel suggest that relationships ‘are
the spiritual and cultural foundations of Indigenous peoples’. As a foundation, relationality is how the world
is known and how we, as Peoples, Country, entities, stories and more-than-human kin know ourselves
and our responsibilities to one another. Wilson notes that ‘relationships do not merely shape reality, they
are reality’ (2021, pp. 599-600). I doubt I understand, but there are other forms of sense-making. As I feel my way, I am less certain of my
ideas of responsibility and connection. Tynan explains that relationality unites different entities. The river that wends through a
mountain range is in relationship with the mountains. They are connected and in reciprocal relations. The health of the river is dependent on
the health of the mountains. They are kin and bound together in responsibility. I blunder along, trying to think with these concepts with what
feels like an empty mind. I don’t know the world as kin. Nor can I conceptualise the agency of the river or mountain, or their thoughtfulness,
how they might communicate, and know and feel for one another. My discomfort reveals that my concepts are not enough: other ways of
knowing, doing and being are needed for such relational practices. If I pay attention to when my facts falter, it is disconcerting to see so clearly
the framing of my world; it is human-centred and privileges certain ways of being in and knowing the world. Of course, one might rightly ask of
a critical Indigenous studies scholar, didn’t you already know? Yes, intellectually. However, to paraphrase Stevenson, discomfort is not
something that can be simply ‘catalogued by the intellect’ it needs to be experienced—deeply felt—it stays with you (2014). In such a feeling
state, I lose a grip on my commonsense: it registers as uncommon. I am referring to Blaser and de la Cadena’s theorisation of ‘uncommoning’.
As noted, a colonial practice is to render alterity—difference and divergence—the same. One such method is by ‘subordinating one set of
practices to the other’ and claiming equivalence (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017, p. 189). White settler scholars have a
responsibility to de-centre their knowledge practices. Of course the challenge is how to do so when all that is at one’s
disposal is one’s own concepts (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017, p. 191). The impulse is to make sense by rendering alterity
comprehensible within the terms available, thus reproducing colonial knowledge. The ‘uncommons’ disrupts
the idea that there is a shared, common world, which only requires ‘us’ to make it legible to one another (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017, p.
191). Legibilityor translation renders diverse ontologies and epistemologies invisible or invalid. A
decolonising practice calls upon settler scholars to dwell in the discomfort of incomprehensibility, to not
make sense or invoke other forms of sense-making. Discomfort begs questions, for which I have few answers. Sarah Wright
asks, ‘What if the ways our engagement with others are beyond what we say or write, are embodied, are
affective, take place through smell and song, are generated through circulation of emotions ?’ (2018, p. 129).
What can be felt but not comprehended, and thus falls outside the logics of scholarly conventions?
Uncertainty, discomfort and doubt restrain my settler knowingness—the academic drive for authority. Revising my stake in knowledge
production is uncomfortable but it invites new connections and relationships. Dudgeon and Bray explain that ‘understanding Indigenous
“relationality” requires attention to the process of connection’ (cited in Tynan, p. 602, italics original). To illuminate, Tynan writes: which in the
case of cultural burning is about connection between myself as a human, the fire on the ground and all entities present in this practice. As a
relational practice, cultural burning enables Peoples (or birds, lightening and other entities) to bring their relationship with fire together so that
the two (or multiple) entities are more unified as one (2021, p. 602). I want to pay attention to our project team’s process of connection. Gyack
enables the human and more-than-human to come together. For us, this tiny frog facilitates people—Wolgalu/Wiradjuri, researchers,
scientists, local Natural resource managers—to be in relationship with each other, and Micalong swamp, other frog species, the seasons,
different knowledge practices, cultures, experiences, hopes and aspirations. The relationships, connections, are the project. We are not simply
individuals learning from one another, but rather Gyack brings us together into relations of reciprocity and responsibility. Our more-than-
human collective is more than the sum of our parts, yet each entity remains distinct. When we are talking frog, on Country observing Gyack’s
habitat, or listening to stories, my human-centrism is momentarily disrupted. I think differently. But I cannot think the same. More so, I feel
differently.
 Util---1NC
Utilitarian calculus fails and is incapable of developing systems of care outside of
technological rationality.
Glazebrook 19, [Dr. Patricia Glazebrook is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Politics,
Philosophy, and Public Affairs at Washington State University. “Heidegger and Economics: Withdrawal of
Being in Capital”, Divinatio, [Link] Accessed 7-25-
2024, 2019]//MCN
Mathematicians, Utilitarians, and the ones who walk away from Omelas Aristotle explained natural entities as things that grow and develop of
their own accord on the basis of an inner teleology: for example, puppies become dogs, acorns become oak trees. In contrast, artifacts are, said
Aristotle, created by a human artist who envisions them in advance based on their intended purpose. (Aristotle 1941, 640a32; cf. 1934,
1140a13) In the subsequent Judeo-Christian account, nature is a divinely created artifact: what was driven by inner purpose for Aristotle is now
driven by divine intent. In modern science, however, God is – as LaPlace is reported to have told Napoleon – an unnecessary hypothesis. (Ball
2003, 388) The ontological domination of modern science accordingly reduces beings to objects –
purposeless, spatiotemporally extended bodies subject to forces. Nature has in this history been
stripped first of its own purpose and then of divine intent, rendering it nothing more than material
readily available in modernity for technological appropriation to human needs. Modern technology thus
‘sets upon nature’ (Heidegger 1997b, 18/1977, 15) that is no longer understood as what grows of its own accord,
but as material for human production. (Heidegger 1997b, 36/1977, 32) The whole inter-related play of balance that allows
ecosystems to endure is lost, and technoscience is unrestrained in its mobilization of ‘the organized global
conquest of the earth.’ (Heidegger 1997a, 358/1982, 248) What Heidegger has neglected to note is how the Gestell of technology can
only be mobilized because nature has first been reduced mathematically, i.e. in human projection, to the reckonable in numbers. Yet Heidegger
does not take this last step into critique of capital, despite having the conceptual resources. In his analysis, the mathematization of beings is
already embedded in Western metaphysics, long before Galileo unconceals it in the claim that the universe ‘is written in the language of
mathematics.’ (Drake 1957, 258) Heidegger traces the mathematical back to the (unspecified) Greek concept of ta mathemata in Die Frage nach
dem Ding. For the Greeks, ta mathemata meant not just numbers but the fore-structure of understanding, i,.e. what is already known in
advance of experience: ‘The mathemata are things insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to be in advance, the
body as bodily, the plant-like of the plant, the animal-like of the animal, the thingness of the thing, and so on.’ (Heidegger 1987, 56/1993, 251)
Numbers do not exhaust the mathematical but are one case of it that, as an idealization of what is
encountered in experience, is especially amenable to the fore-structure of understanding. Numbers are
found in things not because they are already there, but because the understanding brings them to
things. They therefore carry epistemic certainty insofar as they are found in experience by being first
projected there, and reason is certain of its own creation. Heidegger’s phrase in Being and Time, ‘the mathematical
projection of nature,’ (Heidegger 1986/1962, §69) can be read as ‘the epistemically certain projection of nature.’
He is interested in Being and Time in showing how nature is projected in modern physics as something about which certainty can be had. Later,
in ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ he calls this projection of certainty ‘rigor [Strenge]’ (Heidegger 1994, 76/1977, 118) and once more appeals to
what ta mathemata meant to ‘the Greeks.’ The rigor of science is its exactitude and mathematical precision. This precision is excellent in the
messy world of ta pragmata, and as modern science holds sway essentially in the modern epoch, utilitarianism provides a convenient
mathematization of ethics. A
utilitarian calculus undertaken by establishing the many according to whatever
you wish to define as the good (as long as it can be reckoned) becomes a basis for ethics. Of course, the
simplest, most straight-forward reckoning to populate the utilitarian calculus is exchange value
reckoned in currency. Cost-benefit analysis rules the ethical day, whether in managing capital itself, or
in determining, for example, what health insurance premiums are in the US. This is an ontological point:
beings are projected as cash-value. Marilyn Waring has written extensively about the invisibility of women’s unpaid labor. Indeed,
the women’s labor that provides at least 70 percent of Ghana’s national food basket is not accounted for nationally or internationally as these
women grow subsistence crops that are not taken to market. (Glazebrook 2011) Their work has no ontological force, but the national economy
would collapse and a massive humanitarian crisis in starvation would ensue in Ghana if these women stopped growing these crops. These
women make up pockets in global capital where capital does not reign. They grow for subsistence in a labor of care for their dependents, where
‘care’ does not intend (though it may also entail) emotional attachment so much as the praxes of daily reproduction of the material conditions
of living. Utilitarianism
is, however, not an ethical system of care. Care cannot be a calculation, though it
involves calculation and reckonings, because it cannot be an abstraction. It is a relational ‘here-and-
now,’ for this person, this tree, this child, this crop. It is a balancing rather than a reckoning. A balance that is
not a reckoning is demonstrated by a gymnast, and the tight-rope walker Zarathustra must carry after its fallenness out-of-time. The first and
foremost world of lived experience is not reckoning but doing. Heidegger’s pragmatism in Being and Time fails to get further than tool use.
Tools can assist in doing, but they are not a substitute for doing. Doing is primary. A calculator does not make one a better tight-rope walker. In
the constant dunamis of life, technology
is unable to keep up. Tools can only be in the present, while Dasein flies
into the future. Utilitarian toolish thinking accordingly cannot open an ethos, a practice of sustaining
enduring community. Yet it is often the first thing taught in an ethics course. It allows discussion of the good and of
value, so is a step close to ethics than scientific standards of objectivity, impartiality and distance. But
the utilitarian calculus is indifferent to the individual and governs by reckoning rather than care. So, for
example, the US health care system is oriented to serve those who can pay rather than those who are sick – it treats people who are sick, but
not necessarily the sick who are people. Utilitarianism cannot ground communities; it is homelessness. Ursula Le Guin’s
story ‘The ones who walk away from Omelas’ describes a perfect city of happiness, Omelas. It is made possible by a single child, kept in a small,
dark room sitting in its own filth, with no human contact except an occasional kick. This city runs a utilitarian calculus of the greatest good for all
except one against the absolute suffering of that one. Some who go to see this child then leave Omelas, Le Guin writes, ‘they do not come back.
The place they go toward is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it
does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.’ (Le Guin 1977, 477) No-one understands
them. They are unheimliche.
 Scenario Planning---1NC
Scenario analysis is fundamentally rooted in human management which reinforces
neoliberalism and should be rejected.
Marzac 18, [Robert P. Marzec is Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia.
“Securing the future in the anthropocene: A critical analysis of the millennium ecosystem assessment
scenarios”, Elementa, [Link] Accessed 7-25-2024, 2018]//MCN
For reasons of security: Why narrative lacks ontological thought in the MA This absence of a concern for imagining different forms of human
subjectivity brings me around to the problematic relation the MA takes to the (very) human activity of storytelling, and back to the
qualitative/quantitative counterpoint I focalized in my opening. The Working Group clearly believes
in a fundamental difference
between the qualitative/narrative/words and the quantitative mathematical modelling/numbers
registers of future scenario building. Like any good novelist—who does extensive research on the history of her topic, who looks
into mounds of “data” in preparing to imagine a world for her characters, who rigorously considers how her characters will confront and
hopefully overcome these very real contextual barriers of existence—the Working Group authors diligently incorporate the mountainous
amounts of numbers, graphs, data, and modelling results that are crucial for telling a story worthy of our consideration. Yet the characterization
of “narrative,” as we saw above, would appear to be limited in terms of its relation to the human potential for creativity. As mentioned above,
we’re reminded in the “background” section of the MA that narrative is seen as a force that needs to be tempered by
empirical data. I would like to trouble this seemingly logical representation of storytelling. Narrative in the humanities and social sciences
is no easily defined concept. As the literary critic J. Hillis Miller argues, narrative is ubiquitous, and appears in multiple
forms: “As adults, we hear, read, see, and tell stories all day long—for example, in the newspaper, on television, in encounters with co-
workers or family members. In a continuous silent internal activity, we tell stories to ourselves all day long. Jokes are a form of narration.
Advertising is another: ‘Use this product, and then you will feel much better.’ At night we sleep, and our unconscious minds tell us more stories
in our dreams, often exceedingly strange ones” (Miller, 1995). Storytelling may be ongoing, and active in multiple venues, but why storytelling
appears to be so ontologically essential is not an easy question to answer: “what psychological or social functions do stories serve? Just why do
we need stories?” (Miller, 1995). As Miller points out, there is an incredibly diverse set of theories about narrative, and that very salient fact
stands as evidence that narrative cannot be taken lightly. Unfortunately, the pressures of contemporary existence tend to push our awareness
of narrative outside the framework of our daily, complex lives. Social inequalities, economic demands, political violence, and now ecological
destruction and climate change would seem to demand that “reality,” not storytelling, should be our focus. The MA’s imperative
to
focus more heavily on generating pragmatic, plausible future realities rather than unhinged speculations
is thus a symptom of our ecologically troubled times. Such a demand is a forcing that must surely impact
the ontological essence of the creative narrative event, steering the imagination towards more
utilitarian ends. These pressures are no doubt what informs the Working Group’s understanding of “narrative.” The MA narrative of
potential future scenarios seeks to situate a secure and stable (sustainable) human cultural and
technological architecture on top of the fluidity of (political and ecological) life. This is a noble cause. But
herein also lies one of the central ontological and ethical dilemmas peculiar to the Anthropocene. 6 As has
been widely and extensively documented over the course of more than three decades, the anthropogenic geological forcing of
the planet’s ecosystems is in the process of introducing increased ecological and human insecurity —in
terms of food and water security, habitat degredation, species decline and extinction, biome resiliency weakening, increased precipitation and
flooding, increased drought—the list continues to lengthen (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; IPCC, 2007; IPCC, 2014). The scale of
these insecurities is unprecedented, raising issues of human and ecological security to the level of an existential threat. However,
during
almost the same period of time, the concept of “security” has become not only one of the essential
practices of contemporary politics, but also an “increasingly dominant paradigm of government in
contemporary politics” (Agamben, 2005). Features that previously characterized totalitarian forms of government—the centralization
of power within executive branches, the declarations of “states of emergency” and martial law, the suspension of citizen rights, and the military
measures necessary for imposing continual GDP growth on finite ecosystems— have begun to appear increasingly in democratic societies and
become a defining element of civil society (Agamben, 2005; Pease 2009). This
growth of security-oriented cultural
narratives and political paradigms risks overpowering the kind of alternative narrative potentials of
sustainability and human subjectivity I referenced above. For instance, since the publication of the MA and the IPCC’s
Fourth Assessment Report the United States Department of Defense and security institutions such as The Center for a New American Security
have been more vocal about climate change and other environmental problems—organizing conferences, producing colloquium briefs, issuing
extensive reports and strategic communication plans, and publishing volumes in order to coordinate “public awareness” of Anthropocene
threats (Marzec, 2015).
National and international defense departments and security councils have begun to
explicitly characterize climate change as a “threat multiplier” capable of generating a more expansive
war on terror (Burke and Parthemore, 2009), and military and security institutions have staged climate change
war games (Tollefson, 2008; Aton, 2017). These efforts certainly make the case for Anthropocene threats, but they also attempt to steer
civil society towards a particular militarized understanding of “adaptation” (which is defined as the preparation for inevitable ecological
disasters to come) rather than “mitigation” (reducing or preventing ecological destruction). For instance, during the Center for a New American
Security’s 2008 Climate Change War Game, players initially focused their efforts on sustainability challenges. However, players eventually found
sustainability efforts to be a tactically troublesome distraction from national and international security: “A focus on cutting greenhouse gas
emissions runs the risk of crowding out full consideration of adaptation challenges” (Burke and Parthemore, 2009). In the wake of this concern,
game players refocused their attention on security measures rather than sustainability. This concentration on national
and international security is certainly not surprising, given the source. Nonetheless, this focalization on a militarized conception
of security is now part of a larger cultural momentum, one that has become a central and defining
existential component of human life (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016). If efforts centered on imagining new forms of sustainability
pose a threat to security demands, one can imagine how the imaginative work of generating speculative sustainable futures may eventually be
deemed a potential security risk. Security is, of course, of paramount importance if we are to confront the growing loss of habitats and
biodiversity, and address the equally serious issues of food and water security. Yet, as with narrative, there are different forms of security and
different ontological reasons for imagining how security systems will unfold and be deployed. These larger ontological features of security form
part of the background of the MA scenarios. This is especially noticeable in the Order from Strength scenario, with its focus on tribalism and
regional conflict. But as the Working Group also informs us in its background explanatory sections, the kind
of scenario building
influencing conceptions of security in the MA have their history in the discipline of “future studies” as
conceived during the first decades of the Cold War by the U.S. Department of Defense and defense contractors
such as the RAND corporation: “Scenario analysis has its roots in the strategic planning exercises and war
games devised in the early years of the cold war” (Raskin, 2005). We are told too that the “direct antecedent” of the
scenarios is the “second wave” in scenario development, which began with corporate scenario planning in the 1970s (Raskin, 2005). The fact
that a military and a corporate genealogy form the declared lineage of the scenarios is by no means a tributary matter. The corporate “second
wave” of future studies as established in this politico-scientific genealogy is presented as a major development, a new epistemological
direction. However, corporate and military fields have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism, as Manuel De Landa reveals at great
length in his War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991). That is, ontologically speaking, they are of the same essence. In fact, as Frederick
Taylor himself pointed out over a hundred years ago in his seminal Principles of Scientific Management (1911) the impetus for his great
assembly line idea came from observing military camps and their maneuvers and drills. This general diffusion of a militarized focus on security
across a larger cultural spectrum—what I have termed elsewhere “environmentality”—has been gradually developing over the course of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Marzec, 2015).7 We must ask ourselves what might happen if security becomes the fundamental basis of
narrative, or even the reigning feature of imagination itself. Elements of this kind of militarized security appear most heavily in the MA’s Order
from Strength scenario, but the other scenarios also place similar emphases on security in one form or another. In
TechnoGarden the forcing of a global economy around sustainable technologies sees a number of “unelected technocrats” affiliated with
corporations and NGOs come to power (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005c). The
“increased enforcement of global
environmental and civil regulations by technocrats lead to an intense series of ‘police and national
building’ wars” (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005c). Ecological projects are “backed by military force,” and in
order for the entire global system to function properly, these kinds of security measures are emphasized
as a basic necessity of human existence (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005c). “Global Orchestration” places
similar emphases on national and international security when the solutions imposed by large-scale
technological solutions and global economic orders generate unforeseen “ecological surprises” in the form
of infectious diseases, fisheries collapse, aquafer depletion, etc. (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005c). The heavyhanded control
necessary for Global Orchestration cannot handle the kind of “crossscale ecological feedbacks” that arise from such a rigidly securitized system
(Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005c). Even the Adapting Mosaic scenario—the most flexible system—sees military conflict unavoidable
in certain regions of the world. Narrative and transformation As we have seen, the MA Working Group grounds “ future
studies” as a
discipline in the militarized mentality of the Cold War (the “first wave”) and early neoliberal
development (the “second wave”). But there is a much culturally broader and historically extensive literary canon of
futureoriented works that is worrisomely absent from this disciplinary framework. There is, for instance, no mention of the field of utopian
studies, a discipline comprised by works that attempt to construct sustainable and egalitarian forms of existence. These works are part of a
lengthy literary canon of future studies: Plato’s Republic, Euhemerus’s paradise island in Sacred History, Christine de Pizan’s women’s utopian
city in The Book of the City of Ladies, Thomas More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campenella’s The City of the Sun, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis,
Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Morris’s News from Nowhere,
B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and dozens more. Instead the authors establish a framework of narratives that place
more importance on national security and the economy. As I mentioned briefly above, narrative in the humanities is understood to involve acts
of both order-making and order-giving (Miller, 1995). As Terry Eagleton has argued, narrative—and literature in general—is part of the political
“way we organize our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves” (Eagleton, 1996). In this sense, storytelling helps address
the need to provide sometimes lengthy, sometimes momentary forms of stability. We can also understand these forms of stability in terms of
maintaining a healthy and productive sense of security. There are certainly many narratives that make this kind of healthy securitizing their
prime directive. Other
types of narratives, however, warn us of what can happen when security becomes a
predominant political paradigm, and an essential rationale for existence in all its rebellious variety. Almost
all the works I listed just above would fall into this category. They reveal the limitations and oftentimes violence of human manufactured
systems of security. As
such they serve as a doorway to the ontological—to, that is, an awareness and
subsequent critique of the distinguishing way things are. This enables us to rethink the concepts humans
have created, the values they hold, and the behaviors they have adopted (the ontic) . In the speculative fictions
of narrative, humans learn, to return to Miller, to “experiment with possible selves” (Miller, 1995). We learn what places have been made
available for humans to occupy—what humanist theorists refer to as “subject positions” (Hall, 1997). A human subject is never a metaphysically
free-floating, disinterestedly thinking, context-less being (despite the fact that some through history have attempted to constitute humans in
precisely this fashion—the colonial landlord presenting himself as innately superior to his colonized subject is one example). Cultural and
historical contexts create subject positions for us. These positions are not merely secondary constructs hiding a more fundamental Self. They
are the positions in and from which we come to live, think, hope, and dream. This means that these positions influence and sometimes even
govern how we think and act, and how we develop our individualized (and frequently massproduced) identifications with the world. Because
these positions are constructs, this means that they are not, as with any manufactured entity, absolutely and unquestionably binding. In these
positions humans come to be what they are, but the essence of what it means to be human changes from one historical epoch to the next,
from one culture to the next. The most insightful speculative narratives open the potential to fundamentally rethink the nature of the world
and the subject positions given to humans. Such insight requires that we let go of those things that make us feel most secure. We should not be
surprised that environmental concerns were beyond the horizon of these first two waves of scenario building as defined by the MA Working
Group. For introducing the environment into modern cultural and political systems of human power is a rebellious act, one that calls for a
fundamental transformation in how humans constitute their sense of human existence in the world. The philosopher and political and literary
critic Jacques Rancière offers us a felicitous description of the kind of rebellious narratives that refuse to reproduce the subject positions we’ve
been naturalized to accept out of hand. He characterizes a truly ethical and political act as a narrative that makes “the part of no part” appear
(Rancière, 1999). The “part of no part” is not simply a marginalized constituency that already exists. The phrase names a potential form of
subjectivity that has yet to exist—precisely because of an imbalance of power in the sociopolitical system. Furthermore, the part of no part
begins to make its appearance in and through the speculative space of narrative—which can be an act of speech, or an act of writing. In this
sense, the potential for transformation is first made possible in the realm of narrative. The part of no part, according to Rancière, “names a
fundamental wrong” in its act of drawing attention to the imbalances of power. The significant point to draw from this is that narrative— fiction
—names the space in and through which we can begin the process of creating a different empirical reality. The MA scenarios,
in part,
offer this kind of ontological critique of current systems, and they in turn offer future systems that
have the potential for reorganizing the state of human and nonhuman existence. But in neglecting the
nature of human subjectivity, and in foregrounding the need for security without ontologically
thinking the very essence of security in the Anthropocene era, they end up reinforcing current
neoliberal subject formations and structures. Only through the creation of new forms of subjectivity can
we generate new conceptions of politics, sociality, and ethics. Such new forms would, in turn, bring with them new
contexts for recreating behaviors and values that speak to that immense but increasingly impoverished ecological element of existence that
globally dominant human societies and their many apparatuses of economic and political development have thus far given little or no part.
The addendum of “extinction outweighs” to “black lives are affected too” is the Slave
State’s advertisement that pornotropes black flesh a fungible tool for its existential
project---that ritual reputation is inseparable from the episteme of slavery and
ensures complacency---turns case.
Warren ’18 [Calvin; 2018; Associate African American Studies at Emory University; Ontological Terror;
Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation, “THE INVENTION OF THE NEGRO AND THE NECESSITY OF BLACK
BEING,” p. 45-48]

In this schematic, the body is a metaphor for instrumentality or abject use value . Spillers suggests that this body “is
reduced to a thing, to being for the captor.” With the death of African existence (the flesh) an oppres- sive mode of existence is imposed on the
Negro. This existence is unlike human being. The human being’s mode of existence is to be for itself, and this being for itself is the structure of
care between Dasein and Being. Black being is invented, however, precisely to secure the human’s mode of
existence. Reading Spillers’s metaphysical schema through Heidegger’s, we could suggest that the black body or this “thing, being for
the captor,” is invented to serve as the premier tool or equipment for human being’s existential project
(and I would argue that this equipment is not equivalent in form to the human , even if the structure of tool-being,
as Graham Harman would call it, provides a general explanatory frame).37 In other words, the mode of existence for black
being is what Heidegger would call “availableness.” Availableness is “the way of being of those entities
which are defined by their use in the whole.”38 To exist as “a thing, being for the captor” is to inhabit a mode of existence
dominated by internecine use and function. Black being, then, is invented not just to serve the needs of economic interest and cupidity, but
also to fulfill the ontological needs of the human. This thing is something like Heidegger’s equipment—an object that when used with such
regularity becomes almost invisible, or trans- parent, to the user (blackness is often unthought because the world uses it with such regularity;
antiblackness is the systemization of both the use of blackness and the forgetting/concealment of black being). Utility eclipses the thing itself.
We must, then, understand antiblackness as a global, 46 Chapter One systemic dealing with black bodies,
as available equipment. Heidegger considers dealings the way the Being of entities, or equipment, is
revealed phenomenologically through the use of this equipment . Antiblack dealings with black bodies do
not expose the essential unfolding, or essence, of the equipment; rather, the purpose of antiblack
dealings is to systemically obliterate the flesh, and to impose nothing onto that obliterated space—care
and value are obsolete in this encounter.39 Therefore, equipment structure is predicated on the premier use of blacks within the network of
equipment. In other words, black use cuts across every equip- mental assignment, making it the ultimate equipment. Why
does black
equipment cut across all assignments, and why is it the tool Dasein relies on to commence its existential
journey? We might say the answer to these difficult questions is that the essence of black equipment is nothing— being is
not there. If Heidegger assumes that equipment will reveal its being through its usage, then he did not
anticipate the invention of the Negro— equipment in human form, embodied nothingness. Using black
equipment reveals existence but not being (existence as non-being for Greek philosophers, according to Heidegger in
Introduction to Metaphysics). This puzzle is what black philosophy must investigate, must think through, to understand the continuity of
antiblackness.

Spillers describes black being is a “living laboratory,” and we can conceptualize this laboratory as the source of
availableness for modernity. A living laboratory is a collection of instruments for carrying out ontological
experimentation, or the construction of the human self. Black beings constitute this irresistible source of availableness for the world.
Saidiya Hartman meditates on the ontological utility of black being for the human when she states:

The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal
senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave—that is, the joy made possible by virtue
of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity—and by the extensive capacities of property
—that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently, the
fungability of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the
projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the
surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.

40 Instruments, tools, and equipment are interchangeable/replaceable; this is starkly different from
human being, whose existential journey in the world renders it incalculable and unique . When I suggest
that black being is pure function or utility, I mean precisely the way this being is used as a site of
projection for the human’s desires, fantasies, and onto- logical narcissism. The body that Spillers presents is a necessary
invention because it is through the human’s engagement with instruments (tools and equipment) that the
human comes to understand the self. To be for the human is to serve as the empty vessel for the human’s reflection on the world
and self. In short, what I am suggesting is that black being is invented as an instrument to serve the needs of the human’s ontological project.
This use, or function, exceeds involuntary labor and economic interest. It is this particular antiblack use that philosophical discourse has
neglected. The Negro, as invention, is the dirty secret of ontometaphysics.

If we follow Heidegger’s understanding of the human being as Dasein (being there) and thrown into the world, then black being emerges as a
different entity: the Negro is precisely the permanence of not being there [Nicht Da Sein], an absence from ontology, an existence that is not
just gone away (as if it has the potential to return to being there) but an exis- tence that is barred from ever arriving as an ontological entity,
since it is stripped of the flesh.41 To assert that black being is not of the world is to suggest, then, that black being lives not just outside of itself,
but outside of any structure of meaning that makes such existence valuable. Black being is situated in a spatiotemporality for which we lack a
grammar to capture fully. Spillers’s body, then, is the symbolic and material signifi- cation of absence from Being. To be black and nothing is not
to serve as an aperture of Being for the Negro; rather, it is to constitute something inassimilable and radically other, straddling nothing and
infinity. The Negro is the execration of Being for the human; it is with the Negro that the terror of ontology, its emptiness, is projected and
materialized. This is the Negro’s function.

Inventing the Negro is essential to an ontometaphysical order that wants to eradicate and obliterate such ontological terror (the terror of 48
Chapter One the nothing); and since ontometaphysics is obsessed with schematization and control, it needs the Negro to bear this unbearable
burden, the execration of Being. To return to our proper metaphysical question “How is it going with black being?,” we can say that neither
progressive legislation nor political movements have been able to transform black being into human being, from fleshless bodies to recognized
ontologies. Spillers also seems to preempt the question when she states, “Even though the captive flesh/body has been
‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter . . . it is as if neither
time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as [the flesh] is ‘murdered’ over
and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless
disguise.”42 This onticide, the death of the flesh/African existence, continues impervious to legal, historical, and
political change. This is to say that the problem of black being, as both a form of ontological terror for the human and a site of vicious
strategies of obliteration, remains. To ask the (un)asked question “How is it going with black being?” is to inquire about the resolution of the
problem of black and nothing, ontometaphysically, as it imposes itself onto the Negro. The answer to the Negro Question, then, is that the
ritualistic and repetitive murder of the flesh, the primordial relation, is absolutely necessary and
indispensable in an antiblack world. And as long as the world exists, this murder must continue.
 Link - China
Ethno-racial paranoia subtends geostrategic conflict between the U.S. and China –
both rely on carceral and extractive relations to Black people while imagining
themselves as racially progressive, civil, and thus superior. Interpreting the conflict
through neoclassical realism generates “an internal loop” of affective investments in
interdependent imperial formations.
Zhang & Liu ‘22[Charlie Yi Zhang – Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the
University of Kentucky. Wen Liu – Assistant Research Professor at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia
Sinica. Casey Lee – Staff Member of the Tennessee Historical Commission. “Ethno-Racial Paranoia and
Affective Cold Warism: Remapping Rival US-PRC Imperial Formations” American Quarterly, Volume 74,
Number 3, September 2022, pp. 499-521. [Link]
casa_token=M7fhyQQDcvQAAAAA:GnMI0pMRr-OuMddX6N7vEmvSWde97It-
JaCr1Gsttk45gvxcy3IyljC0KX_C3uZydZd_iU5Z]

Ethno-race, once again, becomes a critical site of geostrategic confrontation as the new Cold War
unfolds. When the Trump administration’s blatant disregard for human lives, as manifested in the US’s ill-managed response to the COVID-
19 pandemic received overwhelming criticism in April 2020, Trump himself coined and used the racialized term “Chinese virus” to deflect critics’
attention from his mishandling of the pandemic to his “communist” opponent.62 Feeding on the infrastructure of ethno-racial
paranoia, this narrative peeled back affective layers in US history to retrieve the dreadful memory of the
yellow peril, effectively revamping the pathologizing strategy that targeted Chinese immigrants for low-
paying menial work ever since the nineteenth century. The racial slur, “Chinese virus,” kindled waves of anti-
Asian sentiment and hate crimes in the US, as well as among many of its allies that were also hit hard by the virus. These
disturbing developments provide telling examples of the ethno-racially informed paranoid measures to
contain both the deadly disease and the racialized bodies that allegedly spread it in order to destroy the
Western world. Across the Pacific, the Chinese government also turns to ethno-race as a key conduit to serve
its interests in amplifying Cold Warism in its escalating competition with the US. After the murder of
George Floyd in 2020, Beijing quickly condemned racial discrimination in the US as a “persistent social ill.”63 Chinese-language media
further exploited this tragedy by extensively covering the US police and National Guard’s brutal crackdown
on antiracism protests. Such coverage, however, was not indicative of the PRC’s condemnation of police violence but a strategy to
justify extreme policing tactics used to suppress the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement (Anti-ELAB
Movement), in which millions of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest the Chinese government’s encroachment on Hong Kong’s
autonomy stipulated by the Basic Law since its handover to China in 1997. For instance, Xinhua, the PRC’s official state press
agency, argued that Washington’s condemnation of Beijing’s measures in Hong Kong are hypocritical
because violent crackdowns on peaceful protestors are “not uncommon” in the US.64 In doing so, the
PRC’s critique of the US government functioned to deflect any criticism of its own wrongdoings. The PRC
has further utilized ethno-racial paranoia to generate political divisions between Hongkongers and mainlanders by dismissing the Hong Kong
protests as anti-Chinese xenophobia.65 The PRC’s reliance on ethno-racial paranoia to deflect criticism is best illustrated in a tweet by Hua
Chunying, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. On May 30, 2020, Hua retweeted a statement posted earlier that day by Morgan
Ortagus, the former spokesperson of the US Department of State: “This is a pivotal moment for the world. It will go down in history. Freedom
loving people around the world must stand with the rule of law and hold to account the Chinese Communist Party, which has flagrantly broken
its promise to the people of Hong Kong.” When retweeting Ortagus’s tweet, Hua added “I can’t breathe,” a slogan associated with the Black
Lives Matter movement originating from Eric Garner’s last words as he was strangled to death by a New York City police officer, as a mockery of
the hypocrisy and double standard evident in the spokesperson’s tweet. By appropriating this powerful slogan, Hua tried to call out the US
government’s violent mistreatment of Black people to invalidate its moral advantage over the PRC. Moreover, Hua also leveraged a
meticulously crafted Black-friendly image to boost the PRC’s moral legitimacy on the world stage.
For context, even after the end of the old Cold War, thePRC has been continuing to portray racism as a uniquely Western
problem. In the same vein as Maoist China’s manipulation of Afro-Asian solidarity, the current Chinese government promotes a
Black-friendly self-image in order to advance global outreach and double down on state-driven
investments in Africa. In popular culture and official discourses, the PRC depicts itself as a supportive and caring
friend of Africa that provides genuine aid for national economic development across the continent . This
“yellow savior” discourse is clearly demonstrated in an infamous China Central Television comedy skit performed during the 2018 New
Year’s Gala. Taking a celebratory stance on Chinese-African cooperation, this skit put Chinese actors in “blackface” to depict African people. It
commemorated both Chinese economic advances on African lands and African people’s gratitude for Chinese assistance with modernization.66
Here, ethnoracial comparison is framed no longer in the Maoist anti-imperialist sentiment of Third
World Liberation but in a one-sided narrative of modernization where the PRC appears as a superior
savior to all Africans, who are depicted as passive subjects, devoid of agency, waiting to be
modernized by the Chinese. The hypocrisy of the PRC’s Black-friendly image is further illustrated in discriminatory policies that
targeted diasporic Africans living in Guangzhou, China, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Home to the PRC’s largest African community,
Guangzhou received overwhelming criticism and international backlash for its unfair treatment of Africans after the outbreak of the pandemic.
In April 2020, the Guangzhou municipal government announced intensified scrutiny of all foreign nationals as a way to better contain COVID-19
transmission from overseas travelers. In practice, the
Guangzhou government singled out Africans as the main target
of draconian policies even though many of them had no recent history of overseas travel, subjugating
them to forced screenings and quarantines. In some extreme cases, landlords evicted Africans while hotels
turned them away without valid reasons, resulting in a spike in homelessness. Guangzhou’s racist and discriminatory policy was
quickly criticized by several African countries, including Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria. The state-owned Global Times furiously dismissed
allegations of racism as “absurd and nothing more than a malicious attempt to sow discord between China and African countries.”67 Similarly,
Zhao Lijian, another spokesperson of the Chinese For- eign Ministry, denied accusations of targeted mistreatment,68 and reiterated the
discourse of Afro-Asian solidarity. According to Zhao, “China and Africa are good friends, partners and brothers” whose friendship “is forged on
the basis of joint efforts to seek national independence, liberation, economic development, and better livelihood in the past decades.”69 This
incident clearly illustrates how the PRC utilizes ethno-racial discourse to defend its racist practices. The examples above reveal that ethno-
racism, contrary to the PRC’s claim, is a problem far from unique to the capitalist West. Inlight of the mass incarceration of
Uyghur Muslims in labor camps where they perform forced labor creating products that benefit many
multinational corporations,70 the 2020 policy designating Mandarin the primary instructional language
(instead of Mongolian) in Inner Mongolia,71 and the open discrimination against Africans in China that
crescendoed during the pandemic,72 ethno-racism can hardly be seen as absent in “socialist” China .
Turning a blind eye to rampant racial and ethnic discrimination across Chinese society, the official rhetoric touts the PRC as a
trustworthy ally of both African and African American peoples .73 As the PRC emerges as an overpowering player in
the global market, this paranoid polarization of the racist US versus a Black-friendly China should be further interrogated. While acknowledging
that the PRC’s criticism of the US’s deep-rooted problems of anti-Black racism and police brutality should not be dismissed, our goal in this
essay is to use these geostrategically loaded rhetorical battles to unpack how ethno-racial paranoia functions
to gather and spread
momentum for Cold Warism through hostile affects circulated between rival imperial forces . On the
one hand, many US politicians’ condemnation of the “communist” PRC for violating the basic human
rights and freedoms of ethnic minorities serves to consolidate the superior image of the US as a
bastion of freedom and democracy for subjugated groups. On the other, the PRC defends its moral
superiority over the US by repeatedly invoking the popular discourses of antimperialism and racial
solidarity. Ethno-racial paranoia thus rounds up our affective attachments in an internal loop and
forgoes any effective analyses of interdependent imperial formations . It also prevents us from addressing the actual
problems of ethno-racism that underline the functioning of both the US and PRC. In the emerging new Cold War, the US and PRC have both
strategically manipulated ethno-racial paranoia to buttress and forward their imperialist interests while deviating from more material
commitments to achieving social justice, thus making it more difficult for the concerns of minoritarian subjects to be heard. In the last section,
we turn to the pro-democracy and self- determination movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan to illustrate the obstacles to political mobilization
in the periphery under the affective infrastructure of Cold Warism fueled by ethno-racial paranoia. Instead of a depressed collective loosely
bound by shared hopelessness, these activist groups “lay the basis for a sideways step into political engagement in a disappointing world.”74
Fears of an aggressive China contribute to a cycle of war-profiteering based in
Sinophobia.
Qiao ‘20 [Collective, 9-29-2020, "Sinophobia, Inc.: Understanding the Anti-China Industrial Complex
— Hampton Institute," Hampton Institute, [Link]
understanding-the-anti-china-industrial-complex // ]

The United States’ alliance is barreling towards conflict with China . In recent months, the U.S. government has
taken unprecedented steps to upend normal relations with China: sanctioning Communist Party of China
officials, banning Chinese tech companies like TikTok and Huawei, interrogating and surveilling Chinese students and
scientists, and even forcing the Houston Chinese consulate to close. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls it an end
to “blind engagement” with a Chinese state he labels an existential threat to the “free world.” And the other members
of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance—Canada, New Zealand, and the UK—are by and large caving to U.S. pressure to take
parallel measures to isolate China. Yet the Western policy doctrine of “great power competition” with China has not been
accompanied by a robust public debate. Instead, this blustering state rhetoric has coincided with public views of China hitting historic lows.
Thanks in part to racist corporate media coverage which blamed China for the spread of COVID-19, unfavorable views of China are skyrocketing. Pew Research reported in July that

unfavorable views of China had reached “new highs” in the U.S.—more than doubling from 35 to 73 percent
between 2005 and 2020. Australian trust in their northern neighbors is even worse: in 2020, 77 percent of Australians expressed distrust in China, compared to just 38 percent in 2006. As the
U.S. and other Western nations are mired by the crises of COVID-19, unemployment, wage stagnation, and systemic racism, the fictitious “China threat” should be the least of our worries.
After all, China has made clear time and time again that it wants peaceful relations and cooperation with the U.S, and China’s foreign policy principle of a “community of shared future for

humankind” is enshrined in the Communist Party constitution. Make no mistake— the New Cold War on China is a one-sided escalation for
conflict led by the U.S. and its allies. The fact that Western public opinion on China is marching in lockstep with the State Department’s call for Cold War
aggression reflects the convergence of state, military, and corporate media interests which monopolize our media ecosystem. Behind the State Department’s

bluster and the military “Pivot to Asia” exists a quiet, well-oiled machine that is busy manufacturing
consent for war on China. Too often, the hawkish policy stances it enshrines are taken as objective ‘truth’ rather
than as pro-war propaganda working in the interests of weapons corporations and political elites. We
call it Sinophobia, Inc.—an information industrial complex where Western state funding, billion dollar
weapons manufacturers, and right-wing think tanks coalesce and operate in sync to flood the media
with messages that China is public enemy number one. Armed with state funding and weapons industry sponsors, this handful of
influential think tanks are setting the terms of the New Cold War on China. The same media ecosystem
that greased the wheels of perpetual war towards disastrous intervention in the Middle East is now
busy manufacturing consent for conflict with China. By saturating our news and newsfeeds with anti-China messages, this media machine is
convincing average people that a New Cold War is in their interests. In reality, the hype of an imagined ‘China threat’ only serves the

interests of the political elites and defense industry CEOs who stand to profit from this disastrous
geopolitical escalation. WHO’S WHO IN SINOPHOBIA INC. In order to mount a sustained challenge to the New Cold War on China, the anti-war movement must develop a
critical media literacy with which to see through this imperialist media machine. A close eye reveals that a handful of think tanks, pundits, and “security experts” show up time and time again
in corporate media coverage of China. What’s more, these “independent” experts have explicit ties to the weapons industry and the state departments of the U.S. and its allies. The Australian
Strategic Policy (ASPI) is one such actor. It’s been called “the think tank behind Australia’s changing view of China” and decried by progressive Australian politicians as “hawks intent on
fighting a new cold war.” But despite its right-wing slant, ASPI saturates Western media across the political spectrum—from Breitbart and Fox News to CNN and the New York Times. The
broad legitimation of think tanks such as ASPI is one factor behind today’s bipartisan support for imperialist aggression on China. From national defense and cybersecurity to human rights

China hawks of ASPI weaponize a variety of issues in support of their call for military buildup vis-a-vis China. ASPI and its staff have
allegations, the

called for visa restrictions on Chinese students and scientists, alleged a secret Chinese biological weapons program, and
claimed China is exploiting Antarctica for military advantagesz. No matter how outrageous the allegation, ASPI finds warm welcome in a
media ecosystem hungry for controversy and a geopolitical climate inching closer to military aggression on China by the day. When it comes down to it, that’s exactly what ASPI wants. ASPI
executive director Peter Jennings unabashedly describes himself as a “national security cowboy,” saying that “Australia needs more cowboy and less kowtow.” As Australian PM Scott

Morrison has pushed record defense spending, Jennings called for even higher targets, saying “if we’re
sliding towards war, the money must flow.” This belligerent attitude towards military confrontation makes sense in the context of ASPI’s financials. Despite
 ASPI—like many of the biggest players in
being cited as a ‘non-partisan expert’ on all things China, when it comes to the profits of war, ASPI has skin in the game. That’s because

Sinophobia, Inc—receives major funding from the Australian military and U.S. weapons contractors like

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, ASPI received 69% of it’s funding—over AU$7 million—from the Australian
department of defense and federal government. Another AU$1.89 million came from overseas government agencies—including the Embassies of Israel and

Japan, the U.S. Department of Defense and State Department and the NATO Strategic Comms Center . Far
from being a non-partisan counterbalance to imperialist state agendas, the same governments pushing geopolitical aggression on China are in fact ASPI’s primary funders. Disturbingly, another
AU$1.1 million came from defense industries and the private sector, including Lockheed Martin ($25,000 for a “strategic sponsorship”) and Northrop Grumman ($67,500 for an “ASPI
Sponsorship”). In a blatant display of their conflict of interest, the same weapons corporations sponsoring ASPI’s anti-China call to arms are also supplying the New Cold War on China. In 2016,
the Australian department of defense awarded Lockheed Martin a AU$1.4 billion combat “combat system integrator” contract as part of its Future Submarines program to “stand up” to
China. Under the same program, defense contractor Naval Group—which contributed a $16,666.68 “ASPI Sponsorship” in 2019-2020—was awarded a $605 million contract for submarine

design. The scope of potential profit from stoking military conflict with China is enormous . Under the auspices of the “Pivot
to Asia,” the U.S. has ramped up arms exports to allies such as Japan and Australia as part of a new anti-
China containment doctrine. From weapons exports totalling $7.8 billion to Australia and $6.28 billion to South Korea between 2014 and 2018 alone, to loosened
regulations allowing military-drone exports to India, these bloated deals are an absolute windfall for U.S. weapons manufacturers. Every dramatic report on the

‘China threat’ funnels towards the same result: more warships in the South China Sea, more
reconnaissance planes sent into China’s airspace, and more missile and anti-missile stations across U.S.
‘allies’ and client states in the Asia-Pacific. The New Cold War on China means billions in profit for U.S. weapons manufacturers, who quietly fund the
‘research’ that provides the justification for increased military buildup vis-a-vis China. A CYCLE OF PERPETUAL WAR This vicious cycle of the military-industrial

complex drives Sinophobia Inc. Having watched this convergence of corporate media, weapons manufacturing, and State Department interests manufacture consent
for the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we should be able to recognize the pattern. But so far, it looks like the same toolkit is working yet again. First, ‘independent’

security experts such as ASPI, funded by Western governments and their weapons industries, provide
‘irrefutable’ evidence of the so-called China threat. Second, these reports are picked up, cited, and amplified
by the corporate media and then absorbed by the general public. Third, Western nations and their allies
cite these reports on the ‘China threat’ to justify their own geopolitical ambitions and military aggression
towards China. And finally, defense departments award billion dollar contracts to weapons corporations to
equip the militaristic “Pivot to Asia”—completing the cycle by padding the pockets of the very
corporations funding the think tanks we started with. Of course, ASPI is just one of several heavy hitters in the anti-China industry. Stalwarts of the
D.C. security realm like the Center for Strategic & International Studies and the Council and Foreign Relations are similarly obliged to their state and military industry donors.

The Center for Strategic & International Studies has been described as one of the most influential think tanks in the world. Its dramatic reports on
Chinese military operations and Chinese “foreign influence” campaigns garner headlines in Forbes, New York Times, and even left-leaning outlets

like Politico. Bonnie Glaser, director of CSIS’s “China Power Project,” is a particularly sought-after commentator on China. She’s demonized Chinese subsidies to domestic industry,

called Belt and Road Initiative a plan to bring countries into “China’s orbit” and “see authoritarianism strengthened,” called to “push back” against China’s foregrounding of Marxism as an

” None of these
alternative to free market neoliberalism, and called “many of the the things the Trump administration has done to highlight the threats that China poses…correct.

corporate media op-ed features, interviews, and press quotes bother to mention that CSIS counts among its “corporation and trade association

donors” Northrop Grumman ($500,000 annual contribution), Boeing, General Atomics, and Lockheed Martin ($200,000-
$499,999 annual contribution), and Raytheon ($100,000-$199,999 annual contribution). Even worse than simply accepting military industry funding, CSIS has held

closed-door meetings with weapons industry lobbyists and lobbied for increased drone exports for the
products of war manufactured by funders such as General Atomic and Lockheed Martin. But instead of calling out this conflict of
interest, corporate media uncritically lifts up these think tanks as supposedly ‘impartial’ security experts. Only a handful of independent news platforms bother to point out these ‘third-party’
interests in paving the way to perpetual war. Instead, these think tank employees are held up as objective experts and lavished with media attention, making them go-to sources for comments

and editorial features on all things China. According to mainstream media, there’s no conflict of interest: only a pending conflict with
China to drum up support for. A BIPARTISAN REVOLVING DOOR The incestuous relationship between the Pentagon, security think tanks, and the private weapons
sector goes far beyond dirty money. High-level diplomats themselves frequently move back and forth from their posts in

the defense department to the boards of weapons corporations and policy institutes, wielding their
insider insights to help weapons corporations rake in federal money. The revolving door of the military-industrial
complex crosses party lines. Take Randall Schriver, a China hawk hand-picked by Steve Bannon to serve as the Trump Administration’s Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. Schriver was the founding president of the Project 2049 Institute, a hardline security think tank funded by weapons giants like Lockheed Martin and
General Atomics and government entities including the Taiwan Ministry of National Defense and the National Endowment for Democracy. Predictably, under Schriver’s leadership, Project
2049 called for increased arms sales to Japan and Taiwan while sounding the alarm on the supposed threat of a “flash invasion” of Taiwan or a “sharp war” with Japan. Not to be outdone,
foreign policy veterans of the Obama Administration got rich forming ‘strategic consultancies’ dedicated to leveraging their insider status to help weapons corporations win federal contracts.

s
Michèle Flournoy, a favored pick for a Biden administration’s defense secretary, erved as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012 and has overlapping roles as a founder of
corporate geopolitics consultant group WestExec Advisors, and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank preaching expertise on “the China challenge” and the “North

Flournoy has decried the

Korea threat” with the help of funding from the usual state and military industry suspects. Given this resumé, it comes as no surprise that

“erosion of American deterrence” and called for new investment and innovation to “maintain the U.S.
military’s edge” in Asia, a clear assurance that a Biden administration would mean new and growing contracts to
old friends in the security industry. ENEMY NUMBER ONE The cogs of the military-industrial-information complex have ensured that the debate on China is all
but nonexistent. Anti-China posturing has become a defining issue of the November presidential election. But there is effectively zero policy distinction between the approaches espoused by
the Biden and Trump camps—only a rhetorical competition playing out in campaign ads and stump speeches to prove who can really be ‘tougher on China.’ The revolving door of Sinophobia

Inc. makes certain that whether Republicans or Democrats come out on top in November, the weapons contracts
will continue to flow. Despite incessant fear mongering over the looming threat of ‘Chinese aggression,’ China has been
explicitly clear that it does not want conflict with the U.S., let alone hot war. In August meetings with the European Union,
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi called for renewed cooperation, proclaiming that “a Cold War would be a step backwards.” Where the
U.S. pursues unilateralism, sanctions, and the threat of military intervention to get its way, China has invested in international organizations ,

stepped up to fund the World Health Organization in the absence of the U.S., and promoted pandemic aid, cooperative
vaccine development, and helped nations suffering under U.S. sanctions fight COVID-19. Make no mistake:
there is no supposed “mutual escalation” or “inter-imperial rivalry” here —U.S. aggression in military
buildup, propaganda and economic sanctions is a one-sided push for conflict and war in spite of
China’s repeated calls for mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and continued engagement premised
on recognition of China’s national sovereignty and dignity. U.S. political elites have turned to
Sinophobia as a bogeyman to distract from the failures of capitalism, neoliberalism, and a violent U.S.
empire that invests more in perpetual war than in basic health care and infrastructure for the
American people. That’s what makes Sinophobia Inc. so effective: mass discontent fomented by an unresolved pandemic, rising
unemployment, and American anxieties over the future can all be shunted onto the ‘real’ threat: China. Sinophobia
Inc. is working overtime to convince average Americans that China—and not white supremacy, capitalism,

and militarism—is the ‘real enemy.’ It’s working: 78% of Americans blame China for the spread of COVID-19—more than blame the Trump
administration itself for its handling of the pandemic. That’s why Congress has rubber-stamped a record defense budget for 2021 while declining to pass pandemic
aid, eviction moratoriums, or other protections for American workers. As
Sinophobia Inc. draws us closer to war on China every
day, it’s up to all of us to jam the gears of this war machine. That means a critical eye to the information apparatus busy
manufacturing consent for a war that will only serve the bottom line of the American empire and the corporations that it serves. The self-fueling war machine of
think tanks, governments, and weapons corporations is chugging along, convincing the masses that conflict with China is in the national interest. But it’s clearer than
ever that it’s the CEOs of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin that stand to profit—at the expense of the rest of us.
 Heg---1NC
US hegemony is white supremacy - massive violence against black and brown people
cloaked in a language of “security” and “stability”
Kizer 20 - MA in Democracy & Governance from Georgetown University, BA in Middle Eastern & North African Studies from UCLA [Kate,
“US HEGEMONY RELIES ON DEHUMANIZATION AND WHITE SUPREMACY,” 6/10/2020, [Link]
dehumanization-and-white-supremacy/, DKP]

When I began writing this column, Black

Hawk helicopters were still circling over Washington, DC, flying low to intimidate
and disperse protestors demanding justice for yet another murder of an unarmed Black person , this time George
Floyd by Minneapolis police.
While the spread of popular uprisings against police brutality across the United States feels like an unprecedented
tipping point, the impunity with which police and military forces operate is not new. Nor is it isolated to
domestic policing. The willingness to weaponize state power against those expressing their discontent
and calls for change has long been a part of both US domestic and foreign policy.
Some Washington national security professionals have made laudable statements committing to do better to address the structural
inequities that keep the profession majority-white and cis-male in the face of this repression. Yet these efforts have not
addressed the fundamental problem at hand: the state violence taking place in streets across the United States is a natural
outgrowth of decades, if not centuries of domestic and foreign policy that first and foremost relies on the
dehumanization of Black and brown people to pursue hegemony at home and abroad. Until we
reckon with this fundamental truth, we will continue to fail to actually address the institutionalized and
structural racism that has led to decade after decade of state violence against Black people in this country and
people of color around the world.
In the United States, this dehumanization has its roots in the founding of our country. The prosperity the white majority in the United
States enjoys today cannot be divorced from the genocide of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans,
all for the economic benefit of white colonizers. The violent domination of the white colonial project and its basis in
exploitation and white saviorism not only defined the foundations of early US society, but is echoed
today here at home, and in US foreign policy.
For decades, the United States military has used many of the same tactics abroad that are used against Black and
brown people by police in the United States. The use of force is never a last resort, but instead the preferred
tool to ensure submission. Local conditions, individual experiences, and other drivers to violence, dissent, or
crime – often rooted in governance failure, human rights abuses, and economic and/or political disenfranchisement – are ignored. Instead,
a more pernicious, dangerous motive is assigned to all members of subjugated groups once one individual decides to resort to violence or
commit a crime.
A violent response is then justified in cloaked language about patriotism, security, and saviorism. The United States
military is undertaking dangerous missions against “extremists” to “save” the Afghan people, to “secure freedom” for
Iraqis; just as in the United States police are keeping the streets of the US “safe,” tracking “extremists” that threaten the status quo and private
property. As the experience of the past several weeks has shown, however, violence
from the oppressive force ultimately
begets more defiance. The idea that violence can quell dissension is ultimately rooted in the
orientalist, racist belief that non-white people are inherently threats that must ultimately be silenced
in order for stability to take hold.
The US government’s use of force is continuously justified by its stated intention to create safety — but safety
for whom? Surely not the countless innocents killed in endless wars abroad, the diaspora communities
surveilled, or the Black people murdered by police here at home. The Trump administration’s current militarized
response to the popular uprisings sweeping the country is merely an outgrowth of long-standing policies that have
devalued Black and brown lives, and ignored the unique injustices and inequities these communities face in achieving safety, well-
being, and liberation. The post-9/11 police state and outdated slavery-era laws merely provide useful levers for Trump to pull in the face of this
new challenge to his power.
If people in power continue to see these latest instances of violence and repression as isolated, unfortunate instances that “don’t reflect who
we are as a nation,” then we will have failed to truly challenge and disrupt the forces and systems at play that have allowed white
supremacy to infiltrate every aspect of US public life, including foreign policy.
The solution is not merely to end the transfer of US military weaponry and equipment to police departments, even though this is an incredibly
important, short-term reform. The
solution lies in a larger awakening in this country and a willingness to confront the systemic
It means accepting that our
racism and white supremacy that drives our government’s engagement domestically and abroad.
current policies empower and export white supremacist violence. It starts with divesting from the
institutions whose primary purpose is to terrorize people of color at home and abroad to maintain
white supremacy – the Pentagon, CBP and ICE, state and municipal police. It begins with investment in restorative and community
solutions to conflict and violence that seek to uplift individuals from poverty, ensure and value the rights and dignity of every human being, and
make amends for past injustices.

Western political ordering gives the illusion of containing US militarization which is

liberal deflection – they disavow the violence inherent to the system in which they
operate – this deflection normalizes imperial control, neoliberal exploitation, and
racialized violence globally.
Morefield 19 (Jeanne Morefield, Professor of Politics at Whitman College, Professorial Fellow at the
Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University, PhD from Cornell University, January 8, 2019,
“Trump’s Foreign Policy Isn’t the Problem,” Boston Review, [Link]
morefield-trump%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-isn%E2%80%99t-problem) gz

After two years of President Donald Trump, critics and commentators are still struggling to make sense of his foreign policy. Despite
some hopes that he might mature into the role of commander in chief, he has continued to thumb his nose at most
mainstream academic frameworks for analyzing and conducting foreign policy. Indeed, what makes
Trump’s interactions with the rest of the world so confusing is the way he flirts with, and then departs
from, the script. He may issue policies and give speeches that include words such as “sovereignty,”
“principled realism,” and “peace through strength,” but they frequently appear cheek by jowl with racist
rants, crass opportunism, nationalist tirades, and unrestrained militarism.

It is this
uncomfortable mixture of familiar and jarring that has proven disconcerting for many mainstream
international relations scholars, particularly those “intellectual middlemen” who straddle the realms of
academia, policy think tanks, and major news outlets. Yet rather than ask how U.S. foreign policy might
have contributed to the global environment that made Trump’s election possible, most have
responded to the inconsistencies of Trump’s world vision by emphasizing its departure from
everything that came before and demanding a return to more familiar times . International relations
experts thus express nostalgia for either the “U.S.-led liberal order” or the Cold War while, in outlets such as
Foreign Affairs and the New York Times, they offer selective retellings of the country’s past foreign
policies that make them look both shinier and clearer than they were . These responses do not offer much insight
into Trump himself, but they do have much to tell us about the discourse of international relations in the United States
today and the way its mainstream public analysts—liberals and realists alike—continue to disavow U.S.
imperialism.

For example, liberal

internationalists such as John Ikenberry argue that Trump is guilty of endangering the
U.S.-led global order. That system, according to Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, emerged after World
War II, when the liberal democracies of the world “joined together to create an international order that
reflected their shared interests,” while simultaneously agreeing , as Ikenberry once put it, to transfer “the reins
of power to Washington, just as Hobbes’s individuals . . . voluntarily construct and hand over power to the Leviathan.” The vision
of cooperating nation-states may have originated in values that first “emerged in the West,” they argue,
but these values have since “become universal.” In this accounting, Trump threatens the stability of U.S.
liberal hegemony in two ways: by retreating from multilateral agreements such as the Iran nuclear
deal, and by refusing to participate in the narrative of enlightened U.S. leadership . Future great threats
to global stability, Ikenberry grumbled, were supposed to come from “hostile revisionist powers
seeking to overturn the postwar order.” Now a hostile revisionist power “sits in the Oval Office.”

By contrast, when
realists such as Stephen Walt or John Mearsheimer criticize Trump, they start from the
position that the liberal world order is a delusion, perpetuated most recently by post–Cold War members of the
“elite foreign policy establishment.” Walt and others rightly point to the baseline hypocrisy of a “liberal Leviathan,” noting that
the current fury over Russian election tampering and cyber espionage rings hollow given the long U.S.
reliance on both strategies. This view accompanies a wistful longing for the putatively gimlet-eyed
realism of the Cold War, a time when U.S. presidents understood that their role was to deter the Soviet
Union, prevent the emergence of dangerous regional hegemons, and preserve “a global balance of
power that enhanced American security.” Seen thus, Trump’s hyperbolic and embarrassing nationalism is a
symptom of the abandonment of great power politics, while his fawning treatment of Vladimir Putin
shatters any remaining hope that his self-styled “principled realism” might take us back to a more
strategically realistic time. In the words of former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, watching the Trump–
Putin news conference was like “watching the destruction of a cathedral.”

But what is Trump actually doing to destroy this cathedral? What makes Trump’s words and behavior so objectionable? Previous presidents
have pulled out of multilateral agreements, entered into disputes with allies, and engaged in protectionism and trade wars. The majority of the
Trump administration’s planned and ongoing military deployments are in regions where the military was already deployed by previous
administrations in the name of the War on Terror. Moreover, Trump’s
national security and national policy statements
are littered with the vocabulary of the very experts who find him so terrifying . What, then, makes
Trump’s foreign policy such a singular threat?

Trump’s foreign policy is disturbing because it is uncanny—both grotesque and deeply familiar. Like a
funhouse mirror, Trump’s vision of the world reflects back a twisted image of U.S. global politics that is
and is not who we are supposed to be. For instance, deterrence strategy may require the rest of the
world to believe that the U.S. president might use nuclear weapons , but the president is not supposed
to hint that he might actually do so. The president is supposed to be concerned with regulating the flow
of immigrants but not reveal that race plays a role in these calculations by blurting the phrase
“shithole countries.” The president is supposed to believe that the United States is the most blessed,
exceptional country on Earth—as Barack Obama put it, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being”— but
not engage in excessive nationalism by making “total allegiance” the “bedrock” of his politics, or
combine it with a commitment to “make our Military so big, powerful & strong that no one will mess
with us.”

Sometimes Trump’s utterances hit so close to home that they surpass uncanniness. In an essay by Sigmund
Freud on the uncanny, Freud says dolls and mannequins unsettle precisely because of the possibility that they might actually be alive, a
discomfort that has inspired nightmares, works of literature, and horror movies. Trump, by contrast, is
a living nightmare. He
opens his mouth and the things-which-must-never- be-said simply fall out . Thus, when Bill O’Reilly asked
him why he supported Putin even though he is a “killer,” Trump shot back, “There are a lot of killers. You
think our country’s so innocent?”
Trump’s willingness to say such things has precipitated an existential crisis in the international relations
world. U.S. foreign policy, as an academic discourse and political practice, is built on the delicate
foundation of what Robert Vitalis has called the “norm against noticing,” This deflective move has long been the
gold standard of international relations; under its rules of play, IR experts act as if the United States has
never been an imperial power and that its foreign policy is not, and has never been, intentionally
racist. The norm against noticing thus distinguishes between the idea of the United States as a
necessary world-historical actor and the reality of how the United States acts.

In that reality, the United States has long been an imperial power with white nationalist aspirations .
Given the racialized nature of U.S. imperial expansion, it makes sense that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted,
in a chapter entitled “The Three Races of the United States,” that the United States would one day
govern “the destinies of half the globe.” In its early days, while still a slave-holding country, the United
States asserted its sovereignty through genocide on a continental scale and annexed large portions of
northern Mexico. The country went on to overthrow the independent state of Hawaii, occupied the
Philippines and Haiti, exerted its regional power throughout Latin America, expanded its international
hegemony after World War II, and became what it is today: the world’s foremost military and nuclear
power with a $716 billion “defense” budget that exceeds the spending of all other major global
powers combined.

“Taking over from the British Empire in the early twentieth-century,” argues James Tully, the
United States has used its many
military bases located “outside its own borders”—now nearly 800 in over 80 countries— to force open-
door economic policies and antidemocratic regimes on states throughout the formerly colonized world.
An extremely partial list of sovereign governments that the United States either overthrew or
attempted to subvert through military means, assassinations, or election tampering since 1949
includes Syria, Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, the Congo, Cuba, Chile, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Grenada,
Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Yemen, Australia, Greece, Bolivia, and Angola. Such
interventionist policies have contributed substantially to today’s inegalitarian world in which an
estimated 783 million people live in profound poverty. In sum, for untold millions of humans in the
Global South, the seventy years of worldwide order, security, and prosperity that Ikenberry and
Deudney associate with Pax Americana has been anything but ordered, secure, or prosperous.

And yet the

norm against noticing prevents foreign policy analysis from even acknowledging—let alone
grappling with—the relationship between race and imperialism that has characterized U.S.
international relations from the country’s earliest days . This regime of politely un-seeing—of deflecting
—connections between U.S. foreign policy, race hierarchy, and colonial administration was clearly not in
effect when Foreign Affairs was released under its original name: the Journal of Race Development. This began to change, however, in the
1920s. Among other contributing factors, World War I, the rise of anti-colonial revolutions, and the emergence of liberal internationalism as a
popular ideology helped
convince foreign policy experts in the United States and Europe to adopt a policy
language oriented toward “development” rather than imperialism or racial difference . Mainstream
international relations scholarship today remains committed to a narrative in which the discipline
itself and U.S. foreign policy has always been and remains race blind , concerned solely with the
relationship between sovereign states who cooperate, deter, or compete with one another in a global
system in which the United States is simply, like Caesar, the “first citizen” (Ikenberry) or “the luckiest great
power in modern history” (Walt). For liberals, this involves a studied erasure of the imperial origins of
twentieth-century internationalism in the League of Nations’ Mandate system and the complicity of
Woodrow Wilson in preserving, as Adom Getachew puts it, “white supremacy on a global scale.” For realists, it
requires both forgetting the anti-Enlightenment origins of postwar realist thought and reinserting the
“security dilemma” back into history so that, with the help of Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, the world can—as
Slavoj Žižek says—“become what it always was.”

International relations experts will acknowledge U.S. violence and overreach when necessary, but
routinely read the illiberalism of U.S. foreign policy as an exception that is not at all representative , in
Anne Marie Slaughter’s words, of “the idea that is America.” Slaughter, with Ikenberry, can consider bad
behavior only briefly and only in the service of insisting that what matters most is not what the United
States actually does with its power but what it intends to do. Yes, “imperialism, slavery, and racism have
marred Western history,” Ikenberry and Deudney argue, but what matters is that liberalism “has always
been at the forefront of efforts—both peaceful and militant—to reform and end these practices.” Indeed,
even those public intellectuals such as Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff who, after September 11,
called for the United States to embrace its status as an imperial power, framed their arguments in
deflective, liberal terms. By contrast, because realists project the security dilemma retroactively into
history (while also simultaneously excising imperialism) they can only see the U.S. destabilization of
Third World economies, assassinations, and secret bombings as tragic necessities (great powers, claims
Mearsheimer, “have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the
system”) or as the result of liberals’ ill-advised desire to force “our” values on other nations. Both of
these deflective strategies reinforce the illusion that we live, in Nikhil Pal Singh’s words, in an “American-
centered, racially inclusive world, one organized around formally equal and independent nation states”
where some states just happen to have more power than others, and where the alternative—Russian
or Chinese hegemony—is too frightening even to contemplate.

That deflection would play such an outsized role in supporting the ideological edifice of international
relations today is hardly surprising. Turn-of-the-century British liberals who supported their empire also drew upon a variety of
different deflective strategies to reconcile the violence and illiberalism of British imperial expansion with the stated liberal goals of the Empire.
Such deflection made it impossible for these thinkers—many of whom would go on to work as some of the first international
relations scholars in Britain and help found The Royal Institute of International Affairs—to link the problems of empire with the
violence and disruption of imperialism.

Similarly, deflection
within international relations today obscures the U.S. role in maintaining the
profoundly hierarchical, racist, insecure, deeply unjust reality of the current global order. It also makes
it impossible to address how U.S. foreign policy (covert and overt) has contributed to the destabilization of
that order by creating the circumstances that give rise to “failed states,” “rogue regimes,” and
“sponsors of terrorism.” Moreover, it impedes any theorizing about how the widespread appeal of
Trump’s xenophobia at home might, in part, be the product of U.S. foreign policy abroad, the bitter
fruit of the War on Terror and its equally violent predecessors . In other words, in the grand tradition of
liberal empire, U.S. foreign policy deflection actively disrupts the link between cause and effect that an
entire science of international relations was created to explain .

What makes Trump’s attitude toward foreign policy so uniquely unhinging for international relations
experts, then, is the fact that it is essentially undeflectable. When he explains to Theresa May that
refugees threaten European culture or calls Mexican immigrants killers, he lays bare the meant-to-be
unutterable fear of nonwhite migration that has haunted British, U.S., and European imperialists and
foreign policy experts for over a century. When he summons the fires of nationalism to demand an
unprecedented increase in the military budget, and then gets it with the overwhelming support of
House and Senate Democrats, he reveals that constitutional checks on the commander in chief are
only as good as the willingness of Congress to resist jingoism . When he calls nations populated by
brown and black people shitholes, he openly advertises the unspoken white supremacist edge that has
informed U.S. economic, development, energy, and foreign policies since the late nineteenth century .
Trump’s Muslim ban is simply the War on Terror on steroids. In short, Trump’s foreign policy is
unprecedented not because of what it does, but because Trump will openly say what it does—and because
of what that then says about us as a nation.

The discomfort Trump provokes ought to prompt international relations experts to reflect on the
failings of their discipline to reckon with the relationship between U.S. imperialism, U.S. foreign
policy, and the constellation of xenophobia, militarism, racism, and nationalism that haunts our days.
The fields of intellectual and legal history and political theory are far ahead of international relations in
their critical interrogation of the ideologies that sustain empire at home and abroad . In addition, Trump’s
election has emboldened activists to make increasingly explicit the connections they see between a
racialized, anti-immigrant politics of domestic dispossession and violence and the history of U.S.
imperialism in the world. Unfortunately the same does not appear to be true for the majority of
intellectual middlemen who set the public tone for U.S. foreign policy .

Trump is, finally, both the emperor with no clothes and the pointing child, begging to hold a big
military parade so we can collectively acknowledge the naked imperialist power at the heart of U.S.
foreign policy. Trump practically screams at the United States to look at itself. And yet, the more he
screams, the more the intellectual enablers avert their eyes. They are busy looking elsewhere—
anywhere really—except at that nakedness.
 Security---1NC
Their securitization of the Western conditions of economic growth produce global
violence and creates a global racial imaginary
Barder 21 – Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for International Relations, Politics and International Relations, PhD in
Political Science at Johns Hopkins University [Alexander, Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy, 2021, DKP]
The Global Racial Imaginary

The rapid expansion of European settler colonialism beginning in the fifteenth century had profound
ramifications for the emergence of the idea of the global. What emerged in the aftermath of the
genocidal land appropriation in North and South America and the enslavement of Africans was a
racialized transnational political economy that came to structure the very foundation of proto-capital
accumulation and an imaginary of the global based on racial hierarchy. With respect to the former, Cedric Robinson
famously argued that the rise of the “world system” was predicated upon what he calls the formation of “racial
capitalism,” which itself emerged from an already racially striated European continent.33 Europe’s own internal
“others” were already subject to forms of racialized dispossession, internal colonialism, and indentured servitude or
slavery, which would provide the model for European expansion, appropriation of land, and
enslavement of peoples across the centuries—essentially, building the global order. As Robinson writes, “Racism . . .
was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”34
The important point that Robinson makes is that race should not be viewed as a form of ideological mystification that provides, in a sense, a cover for the violence
of accumulation and dispossession at the heart of the European colonial project. “Racialism,” Robinson adds, should be understood
as a “material force . . . [that] would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from
capitalism.”35 In other words, what is at work here is a process of racialization that expanded across the planet and created a material and ideological reality
in which racial difference and hierarchy came to be understood as constitutive of the order of things.36
What interests me, in particular, are the implications of this materialization of race for understanding the development of what I call a global racial imaginary. How
is it that race can become itself a “material force” or embody a material reality that effectively constitutes the underlying intelligibility of social reality? This is of
course not to suggest that race has any basis in a biological materiality; rather, as Michael Hanchard puts it, “[ Racial]
symbols, meanings and
material practices distinguish dominant and subordinate subjects according to their racial categorizations. Race in this regard is not only a marker of
phenotypical difference, but of status, class, and political power.”37 The sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued that racism cannot simply be viewed as the
product of an irrational individual prejudice or of atavistic legacies; rather, racism is the consequence of processes of racialization, which, for Bonilla-Silva,
“forms a real structure—that racialized groups are hierarchically ordered and ‘social relations’ and
‘practices’ emerge that fit the position of the groups in the racial regime.” As Bonilla-Silva continues,
The analytical crux for understanding racism is uncovering the mechanisms and practices (behaviors, styles, cultural affectations, traditions, and
organizational procedures) at the social, economic, ideological, and political levels responsible for the reproduction of racial domination. I labeled my
approach material because the views and behaviors of actors are fundamentally connected to their position [in] a racial regime.38
The materiality of racial order gives a sense of the solidity of racial hierarchies that congealed during
moments of violent domination, which comes to be seen as entirely natural. To think the racial order in
material terms is to understand that its ideological formation is predicated on the natural longevity of
racial hierarchy across history—even if its content changes over time. It is this ideological configuration
that gave intelligibility to the perpetuation of colonial subjugation that Europeans employed in the New
World and the Atlantic slave trade and that would then form the basis of emergent global order of the
nineteenth century. Thus, as Bonilla-Silva continues, “Racialized societies could not survive without ideology as it fulfills five vital functions, namely
accounting for the existence of racial inequality, providing basic rules on engagement in interracial interactions, furnishing the basis for actors’ racial subjectivity,
shaping and influencing the views of dominated actors, and, by claiming universality, hiding the fact of racial domination.”39 This racial ideology, when it
comes to its role in the emergence of the global, I call the global racial imaginary.
A social imaginary, Charles Taylor argues, is how “people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their
fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”40 A social imaginary reflects the
manner in which “ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is not often expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and
legends.”41 Furthermore, Taylor adds, a social imaginary is not a theoretical vantage point by a minority but rather reflective of a constitutive understanding of the
world that brings together a people as such. A
social imaginary legitimizes practices that are typically seen as entirely
natural and selfevident to the social life of the group. Taylor emphasizes the extent to which the social
imaginary is akin to a “social map” and facilitates “how we stand to each other, how we got to where we
are, how we relate to other groups, and so on.”42 Taylor does not, to be sure, extend his understanding of the social imaginary to the
very processes of racialization that have come to be so important in modernity. To focus on race would certainly contradict his own objective, to show that
modernity was the “order of mutual benefit” among individuals even under conditions of hierarchy. And yet it is here where the
development of race plays a crucial role in defining the very “social map” that would implicate not only
Western polities themselves but the very modern global order. A racial imaginary integrates the material
and ideological foundations—the very “mechanisms and practices” Bonilla- Silva refers to—and reflects
specifically the placement of different groups within a hierarchical order. A racial imaginary then
provides a “social map” in making that hierarchical order appear self-evident and entirely the natural
byproduct of certain immanent societal developments rather than violent appropriation or domination.
Extending the concept of the racial imaginary to the idea of the global, I claim that the very “images, stories, and legends”
that made the global intelligible qua global came out of the long history of settler colonial appropriation and a transnational racial formation. The content of
the global racial imaginary solidified itself in the eighteenth century with the acceleration of European
colonial projects, particularly Franco-British colonization in North America, the Caribbean, and India. But
it also began to crystalize with an entire intellectual foundation for rethinking the place and interactions
with non-European peoples. The “social map” that inchoately developed throughout the eighteenth century rested upon a language rooted in the
natural sciences and climate theory that would only be more fully developed in the following century.43 The advent of a substantial travel literature and proto-
ethnological and geographical knowledge would percolate a view of the immeasurable gulf, not only in civilizational attributes but in mental faculties, between
Europeans and their “others,” especially in Africa and the western hemisphere. It created the very categories, classification schemes, and scientific typologies that
would congeal in the racial science of the following century. And as a consequence, it
created the very sensus communis that gave
this political-economic global order its racialized hierarchy.
 Death---1NC
Turns the case---death culture produces detached fascination and reduces real
tragedies to objects in a game---voting Aff is a hollow gesture that produces violence
and makes enactment of the plan less likely---we have the only evidence specific to
debate.
Bjork 93 – Rebecca Bjork, Former College Debater and Former Associate Professor at the University of
Utah, Where She Taught Graduate and Undergraduate Courses in Communication and Women in
Debate, Reflections on the Ongoing Struggle, Debater's Research Guide 1992-1993: Wake Forest
University, Symposium,
[Link]
While reflecting on my experiences as a woman in academic debate in preparation for this essay, I realized that I have been involved in debate
for more than half of my life. I debated for four years in high school, for four years in college, and I have been coaching intercollegiate debate
for nine years. Not surprisingly, much of my identity as an individual has been shaped by these experiences in debate. I am a person who
strongly believes that debate empowers people to be committed and involved individuals in the communities in which they live. I am a person
who thrives on the intellectual stimulation involved in teaching and traveling with the brightest students on my campus. I am a person who
looks forward to the opportunities for active engagement of ideas with debaters and coaches from around the country. I am also, however, a
college professor, a "feminist," and a peace activist who is increasingly frustrated and disturbed by some of the practices I see being
perpetuated and rewarded in academic debate. I find that I can no longer separate my involvement in debate from the rest of who I am as an
individual. Northwestern I
remember listening to a lecture a few years ago given by Tom Goodnight at the
University summer debate camp. Goodnight lamented what he saw as the debate community's
participation in, and unthinking perpetuation of what he termed the "death culture." He argued that the
embracing of "big impact" arguments--nuclear war, environmental destruction, genocide, famine, and
the like-by debaters and coaches signals a morbid and detached fascination with such events, one that
views these real human tragedies as part of a "game" in which so-called "objective and neutral"
advocates actively seek to find in their research the "impact to outweigh all other impacts "--the round-
winning argument that will carry them to their goal of winning tournament X, Y, or Z . He concluded that
our "use" of such events in this way is tantamount to a celebration of them; our detached, rational
discussions reinforce a detached, rational viewpoint, when emotional and moral outrage may be a
more appropriate response. In the last few years, my academic research has led me to be persuaded by
Goodnight's unspoken assumption; language is not merely some transparent tool used to transmit
information, but rather is an incredibly powerful medium, the use of which inevitably has real political
and material consequences. Given this assumption, I believe that it is important for us to examine the "discourse
of debate practice:" that is, the language, discourses, and meanings that we, as a community of debaters
and coaches, unthinkingly employ in academic debate. If it is the case that the language we use has real
implications for how we view the world, how we view others, and how we act in the world, then it is
imperative that we critically examine our own discourse practices with an eye to how our language does
violence to others. I am shocked and surprised when I hear myself saying things like, "we killed them," or "take no prisoners," or "let's
blow them out of the water." I am tired of the "ideal" debater being defined as one who has mastered the art of verbal assault to the point
where accusing opponents of lying, cheating, or being deliberately misleading is a sign of strength. But what I am most tired of is how women
debaters are marginalized and rendered voiceless in such a discourse community. Women who verbally assault their opponents are labeled
"bitches" because it is not socially acceptable for women to be verbally aggressive. Women who get angry and storm out of a room when a
disappointing decision is rendered are labeled "hysterical" because, as we all know, women are more emotional then men. I am tired of
hearing comments like, "those 'girls' from school X aren't really interested in debate; they just want to meet men." We can all point to
examples (although only a few) of women who have succeeded at the top levels of debate. But I find myself wondering how many more
women gave up because they were tired of negotiating the mine field of discrimination, sexual harassment, and isolation they found in the
debate community. Asmembers of this community, however, we have great freedom to define it in whatever
ways we see fit. After all, what is debate except a collection of shared understandings and explicit or
implicit rules for interaction? What I am calling for is a critical examination of how we, as individual
members of this community, characterize our activity, ourselves, and our interactions with others
through language. We must become aware of the ways in which our mostly hidden and unspoken assumptions about what "good"
debate is function to exclude not only women, but ethnic minorities from the amazing intellectual opportunities that training in debate
provides. Our nation and indeed, our planet, faces incredibly difficult challenges in the years ahead. I believe that it
is not acceptable
anymore for us to go along as we always have, assuming that things will straighten themselves out . If the
rioting in Los Angeles taught us anything, it is that complacency breeds resentment and frustration. We may not be
able to change the world, but we can change our own community, and if we fail to do so, we give up
the only real power that we have.
Vote neg against their death impacts of IR.
Mehrvand ’21 [Ahad and Naser Keramatfar; 2021; Associate Professor of English Language and
Literature Department, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University; MA in English Literature, Azarbaijan Shahid
Madani University; Journal of Philosophical Investigations, “Frommian Biophilic Ethics in Tolstoy’s The
death of Ivan Ilyich” vol. 16]
3. Theoretical Framework

A glimpse of Fromm’s thoughts explicated in his later works; i.e., The heart of the man, The anatomy of human destructiveness and To have or
to be? indicates how, to a considerable degree, Fromm examines the concepts of life and death. In The heart of man and later with more
elaboration in The anatomy of human destructiveness, Fromm defines and elaborates on the two key terms: “necrophilia” and “biophilia”.

Fromm suggests that “necrophilia” is not solely a type of sexual perversion which is oftentimes pertained to a
pathological infatuation and obsession with corpses; rather, in line with the Miguel de Unamuno, the renowned Spanish
philosopher, who approaches the term from a nonsexual angle of view, Fromm also investigates necrophilia in “the characterological
sense” as a character type (1973: 332). In a nutshell, Fromm defines necrophilia as “the passionate attraction to all that
is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to
destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical” (332, emphasis in
original).

To illuminate the
antonym of “necrophilia”, Fromm coins the term “biophilia” which is a character type
displaying opposite traits, indicative of one’s love of life. Fromm (1964) differentiates his definition of
“biophilia” from Freud’s superego, arguing,

the conscience of the biophilous person is not one of forcing oneself to refrain from evil and to do
good. It is not the superego described by Freud, a strict taskmaster employing sadism against oneself
for the sake of virtue. The biophilous conscience is motivated by its attraction to life and joy; the
moral effort consists in strengthening the life-loving side in oneself. For[these] reasons the biophile does
not dwell in remorse and guilt, which are, after all, only aspects of self-loathing and sadness. He turns quickly to life and attempts to
do good. (23)

Fromm (1964) further clarifies the difference between his definitions and those proposed by Freud, asserting
that he is against Freud’s view that both death drive, or what Post Freudians called Thanatos, and life drive, or Eros, are of
“normal biological tendency”, asserting,

The dichotomy of biophilia-necrophilia is the same as Freud's life-and-death instinct . I believe, as Freud did, that
this is the most fundamental polarity that exists. However, there is one important difference. Freud assumes that
the striving toward death and toward life are two biologically given tendencies inherent in all living substance that their
respective strengths are relatively constant, and that there is only one alternative within the operation of the death instinct--namely, that it can
be directed against the outside world or against oneself. In
contrast to these assumptions[,] I believe that necrophilia is not a
normal biological tendency, but a pathological phenomenon--in fact, the most malignant pathology that exists in
mail.(24)
Freud’s death instinct is connected to his understanding of the psychological causes of the World War I. Andrea
Heiss (2011) finds a similarity between Freud and Fromm’s discussions on death instinct and draws upon Fromm’s own opinions (1973) on
Freud, stating,

What reasons motivated Freud to postulate the death instinct? One reason which I have already mentioned was probably the impact of the
First World War. He, like many other men of his time and age, had shared the optimistic vision so characteristic of the European middle class,
and saw himself suddenly confronted with a fury of hate and destruction hardly believable before August 1,1914. (p. 498)
Fromm argues that “necrophilia” is the product of uncongenial and harsh environmental conditions, whereas “biophilia” is “a biologically given
quality” (1973:358):

Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth,
whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group. The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than
to retain. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. He
loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures
rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting
things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. (Fromm, 1973:
365)

Based upon his statements concerning biophilia and necrophilia, Fromm offers “biophilic ethics” (1973 :365), the tenet of which is defined as:
“Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles
life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces” (1973:366). It can be understood from these remarks that Fromm is against any
orientation
that mistakes a human for an object and that, he regards object-centeredness as an immoral act, for such
orientation makes one’s life soulless and indistinguishable from death.

Thus, later in To have or to be?, Fromm delineates two modes of existence, “having” and “being” which are conceivably the
subsets of necrophilia and biophilia, respectively. The reason for such assumption, that is, the aforementioned modes of existence
being considered subsets of necrophilia and biophilia, can be elicited from The Heart of the man where Fromm argues that for a
necrophilious person “having rather than being, is what counts” (2010: ch.3). As explained in To have or to be?,
“having” is defined as a mode of existence wherein one’s “relationship to the world is one of possessing
and owning, one in which I want to make everybody and everything, including myself, my property” (2008: 21). In
contrast, “being” mode means “aliveness and authentic relatedness to the world” (21). In addition, being mode is “in
contrast to appearing and refers to the true nature, the true reality, of a person or a thing in contrast to deceptive appearances as exemplified
in the etymology of being”(21, emphasis in original). Although for a having-oriented person “I am= what I have and what I consume” (23), a
being-oriented person “neither has anything nor craves to have something, but is joyous, employs one’s faculties productively, is oned to the
world” (16, emphasis in original).

In The anatomy of human destructiveness, Fromm underscores how necrophilious individuals tend to find force and
violence as the most effective tools in resolving conflicts (1973: 337), exhibit “lifelessness” in their conversations
by remaining “cold”, “aloof” and “pedantic”, so do not listen with engagement and enthusiasm (339), regard dark to be more
fascinating than light (339), “look” rather than “see” (343) or briefly speaking, “their enemy is life itself” (348) making
them turn all “life” into “things” (350). This way, everything is already dead in the world of “no-life” and
“no-persons” (350). Blatantly ubiquitous necrophilia engenders “monocerebral man”, that is, someone
who is one-dimensionally governed by intellect like a robot, at the expense of emotions (1973: 352). One can
derive from this discussion that the opposite of such qualities are ascribable to the individuals leading their lives based upon biophilia.
Interestingly, all these necrophilious and their opposite, i.e. biophilous traits are detectable in The death of Ivan Ilyich; especially, with more
vivid manifestation, in the protagonist himself before and after he grapples with the debilitating sickness.
 Framework---1NC
They’re trapped in the argument room.
Schlag 3 (Pierre Schlag, 4/1/2003, University of Miami Law Review, “A Reply-The Missing Portion”)ao
law school training leads law students to believe that judicial decisions produce important
From the very first day,

consequences for the social order. The presumption is that the words of the judge (if they are well crafted) will
effectively produce a social reality that corresponds roughly with the words uttered. But what reason is there to believe
this?3

FALSE EMPOWERMENT (No. 2) The endlessly repeated question in first year, "What should the court do?" leads law students to believe that courts respond to the force of the better
argument. This would be tolerable if one added two provisos:

1. The better argument often means little more than the one the courts are predisposed to believe ; and
2. In the phrase "force of better argument" it's important to attend not just to the "better" part, but to the other term as well.

FALSE EMPOWERMENT (No. 3) Law students first learn of many complex social and economic realities through the
medium of case law. What they learn is thus the law's vision of these economic and social realities . Not
surprisingly, there is an almost magical correspondence between legal categories and social or economic practices. This magical fit leads law students (later to

become law professors) to have an extremely confident view of the efficacy of law .

Many law students are cured of this belief-structure by a stay in the legal clinic or by law practice.4 There is one group of people, however, who are generally not cured of this belief-structure
at all, but whose faith is actually intensified. These are the people who hold prestigious judicial clerkships where an emotional proximity to and identification with their judge ("my judge")
leads to an even greater confidence in the efficacy of law. These people are frequently chosen to teach in law schools.

FALSE EMPOWERMENT (No. 4) False empowerment can be disempowering. It can also lead to pessimism and despair.

PESSIMISM, DESPAIR, ETC. (No. 1) Many people react to a loss of faith in law or legal studies with despair or pessimism. But
this is the despair and pessimism that comes from giving up a naive or a romantic vision of law and/or legal studies. The onslaught of this despair and pessimism is a good thing. It is like the
thirty-something who realizes that he is mortal and that life is brief. Generally, this is not welcome news. At the same time, it may help prevent a life spent in Heideggerian dread, tanning
salons, or the interstices of footnote 357.

When the academic loses faith in law or legal studies, typically that person is most
PESSIMISM, DESPAIR, ETC. (No. 2)

troubled because she has lost the framework that makes her academic project possible. But so what?
Isn't the demand that law conform to an academic project arguably a selfish one ?
THE CON, THE JOKE, AND THE IRONIC TRUTH The Con: In the courtroom, the appellate judge is typically seated behind an elevated bench. On the classroom blackboard the appellate judge is
chalked in above the plaintiff and the defendant. This is both a reflection and a reinforcement of the belief that the appellate judge is an intellectually and politically privileged legal actor.

In actuality, the appellate judge is a person who operates in conditions of severe information deficits
The Joke:

and whose outlook is thoroughly manipulated by professional rhetoricians. Very often he has little or no understanding of the
configurations of the social field to which his rulings will apply. What's more, this is a person who is prohibited from talking about the social field, except with a highly restricted number of
people.

because we believe the appellate judge is a particularly privileged intellectual and

The Ironic Truth: On the other hand,

political actor, we contribute to making him so.

A CRUEL HOAX Legal intellectuals like to believe that law is an intelligent enterprise. They like to believe that the law offers an interesting vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric through which to
think about the world and law itself. This is naive. The political demand that law be efficacious means that law must track, must indeed incorporate popular beliefs about social and economic
identities, causation, linguistic meaning, and so forth. (Those beliefs are often intellectually bereft.)

Within the room,

THE ARGUMENT ROOM The argument room is a place where academic advocates go to argue passionately about law and politics. (Apologies to Monty Python.)

arguments are won and lost; triumphs and defeats are had. But generally, no one outside the room
pays much attention to what goes on inside the room. Sometimes there is seepage and fragments of the conversations are heard outside the
room.
Participants most often spend their time arguing about what should happen outside the room . This they call
"knowledge" or "understanding" or "jurisprudence" or "scholarship" or "politics." The one thing that generally cannot be talked about inside

the room is the construction of the room itself.

 Predictions---1NC
Zero risk of the aff—it isn’t possible to predict the large scale impacts of the aff or any
political action which means that even if they win framework, case is at zero, but this
is offense because it also means that passing the plan has an equal chance to cause
their impacts instead of solving them.
Emilian Kavalski 20, the Li Dak Sum Chair Professor in China-Eurasia Relations and the Director of the
Global Institute for Silk Roads Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China, 2020,
“Inside/Outside and Around: Complexity and the Relational Ethics of Global Life,” Global Society, DOI:
10.1080/13600826.2020.1745158 /jpb

CT = complexity thinking

International Relations (IR) has struggled to foster different ways of seeing and encountering the world that can
help it generate meaningful answers to the pressing questions of our times. The dominant models of IR are implicated
in the construction of a world that is unravelling socially, fracturing economically, and deteriorating
ecologically. There is an urgent need for a change in perception, outlook, and vision that can help uncover new modes of thinking and
doing world affairs that transcend established paradigms and practices. Proponents of Complexity Thinking (CT)1 have responded to
this call by drawing attention to the radical relationality of global life, which contests the Eurocentrism and
anthropocentrism that informs the IR mainstream. In the process, CT makes available much-needed vocabularies and optics
for engaging phenomena, practices, and dynamics that cut across the turbulent pluriverse of global life. The claim
is that CT advances a valuable alternative picture (simultaneously in analytical, ontological, and normative
terms) of the fundamental characteristics and purposes of world politics. This article draws attention to such alternative by
foregrounding the connection between complexity, relationality and the study of IR.

The point of departure for such “complexification” is the recognition that IR is marked by a poignant lack of
ontological pluralism. Regardless of their distinct theoretical commitments, IR scholars tend to subscribe to a
“Newtonian” vision of the “world out there” as a closed system populated by states whose interactions
are motivated by power-maximization in the pursuit of their own self-interest.2 Thus, given the dynamics of
linear causality that backstop this metanarrative, what comes to pass in world affairs is positioned as subject to
anticipation as a result of reductionist models which postulate that all physical phenomena change in gradual
manner and following foreseeable trajectories. This “atomistic ontology” asserts that all social
phenomena are quantifiable and predictable.3 The normative fundamentalism of this stance leads IR to adapt a
mindset of continuities that makes it difficult to address chance, change, and uncertainty.4 In particular, the
framework of instrumental-rational action has become the standard against which alternative claims are
judged. Thus, the “international” produced in this manner is an artefact of ontological and historical
constructs with significant epistemic and ethical effects.

According to the proponents of CT, the mechanistic (and nearly clockwork) features
of this Newtonian imaginary disclose
a normalisation of oppression evidenced by the control, domination and exploitation of various others – be
they human (indigenous, non-Western, gender, and other vulnerable communities) or non-human (nature,

species, and objects). To be sure, some international phenomena – especially, when treated in isolation
– may appear orderly at times (that is, predictable, rational, and linear); however, the point of CT is that
systemically, global politics as a whole is defined by non-linearity, recursivity, and unpredictability. Thus,
by painting itself in the Newtonian corner, the disciplinary mainstream has, on the one hand, evaded the need
to recognise that there are dynamics which are not only unknown, but probably cannot ever be meaningfully
rendered comprehensible, and, on the other hand, has stifled endeavours that can engage in thoughtful
deliberation of the discontinuities, unpredictability, and non-linearity of global life.5

CT challenges the atomistic metanarrative of IR by proposing a relational ontology in which global life
resonates with and through complex and interpenetrating presences whose sociability is infused with
the contingent opportunities inherent in the encounter with the other. The very claim that the world is
populated by and emerges through the continuous interactions between plentiful varieties of life and matter calls
for the positing of alternative ontologies that exceed what is possible (and imaginable) under the
Newtonian metanarrative of IR. At the same time, the “comlexifying” move recognises that the current ecological crises
are profoundly shaped by the histories of colonialism and the practices of plunder and exploitation. Thus, by moving
away from the atomistic universe of IR, CT amplifies the call for relational ethics and politics claiming “a
more just coexistence of worlds”.6 CT’s irruptive translation of such coexistence brings in dialogue the form and the substance of
the languages and experiences of the diverse and infinitely complex worlds cohabiting in global life. Such relationality becomes
coextensive of and standing together with the interpolating spontaneity of surrounding events and things.

1. IR predictions that rely on doctrinal models fail---they obfuscate necessary

information and are rendered statistically obsolete by entrenched bias from
funding.
--AT: Walt Empiricism

--AT: Realism

Daniel W Drezner, Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University 1-18-
2021, "Foreign-Policy Predictions Are Chronically Bad Because International …," [Link],
[Link]
A review of the worst predictions and most useful ideas of the past half-century reveals a few lessons for the readers of Foreign Policy. The first
is that foreign-policy observers are a pessimistic lot. We are awash with doomsaying that has proved no
more accurate than a cult member holding a sign declaring “The end is nigh” on the street corner. The second is
that when examining trends within countries, the primary source of bad predictions is the fallacy of extrapolation: the
belief that the future will be just like the present, only more so. The third is that the most useful ideas are not
rooted in grand strategy or doctrine. Sometimes grand narratives get the big things right, but just as often they create
cognitive blinders [distractors] that make it difficult to recognize error. By contrast, small-bore ideas—grounded in
concrete, specific, well-defined problems—have made the most tangible contributions to international affairs.

To be fair, international relations experts are hardly the only social scientists with a poor record of projecting the
future. Economists have also proved extremely bad at forecasting, even though there are some awfully powerful incentives for economists to
get things right. What makes foreign-policy analysts different is the bias in their forecasting errors. Economists are overly rosy about the future.
This profound “optimism bias” explains the errors of the Bretton Woods institutions. On average, for example, a 10-year macroeconomic
forecast from the International Monetary Fund or World Bank overestimates a country’s annual GDP growth by 1.1 percentage points.

Political forecasters, however, suffer from a different bias: We are a profoundly pessimistic lot. As the Yale University professor John Lewis
Gaddis once delineated in painstaking detail, international
relations scholars failed to predict both the peaceful end
of the Cold War and the manner of the Soviet collapse. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, realists in particular made
overly pessimistic predictions about how the post-Cold War order would affect NATO, nuclear proliferation, violent
conflict, and balancing against the United States. In reality, the 20 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union saw dramatic
declines in almost every category of political violence. The realist line sounds slightly more accurate now, but prognosticators earn no
points for predictions that might come true 30 years late .

it’s good for business. International relations is a

There are three reasons why foreign-policy analysts are so morose. First,
countercyclical profession; bad times in the world are good times for geopolitical analysts—and there are
incentives for doomsaying. The growth industry of political risk analysis, the first generation of which emanated from international
relations scholarship, is predicated on things going wrong. One high-ranking officer at a prominent risk consultancy once explained the
company’s sales pitch as follows: “You scare the shit out of them first. That’s what gets the clients through the front door.”
 SetCol---1NC
The settler psyche is always in a defensive position due to the immense amount of
personal gaslighting one must do to think that their daily life is somehow ethical.
Because of this, analysis and critique of speech acts are critical to the disruption of
subjectivities that sustain settler society.
Henderson ’17 [Phil Henderson (2017) Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler
colonialism, Settler Colonial Studies, 7:1, 40-56, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2015.1092194]

settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their

Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces,
daily life — in all its banality — is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The jarring
nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these charges
become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto operated
within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation of even
a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see ‘their’
beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As Brown
writes, in the ‘loss of horizons, order, and identity’ the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66
Threatened with this ‘loss of containment', the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown's thesis to the
settler colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers,
but rather of a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This
panic — this rabid and insatiable anger — is always already
at the core of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression
‘even after indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening'.68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in
the maintenance of settler colonialism's imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the
settler as such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject — further development and
entrenchment of the settler colonial imago — is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a
process of hardening that leaves the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that
settlers are also always already in a psychically defensive position — that is, the settler's offensive
position on occupied land is sustained through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total
erasure of indigenous populations, the attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers
necessitates the suppression of both desires, if the subject's reliance on settler colonial power structure
is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers’ reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses
that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In
settler colonial contexts, this
requires averting attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers
often suggest that they aim to create a ‘city on the hill’.70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does
suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to ‘periodic hysterical outbursts'. Such is the case when
settlers’ utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they imagine is
founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire's energy into
an obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of
community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby
naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are
intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the
threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must
always remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the
contrary, the settler is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his
dependency on indigenous peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending
fear of its own dissolution, should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples,
but this holds true to settler-allies as well, that decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant ‘self-
disciplining colonial subject’.73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these
disciplinary or phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must also examine and
cultivate the ways in which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is
apparent in the subject's arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject,
indeed of all subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what
sets my account apart from Rifkin's. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many
sociological accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical
perspective, the ‘unconscious constantly reveals the “failure”’ of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects
this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing
status. Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus,
the process of subject
formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the settler
subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of
settler colonialism can be subverted — creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be
opened wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity to pursue what Paulette Regan calls a ‘restorying’ of settler
colonial history and culture, to decenter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of
indigenous peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it
continues to panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not
occur only in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in
reiterative and disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the ‘repetitive
practices of everyday life’ are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of
naturalness to the settler imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions
is at once to striate radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the
easy (re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the ‘micro-politics of
resistance', which historically took the form of ‘moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey
parties’ amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters
with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence
that founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the
settler colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing
presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure.
 Localism---1NC
Their starting point of localism produces irreconcilable global rifts that result in
extinction.
Marramao ’23 [Giacomo; December 10; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Roma Tre University,
Italy; Towards a New Concept of the Political, “The New World Scene,” Ch. 6] bert
No Sovereign, No Indisputable Power

Give me the map there, commands King Lear in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

But meanwhile, the

map of power has changed in the new structure of the world, and there is no Sovereign,
no indisputable Power capable of distribut- ing it. We see it strikingly with the return of war to the heart of the European
continent. The ‘winds of war’ materialized in a dramatic event that, in vio- lation of international law, sees the return of a war conflict in the
heart of Europe: with devastation, deaths of men, women, and children, thousands of refugees forced to leave their homes and take refuge in
other countries of the continent (from Poland to Germany, passing through Italy).

An authentic humanitarian catastrophe, for which Putin‘s expansionist strategy is undoubtedly responsible, which seeks to not
only annex but liter- ally swallow all the territories that previously belonged to the Soviet Union, in a neo-Tsarist imperial project that
even seems to refer to the Russia of Peter the Great.

At the same time, however, we cannot hide the political responsibilities of the United States and Europe in promoting Ukraine’s NATO
membership: How much wiser would the proposal for that country to join the European Union have been? This confirms the new world
scenario that I had outlined in some of my works: a
new multipolarism no longer hegemonized by nation states but by
continent-states, whose objectives seem to confirm the risk of a fragmented Third World War, of the that
he had recently spoken to Pope Francis.

But we had already seen evidence of the

new logic, of the new system of world powers, with the clashes in the
G20 and Cop26 on the management of the pandemic and the point of no return on climate change. There
is only one way to understand the reasons: to take note of the uselessness of the old maps of the State, the economy, and society, building new
maps capable of guiding us in the apparently indecipherable logic that presides over the game of alli- ances and conflicts, disrupting the
traditional hierarchies of influence between the different actors on the planetary scene: political elites, financial powers, and movements.

<<<CONDENSED NONE OMITTED>>>

No Map: The Non-Euclidean Spatiality of the World A scenario, in many ways unprecedented, of a world that is anything but ‘liq- uid’, shaped by the non-Euclidean spatiality of a global dynamic in which uniformity induces
diaspora, interdependence generates divisive effects, and techno-economic deterritorialization turns into political (or even war) reter- ritorialization. It is then inevitable that anyone who thought of globalization in ‘Euclidean’
terms, as a linear process destined to spread homogeneously over a smooth surface, would find themselves proclaiming (sadly or trium- phantly) its end. In reality, the nature of this globalization (in many aspects different from the
previous ones that have marked the course of history) is precisely that of presenting itself with an ancipite profile, with a double logic. The ‘time–space compression’ (David Harvey) between the profoundly dif- ferent cultures of all
the continents has disturbed the relations between East and West, setting in motion an ambivalent process of economic-technological appropriation and identity reaction that, in civilizations with a thousand-year history, such as
China, India, and Russia, has given rise to intertwinings between the capitalist market and political power radically different from the historical form of Western societies. Thus has emerged the phenomenon of continent-states
declining ‘capitalism’ in specific geocultural forms. The domination of global capital – as we have already seen previously and as I highlighted in my book Dopo il Leviatano (‘After the Leviathan’) – does not give rise to a single form
of ‘capitalism’ (a term, moreover, absent from Marx’s lexicon and scientifically ‘unclouded’ only since Werner Sombart and Max Weber), but to a plurality of ‘capitalisms’ rooted in strongly differentiated ethical-cultural
environments in Europe and North America. Marx: Capital – not Capitalism Marx would therefore, according to the opinion of some economists and soci- ologists, be both right and wrong: right: for having foreseen the expansive
dynamics of global capital; wrong: for having believed that this expansion would automatically lead to a universal homogenization of the world. But such a judgement does not consider the important rethinking of the late Marx on
the future of the capitalist mode of production in civilizational con- texts other than Europe and the United States: a rethinking witnessed above all by the Ethnological Notebooks. Thus it happens that the current world map is
increasingly marked by the power of ‘political capitalisms’ represented no longer by nation states, but by continent-states willing to compete with the West and, in the case of China, to confront the United States as the hegemonic
power of the global world. We find ourselves, at this point, before a paradox. The exponential growth of sovereignty in countries like China, Russia, and India has as a counterpart in Europe a progressive dispersion of sovereignty: a
phenomenon that must be gone to the character of the ‘post-national constellation’ of the EU (according to the famous expression of Jürgen Habermas) and destined to feed populist and sovereign drives (as in the case of Hungary
and some other EU States). It is difficult to say now if and to what extent the dispersion of sovereignty can be a factor of weakness or, paradoxically, a factor of strength in the face of the centripetal and sovereignist
authoritarianism of countries like Russia and China. In any case, those who speak ignorantly of the end of globalization should be reminded that war is only the other side of a global world. A world that is now multipolar: articulated
no longer in nation states, as the pathetic European sovereignists think, but in paternalistic-authoritarian continent- states. The only hope is that they push the West to practice democracy and human rights in a less hypocritical and
supremacist way than before. One thing, however, seems certain: only the transition towards a political Europe, towards a sovereign Europe capable of playing the role of global actor, can open the perspective of a democratic
alternative, a tertium, between neoliberal anarchy and hegemonic temptations and totalitarian. A Tertium, not a ‘third way’. Because of third ways (right or left) the European cemeteries of the twen- tieth century are paved. As
can be seen in the new image of the world that we have begun to out- line, it is an arduous task to try to retain the heart of the present: locate the logic and the structure in it – beyond the noise of the present – to bring them to
the concept. It has always been arduous: it was also arduous in the time of Hegel and Marx, and in the time of Weber and Lenin. But today it is even more so: in the present of our ‘finite world’, spatially compressed and tem-
porally accelerated, and yet increasingly impossible to lead towards a mono- logic. A world that, in reality, seems dominated by the distracting effects of a logic, by virtue of which the standardizing structure of the techno-economy
and the global Emporium corresponds to a growing diaspora of identities, values, and life forms.

<<<RESUME PARAGRAPH INTEGRITY>>>

Between Babel and Kakania

Often in the past I have resorted, due to the discretion of this ‘state of the art’, to suggestive metaphors taken from literature, such as Musil’s
Kakania: Isn’t our world perhaps a globalization of Kakania? Or collected from ‘influential scenes’ (in the sense of the Freudian Ur-szene) that go
back to the mythical- religious heritage of our civilization, as in the case of Babel: Is not our uni- formed world more and more similar, perhaps
like the tower of Babel, to a cacophonous compendium of multiple and untranslatable languages?
Ignoring George Steiner’s wonderful collection of essays ‘After Babel’, which goes back as far as 1975, perhaps it is nonetheless difficult today to
find a literary text or essay capable of accounting for the captivating bi-logic of Global Babel, with the same intensity and symbolic efficacy of
some films or, rather, cinematographic texts. Films are also texts – that is to say, according to the incomparable class of Roland Barthes, woven
– which, due to expres- sive dignity and richness of thought stimuli, have very little to envy to written texts. Babel is the title of a suggestive film
by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñarritu. In it, the globalized world is described as a babelic space, composed in the form of mosaics of
a multiplicity of dispersed pictures of life – at the same time materially unequal and culturally differentiated – linked by fluxes of events that
cross them. Macro events, such as the great financial crises, or microscopic events, as in the case of the event from
which the film begins: a wandering projectile that, fired by a super-technological rifle used inexpertly by a boy who has stolen it from his father,
shepherd in the moun- tains of Morocco, accidentally ends up against a tour bus, critically injuring a young American (Cate Blanchett) traveling
with her husband (Brad Pitt). The effects of the event are
unleashed, according to the physical mechanism of the chain
reaction, in different contexts of the world, made interdependent by the explosive punctuality of what
happened: from Morocco, a still archaic coun- try, to opulent California, where the couple of tourists resides; from the mix- ture of
modernity and tradition of the Mexican people (from where the nanny of the couple’s children comes from) to the existential and
intergenerational problems of youth communities in the metropolitan condition of contempo- rary Tokyo (where the Japanese global hunter
lives – that just before returning to Japan he had given the rifle to the Moroccan shepherd). It is difficult to deny that the suggestive charge of
the film depends on its paradoxical descriptive relevance: from
the efficiency with which it illustrates the enigmatic
inter- dependence of a glocalized world, in which differentiation proceeds at the same rate as unification and centrifugal thrusts,
autonomist and idiosyncratic are intxertwined in an inextricable plexus with the technological-mercantile homologation of lifestyles and
consumption. And yet, there is something essential that seems to be missing from this relevant and perspicuous snap- shot of our global age.
The true stake in the dramatic phase of transition that we are experiencing between modernity-nation and modernity-world, from the no-more
of the old interstate order under the hegemony of the West to the not-yet of a new supranational order to be built from In a multilateral way,
it cannot be reduced to the alternative between liberalism and communitarian- ism – or rather: between liberal
individualism and communitarianism – nor can it be resolved in a kind of compromise or synthesis
between the instances of distributive universalism and identity differentialism.
As Seyla Benhabib opportunely observed in her works, it is now oppor- tune not only to undo the false dilemma between universalism and
relativism but also to resolve the impasse of a normative political philosophy that tends to objectify ‘cultural identities’ and ‘struggles for the
recognition’, assuming these in cal data quality and not as problems.

However, overcoming such stagnant situations (same ones that strongly jeopardize the effectiveness of liberal contractualist theories and John
Rawls’ own overlapping consensus proposal) is only possible under two conditions.

Firstly, breaking the equation between culture and identity; second, sub- tract the universal – despite its etymology – from the logic of
uniformity and reductio ad Unum, to ascribe it to the regime of multiple and difference.

The foregoing would be equivalent, in other words, to ‘breaking the mir- ror’, breaking the specular relationships that we usually establish
between ‘us’ and ‘others’: a break that cannot be a simple inversion of perspective (know- ing how others see us). Looking instead of knowing
how we look at others can be very instructive, but it is not enough to get rid of our ‘orientalisms’); rather, it must consist of an ability to glimpse
in others an autonomous and original perspective of universalization. The problems of the current Babel do not deal with how the so-called
‘cultural differences’ look at each other – in the reflex- ive and reciprocal double sense – but with how each one imagines and thinks the
universal. What’s more, not only as she imagines and thinks it, but also as she has collectively transcribed and codified it in her value
statements, and in her declarations of principles and universal rights. As regards Europe’s posi- tion on the new world scene, I would like to
underline two aspects that I con- sider to be decisive. In the first place, we must never forget that Europe was both the land of revolutions and
of the civilization of law and the continent of wars: it was from the heart of Europe, from the ‘heart of darkness’ of Europe, from which the wars
of religion, the civil wars, and the two world wars were born with the horrors they provoked.

Secondly, we must not lose sight of the fact that Europe’s wealth lies pre- cisely in its differences.

Intersectionality: Universalism of Difference and the Politics of Translation

The unity of Europe was not founded on an ethnic, religious, linguistic, eco- nomic, or political unification, nor on an imaginary, mythological,
psychoso- cial, or aesthetic unification but precisely on diversity and discontinuity. In this sense, Umberto Eco’s affirmation that the language of
Europe is transla- tion has a symbolic charge that can be projected onto the polycentric scenario of planetary civilizations, redefining the
meaning of legal and political uni- versalism in radically new terms. In terms, that is, of what in my books of recent years I have called
‘universalism of difference’: adopting a philosophi- cal lexicon, we could say that difference – not identity – is the ontological texture of the
universal.
A universal that, in the multipolar world of our present, coincides with the idea of translation as a political project. The future of
humanity depends entirely on the ability of the different civilizational contexts to translate each other, in an
attempt to reach an agreement on certain key notions such as ‘humanity’, ‘dignity’, ‘right’, ‘justice’,
‘freedom’, and ‘equality’: decisive but highly controversial values, as was evident in the confrontation between Western and Asian
representatives in the preparatory commissions for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. We must increasingly try to translate
the different meanings that the different languages and civilizations attribute to these terms-concepts, fundamental for the future of humanity
on the planet.

But, at the same time, with the lucid awareness that something essential will always remain in the translation ... ‘lost in translation’. And yet,
the cat- egorical imperative of the universalism of difference, in
the face of an identity cosmopolitanism imposed on all
other cultures by the hegemonic civilization of the West, forces us to try again and again to translate the
principles and values of many cultural forms. In the firm conviction that the House of the Universal has not already
been built once and for all by Westerners, that in this way we would welcome all the rest in our legally democratic civilization
with more or less benevolent tolerance.

On the contrary – as the great philosopher, theologian, and writer of Spanish and Indian culture Raimon Panikkar, whom I had the privilege of
knowing personally, has already warned – that house of the universal must always be rebuilt multilaterally.

Only in this perspective could a sovereign Europe play an important role in the new world scenario polarized by the new dualism between the
United States and China and by the Cyber-Leviathan of the Internet and Artificial Intelligence. But this would require a grand political design
from which the elites currently ruling the European Union appear light-years away.

Herein lies the paradox of our time: the continent that generated the con- cept of politics – starting from the classical Greek polis, to move on
to the Roman idea of civitas and the modern concept of State, derived from the Latin expression status reipublicae and introduced for the first
time by Machiavelli in the famous incipit of the Prince (‘All States, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and are either
republics or principalities’.) – this same continent, that is Europe, appears at this moment as the subject weakest and politically most impotent
on the new world stage.

In this time of interregnum we must therefore commit ourselves to writing the word ‘universal’ with one hand, and the word ‘difference’ with
the other, resisting the temptation to write both words with a single, exclusive hand.

Because it would, however, be the wrong hand.

 Apocalyptic Rhetoric---1NC
Imagining apocalyptic scenarios is key to overcoming cognitive biases about risk.
Totalizing critiques conflate Nazis with anti-war advocates.
Davidson ’24 [Joe P. L.; May 17; PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge; American Political
Science Review, “The Apocalypse from Below: The Dangerous Idea of the End of the World, the Politics
of the Oppressed, and Anti-Anti-Apocalypticism,” p. 1-13] bert

The apocalypse is a dangerous political concept. For

many of the scholars discussed above, the problems of the
apocalypse are enough to dismiss the end of the world as a viable notion in political thought. However, the
method of anti-anti-apocalypticism suggests another way of approaching these critiques. The challenges highlighted offer a set of guidelines for
developing a defensible mode of apocalypticism. The primary criterion for a viable political conceptualization of the apocalypse is that it should
address and mitigate the authoritarian tendencies associated with the end of the world. Given this, some questions emerge: Is it possible
to enlist the apocalypse as a force that opens rather than closes possibilities? Or does the declaration of the end of
the world necessarily involve restricting political options? These are the concerns that will guide the remainder of the article.

An analogy is useful in terms of clarifying what is at stake in the defense of the apocalypse. Political theorists of the apocalypse find themselves
in a similar position to just war theorists. War, given its strong association with death and destruction, cannot be affirmed without qualification.
It is an ineradicably dangerous act in the sense that objections to war cannot, even in principle, be entirely rebutted. However, war is
sometimes necessary. Given the conflicts in the current world, pacifism is unlikely to be viable in every instance. The “tragic character” of war
resides in this tension between the destructiveness of conflict and the impossibility of peace (Evans Reference Evans and Evans2005, 10,
emphasis in original). For just war theory, a consequence of this tragedy is that we require normative regulations for deciding when wars should
be fought and what kinds of wars should be prosecuted (for overviews, see Frowe Reference Frowe2022; Lee Reference Lee2012).

Apocalyptic politics has a similarly tragic character. It is not only the case that the apocalypse can have dangerous consequences, but it is also
the case that these dangers are bound up with the core components of the apocalypse as a concept. Imagining the total destruction of the
present political order fosters precisely the authoritarian tendencies described above. The apocalypse has a strong affinity with an
uncompromising, all-or-nothing mode of politics in which everything is staked on either hope for the end (as in the apocalypse with kingdom) or
fear of the end (as in the apocalypse without kingdom). At the same time, it
is difficult to imagine apocalyptic rhetoric
disappearing in the near term. There will be political movements, because of the situation in which they find themselves, compelled
to imagine the end of the world. Certainly, some apocalyptic movements regard this as a contingent situation. For those who believe
catastrophe is followed by liberation, it is possible to achieve a state of peace and harmony where nobody would desire the end of the world.
However, at least in the pre-apocalyptic world of the present, the apocalypse, like war, has a tragic character and guidelines on its uses are
required to minimize its dangers.

The analogy with war is useful because it offers an indication of the variety of strategies by which to defend the apocalypse. Just war theorists
propose that there are different principles that govern the justness of war (Evans Reference Evans and Evans2005; Frowe Reference
Frowe2022; Lee Reference Lee2012). To make a judgment about a war, we must study its causes (for instance, is it the
last resort?), conduct (for instance, are noncombatants directly targeted?), and consequences (for instance, are the terms of the peace fair to
all parties?). My contention is that a similar typology of principles applies to the task of defending the apocalypse. Cause pertains to the
particular political context in which the apocalypse is deployed, conduct pertains to the modality of the
apocalyptic rhetoric deployed by actors, and consequence pertains to the desired ends of the
apocalyptic movement. As an analytic device, the distinction between cause, conduct, and consequence discerns separate ways to
affirm the dangerous idea of the apocalypse. In the subsequent sections of the article, I consider how both cause and conduct can be used to
defend the apocalypse.

However, the analogy between just war theory and anti-anti-apocalypticism is not perfect. The differences between the two are also
instructive. In particular, it should be stressed that the task of considering the consequences of war and the apocalypse is quite different. As
Mark Evans comments, “the goal of a just war is a just peace,” such that a war can be considered just insofar that it ends violent conflict
(Evans Reference Evans and Evans2005, 9). In negative terms, a similar statement can be made about the apocalypse. The
goal of
apocalyptic movements is a world where the apocalypse is no longer required, either because the threat feared
(such as nuclear war) has been reduced to a minimum or because a fully liberated world (such as Revelation’s New Jerusalem) has been
established. However, in contrast to war, it is difficult to make this statement in positive terms. The apocalypse is a means to a variety of
different ends, with movements proposing radically different visions of what the postapocalyptic world will look like. To take a few examples
already mentioned, environmentalists, antinuclear activists, colonialists, and fascists all employ apocalyptic rhetoric but with different purposes
in mind.

The desired consequences of an apocalyptic movement are relevant to considering whether it is

defensible. In fact, if the content of the apocalypse cannot be affirmed, then other factors, including its cause and conduct, need not be
considered. Obvious cases here are Nazi millenarianism, which imagined a state of Aryan supremacy in which other people had been eliminated
or subjugated (Redles Reference Redles2005), and the eschatological visions of European colonizers, which posited the genocide of Indigenous
people as necessary for the realization of a new world (Villagrana Reference Villagrana2022). Even if the causes and conduct of Nazi and
colonial millenarianism are defensible in the terms described below, they would continue to be indefensible because of their desired
consequences. By contrast, a
case can be made for affirming the desired consequences of other apocalyptic
movements—for example, stopping climate change or preventing nuclear war—and thus, cause and
conduct become relevant.

However, given the diversity of apocalyptic movements, it is difficult to draw any general lessons about the apocalypse
by considering its desired consequences. Indeed, if the goal of a political movement is indefensible, then it is irrelevant whether it deploys the
apocalypse or some other concept for imagining the desired change. More specifically, it is not clear how refining the consequences of an
apocalyptic movement addresses the anti-apocalyptic concerns discussed above. That is, apocalyptic movements with the same end may either
foster or resist an authoritarian understanding of history. By contrast, as we shall see, cause and conduct are closely attuned to
the specific problems that face apocalyptic movements.

CONDUCT: APOCALYPTIC REDIRECTION AND UTOPIAN HOPE

As noted in the introduction, there have been several recent attempts by political theorists to defend the apocalypse from its critics. These
theorists have implicitly used the anti-anti-apocalyptic method; they have employed the criticisms directed against the apocalypse to rethink it
in viable terms. However, as I demonstrate in this section, they have primarily focused on one strategy for defending the apocalypse,
emphasizing the conduct of the apocalypse and deemphasizing its causes. It should be noted here that the conduct of the apocalypse is
different from the consequences of the apocalypse. The latter refers to the content of the world desired by the apocalyptic movement, while
the former refers to different modes of apocalyptic thinking. To consider the strengths and weaknesses of the conduct-based approach, I focus
on two attempts to rethink the modality of the apocalypse: Alison McQueen’s Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Reference McQueen2018)
and Ben Jones’ Apocalypse without God (Reference Jones2022).Footnote 4

For McQueen, the most defensible form of apocalyptic thinking is that which accentuates the negative.
Commenting on Thomas Hobbes and Hans Morgenthau, she proposes a form of apocalyptic redirection: “They redeploy apocalyptic
images and rhetoric to get their audiences to imagine the end of the world in order to prevent it”
(McQueen Reference McQueen2018, 195). If the apocalypse is not a vehicle for the realization of a better world but merely a means of avoiding
the worst tendencies in the current world, then political movements cannot use it to validate authoritarian actions in the name of achieving
perfection. Moreover, McQueen recognizes that, even in the case of apocalyptic redirection, there is a need to guard “against the risk of
perverse apocalyptic politics” (McQueen Reference McQueen2018, 205). To this end, she stresses that the
negative apocalypse is
attuned to the “imaginative challenges” of confronting events like nuclear war, with images of future
catastrophe questioning and reforming the “cognitive biases and motivated reasoning” that cause
people to “underestimate […] global risk” (McQueen Reference McQueen2018, 203). This implies that the negative apocalypse
is self-limiting, highlighting previously repressed issues but leaving open exactly how these matters of concern should be addressed. McQueen’s
negative apocalypse raises salient risks for discussion, but it does not propose a single solution to the crisis in question.

Jones’ Apocalypse without God offers an alternative conduct-based approach to defending the apocalypse. In contrast to McQueen, Jones is
concerned with the positive moment of the apocalypse. He argues that the apocalypse helps augment ideal visions of just worlds by offering a
means of charting “a path from the imperfect present to the seemingly unattainable ideal society” (Jones Reference Jones2022, xi). At first
glance, Jones appears vulnerable to the criticisms directed against the end of the world by mid-twentieth-century liberals and postcolonial
critics. By emphasizing the utopian moment of the apocalypse, it seems that the end of the world should be hastened rather than forestalled.
However, Jones carefully defends his theory against this challenge, arguing that there is no necessary relationship between the apocalypse and
authoritarianism. For Jones, theapocalypse with kingdom should be accompanied by an “epistemic humility,” a
simultaneous awareness of the uncertainty of the future and an openness to new possibilities
(Jones Reference Jones2022, 176). This is an important qualification that addresses the concern that the apocalypse might
be used to justify totalitarian and colonial violence. If the end of the apocalyptic movement is conceptualized as uncertain
and provisional, then its proponents are more likely to “take a wary view toward justifications for violence that appeal to utopian goals”
(Jones Reference Jones2022, 189).
McQueen and Jones refine two major modalities of apocalyptic thinking, negative and positive, such that they address anti-apocalyptic
challenges. In the case of the negative apocalypse, this involves using it to raise matters of concern but refraining from offering solutions on
how the catastrophe might be responded to, and in the case of the positive apocalypse, this involves treating the desired goal of the apocalypse
with a strong degree of humility to forestall the use of violence. In this fashion, revising the modality of apocalyptic thinking helps address the
anti-apocalyptic critiques raised above.

A question can be posed here: if both the desired consequences and the conduct of an apocalyptic movement can be affirmed, is this sufficient
to affirm the movement as a whole? To consider this issue, we can return to the analogy with just war theory. In the case of war, an armed
conflict might have a defensible end (i.e., a just peace) and employ defensible means (i.e., not targeting noncombatants), but this is insufficient
to affirm the war. It is also necessary to consider its causes, or the circumstances that have resulted in the war in the first place. A war fought
without just cause is indefensible regardless of its goal and conduct. A similar argument can be made about the apocalypse. The discussion thus
far demonstrates that conduct is an important factor in mitigating the political risks associated with the apocalypse. There are certain things
that apocalyptic movements, once they are active, should and should not do. However, this leaves the causes of the apocalypse largely open. It
seems that anybody can employ the apocalypse at any time as long as it conforms to certain rules of conduct. The relative openness regarding
causes is worrying because of the political risks associated with the apocalypse. As emphasized above, these are intractable; they can be
mitigated but not fully addressed. Given this, it is prudent to consider a variety of ways in which the apocalypse can be controlled and
regulated. As I demonstrate below, a cohesive defense of the apocalypse requires guidelines focused on both the conduct of the apocalypse
once it has been mobilized and the causes that trigger the mobilization of the apocalypse in the first place.
 Supply Chains---1NC
Supply chains are imperial violence – they operate on a global architecture of behavior
modification that turn the brain into the marketplace and cloak enclaves of death
throughout the global south
Mbembe 19 – member of the staff at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the
Witwatersrand, visiting appointment at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University PhD in History at the Sorbonne, DEA in Political
Science at the Instituts d'études politiques, [Achille, “Bodies as Borders,” From the European South 4, pg. 5-18, DKP]
My intervention is a set of urgent, fragmentary, and unfinished reflections on our global present. When I say ‘our global present’, what I truly have in mind is the sustainability and durability of
our planet. As a matter of fact, this is an almost existential preoccupation, which is increasingly expressed in many different voices and shared by various people all over the world.
Indeed, many are wondering how we should inhabit anew and share as equitably as possible a planet whose life-support system has been so severely damaged by human activities and that is

In view of the deep state of fragmentation the planet finds itself in, they are asking: how
in dire need of repair.

should we re-member it, that is, put back together its different parts, reassemble it and reconstitute it as
an integrated system in which humans and nonhumans, physical, chemical and biological components,
oceans, atmosphere and land-surface are all interlinked in a grand gesture of mutuality?
These questions of inhabitation and interconnection, of mutuality, sustainability and durability, of the
interlacing of human history and Earth’s history are far from abstract concerns. In fact, the ongoing long-term planetary
environmental changes have only further dramatized them, and there is little doubt that they will be at the centre of any debate on

the future of life and the future of reason in this century. To properly attend to them forces us to refocus our attention on three mega
processes that have an almost overwhelming bearing on what humanity and the planet we live on (the only one, so far, where life is known to exist) might become.
Early 21st-century corporate sovereignty

The first mega process is the unprecedented consolidation of power and knowledge (political, financial,
and technological) in the hands of private high-tech corporate entities whose sphere of action is not one country
or one region, but the globe. ‘Corporate sovereignty’ has taken various forms throughout history. Take, for
instance, the English East India Company and its political dominance in some parts of the Indian subcontinent in the 18th century. A composite, diffuse and hybrid entity, it exercised powers
customarily associated with formal state institutions. It could acquire territories and exercise authority over people. It could engage in wide ranging operations such as tax collection and war

making. In competition with the monarchical and national state, it was a key part of the different institutional and constitutional
forms that shaped imperial expansion (see Stein 2011).
The conditions that have enabled the expansion of privatized government in the first half of the 21st century are well known. Many of these have to do with the

various legal frameworks behind international trade agreements, foreign investment treaties and other
mechanisms that have turned markets into the single most undisputed forces of our times. Others have to do with
the computational transformations of financial markets and the possibilities afforded by media technologies (see Beverungen and Lange 2018). Furthermore, whether the old distinction
between the economic power of corporations and the political sovereignty of states still holds is more and more open to debate (read Barkan 2013). Most global corporations aspire to secede
from everybody else while exercising surveillance on everybody else. Their big dream is to be exempt from taxes and to be free from accountability; in short, to enjoy the kind of immunity and
state of exceptionality we used to recognize only to truly sovereign powers.

a global architecture of behaviour modification is

In a recent book about what she terms “surveillance capitalism,” Shohana Zuboff argues that

under way. Driven by powerful states, high-tech corporations and military apparatuses, surveillance
capitalism threatens what she calls “human nature” in the 21st century, just as industrial capitalism disfigured
the natural world in the 20th. She shows the extent to which vast wealth is accumulated in what she terms new
“behavioural futures markets,” that is, markets where predictions about our behaviour are bought and
sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to new means of behavioural
modification. Indeed, capital, especially finance capital, has become our shared infrastructure, our nervous system, the
transcendental maw that nowadays maps out our world and its psycho-physical limits (Zuboff 2018). Around us, it
looks as if nothing escapes its control. Affects, emotions and feelings, manifestations of desire, dreams or

thoughts – no sphere of contemporary life has been left untouched by the spread of capital. Capital now extends
its grasp deep into the underbelly of the world. In its wake, it leaves vast fields of debris and toxins,
waste heaps of humans ravaged by sores and boils. Now that everything is a potential source of capitalization, it has
made a world of itself: a hallucinatory phenomenon of planetary dimensions.
Early 21st -century corporate sovereignty is therefore an unprecedented form of power, whose main aspiration is to free itself from democratic oversight. As a result, we might no longer live in

The demos properly understood might no longer be the sovereign. Finance

an epoch when sovereignty was exercised by the demos.

of a ubiquitous digital architecture might have definitely become the new Leviathan. We
capital in the guise

are witnessing the historical bifurcation between liberal democracy and finance capitalism, and the
emergence of a new form of sovereignty – corporate sovereignty – which claims for itself the law of
immunity and the powers of exception.
The computational speed regime

technological escalation and the ways in which it has totally redefined the nature of
The second mega process I would like to invoke is

speed, unshackled markets and the economy, and the way it constantly monitors our behaviour in an
attempt at revealing how it could be modified and optimized. As a matter of fact, some of the fastest expanding markets in the world
today are ‘markets for future behaviour’. They rely on better understanding incipient future intent. This “could be future voting intentions, the intent to commit fraud, the intent to buy life
insurance, or the intent to stream a specific video,” argues Louise Amoore (2019, 4). These markets also rely on the extraction and mining of new forms of raw material, mostly consisting of
information and details about individuals’ behaviour taken, as Zuboff writes, from the distant corners of our unconscious. It is raw material “plumbed from intimate patterns of the self” – “our

The purpose is not only to heighten the

personality, our moods, our emotions, our lies, our vulnerabilities, every level of our intimacy” (2018, 201).

predictability of our behaviour. It is also to make life itself amenable to ‘datafication’.

A key feature of our times is therefore the extent to which all societies are organized according to the
same principle – the computational. We are surrounded with ubiquitous computing, technologies that
weave themselves into the fabric of our everyday lives, devices, sensors, things we interact with and which have become part
of our presence in the world all the time. How the boundary between us and these devices is enacted is a matter of open debate (Matzner 2019).
But, what is the computational? The computational is generally understood as a technical system whose function is

to capture, extract, and automatically process data that must be identified, selected, sorted,
classified, recombined, codified and activated. Yet we shouldn’t forget that the computational is also a force and
energy of a special kind, a speed regime with its own qualities and infrastructures. It is a force and energy that produces and serializes subjects,
objects, phenomena; that splits reason from consciousness and memory, codes and stores data that can
be used to manufacture new types of services and devices sold for profit. Whether operating on bodies, nerves, material,
blood, cellular tissues, the brain or energy, the aim is the same, i.e. the conversion of all substances
into quantities; the conversion of organic and vital ends into technical means; the capture of forces
and possibilities and their annexation by the language of a machine-brain transformed into an
autonomous and automated system.
But the computational is also the institution through which a common world, a new common sense and

new configurations of power, of perception and of reality are nowadays brought into being. The globalization of
corporate sovereignty, the extension of capital into every sphere of life and technological escalation in the form of the computational are all part of one and the same process.
The dialectics of entanglement and separation

the combination of fossil capital, soft-

The third mega process is what we should call the dialectics of entanglement and separation. All over the world,

power warfare, and the saturation of the everyday by digital and computational technologies has led
to the acceleration of speed and the intensification of connections, creating a new redistribution of the
Earth and of population movements. To be alive, or to remain alive, is increasingly tantamount to being able to move
speedily.
In the process, the human race has come up against terrestrial limits. Such limits are not only the
consequence of the sphericality of the planet. They are also limitations on the expansion of life as such.
As the planet increasingly seems bound to burn, it is not only the individuated bodies that are
imperilled. It is earthly existence, the fate of everything on earth, the fluidity of life which is at stake
(Pyne 1997; Parisi and Terranova 2000).
Meanwhile, we are, more than ever before at any other time in human history, not only in close proximity to each other but also exposed to each other. This close proximity and exposure is
experienced less and less as opportunity and possibility and, more and more, as heightened risk. But entanglement and exposure to each other are not all that characterize the now. Wherever
we look, the drive is simultaneously and decisively towards contraction, towards containment, towards enclosure and various forms of encampment, detention, and incarceration.

Typical of this logic of contraction, containment, incarceration and enclosure is the worldwide erection
of all kinds of walls and fortifications, gates and enclaves. In other words, various practices of
partitioning space, of offshoring and fencing off wealth, of splintering territories, of fragmenting spaces,
saddling them with various kinds of borders whose function is to decelerate movement, to stop it in
some instances, for certain classes of populations, in order to manage risks. Various reasons are mobilized to account for this
renewed infatuation with borders taken as the best way to manage risks. Security and the preservation of one’s identity are some of these reasons. And as it happens, physica l and

virtual barriers of separation, digitalisation of databases, filing systems, the development of new
tracking devices, sensors, drones, satellites and sentinel robots, infrared detectors and various other
cameras, biometric controls, and new microchips containing personal details – everything is put in
place to transform the very nature of the border in the name of security. Borders are increasingly turned into mobile, portable, omnipresent and ubiquitous
realities. The goal is to better control movement and speed, accelerating it here, decelerating it there and, in the process, sorting, recategorizing, reclassifying people with the goal of better
selecting anew who is whom, who should be where and who shouldn’t, in the name of security.
As a result, borders are no longer merely lines of demarcation separating distinct sovereign entities. Increasingly, they are the name we should use to describe the organised violence that
underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general. But perhaps, to be exact, we should not speak of borders in general but, instead, of ‘borderization’, that is, the process

certain spaces are transformed into uncrossable places for certain classes of populations, who
by which

thereby undergo a process of racialization; places where speed must be disabled and the lives of a
multitude of people judged to be undesirable are meant to be immobilized if not shattered. Whatever the case, the technological
transformation of borders is in full swing. In a sense, one of the major consequences of the acceleration of technological innovations has been the creation of a segmented planet of multiple
speed regimes.
A key development, of late, is the extent to which border security practices have taken a keen interest in the connection between the human body and identity, as a means to achieve detailed
control over movement and speed. This being the case, the question we must ask is the following: what precisely is at stake in the extension of the biometric border into multiple realms of
social life and, in particular, the human body? In other words, what explains the migration from the border understood as a particular point in space to the border as the moving body of the

a new global partitioning between potentially risky bodies vs. bodies that are
undesired masses of populations? The answer is

not.
It is in the nature of risk to be hidden from view. That which is hidden from view is generally unknown.
For it to be known, it must be visualized. The screening of bodies at border checkpoints aims at making visible “that which is hidden from view, opening up
new visualizations of the unknown, potentially risky body” (Amoore and Hall 2009, 444). In such a context, biometric technologies are supposed to fragment the human body in order to
recompose it for the purpose of securitization, of elimination and neutralization of the risk. This happens because the human body is seen as an indisputable anchor from which data can be
safely harnessed or extracted. As a result, we are witnessing a gradually extending intertwinement of individual physical characteristics with information systems – a process that has served to
deepen faith in data as a means of risk management and faith in the body as a source of absolute identification. In this sense, biometric technologies should perhaps be best understood as
techniques that govern both the mobility and enclosure of bodies (see van der Ploeg 2003). They are perceived as infallible and unchallengeable verifiers of the truth about a person – the
ultimate guarantors of identity. They are supposed to produce the identification of a person beyond question, and lend authenticity and credibility to all of the data that are connected to that

According to this logic, the world would be safer if only ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty
identity.

could be controlled. These technologies are assumed to provide a complete picture of who someone is,
to fix and secure identity as a basis for prediction and prevention, leaving people to dispute their own identity.
The three mega processes I have briefly sketched are driving the movement towards what I have called ‘planetary entanglement’, as well as its opposite, that is, enclosure, contraction,

they are shaped by the alliance between military power, the industries
containment, encampment, and incarceration. Once again,

that surround it (contractors), and tech giants. They are also driven by corporate elites increasingly detached from their countries of origin and who
store most of their capital in tax heavens (see Davis 2019). These elites can no longer be ‘forced to account’ through traditional means such as elections or protests. They defeat citizens’

But
scrutiny via complexity and secrecy, often under the pretext of national security or via an economic rationale that puts capital first, before people. This movement is erratic, uneven.

everywhere it heightens uncertainty and insecurity. Everywhere it institutionalizes the risks inherent in
the misfortunes of reality.
Life and mobility
Part of what we are witnessing as a result is a novel imbrication, a symbiotic merging of life and mobility. To be alive, or to survive, is more and more co-terminus with the capacity to move.

Life itself is more

Just as living, movement, in turn, involves continual doublings, the incessant crossing of multiple lines and thresholds, multiple transitions across layers.

and more taken as something that can be calculated and recombined rather than merely represented.
Furthermore, we are witnessing a bifurcation between life on the one hand and bodies on the other hand. Nowadays, not every body is thought of as

containing life. Discounted bodies are believed to contain no life as such. They are, strictly speaking,
bodies at the limits of life, trapped in uninhabitable worlds and inhospitable places. The kind of life they bear or
contain is not insured or is uninsurable, folded as it is in extreme and thin envelopes.

Such bodies on the precipice are the most exposed to droughts, storms and famines, toxic waste and
various experiences of effacement. Their livelihoods made impossible, they are the most likely to sustain the most

crippling wounds and injuries. Trapped human subjects often without escape, they bear the brunt of terrestrial
life on a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017). At the same time, they exceed all attempts to contain them. These bodies are not simply in motion. Interactive and
generative, they are movements and events. The inside of such bodies is not separated from their outward environments. From the perspective of discounted bodies, to be alive is always and
already to breach boundaries or to be exposed to the risk of the outside entering the inside (read Litvintseva 2019).
This disentanglement of life from discounted bodies, this redistribution of life on differential scales of insurability and non-insurability, is a key dimension of contemporary migration regimes.
The latter aim either at slowing down the dynamics of people’s interactions, at creating distance or at shattering the chains of relations between them, so as to institute new patterns of
separation. Contemporary movement restrictions are not limited to national boundaries. They are at work on a global scale. They are deepening the space and time asymmetries between
different categories of humanity while leading to the progressive ghettoization of entire regions of the world. To a large extent, this is akin to a universalization of the Israeli model. In this
model, the restriction of movement does not necessarily aim “to confine unwanted people territorially or to dissociate their movements from those of citizens, but to inscribe them into
temporalities and spatialities that are disjointed to the point of giving these populations the illusion of being territorially separated” (Parizot 2018, 38).
Furthermore, at a time when the material components and biological organization of the body can be reengineered and redesigned, the latter are more than ever based on the ideas of
repressive selection, reproduction and the rejuvenation of species. Only what can potentially generate value counts as life. In this context, borders are meant to concretize the principle of
dissimilarity rather than that of affinity. They are not only obstacles to free movement. They are boundaries between species and varieties of the human. As such, they play a crucial role in
contemporary modes of production of human difference and relatedness. Human bodies are increasingly divided between those that matter and those that do not, those who can move and

They must be tracked,

those who cannot or should not, or should only move under very strict conditions. Bodies that should not move are those that are uninsured.

captured, and dispensed of. Such bodies are kept shifting between invisibility, waiting and effacement.
They are trapped in fragmented spaces, stretched time and indefinite waiting (Peteet 2018). As for the dream
of perfect security, it requires not only complete systematic surveillance, but also a cleansing policy.
This dream is symptomatic of the structural tensions that, for decades, have accompanied our transition
into a new technical system of increased automation – one that is increasingly complex yet also
increasingly abstract.
One of the major contradictions of the liberal order has always been the tension between freedom and security. Today, this question seems to have been cut in two. Security now matters
more that freedom. A society of security is not necessarily a society of freedom. A society of security is a society dominated by the irrepressible need for adhesion to a collection of certainties.
It is one fearful of the type of interrogation that delves into the unknown, unearthing the risks that must surely be contained within. This is why in a society of security, the priority is, at all
cost, to identify what lurks behind each new arrival – who is who, who lives where, with whom and since when, who does what, who comes from where, who is going where, when, how, why,
and so on and so forth. Moreover, who plans to carry out which acts, either consciously or unconsciously. The aim of a society of security is not to affirm freedom, but to control and govern
the modes of arrival.
The current myth claims that technology constitutes the best tool for governing these arrivals; that technology alone allows for the resolution of this problem – a problem of order, but also of

the dream of a humanity transparent to herself, stripped of

awareness, of identifiers, of anticipation and predictions. It is feared that

mystery, might prove to be a catastrophic illusion. For the time being, migrants and refugees are bearing the brunt of it. In the long run, it is by no
means certain that they will be the only ones.
The mega processes highlighted above leave us with foundational questions that will haunt us for most of this century. The first foundational question is related to what I called ‘borderization’,

Perhaps more than at any other moment in our recent past, we are
or the logics of containment, enclosure, and contraction.

increasingly faced with the question of what to do with those whose very existence does not seem to
be necessary for our reproduction; those whose mere existence or proximity is deemed to represent a
physical or biological threat to our own life. Throughout history, and in response to this foundational question, various paradigms of rules have been
designed for human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superfluous. One historical response has consisted in putting in place spatial exclusionary arrangements.

Such was, for instance, the case during the early phases of modern settler or genocidal colonialism in
relation to Native American reservations in the United States, island prisons, penal colonies such as
Australia, camps and Bantustans in South Africa. A late modern example is Gaza, and Gaza might well prefigure what is
yet to come. Here, control of vulnerable, unwanted, surplus or racialized people is exercised through a
combination of tactics, chief among which is ‘modulated blockade’. A blockade prohibits, obstructs, and limits who and what can enter and leave the Strip. The goal might
not be to cut the Strip off entirely from supply lines, infrastructural grids or trade routes. It is nevertheless relatively sealed off in a way that effectively turns it into an imprisoned territory.

Comprehensive or relative closure is accompanied by periodic military escalations and the generalized use of extra-
judicial assassinations. Spatial violence, humanitarian strategies, and a peculiar biopolitics of
punishment all combine to produce, in turn, a peculiar detention space in which people deemed surplus,
unwanted, or illegal are governed through abdication of any responsibility for their lives and their
welfare.
allBut there is another, early 21st -century example, which consists in waging new forms of wars, which can be called wars on speed and mobility. Wars on mobility are

wars whose aim is to turn into dust the means of existence and survival of vulnerable people taken as
enemies. These kinds of wars of attrition, methodically calculated and programmed, and implemented with new methods, are wars against the very ideas of mobility, circulation, and
speed, whilst the age we live in is precisely one of velocity, acceleration, and increasing abstraction and algorithms. Moreover, the targets of this kind of warfare

are not by any means singular bodies, but rather great swathes of humanity judged worthless and
superfluous.
All of the above belongs to the current practice of remote borderization, carried out from afar, in the name of freedom and security. This battle, waged against certain undesirables and

Wars on mobility are peculiar

reducing them to mounds of human flesh, is rolled out on a global scale. It is on the verge of defining the times in which we live.

wars on bodies. They have to do with two broad questions that confront us today and will haunt us for
most of this century: on the one hand the question of life futures, that is, of the self-organization of
being and matter; on the other hand, that of the future of reason.
The future of life and the future of reason
For a long time, the human race has been concerned with how life emerges and the conditions of its evolution. The key question today is how it can be reproduced, sustained, made durable,
preserved and universally shared, and under what conditions it ends. Overall, these debates about how life on Earth can be reproduced and sustained, and under what conditions it ends, are
forced upon us by the epoch itself, characterized as it is by the impending ecological catastrophe and by technological escalation.

, today, unprecedented numbers of human beings are embedded in increasingly complex

It is a fact that

technostructures. The latter are increasingly intervening in the dynamics of the Earth system on a
planetary scale. This has led to the transgression of planetary boundaries such as those related to
anthropogenic climate change, degenerative land-use change, accelerated biodiversity loss,
perturbation of the global biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and the creation and
release of novel entities such as nanoparticles and genetically engineered organisms (see Donges et al.).
Furthermore, both metabolically (for example in terms of their energy needs) and reproductively, technologies are becoming more and more tied in complex networks of extraction and
predation, manufacturing and innovation. An example is recent developments in the domain of genes and molecules. As Margarida Mendes shows, the heyday of DNA study has allowed the
cracking and public dissemination of the genetic codes of humans, plants, and animals. This, in turn, has given way to an exponential rise of biological patents, as currently nearly 20% of the
human genome is now privately owned, in a context of a market logic that addresses life as a commodity to be manipulated and replicated under the volatility of market consumption. Studies
after studies have shown for instance that corporations are intervening directly in the natural cycles of life and ecosystems through the widespread genetic modification of key elements in the
food chain (see Mendes 2017). As patented GMO genes are absorbed into our bodies in a proprietary relationship of biological subjugation, the body itself becomes an expanded, multiple

that there is a shifting distribution of powers

infrastructure, where intervention can happen at many different scales. It is therefore correct to argue

between the human and the technological, in the sense that technologies are moving towards ‘general
intelligence’ and self-replication. They are being granted the powers of reproduction and independent teleonomic purpose rather than having them taken awayOver
the last decades, we have witnessed the development of algorithmic forms of intelligence. They have been growing in parallel with genetic research, and often in its alliance. The

integration of algorithms and big data analysis in the biological sphere does not only bring with it an
increasingly greater belief in techno-positivism and modes of statistical thought. It also paves the way
for regimes of assessment of the natural world, and modes of prediction and analysis that treat life
itself as a computable object. Concomitantly, algorithms inspired by the natural world, and ideas of natural selection and evolution are on the rise. Such is the case
with genetic algorithms – a subset of evolutionary algorithms that mimic actions inspired in biological operators , such

as cells, seeking to optimize the responses to the problems of their environments by self-generating,
and encompassing processes of mutation and natural selection. The latter are designed to evolve and
further adapt to the environment, in a process of self-generation. The belief today is that everything is
potentially computable and predictable. In the process, what is rejected is the fact that life itself is an
open system, non-linear, and exponentially chaotic.
These are also times when many are gradually coming to the realization that reason may well have reached its limits. Or, in any case, it is a time when reason is on trial – we are, in other

words, in a sort of Dark Enlightenment. Reason is a faculty we used to recognize in humans and in humans alone. In the Western tradition we have all, willingly or not,
become the inheritors of reason, always seen as the highest of all human faculties, the one that opened the doors to knowledge, wisdom, virtue and, most importantly, freedom. Although
unequally redistributed among them, it was the prerogative of humans alone. It distinguished the latter from other living species. Thanks to their superior capacity to exercise this faculty,

Today, reason is on trial in two ways. First, reason is increasingly replaced and
humans could claim to be exceptional.

subsumed by instrumental rationality, when it is not simply reduced to procedural or algorithmic

processing of information. In other words, the logic of reason is morphing from within machines and
computers and algorithms. The human brain is no longer the privileged location of reason. The human
brain is being “downloaded” into nano-machines. An inordinate amount of power is gradually being
ceded to abstractions of all kinds. Old modes of reasoning are being challenged by new ones that
originate through and within technology in general and digital technologies in particular, as well as
through the top-down models of artificial intelligence. As a result, techne is becoming the
quintessential language of reason.
Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne is increasingly weaponized. Time itself is becoming enveloped in the doing of

machines. Machines themselves do not simply execute instructions or programs. They start generating complex behaviour. The computational reproduction of

reason has made it such that reason is no longer, or is a bit more than, just the domain of human
species. We now share it with various other agents. Reality itself is increasingly construed via statistics,
metadata, modelling, mathematics.
 Western Research---1NC
AND, you should be skeptical of their evidence – their research model proscribes a
violent model that privileges Western research practices. Voting AFF incentivizes the
perpetuation of exclusion as a norm and rewards and makes us feel good about
psychic violence built upon standards created by hetero-cis-white-men.
Barkin and Sjoberg 21 – *J. Samuel, Associate Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Governance in the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, PhD in IR at Columbia
University, **Laura, British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London, Professor
of Political Science at the University of Florida, Ph.D., University of Southern California School of International Relations; J.D. Boston College Law
School [J. Samuel and Laura, “The Queer Art of Failed IR?,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2021, Vol. 0(0) 1–17, DOI:
10.1177/0304375421989572, DKP]

We argue that knowledge cumulation in IR is a fantasy reified by paradigmatic clusters and the mimicry of
research standards and practices in the natural sciences (e.g., Elman & Elman, 2001, 2003). The “evidence” of “knowledge
cumulation” in IR comes as much from the ritualized practice of research behavior as it does from any “true” or
genuine notion of knowledge cumulation. One has “succeeded” in the enterprise of IR by cumulating knowledge, and the work of
“successful” scholars is by definition cumulated knowledge. Cumulation of knowledge as a standard of success is a condition of possibility for
the desirability of success in the field. That
ritualized practice at once is institutionalized as success and institutionalizes the need for
research success, reified and reproduced by hiring, tenure, merit raise, and promotion standards.
This ritualization is a signifier that what counts as knowledge in the field, in particular research programs and more
generally, is performative (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1990; Weber, 1998)— where standards are set by their utterance and
repetition rather than by some external “objective” standards of (narrowly) good science or (more broadly) good
research (Baudrillard, 1991; Shepherd, 2008; Williams, 2003). Scholars iterate and reify standards of measurement of
knowledge in each piece of scholarship which “succeeds” in the field, and these iterations make it a
paradox for scholars to both occupy the methodological, epistemological, and political space that falls
outside of inherited standards and succeed. Outside -the -mainstream work’s underrepresentation in the places understood to
be publishing “success” is overdetermined, and the correlation between mimicry of traditional scholarship and “success” of critical scholars a
given.
We mean “performative” in the sense that Judith Butler uses it (Butler, 1990, 1993), particularly as she talks about it going hand in hand with a
Foucauldian notion of disciplining,8 where “performativity
cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability
—a regularized and constrained repetition of norms” which resonate as “ritualized production” (Butler,
1993, p. 60). This frames performativity as a “specific modality of power as discourse” (Butler, 1993, p. 139) where
the politics of the signification and the politics of the sign meet, an act of territoralization, of production, of installation—which does not have
to be alone, singular, or unidirectional. Since performatives are their own referent (Butler, 1993, p. 159), they proliferate as manifestations of
the power underlying them and interact relatively on the basis of that relative power. In this context, “performances” are actions and events,
iterations and reifications, and context-specific, which “bring a subject into being” relationally.9
To escape the recursive, performative loop of “disciplinary success,” we argue that it is important to see the
possibility that knowledge cumulation is not, and should not be, a given in IR research. Instead, we argue that
the idea itself is an inherited empty signifier with unspoken content which governs the production of what we understand as disciplinary IR.
Traditionally, the idea of knowledge cumulation is firmly grounded in a neopositivist understanding of social science, in which the role of theory
is to collate observed empirical regularities across cases or what Waltz calls laws (Waltz, 1979). While this interpretation is critiqued in most
critical IR, “cumulation,” in that work, becomes a term without clear conceptual content. The
paradigmatization of IR theorizing
distracts from a particular theory’s internal conditions of possibility by introducing incompatible
conditions of possibility drawn from an inherited disciplinary sociology of what knowledge is and how it
works. As such, any acknowledgment of the idea of cumulativity from within specific exercises in
reflexive IR creates the grounds for necessary failure within those exercises.
The simultaneous rejection of traditional “cumulation” and continued performance of acts of cumulation can be understood by seeing the ways
that silence frames cumulation in critical IR. We learn from feminist theorists that the unspoken is as important as
if not more important than what is spoken (Charlesworth, 1999; Kronsell, 2006), coming from attention to how
IR’s others are omitted, excluded, kept out, and not mentioned (Agathangelou & Ling, 2004; Tickner, 1988). We argue
that IR’s silences tell us more about the state of knowledge cumulation in the discipline than looking for standards that tell us what we do
know. Accordingly, we ask on principle what any given research program does not take account of and how accounting for those omissions
could changes analysis. We focus on both visible omissions (like the concepts that a research program fails to
incorporate) and invisible omissions. Invisible omissions are those that are unhearable by a research program
— normally left out or ignored by both the researchers that form the core of the research program and their critics (Butler, 2001; Edkins et al.,
2012; Hansen, 2000). By “unhearable,” we mean either that the omitted content falls outside of the boundaries set for dialog or is assumed by
all stakeholders to be by definition irrelevant (for deeper analyses see MacKinnon, 2006; Spivak, 1988). Unlike its visible omissions—variables
that its scholars and their critics have added to, re-operationalized, expanded on, or suggested the inclusion of—invisible omissions are often
not treated as omissions at all within particular scholarly boundaries.10
The discipline’s “collective” standards for knowledge production, then, can be understood as constituted by social
performances of dominance rather than founded on some given or objective notions of what science
should be. Rather than being objective judgments of quality, statements like “this is good science” and
“these results are robust” are signs without referents used to discipline (Baudrillard, 1995). The invisible
disciplining nature of the performative standards of knowledge cumulation is part of the story of Butler’s understanding of performativity. The
other part is attention to who is excluded by claims to knowledge cumulation (generally as well as in specific paradigmatic situations), what is
left out, and on what axes. These disciplinary standards (both in the conventional and Foucauldian sense) make invisible their
own impossibility and their related necessary failure.
For example, a submission to a traditional IR journal in the United States or Western Europe which makes an interesting
argument, but is not in the format of, methodologically acceptable to, inclusive of the same forms of
evidence traditionally used in, and good science to that journal’s traditional reviewers is unlikely to succeed in getting
published.11 This will generally be justified with reference to the “quality” of the piece, and rarely if ever will
questions of sex, race, gender, class, and other axes of exclusion be discussed as producers of the standards that
then exclude on “quality” where “quality” has been set up in a way that excludes all performances of
scholarship which are not mimicry of a particular Western, liberal model (Paolini, 1999).12 Even editors and
reviewers who note the exclusionary effect of these standards will often mourn that and move on,
imagining the only possible alternative being lacking standards, and seeing such a lack of standards as more insidious than
the exclusionary effects of using certain sets of standards. “Knowledge cumulation” then becomes a set of
reified and artificial standards rather than a journey for truth or interest.
The answer to this quagmire is sometimes a liberal politics of inclusion (e.g., Nedal & Nexon, 2018)—how do
“we” get more women, more minorities, and more people from underrepresented places in the world to be able to meet the
standards of good scholarship in the field? That liberal politics of inclusion, while well-intended, can be read
as a (subtle, perhaps accidental) expansion of the violence it (formally) seems to abate. It fails to question the utility of
the existing standards of good scholarship and assumes that those currently excluded would be happy to
change the form, shape, and/ or nature of their scholarship to fit within the (unquestioned/unquestionable)
mold of good scholarship, either loosely or strictly understood. As Puar (2006) argues, liberal “inclusion” to absorb the other within
can be as violent as if not more so than exclusion even as it appears progressive. That violence is the reproduction of
naturalized, bounded identities when identities are liminal and messy when not policed (e.g., Agathangelou,
2013; Haritaworn et al., 2013; Scott, 2013). The bounded nature of IR inclusion excludes liminality, messiness, and outsideness (e.g., Malksoo,
2012).
Expanding the boundaries of IR to include any given particular excluded work maintains an illusion of stability, hiding what is unstable; it
maintains an illusion of certainty, hiding what is in doubt; it maintains an illusion of coherence, hiding the rebellious, the failed, and that which
remains outside (e.g., Sjoberg, 2017). Queer theorizing of the liminality involved in unstable sex/gender identities shows that even that which is
presumed to be the most primordial (sex identity) is really liminality hiding under supposed definition (e.g., Weber, 2016a). Translated to
thinking about inhabitability, this theorizing suggests that the apparent safety of (constituting then occupying) inhabitable space hides liminality
and uncertainty, and perhaps danger, under its supposed (empirical and normative) clarity (Haritaworn et al., 2014). Therefore, “all the
repressive and reductive strategies of power systems are already present in the internal logic of the sign,” such “that violence is an inevitable
byproduct of signification” (Baudrillard, 1981).
In this way, not only do traditional standards of knowledge make invisible their own impossibility, they hide the
violence of IR’s denials of failure and continued insistence on traveling failed paths despite the condemnation of failure and the
privileging of success. IR’s continued recursive enactment of its settled “standards” despite their obvious
failure and exclusiveness makes invisible the raced, classed, and sexed impacts of those standards and
their apparent objectivity. Baudrillard’s work provides a path for navigating this disjuncture between signs (IR’s “standards”) and referents (the
fantastic notion that “good scholarship” exists objectively) (Baudrillard, 1975). He argues that “only ambivalence, as a rupture of value…
sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign… questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding)
and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).” This ambivalence, Baudrillard argues, “brings the political economy of the sign to
a standstill; it dissolves the respective definitions of symbol and referent” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 150).

Endorsing the inclusion of nontraditional perspectives, classifying and categorizing them, and assuming inclusion’s possibility may all have
violent impacts (for discussions of the violences of inclusion see Haritaworn et al., 2013, 2014; Mbembe, 2019). Moving of the signification
“knowledge” from any referent to which it was originally tied makes method and research performances of scholarship, rather than (the
illusive) scholarship itself. If
“research” is a performance of scholarship, “standards” for research serve to
disguise the fantastic nature of knowledge cumulation. As such, there is no space for liminality,
uncertainty, change, inadequacy, and failure in structural rather than passing senses. Yet looking beyond the
discourse of certainty, those pervade IR. A Baudrillardian ambivalence toward research programs and their truth statements can reveal the
recursivity of IR’s standards of knowledge cumulation. This is because condemnation or rejection of any given research program and its truth
statements endorses its assumptions about truth, as well as some of its assumptions about what the international arena is and how it works.
As such, the idea that IR knowledge cumulation can be nothing but fantasy is straightforward. If the reification of
standards of knowledge cumulation is a signification divorced from a referent, where the recovery of the referent
is conceptually and practically impossible, then knowledge cumulation is and will always remain an empty signifier.
The only question is how that empty signifier directs and is directed.
We suggest that, in IR, more often than not, knowledge cumulation directs and is directed by discursive seduction. In Baudrillard’s words,
seduction is “that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from its truth” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). What makes a
discourse of knowledge, of science, and of progress seductive “is its very appearance: the aleatory,
meaningless, or ritualistic and meticulous circulation of signs on the surface, its inflections and its
nuances. All of this effaces the content value of meaning, and this is seductive” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). Therefore, if there could be
an interpretive discourse of knowledge cumulation that reached truth value, that truth value would be selfdefeating, since “the meaning of an
interpretive discourse, by contrast, has never seduced anyone.” This is the fundamental contradiction, in Baudrillard’s terms, that makes
standards for knowledge cumulation in IR internally impossible. He explains that “every interpretive discourse wants to get beyond
appearances; this is its illusion and fraud. But getting beyond appearances is appearance, and is hence subject to the stakes imposed by
seduction, and consequently to its own failure as discourse” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). As such, what is left in/of the failed discourse can
only be the fantastic, and pretensions to success hollow.
Inhabiting a Failure of a Discipline
The need for success and the denial of failure depend on two things: first, both success and failure existing and being identifiable; and second,
presuming a particular normative relationship between success and failure. In IR, as we discussed above, scholars are thought of as successes or
failures according to a complicated metric of disciplinary prestige based on publication outlet, “scientific standards,” and perception of the
change that they have caused in the discipline. Work
is characterized as successful or failed based on whether it
contributes to knowledge cumulation. The discipline itself is understood as successful or failed based on
the aggregation of those measures. On these terms, the emptiness of disciplinary standards and the
impossibility of knowledge cumulation make every piece of scholarship and every scholar in IR a failure
and the discipline along with them.13 To us, the identification of success/failure is impossible.
Still, we focus our approach to “disciplinary IR” around questioning the second assumption, that the normative relationship between success
and failure is such that success is good and desirable and failure is bad. Failure has been insufficiently explored in disciplinary IR, both in
thinking about the disciplinary enterprise and in thinking about the world “out there” which we purport to study.14 Here, we look to theorize
the “upside” of the failure of the disciplinary enterprise of IR. It is, after all, failure that Baudrillard called for, in different words—a willingness
to drop commitment to and passion for a certain end in the recognition that both that end and its opposite are empty signifiers. Queer
theorists have suggested that this sort of failure—failure to live up to expectations which were messy, detached, or a priori untenable—might
be worth celebrating (Halberstam, 2011). We build on these two understandings to embrace failure in IR.
Often failure is thought about as either a final end (something has failed), as a stumbling block on a path to success (if at first you do not
succeed, try, try again), or as a miscalibration (we thought this was success, but really it is failure instead). With Jack Halberstam, we suggest a
normative reinterpretation. Rather
than seeing failure as an end point, or as a stopping point on the way to success, it can be
seen as itself a politics, “a category levied by the winners against the losers” and “a set of standards that ensure all future radical
ventures will be measured as cost-ineffective” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 184). Halberstam uses the example of reproductive success. Inherited
wisdom has suggested for a significant amount of time that people should have children—that a heterosexual marriage with biological offspring
is the ideal of success in one’s personal life. That could be taken at face value: success (measured in biological offspring to still-married
heterosexual, cissexual parents) is to be valued, and failure (measured in some other reproductive result) is to be devalued. Or the very
normative value attached to reproductive success is itself a weapon, where associating failure with non-reproduction is a category levied
against the losers by the winners. Redefining all reproductive results as successful or changing which reproductive results are measured as
successful does not change the weaponized, normalizing character of the concept of success. This is a metaphor for IR’s disciplinary sociology,
but it is also directly applicable to IR’s epistemological and methodological engagement with non-heteronormativity
Applied to IR, the normalization of “success” as the thing to which all (researchers) should aspire reifies
membership in the categories of “successful” and “failed” and provides the “successful” with a powerful
weapon to continue to exclude, put down, and delegitimize the “unsuccessful.” The “winners” are by
definition in a normatively superior position compared to the “losers” despite the emptiness of the signification of each category.
Understanding individual pieces of work, individual scholars, or research paradigms as failed (a foil to successful) is a
categorization wielded by those who have already been classified as successful to achieve and perpetuate
the exclusion of those whom they can constitute as inferior. In this way, research success is a category IR’s
winners wield against its losers to perpetuate their position as winners , consciously or unconsciously, against a
background of a disciplinary IR where the standards for research were created largely by white, heterosexual
cis-men and remain largely undisturbed despite the intellectual and representational diversification of IR research and IR scholars.
Failure as a category in IR scholarship serves to “reinscribe and renormalize standards of ‘research success’ which remain unchanged,
unchangeable, and regressive” (Halberstam, 2011). The scholarship that makes unconventional claims to knowledge cumulation (or no claim to
knowledge cumulation) not only fails but constitutes its researchers as failures—which becomes recursive when “we tend to blame each other
or ourselves for the failures of the social structure we inhabit, rather than critiquing the structures… themselves” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 35,
citing Kipnes, 2004). In Halberstam’s view, it
is the system that privileges success, that is, the problem, and failing
within it is an emancipatory possibility which “dismantles the logics of success and failure with which
we currently live” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 2).
Realizing the caging nature of the boundaries of disciplinary success, it is possible to think that failure might be perceived as
something to celebrate and strive toward rather than something which should inspire shame. Halberstam
suggests that “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer
more creative, more cooperative, and more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). In
Halberstam’s view, it is only when the norms and metrics by which we aspire to success become both politicized and
problematized that freedom becomes possible. It is not failing that we as scholars or as people need to learn to do—we fail
all the time. As Halberstam notes, failure is endemic in life and work as “to live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately die,” despite
denial, resistance, and constructs of success (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Instead of needing to learn to fail, we argue, we need to
learn to embrace failure, particularly the collective failure of the enterprise of “disciplinary IR” to achieve or approximate
“knowledge cumulation” generally or the aspirations of particular research programs specifically.
Case---1NC
 Academy---1NC
The western conception that one within the academy can kick-start movements and
somehow activate a world-changing “event” is locked within a violent form of colonial
Enlightenment based on the white man’s burden – instead we should recognize that
the disenfranchised are always already creating futures for themselves through daily
acts of survival and quotidian moments of resistance, rather than grand western
narratives.
Nayar 17 (Jayan Nayar, Associate Professor and Director of the International Development Law and
Human Rights LLM Program at the School of Law at the University of Warwick, February 2017, “Some
Thoughts on the “(Extra)Ordinary”: Philosophy, Coloniality, and Being Otherwise,” Alternatives: Global,
Local, Political Volume 42 Issue 1) gz

Indeed, it is a peculiar enterprise that we “critical intellectuals” engage in.2 We assume an audacious capacity to contemplate
the “world” and read its signs and to interpret our present and imagine better futures. We think, perhaps,
this a worthwhile social endeavor; the “thinker,” we might hope, serves as a catalyst to identify, to instigate, and to
provoke otherwise merely latent potentialities of suppressed insurgencies against the ossification of the
future in unsatisfactory and captured presents.3 With this self-assumed sense of purpose, perhaps it is understandable that many of us
seek out the “street” for our thinking;4 it is here that we search for the extraordinary “event” that marks, as we
see it, a rupture, the moment of catharsis, a transformation, the “new” born into the world . We see this tendency to

philosophize the street clearly in recent intellectual work of the critical “post-Enlightenment” philosophers.5 Reading “uprisings,” “resistance,” and

“revolutions”, interpreting the happenings of irruptions in the squares and bazaars of anger, ascribing
meaning to voice as voiced in a multitude of vernaculars in multiple locales as these events are gazed
upon and made audible to consuming eyes and ears, and investing hope and dispensing disappointment ,
indeed, we observe that much political–legal thought is so moved by the (variously conceived of) “political” projects to open

up possible pathways of “rupturing” the present. In this fashion, the street has indeed come to be the primary locale from which philosophical
contemplations are undertaken in this “age of resistance” as Costas Douzinas has named our present time: A sequence of uprisings will dominate the world political landscape in the next

What inspires such fervor, such ecstatic

period. Ours is an age of resistance. The possibility of radical change has been firmly placed on the historical agenda.6

celebration of the street, is a perceived, hoped for, emergence,7 here, the extraordinary event is the
harbinger of hope, marking the (possible, nascent) becoming of a “political subject” as the one who emerges into the
street, and out from the street, breaking free from the shackles of extant sovereign-biopolitical
diagrams, heralding (with “fidelity”), as Alain Badiou would have it come to be, the “rebirth” of history .8
The street, thus, portends history. This, we see, is thinking fixed on the spectacular, the heroic, and the extraordinary of

“radical change.” It is this philosophical tendency—to appropriate the street as the ecstatic site of
extraordinary becoming—that is my concern in this essay. It is this heroic orientation of thought that is the subject of my critique. In what follows, I consider the
philosophical–political heritage from which the preoccupation with thinking the extraordinary of the street originates and question the implications of such thinking. I argue that such thinking

betrays the continued coloniality of critical post-Enlightenment philosophy .9 My intention is to provide a

different reading of the “extraordinary” that emerges in the street—as a physical place of embodied presence rather than a reified space of philosophical aspiration—informed by what I argue

to be a decolonial understanding of the presents (and presence) of already being in the world. The essay is organized as follows. First, I trace the foundations of what I name the
“ontology of abandonment and resurrection” which, I argue, founds critical Eurocentric political–legal
philosophy. Central here is the invention of the mythologies of the event and of “becoming.” I argue that for the
philosopher of the European (post-)Enlightenment, betrayed by the idea and abandoned by the “revolutionary subject,” the quest for a
new evental becoming is all consuming. I demonstrate that the street presents precisely such an opportunity for
rescue, the irruptions there witnessed serving to revive the heroic moment of “becoming subject” through the
event. But this, I argue, is a philosophy that perpetuates, still, colonial categories of being. Against this
philosophy of the extraordinary, I suggest a twofold correction: firstly, an emphasis on the persistent ordinariness of the perceived extraordinary of the street in order that the many worlds of
resistance against the normalities of coloniality are deinvisibilized to philosophy; secondly, and consequently, a cognition of the resilient extraordinariness of the “ordinary” everyday, so that
the worlds of being-otherwise to “Europe” are returned to the philosophical register as present and real possibilities of being. What is intended by this “decolonial” correction, as I elaborate
below, is to return philosophy from the street to the everyday locations, material conditions, and experiences of embodied beings in the world.10 In this task of rupturing the coloniality of
philosophy, I suggest, we philosophers of rupture are ourselves implicated. On the Ontology of Abandonment and Resurrection (and Disappointment) We begin by directing our attention to
the constitutive categories of the European (post-)Enlightenment. By this, I mean the fundamental concepts that found the ground from which (Eurocentric) political–legal philosophy is
thought and the premises from which “critical” discoveries are imagined to be made;11 examples relevant to the present discussion include (human)being, sovereignty, the political,
constituent and constituted power, and subjectivity. Variously, the attempt to reclaim some emancipatory meaning and content for these foundational categories of (presumed) human
beingness in the world characterizes much of the preoccupation of critical philosophy. What we are concerned to do here is to reveal the coloniality of the ontological foundations of this
cosmology of the “modern,” whereby the radical, “enlightened” potentiality of human beingness was projected as the Idea of Europe onto the world. I suggest that we can best understand
this past, and present, of post-Enlightenment political–legal philosophy as being founded upon an ontology of abandonment and resurrection. The so-called French Revolution, as a
philosophical invention, is a good place to start in this connection. It would appear that no critical, transformative, engagement with the worlds of politics, of law, of democracy, of hope for

the “French Revolution” as the ruptural moment of

better human futures, in short, is possible, without some return and due reference to

European human imagination and enactment presented, as it often is, as an original, and originary, Event in history. This is the moment of
the great birth of “man”-post-God, “degodded” as Sylvia Wynter put it,12 as “subject” and “citizen,” a
being sovereign, author in and of the world. In this construction of the “Idea” of being in history is the French Revolution, for the post-Enlightenment
philosopher of the European tradition, a constitutive Event, for with it, through it, is consolidated the advent of man as a necessary rupture from emptiness and darkness into fullness and

With
belonging, the emergence from the abandonment and void of godlessness into the secular “word” and world of reasoned Enlightenment. This is a momentous becoming indeed.

the invention of the French Revolution, as event (quite aside and distinct from the temporal happenings and outcomes in France from 1789 and
onward),13 the citizen thus replaces the “believer,” the “children of revolutionary sovereignty” thus replace the

“children of God,” the violent “eventual” revolutionary-becoming thus replaces the portend of the
(im)possible secular resurrection of the human-as-citizen into the world of words and meaning absent
mediation by the divine ascription of placements.14 Indeed, a becoming into the world through an extraordinary event—a secular
resurrection as it were—is necessary to birth the “rupture” and bring into “being” the modern promise of
salvation, necessary to relegate the claim of God (and his priests) on humanity to the fringes of “premodern”
superstition.15 Simply put, the French Revolution—as invented by the repetitions of political–legal philosophers
—marks the recurrent moment and provides the repeated enunciation for a spectacular send-off for (the

Western version of the Judeo-Christian) God by the philosophy of a new (En)Light(enment) and
the “liberation” and “freedom” of sovereign man thereby rebirthed.16 Thus was invented the ontology of
(colonial-)modern beingness that so many take as given: That human beingness is the possibility of becoming—being
out of nonbeing. We see this defined by the duality of the believer and the heathen under Occidental Christianity, traced to an earlier distinction between the
(political-)sociality/civilization of bios and the “naturality” of zoe in more “classical” Grecian rationalizations.17 That beingness—as being self as self with others—is, as such,

haunted by the inherent and perpetual threat of abandonment to nonbeing from bios-community to zoe-bare life. It is the
(constantly strived for) universal potentiality and responsibility of man therefore to become into the “public”
as (ethical-)political subject.18 That this becoming, out of nonbeing (zoe-bare life) into the world of political-being-
subject, is a process filled with ontological labor pains; theories of “social contract” enacted out of the
extraordinary event thus serves as the modern philosophical vehicle for this transformation from the
extraordinary moment to the normalized future. This is all well and good, no doubt significant for an understanding of the evolving cosmologies and
philosophoscapes of the emerging “European man” out of his ages dark; the actual in the “ideal” of this emancipation of the modern subject was, however, something quite different.19 A

decolonial telling of the philosophical biography of the political subject begins with remembering that
we are not merely recounting a “European-modern” philosophical tale here. The birthing of the modern
universal subject of the political was coeval with its coconstitutive colonial underside ;

it was an ontological birth whose origins lay in the violent gestations, both material and
cosmological, of the colonial ordering of the world. I don’t intend to repeat the readings of the history of History through a
colonial–modern lens; this has amply been done effectively elsewhere.20 My aim is more to draw out the constituting premises that connect the current preoccupation of extraordinary
becoming of (Westernized) man with prior colonial philosophies of being that sought to deny and thereby annihilate the manifold actuals of already-(other-)beingness that constitutes the

worlds of being (variously)human. We recall that the foundational assumptions and constitutive philosophical categories of
being, sovereignty, subject, and political were invented alongside the material enforcement of
colonial–modern politics and law.21 From the very beginning, the universal Man of the
Enlightenment was constructed on a whole array of geo- and body political
disqualifications;22 for all the assertions of the sovereignty of man, it was the bordering of
“population” that marked the advent of the “sovereignty” of (biopolitical) “government.” 23 This, to stress the
point, was no “exception” but the very actuality of colonial–modernity .24 “Indeed, a matter of anguish for the Eurocentric philosopher of

the Enlightened subject is the continuing realisation that the inflicted and perpetuated suffering upon the majority of the human

population is a matter of everyday and ordinary reality, that the ‘exclusions’ and depravations that
are daily witnessed as defining the ‘actual’ of human-beingness under national and global orders of
(b)ordered populations are a constitutive feature of the condition of (colonial-)modernity.”
Aside from the dire actualities of the biopolitics of “populationization,” the effects of “individualization” that has ensnared the subject perhaps pose a greater disappointment to the
philosopher. The problem, simply put, is a crisis of the “present”: the apparent complacent condition of being that has come to define the settled present of a domesticated subject. As
Zygmunt Bauman observed, the “imagination” that underpins the “postpolitical,” “postmodern” consensus of neoliberal “liquid modernity,” the result of the global consolidation of capitalism,
is one whereby the much vaunted subject is concerned more with the “mining” of “disengaged” happiness and less with any historic mission for an enlightened humanity.25 It would appear,
the enticements of consumerism and entrepreneurism, more than some resurrection of a political subject into history defines the (post)modern condition of being. And the consequence of
this emptying out of “the political” from the subject? Precarious beingness and being “precariat” now are now recognised as the “normal” conditions of modern subjectivity.26 Through all this,
the philosopher, it would appear, stands abandoned by her subject. The abdication by the subject of her “historic” responsibility of becoming-being-in-the-political is an ongoing
disappointment for any critical political–legal philosopher who takes the universal promise of the “Enlightenment” seriously; it is after all the repudiation, by embodied actual beings, of the
philosophically ascribed role of the political subject to be the maker of history. Rescue is necessary therefore; recovery of the foundational promise of the Enlightenment is, for the philosopher
of rupture, imperative. And so, we understand the reasons for the following refinements to the original birth story of the political subject that we find in much current critical thinking: That to
be denied being-(in the) political, is to be either in abjection or in stupor, in ontological nothingness as inexistent, or meaninglessness as a commodity, a thing not worthy of the legacy of the
idea of Europe. The former is the state of “rightless” exclusion that concerned Arendt and her philosophical progeny, it is the condition of abandonment that preoccupies post-Agambenian
philosophers of biopolitical sovereignty. The latter is the perceived condition of the contemporary biopolitical subject object of governmentality—the “counted” and the “accounted-for,” self-
disciplining, held docile, and domesticated to be nothing useful other than as “entrepreneurial citizen consumers”—that is the object of disappointment if not contempt. And so, the crisis of
the present necessitates efforts to revive, if not rescue, even resurrect, the political subject from either abandoned deprivations or hedonistic automatonity and consumptive banality. That
becoming subject, therefore, is the continuing ontological potentiality of ruptural emancipation. Becoming subject, thus, is an ever incomplete project of becoming–being in history. With this

it becomes the task of the

critical reformulation of the idea, we arrive at the present problem to “invent,” as Badiou put it, the “problem of the present”;27

philosopher to identify the critical moments whereupon might history be glimpsed in events of rupture,
of becomings. We see variously therefore that the intention to reclaim some presumed emancipatory content to these
related foundational assumptions of human beingness permeate through the vast majority of critical thinking on the

subject of the subject in the political. The question that is addressed in such contemplations of the present is: how to rescue the emancipatory potentiality of the
subject from the normalizations, and banalizations, of the present?28 As Badiou poses it, “How are we to be faithful to changing the world within the world itself?” This becomes: How are we
to weave in the world the political truth whose historic condition of possibility was the event, without it being able to be the realization of this possibility? How are we to inscribe politically, as

We
active materiality under the sign of the Idea, a reawakening of History?29 And so we understand the particular preoccupation of the contemporary critical philosopher with the street.

witness the incessant search by philosophers of radical hope for such evental and heroic happenings; so is the
world scoured for ruptural articulations, so are peoples’ struggles ascribed meaning vis-a-vis the
constitutive categories of modern political–legal philosophy. From the past are the French and American
Revolutions (and their enunciations of universal subject beingness) tracked through to the Russian and Chinese Revolutions (less so the
Haitian and Mexican), the revolts of 1968, and now (jumping a few decades) to the antiglobalization movements post Seattle, the

Occupy movements, the “Arab Spring,” all grist to the mill of the philosopher in search of signs that faith
in the subject of the political may be redeemed, that history itself may be reawakened . For the purpose of the Idea,
therefore, are the instances of irruptions sought to be revisited, read repeatedly, and referred to in their many and

varied interpretations as (potential) instances of becoming—as Badiouian event, as Rancieriean

“dissensus,” as Zizekian “truth–event/act,” as Douzinasian “resistance/insurrection.”30 The extraordinary is a constant
preoccupation, we see. Yet, notwithstanding the philosophical investment in the event, life, when viewed through the lens of

the heroic, inevitably disappoints. The event, in its materiality, is never quite as pure as its
philosophical version, never quite enough to transform “History” sufficient for the philosopher’s
satisfaction;31 moments of exalted extraordinary emancipation seemingly tire into languid returns to
imperfection and corruption, domesticity, even “failure.” Zizek, for example, is quite clear: [W]e should avoid the temptation simply to admire
the sublime beauty of uprisings that are doomed to fail.… What new positive order should replace the old one, once the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising has waned? It is here that we
encounter the fatal weakness of the current protests. They express an authentic rage that remains unable to transform itself into even a minimal positive programme for socio-political change.
They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.32 If only people who struggle, erupt, and promise such excitement to the philosopher could be truer to their calling, possess greater fidelity

despite the many inadequacies and failures of these uprisings,

to their evental cause, be firmer in their resolve to fulfil the revolution. Still,

as Zizek judges them, the “radical emancipatory core” of such expressions of irruption is affirmed .33 Indeed for the Eurocentric
 Without the extraordinary resurrection of some
“secular” philosopher, this fidelity to the idea is a matter of philosophical salvation/damnation.

mythologized subject birthed through the extraordinary event, the post-Enlightenment philosopher of
(becoming-)being is left devoid,34 absent a cosmology of human beingness that is able to withstand the
abandonment of God, that makes such “degodding” meaningful. And so we witness: a foundational ontology of abandonment and
resurrection informs the philosophical “discoveries” of critical post-Enlightenment philosophers of the street. To us who are nonbelievers of this parochial faith system, however— for

those of us non-Europeans less entranced by the advent of the secular subject of becoming born out of the
Enlightenment of Europe—a different reading of the philosophical “situation” of the present presents
itself. With this unenchanted understanding of history, we turn now to see and read differently the street in the (extra)ordinariness of struggle. On the Ordinariness of the Extraordinary
Unintended it might be, but radical readings of spectacular extraordinary becoming are premised still on prior
constructions of human beingness based on a colonial–modern ontologic–
epistemology of being/nonbeing. For the post-Enlightenment philosopher—Badiou is
exemplary—what is assumed is that to “be” outside the political is to be abandoned to
inexistence, whereby the political has come to be the ontological standard of a
postdivine, secular normality of human beingness proper, a life desired, a life full; as
such “inexistence” (nonbeing) in political subjectivity is the underlying abandonment that
defines the condition of the captured present that requires recovery and rescue.35 The recovery and
rescue of Eurocentric philosophy, that is, the ascription of extraordinary becoming to events of irruption serves precisely, it appears to me,
to enable such a rescue, whereby the philosopher assumes that what is witnessed in these instances is
the extraordinary ruptural assertion of the idea, of the subject, claiming a belonging in the political, out of
absence, out of inexistence, out of nothingness, into (extraordinary-)being, a “liberated” entity—
the subject—as the new in history. Badiou, again, is illustrative: “We shall then say that a change of world is real when an inexistent of the world starts
to exist in this same world with maximum intensity.”36 The emergence of a new out of inexistence is the heroic core of post-
Enlightenment political–legal philosophy. A simple counteraffirmation serves as our point of departure for a
decolonial correction to “white ignorance.”37 We can state it simply thus: prior to the apparent
extraordinary moment which draws the (critical) philosopher’s gaze to rest upon the manifestations and expressions of rebellious life,
persists the daily maneuvrings of communities in struggle in their encounters with the
totalizing desires of appropriative power. In this view, what is witnessed as the extraordinary
becoming of the new into the world is but the material and exigent appearance of persistent,
if largely “invisible” being(-otherwise) whose everyday is the ordinary struggle against
extant orders of asserted normalities. It is this that I here term already-(other-)being that underpins a
decolonial philosophy. And it is this presence, and persistence that is lost to critical Eurocentric
philosophers of rupture; we see this, for example, in the philosopher’s apparent discovery of dissensus. We observe the following: the critical philosopher’s
discoveries of ruptural becomings is informed repeatedly, to use Santiago-Gomez’s phrase, of a “point-zero” perspective on human life

worlds.38 By this is meant a perspective whereby it is the “discovery” of the “other” (as imagined) by the philosopher that
begets the worlds of meaning from whence history, as a projection of the idea, marches on. This we observe is commonplace in much
recent thinking and writing on resistance and dissensus. For example, in concluding his analysis of the Tunisian uprisings which marked the start of the so-called Arab Spring, Illan Wall reflects
thus: In terms of strategies of resistance then, I want to underline the importance of learning to live together without loyalty, without the everyday presupposition that the state is naturally
and inexorably there. It is the interruption of everyday authority that is crucial.…this inoperativity is already there.…Let me suggest then, that the point of articulation between the critical legal
theory of dissensus and the Tunisian events is the question: how to unwork sovereign power on an everyday basis, without reinstituting the same logics once more?39 Wall’s is a thoughtful,
and respectful reading of resistance, rooted and influenced by Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “inoperativity”; indeed, he is mindful not to “appropriate the politics of the “postcolony” and put it to
work for some “European” project.”40 However, as with all Eurocentric viewings of the worlds of “rupture/resistance,” the point-zero perspective is marked here. What I mean by this is that
the analysis assumes a (dissensual) moment, an event, from which the extraordinary emergence/becoming of a new is discovered; a perspective that identifies dissensus in moments of
“emergence” out of perceived absence or inexistence after all is one which assumes a prior “consensus,” a normality from which then the “interruption” is thought to be witnessed. From this
point zero, then are “strategies of resistance” postulated, futures anticipated, as a new in the world. But let us pause. For whom this normality of consensus from which dissensus is
celebrated? From whose location of thought this reading of the new of interruption? For whom, and from which moment on, the novelty of this discovery? Even as Wall’s account of the Ben
Ali regime is nuanced, an assumption of a prior normality of the political as a consensus still persists here. A decolonial view instead, I suggest, begins
precisely from a demystification of that assumption of consensus and a recognition of
the many undersides of persistent refusal against such presumptions of normality. I explain below. Wall’s
view and imagination suffers from a common inability of the well-intentioned Eurocentric philosopher to

see a different normality when gazing upon the world, to comprehend that the “interruptions of everyday authority,” and the
nonreification of the state, are perhaps, for social majorities the world over, the persistent everyday
unsentimental normalities of their ordinary being even as they appear subservient; for them, the “importance of
learning to live together without loyalty, without the everyday presupposition that the state is naturally and inexorably there” may rather be better understood and realized than assumed by

such exuberance at fixing a meaning

the critical philosopher who earnestly exhorts such rupture based on some discovery of the extraordinary event. Indeed,

of extraordinariness to the eruptional manifestation of persistent refusals, however, “incompletely” as Wall claims to do,
might well be to impoverish rather than enrich understandings of the extraordinariness of the normalities of
resistance, it might continue invisibilizing the rich tapestry of actually present consciousness and
experiences of (already-)being that refuse the consensus of the present as assumed by the
critical post-Enlightenment philosopher. Let us be frank. Nothing is added to the actualities or the
materialities of life and struggle by the philosophical naming of an eruption of anger or refusal
as event or dissensus, neither are extant orderings of the political as bordered normalities of governmentality challenged by the invented duality of consensus/dissensus;
all such ascriptions do is to attach to a given time and place particular abstracted categories
based on presumed universal truths of beingness. In doing so, the pasts, presents, and infinite
futures that define the materialities of life and struggle are conveniently subsumed under the
celebratory reification of an instant that is read as “evental,” marking a progressive node in
history as promised by the heroic mythology of the European Enlightenment; in this, Wall does not escape from
the “appropriation” of the postcolony for the European project. A decolonial philosophical perspective might understand
resistance and struggle differently, grounded as it is in the experiences of past and present struggles of
ordinary human beingness outside of the privileging gaze of the post-Enlightenment
philosopher: notwithstanding both the material infliction of violence and the ideological–biopolitical
constructions of subject-ontologies, subjected human populations remain in their majority stubborn
in their multiplicities of already being as other to the totalizing ascription of being-
subject that is the biopolitical project of the sovereign assertion.41 What is significant in this
other ontology of being—not fixated with tropes of abandonment and resurrection—is its rootedness in the histories and
materialities of everyday resistance to the coloniality of power.42
 China Turn---1NC
Western authors agree, Chinese IR is formulated in accordance with Marxist
principles, not neoclassical IR – prefer reverse-biased evidence – the security dilemma
is wrong.
Rudd ’22 [Kevin, President @ Asia Society, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Australia:
“The World According to Xi Jinping: What China’s Ideologue in Chief Really Believes,” Foreign Affairs,
November/December 2022 issue. [Link]
china-ideologue-kevin-rudd?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=Ukraine
%E2%80%99s%20Path%20to%20Victory&utm_content=20221014&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week
%20-%20112017]//AD

In the post–Cold War era, the Western world has suffered no shortage of grand theories of history and
international relations. The settings and actors may change, but the global geopolitical drama goes on:
variants of realism and liberalism compete to explain and predict state behavior , scholars debate whether the
world is witnessing the end of history, a clash of civilizations, or something else entirely. And it is no surprise that the question
that now attracts more analytical attention than any other is the rise of China under President Xi
Jinping and the challenge it presents to American power. In the run-up to the 20th National Congress of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), as Xi has maneuvered to consolidate his power and secure an unprecedented third term, Western analysts
have sought to decode the worldview that drives him and his ambitions for China.

One important body of thought has been largely absent from this search for understanding, however:
Marxism-Leninism. This is odd because Marxism-Leninism has been China’s official ideology since 1949.
But the omission is also understandable, since most Western thinkers long ago came to see communist ideology as
effectively dead—even in China, where, in the late 1970s, the CCP leader Deng Xiaoping set aside the Marxist-Leninist
orthodoxy of his predecessor, Mao Zedong, in favor of something more akin to state capitalism. Deng summed up his
thoughts on the matter with characteristic bluntness: Bu zhenglun, “Let’s dispense with theory,” he told
attendees at a major CCP conference in 1981. His successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed his lead, rapidly expanding the role
of the market in the Chinese domestic economy and embracing a foreign policy that maximized China’s participation in a global economic order
led by the United States.

Xi has brought that era of pragmatic, nonideological governance to a crashing halt. In its place, he has
developed a new form of Marxist nationalism that now shapes the presentation and substance of China’s politics,
economy, and foreign policy. In doing so, Xi is not constructing theoretical castles in the air to rationalize
decisions that the CCP has made for other, more practical reasons. Under Xi, ideology drives policy more often
than the other way around. Xi has pushed politics to the Leninist left, economics to the Marxist left, and
foreign policy to the nationalist right. He has reasserted the influence and control the CCP exerts over all domains of public policy and private
life, reinvigorated state-owned enterprises, and placed new restrictions on the private sector. Meanwhile, he has stoked nationalism by
pursuing an increasingly assertive foreign policy, turbocharged by a Marxist-inspired belief that history is irreversibly on China’s side and that a
world anchored in Chinese power would produce a more just international order. In short, Xi’s rise has meant nothing less than the return of
Ideological Man.

These ideological trends are not simply a throwback to the Mao era. Xi’s
worldview is more complex than Mao’s, blending
ideological purity with technocratic pragmatism. Xi’s pronouncements about history, power, and justice
might strike Western audiences as impenetrable or irrelevant. But the West ignores Xi’s ideological messaging
at its own peril. No matter how abstract and unfamiliar his ideas might be, they are having profound effects
on the real-world content of Chinese politics and foreign policy—and thus, as China’s rise continues, on the rest
of the world.
PARTY MAN

Like all Marxist-Leninists, Xi

bases his thinking on historical materialism (an approach to history focused on the
inevitability of progress through ongoing class struggle) and dialectical materialism (an approach to
politics that focuses on how change occurs when contradictory forces collide and are resolved). In his
published writings, Xi deploys historical materialism to position the Chinese revolution in world history in a
context in which China’s move to a more advanced stage of socialism necessarily accompanies the
decline of capitalist systems. Through the lens of dialectical materialism, he portrays his agenda as a step
forward in an ever-intensifying contest between the CCP and reactionary forces at home (an arrogant
private sector, Western-influenced nongovernmental organizations, religious movements) and abroad (the
United States and its allies).

These concepts may seem abstruse and arcane to those outside China. But they are taken seriously by elites in the CCP,
senior Chinese officials, and many of the international relations scholars who advise the government.
And Xi’s published writings on theory are vastly more extensive than those of any other Chinese leader
since Mao. The CCP also draws on the kinds of economic and strategic advice that typically guide Western political systems. But within the
Chinese system, Marxism-Leninism still serves as the ideological headwaters of a world view that places China
on the right side of history and portrays the United States as struggling in the throes of inevitable
capitalist decline, consumed by its own internal political contradictions and destined to fall by the
wayside. That, in Xi’s view, will be the real end of history.

In 2013, barely five months after his appointment as party general secretary, Xi gave an address to the Central Conference on Ideology and
Propaganda, a gathering of top party leaders in Beijing. The contents of the speech were not reported at the time but were leaked three
months later and published by China Digital Times. The speech offers an unfiltered portrait of Xi’s deepest political convictions. In it, he
dwells on the risks of the ideological decay that led to the collapse of Soviet communism, the West’s
role in fomenting ideological division within China, and the need to crack down on all forms of dissent. “The disintegration
of a regime often starts from the ideological area,” Xi said. “Political unrest and regime change may occur overnight, but ideological evolution is
a long-term process,” he continued, warning that once “ideological defenses are breached, other defenses
become very difficult to hold.” But the CCP “has justice on our side,” he assured his audience, encouraging them not to be “evasive,
bashful, or mince our words” in dealing with Western countries, whose goal is “to vie with us for the battlefields
of people’s hearts and for the masses, and in the end to overthrow the leadership of the CCP and
China’s socialist system.”
This meant cracking down on anyone “harboring dissent and discord” and demanding that CCP members demonstrate loyalty not only to the
party but also to Xi personally. What followed was an internal “cleansing” of the CCP, accomplished by purging any perceived political or
institutional opposition, in large part through a decadelong anticorruption campaign that had begun even before the speech. A “rectification
campaign” brought another round of purges to the party’s political and legal affairs apparatus. Xi also reasserted party control over the People’s
Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police and centralized China’s cybersecurity and surveillance systems. Finally, in 2019, Xi introduced a
party-wide education campaign titled “Don’t Forget the Party’s Original Purpose, Keep the Mission in Mind.” According to an official document
announcing the initiative, its goal was for party members “to gain theoretical learning and to be baptized in ideology and politics.” By around
the end of his first term, it had become clear that Xi sought nothing less than to transform the CCP into the high church of a revitalized, secular
faith.

HIGH MARX

In contrast to those immediate moves toward a more Leninist discipline in domestic politics, the
shift to Marxist orthodoxy in
economic policy under Xi has been more gradual. Economic management had long been the domain of the technocrats who
serve on the State Council, China’s administrative cabinet. Xi’s personal interests also lay more in party history, political ideology, and grand
strategy than in the details of financial and economic management. But as
the party apparatus increasingly asserted control of
the economic departments of the state, China’s policy debates on the relative roles of the state and the
market became increasingly ideological. Xi also progressively lost confidence in market economics following
the global financial crisis of 2008 and China’s homegrown financial crisis of 2015, which was sparked by the bursting of a
stock market bubble and led to a nearly 50 percent collapse in the value of Chinese stocks before the markets finally settled in 2016.

China’s economic policy trajectory under Xi—from a consensus in support of market reforms to an embrace of increased party and
state intervention—has therefore been uneven, contested, and at times contradictory. Indeed, in late 2013, less than six
months after Xi’s revivalist sermon on ideology and propaganda, the Central Committee of the CCP (the top several hundred leaders of the
party) adopted a remarkably reformist document on the economy, starkly titled “The Decision.” It outlined a series of policy measures that
would allow the market to play “the decisive role” in the allocation of resources in the economy. But the rollout of these policies slowed to a
standstill in 2015, while state-owned
enterprises received trillions of dollars in investment from “industry
guidance funds” between 2015 and 2021—a massive infusion of government support that brought the
Chinese state roaring back to the center of economic policy.

At the 19th CCP Party Congress, in

2017, Xi announced that going forward, the party’s central ideological
challenge would be to rectify the “unbalanced and inadequate development” that had emerged during
the “reform and opening” period of market-based policy changes that Deng had inaugurated in the late
1970s. In a little-noticed speech published in the party’s ideological journal in 2021, Xi in effect challenged Deng’s definition of “the primary
stage of socialism” and Deng’s belief that China would need to endure inequality for hundreds of years before achieving prosperity for all.
Instead, Xi
hailed a faster transition to a higher phase of socialism, declaring that “thanks to many decades
of hard work, [this] is a period that marks a new starting point for us.” Xi rejected Deng’s gradualism
and the notion that China was doomed to an indefinite future of developmental imperfection and
class inequality. Through more rigorous adherence to Marxist principles, he promised, China could achieve
both national greatness and greater economic equality in the not-too-distant future.

Such an outcome would rely on party committees increasing their influence on private firms by playing a larger role in selecting
senior management and making critical board decisions. And as the Chinese state began securing equity in private firms, the
state would also encourage successful entrepreneurs to invest in state-owned enterprises, mixing the
market and the state to an ever-greater degree.

Meanwhile, CCP economic planners would be tasked with designing a “dual circulation economy,” which
in effect meant that China would become increasingly self-reliant across all sectors of the economy while the
world’s economies would become increasingly dependent on China. And in late 2020, Xi laid out an approach to income redistribution known as
the “common prosperity agenda,” through which the rich were to be expected to “voluntarily” redistribute funds to state-favored programs to
reduce income inequality. By the end of 2021, it was clear that Deng’s era of “reform and opening” was coming to a close. In its place stood a
new statist economic orthodoxy.

This straight turns their scenario – attempts to deter China will be seen as strategically
hostile and cause dialectical escalation only explained by Marxist IR – China is too
ideologically disciplined to respond to western posturing, but their thought that
victory is inevitable means they won’t preemptively start war – only the plan has a
risk of causing it.
Rudd ’22 [Kevin, President @ Asia Society, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Australia:
“The World According to Xi Jinping: What China’s Ideologue in Chief Really Believes,” Foreign Affairs,
November/December 2022 issue. [Link]
china-ideologue-kevin-rudd?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=Ukraine
%E2%80%99s%20Path%20to%20Victory&utm_content=20221014&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week
%20-%20112017]//AD
Xi’s Marxist nationalism is an ideological blueprint for the future; it is the truth about China that is hiding in plain sight. Under
Xi, the CCP
will evaluate changing international circumstances through the prism of dialectical analysis—and not
necessarily in ways that will make sense to outsiders. For example, Xi will see new Western institutions
intended to balance against China, such as the Quad (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a strategic cooperation
agreement between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) and the AUKUS (a defense agreement linking Australia, the United
Kingdom, and the United States), as both strategically hostile and ideologically predictable, requiring new forms
of political, ideological, and military “struggle” to roll back. In his Marxist-Leninist view, China’s ultimate
victory is guaranteed because the deep forces of historical determinism are on the CCP’s side, and the
West is in structural decline.

This view will affect the likelihood of conflict in Asia. Since 2002, the CCP’s code language for its belief
that war was unlikely has been the official phrase “China continues to enjoy a period of strategic
opportunity.” This statement is meant to convey that China will face a low risk of conflict for the foreseeable
future and can therefore seek economic and foreign policy advantages while the United States is bogged
down elsewhere, especially in the broader Middle East. But in the wake of Washington’s official labeling of China as
a “strategic competitor” in 2017, the ongoing U.S.-Chinese trade war, mutual (if selective) forms of
economic decoupling, and the hardening of U.S. alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and NATO,
the CCP is likely to change its formal analytical conclusion about the strategic environment.
The danger is that dialectical methodologies and the binary conclusions that they produce can lead to spectacularly incorrect conclusions when
applied to the real world of international security. In the 1950s, Mao saw it as dialectically inevitable that the United States would attack China
to snuff out the Chinese revolution on behalf of the forces of capitalism and imperialism. Despite the Korean War and two crises in the Taiwan
Strait during that decade, no such attack materialized. Had Mao not taken such an ideological view, the thawing of China’s relationship with the
United States could perhaps have been initiated a decade earlier than it was, particularly given the unfolding reality of the Sino-Soviet split that
began after 1959. In similar fashion, Xi now sees threats on every front and has embarked on the securitization of virtually every
aspect of Chinese public policy and private life. And once such threat perceptions become formal analytical
conclusions and are translated into the CCP bureaucracies, the Chinese system might begin to function
as if armed conflict were inevitable.

Xi’s ideological pronouncements shape how the CCP and its nearly 100 million members understand their country and its role in the world.
They take such texts seriously; the rest of the world should, too. At the very least, Xi’s
embrace of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy
should put to rest any wishful thinking that Xi’s China might peacefully liberalize its politics and
economy. And it should make clear that China’s approach to foreign policy is driven not only by a rolling
calculus of strategic risk and opportunity but also by an underlying belief that the forces of historical
change are inexorably driving the country forward.

This should, therefore, cause Washington and its partners to carefully evaluate their existing China
strategies. The United States should realize that China represents the most politically and ideologically disciplined
challenger it has ever faced during its century of geopolitical dominance. U.S. strategists should
avoid “mirror imaging” and should not assume that Beijing will act in ways that
Washington would construe as rational or serving China’s self-interests.
The West won an ideological contest in the twentieth century. But China
is not the Soviet Union, not least because China
now has the second-largest economy in the world. And although Xi may not be Stalin, he is certainly not
Mikhail Gorbachev, either. Xi’s adherence to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy has helped him consolidate his personal power. But this
same ideological stance has also created dilemmas that the CCP will find difficult to resolve, especially as slowing economic growth puts in
doubt the party’s long-standing social contract with the people.
 Extinction---1NC
Refuse monocausal, linear accounts of extinction events in favor of a present
apocalypse that is accelerated by structural failures in social systems.
Hin-Yan 18. Liu, Associate Professor at the Centre for international law, Conflict and Crisis at the University of Copenhagen, Ph.D. from
Kings College London, et al., 4/22/18, “Governing Boring Apocalypses: A new typology of existential vulnerabilities and exposures for existential
risk research,” Futures, Vol 102, p. 7-16

growing body of scholarship has argued that a new

1. Introduction the definition and framings of existential risk¶ In recent years, a

class of risks bears closer study, for their potential extreme impact on the survival of humanity (Bostrom,
2002, 2013; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2011; Matheny, 2007; Rees, 2004). Prior research has identified a range of such human

extinction risks (Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2008; Haggstrom, 2016; Pamlin & Armstrong, 2015), both natural and manmade, including risks from
supervolcano eruption, asteroid impact, global warming, nuclear war, as well as more speculative risks
from emerging technologies such as biotechnology, high-energy physics experiment disasters, or
misaligned artificial intelligence. (Asimov, 1981; Baum & Barrett, 2016; Bostrom, 2014; Ord, Hillerbrand, & Sandberg, 2010; Posner, 2004; Sagan,
1983; Smil, 2005; Tegmark & Bostrom, 2005; Yudkowsky, 2008a). ¶ While it is encouraging to see greater attention for a critical topic that has long remained
understudied, it
is relevant to ask how the framing of the field’s basic concepts shapes both which problems
it identifies and prioritizes, as well as which policy approaches it considers and engages. In his seminal paper,
Bostrom defined an existential risk as ‘[o]ne where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically
curtail its potential’ (Bostrom, 2002). Thus in Bostrom’s view, existential risks are characterised both by their scope (pan-generational) and their intensity (crushing):
the size of the group of people who are at risk1 and how badly each individual within that group is affected, respectively (Bostrom, 2002). ¶ Much
prior
research on existential risks has thus deployed criteria and methodology which have identified discrete
and independent challenges of sufficient severity and pervasiveness to bring about the ‘adverse
outcome’ in a direct causal manner. In this reading, existential risks are an extreme offshoot of global
catastrophic risks—disasters which “might have the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale” (Bostrom, 2013; Bostrom &
Cirkovic, 2011, p. 2), but which fall short of permanent collapse. While we are not necessarily averse to the Bostromian definition of ‘adverse outcomes’—a
definition which indeed seems to characterize the space of eventual outcomes to be avoided— we take more issue with the limited range
of pathways towards this dreaded outcome-space, which much of the literature has focused on exploring. Specifically, as noted by
others in the community, much prior research “has focused mainly on tracing a causal pathway from a

catastrophic event to global catastrophic loss of life” (Avin et al., 2018, p. 1). As such there remains an event-focus,
in the sense that only discrete events that are causally connected to the demise of humanity within a
relatively short time-frame qualify as an existential risk (rather than a ‘merely’ globally catastrophic one, or a background risk).¶
1.1. Existential risk (re)framings as crucial consideration for law & governance approaches ¶ Distinguishing existential risks as a uniquely

threatening outlier along the spectrum of global risks, however, is arguably an unnecessarily narrow
framing of the field of study. Indeed, a high-profile ‘one-hit-KO’ existential risk such as a global nuclear war
or a pandemic may constitute only one avenue towards that ‘adverse outcome’, and concentrating
predominately upon (ways to intervene in) its origin and direct pathway, risks overshadowing other potential
paths or disaster interaction effects2 that functionally converge towards that same disastrous outcome,
even if only indirectly or over longer timescales, with a potentially higher probability. Indeed, as recently noted by
scholars in the field, a full mapping of scenarios that lead to catastrophic outcomes “requires exploring the

interplay between many interacting critical systems and threats, beyond the narrow study of individual
scenarios that are typically addressed by single disciplines” (Avin et al., 2018, p. 2).The precise framing of
‘existential risks’ is therefore a crucial consideration, informing ethical, strategic, and epistemological (cf.
academic) priorities in facing ‘adverse outcomes’. This is particularly the case in the context of studying

how global political dynamics may interact with certain existential risks, and in formulating
meaningfully effective policies and governance approaches to such risks . Of course, this is not to say that the field of
existential risk studies has not sought to involve and engage with policy and governance approaches and solutions. Indeed, to its credit, research in the field of
existential risks has actively sought to engage with these issues—given that, as Bostrom himself observes (2013:27), global cooperation is critical to mitigating a
wide range of existential risks. Likewise, researchers within the ‘AI safety’ community are beginning to highlight fields such as policy and psychology, as under-
represented but potentially promising approaches to addressing risks arising from AI (Brundage, 2017; Sotala, 2017b). ¶ Accordingly, there has been research into
the interaction effects between technologies and politics—such as the possibility that arms races might increase the risk that untested, powerful AI systems are
deployed rashly or prematurely (Armstrong, Bostrom, & Shulman, 2013; Shulman, 2009). Other work has drawn on cognitive psychology, to study how people might
structurally (mis)judge the probability of risks (Yudkowsky, 2008b). Likewise, work exploring policy- and governance approaches to mitigating existential risks has
explored policy approaches that include insurance arrangements for large catastrophes (Taylor, 2008); technology taxes and subsidies (Posner, 2008); and work
drawing on social (and organizational) psychology to assess ways to motivate AI researchers to choose beneficial AI designs (Baum, 2016). Yet, other work has
examined the cost-effectiveness of biosecurity interventions (Millett & Snyder-Beattie, 2017); pricing externalities to balance public the risks and benefits of
scientific research generally (Farquhar, Cotton-Barratt, & Snyder-Beattie, 2017); and proposing a general international regulatory regime to govern global
catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies (Wilson, 2013). At present, a
majority of existential risk research centres3 have
articulated law and policy research as areas of interest, and scholars in this space have begun to
translate such work into concrete proposed policy interventions—notably the 2017 GPP report, which included proposals to
develop governance for geoengineering research; establish international scenario plans and exercises for engineered pandemics, and build international attention
for existential risk reduction (Farquhar, Halstead et al., 2017).¶ Such work is highly encouraging, and the existential risk research agenda has benefited from it.
Nonetheless, the risk remains that a too-narrow conception of ‘existential risks’ prematurely closes down the
space of law and governance solutions that are possible—or necessary—in assuring humanity a non-
catastrophic future—for instance, a future that, in Bostrom’s framing, meaningfully ‘maximize[s] the probability of an ok outcome’ (Bostrom, 2013, p.
19). However, if human extinction and the persistent and pervasive truncation of technological potential are not completely homologous, then tailoring our

portfolio of policy responses exclusively to closing off the pathways these risks could take —and then calling it a
day—would be insufficient. In fact, this might only afford future policymakers with a false sense of security,

even as the world continues to reside in an overall state of ‘super-risk’ (Bermudez & Pardo, 2015).¶ This is
especially the case when there is a narrow ‘technological’ (re)solution on offer—such as ‘improve global vaccine synthesis
and production capability’, or ‘subsidize international technical AI safety research’—which promise to address or prevent the risk at its root. While such direct
technological solutions may certainly be indispensable to averting some existential risks, they
may not suffice in actually ‘plugging all the
holes’ in our risk space. In a disciplinary context, there is a risk (admittedly self-correcting, given publication incentives) of the research
agenda ‘halting’ early. In a real-world context, the availability of simple, straightforward ‘fixes’ might
even pose a ‘moral hazard’, if policymakers or global governance systems which lack political will or the
attention to explore more complex or costly changes, seize upon the ‘symbolic action’ of the straightforward, first-order mitigation strategies. Even where this is not
the case, certain policy recommendations to mitigate existential risks might depend on too-optimistic a view of institutional rationality or capability. ¶ 1.2. ‘Boring
Apocalypses’: from existential hazards, to existential risks¶ While
such efforts might mitigate specific existential risks, this
might not translate into significantly lowering the overall probability of the ‘adverse outcome’, if only a
part of the problem, or only one problem among many, is addressed. An alternative articulation is that only one path to the
‘adverse outcome’ is being explored by much research into existential risks: erecting obstacles along that path may indeed reduce the overall likelihood of
manifesting these risks, but this might have little impact, or even no effect, upon the manifestation of the ‘adverse outcome’. ¶ Thus, our view is that a materialised
existential risk (what we call an ‘existential hazard’) is sufficient to lead to an (existentially) ‘adverse outcome’, but crucially, that this is unnecessary to reach that
result. If
the overarching objective is to lower the probability of human extinction or significant
technological curtailment, adopting an array of approaches which complement the mitigation of direct
existential risks are required. Within this broad spectrum of aligned approaches, we propose to introduce law, policy, regulatory and governance
tools in this paper as an example. The choice of law and policy perspectives is two-fold: on one hand, they make it possible to take second-order considerations,
which involve indirect and socially and culturally mediated paths towards ‘adverse outcomes’ into account; on the other hand, these recognise both the complexity
of social organisation and the prospect that civilizational collapse may trigger or possibly instantiate existential outcomes. In this sense, law
and policy
approaches offer the possibility of complementing and enhancing the narrower approach adopted by
contemporary existential risk research, to take into consideration other paths to existentially adverse outcomes; and to better
anticipate vulnerabilities, exposures and failure modes in societal efforts to address existential risks.¶ 1.3
 Scholar---1NC
Being IR scholar is a reverse qualification.
Menand 5 – Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991 and has been a staff writer since 2001. His book “The
Metaphysical Club” was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. He
was an associate editor at The New Republic from 1986 to 1987, an editor at The New Yorker from 1992 to 1993, and a contributing editor at
The New York Review of Books from 1994 to 2001. He is the Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Anne T. and Robert M.
Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, November 28 th
("Everybody’S an Expert", New Yorker, Available online at [Link] Accessed
11-10-2020)

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton;
$35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted
in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than
the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that
they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same
repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world
works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the
experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the
future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her
self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the
papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our
system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones. “Expert Political Judgment” is
not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he
began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or
offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that
various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which
they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup?
Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the
ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361
forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they
reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they
assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate. Tetlock
got a statistical handle on his task by putting
most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate
the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic
growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing
probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at
predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the
experts performed worse than they would
have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future
a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in
other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks
evenly over the three choices. Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-
specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable
forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of
diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of
academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished
political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the
New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts
in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.” People who are not
experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists,
though, nothing could be less surprising. “Expert
Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies
that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the
people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a
group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the
results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview.
Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that
expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain
damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no
better than the secretaries’. The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with
our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong. Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale
classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that,
over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say)
the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat
eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring
roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per
cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students,
who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with
almost fifty-per-cent error. The expert-prediction game is not much different. When television pundits make predictions, the more ingenious
their forecasts the greater their cachet. An arresting new prediction means that the expert has discovered a set of interlocking causes that no
one else has spotted, and that could lead to an outcome that the conventional wisdom is ignoring. On shows like “The McLaughlin Group,”
these experts never lose their reputations, or their jobs, because long shots are their business. More serious commentators differ from the
pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area-studies professors—are
not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal
as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does
not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. The expert also suffers from knowing
too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his
or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why
specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious. Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us
when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe.
Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their
theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives
to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than
look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look
for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan. Also, people tend to see the future as indeterminate
and the past as inevitable. If
you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or
the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many
potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes. We have no idea today how
tomorrow’s invasion of a foreign land is going to go; after the invasion, we can actually persuade
ourselves that we knew all along. The result seems inevitable, and therefore predictable. Tetlock found that,
consistent with this asymmetry, experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an
event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a higher degree of certainty than, according to the record,
they really did. When this was pointed out to them, by Tetlock’s researchers, they sometimes became defensive. And, like most of us,
experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables
more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability
of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of x and a one-in-four chance of y, the probability of both x and y occurring
is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less.
The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single,
outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice
and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda
today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than
the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an
active feminist—rather than one. Plausible detail makes us believers. When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that
covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher
premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In
1982, anexperiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess
the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet
Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion
of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union,
sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it
required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail. It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts
got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other
people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from
his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says: Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers
who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new
domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are
already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know
many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises
but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident
about their own forecasting prowess. A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately
determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations,
or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man
theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the
“actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big
idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail
are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in
the short run, but the long run irons them out. Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining
explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating
prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies
kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”
 White Delusion---1NC
The 1AC is a form of white delusion that represents an active misapprehension of
reality -- there is an epistemic imperative to dismantle the anti-black social practice.
McRae ’19 [Emily; May 13; Associate Professor of Buddhism at the University of New
Mexico; Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections, Philosophy of Race, “Chapter 1,” p. 44-45]

I offer this story not only as an example of everyday white delusion, but also to set the tone of this chapter: From both the
Buddhist and critical race theoretical perspectives that I draw on here, ignorance (delusion) is not someone else’s
problem. There is a moral, and epistemic imperative to confront our own ignorance, to dismantle the
false beliefs and misunderstandings that inform our everyday sense of reality. In this chapter, I use the Buddhist concept of
avidyā (ignorance, confusion, delusion) to analyze the causes, mechanisms, and possible correctives for white delusion.
In Buddhist contexts, avidyā refers not only to a lack of knowledge but also (and primarily) to an active
misapprehension of reality, a warped projection onto reality that reinforces our own dysfunction and vice.
Ignorance is rarely innocent; it is not an isolated phenomenon of just-not-happening-to-know-something. It is maintained and
reinforced through personal and social habits, including practices of personal and collective false
projection, strategic ignoring, and convenient “forgetting.” This view of avidyā has striking similarities to philosophical analyses of white
ignorance, such as Charles Mills’s, which understand white ignorance not in terms of a passive lack of knowledge but as an active refusal
by whites to confront basic facts about our social world.

I argue that Buddhist

analyses of avidyā may help us understand the mechanisms of white ignorance and the
practices for deconstructing it. On the Buddhist view, the mechanisms for maintaining avidyā include
obsession with self and clinging to fixed narratives about the self (in the case of white delusion, “I’m not racist” or “I’ve
earned and deserve everything I have”) and the refusal to take seriously cause and effect (such as a failure to historicize racism, the failure to
understand broad, systemic effects of racism, and the inability to apply abstract knowledge of racism to specific cases). In my own case of white
delusion, I was guilty of both kinds of mistakes: I was clinging to a narrative that obscured reality—that it was only women who
bore the burden of managing physical appearance in our society—and I failed to apply my knowledge of how racism works in the abstract to
the specifics of my partner’s life.
Buddhist conceptions of ignorance or delusion may also help to locate possible correctives for white ignorance. Because avidyā is
not simply a lack of knowledge, it cannot be completely remedied by exposure to facts and analyses of those facts.
To be receptive to such knowledge in the first place, to remember and apply it, we must overcome our own
dysfunctional emotional patterns that sustain our confusion. So, on a Buddhist ethical view, white people cannot
combat white ignorance simply with knowledge about racism (which is already widely available) but rather white people need to do
the personal and emotional work of deconstructing our own whiteness, as it arises in our own lives, to
uproot our white ignorance. This is uncomfortable and ugly (but necessary) work that will require white
people to correct for major moral blind spots by developing the moral skill of equanimity (or “tarrying,” as
George Yancy has argued).3
2NC
OV—2NC
 AT: Extinction Outweighs---2NC
IR at the state produces nationalism that is reinforced through practices like debate
that cognitively and affectively takes for granted the legitimacy of the nation state of
hallucinatory whiteness that blackmails and acts violent social exclusion without
change.
Bonikowski and Gheihman ’15 [Bart Bonikowski and Nina Gheihman, Harvard University. Nation-
State as Symbolic Construct. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition,
Volume 16. [Link]
state_as_symbolic_construct.pdf]

Nationalism is one of the central ideologies of the modem era. Not surprisingly, its hegemonic rise over the past 200 years has
attracted considerable attention from historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Researchers have been especially preoccupied with

those aspects of nationalism that have been most disruptive for existing social and political institutions,
from the emergence of collective identification in newly forming nation-states and the struggle for statehood by minority groups to the sudden

emptions of nativism and xenophobia in otherwise stable societies. Much of this literature has been based on the implicit
assumption that in the absence of violent upheavals, nationalism in established democracies is simply a fait accompli rather than a source of continued social and
political change.

In contrast, more recent studies have turned their attention to everyday forms of nationalism, arguing that
the primacy of the nation-state as a unit of political governance and collective identification is
continually reinforced - and sometimes subtly altered - through routine cognitive and affective orientations that are
themselves products of institutional and ritual practices. Such work has shown that meanings attached to the nation are not uniform
within a given national community, but systematically vary across individuals and social groups and are associated with other socially and politically relevant
attitudes and behaviors. This article provides an analytical overview of this burgeoning literature, identifying its contributions, limitations, and potential for
achieving a more nuanced understanding of nationalism in contemporary societies.

Traditional Nationalism Scholarship

The majority of research on nationalism falls within three broad traditions that investigate the origins of the nation-state as an institutionalized
political form, the rise of new independent nation-states in the post-War period; and radical nationalist ideologies in contemporary societies.

Focusing on the historical emergence of the nation-state, the first approach is grounded in the observation that prior to the eighteenth century, the political
authority vested in statelike institutions was rarely absolute or uncontested. Most states ruled over diverse populations sharply divided along lines of ethnicity,
cultural tradition, religion, and language. It is only with the rise of the modern nation-state and its constitutive ideology of nationalism that state sovereignty
became codified in both a territorial and cultural sense, with state subjects increasingly viewing themselves as members of a community with shared descent,
customs, and collective fate (Gellner, 1983; Anderson, 1983). In the process, the nation became the source of the state's legitimacy and the congruence of the
state's political and the nation's cultural boundaries became a taken-for-granted reality. Of course, this process was far from teleological; the
rise of the
nation-state came in fits and starts and was accompanied by protracted conflicts and institutionalized
forms of intergroup domination.
The second tradition documents the rise of independent nation-states in the post-War period, most recently during the postcommunist
transition in Eastern Europe. This literature is rich in case studies, but has been less effective at formulating general conclusions about nation-
state formation and diffusion. Among the exceptions is Hechter's (2000) Containing Nationalism, which argues that nationalist movements are
mobilized by centralized states' direct rule over culturally heterogeneous but territorially bounded populations. Viewing this as a problem for
state stability, Hechter advocates policies that grant autonomy to minority populations. Another important theoretical contribution is
Brubaker's (1996) study of ethnic relations in former Soviet republics and satellite states, which he sees as characterized by three distinct types
of nationalism: 'nationalizing nationalism' of the newly sovereign states, 'minority nationalism' of domestic minority groups, and 'homeland
nationalism' of coethnics in bordering countries. The interaction between these three political forces gives rise to state-driven social exclusion,
oppositional stmggles for minority rights, and occasional eruptions of violence directed against states and their majority populations.

Finally, the third body of literature focuses on radical

nationalist movements. Rather than aiming to reconfigure the political boundaries of existing
nation-states, these movements attempt
to mobilize members of dominant groups to resist changes to the nation's
symbolic boundaries brought on by immigration or the extension of rights to oppressed native-born
populations. These mobilization efforts are typically motivated by racially, ethnically, or religiously
essentialist conceptions of the nation that explicitly exclude entire categories of people based on
ascribed characteristics. Much contemporary research in this tradition focuses on Europe, which has experienced a resurgence of radical right-wing
politics with strong ethnic nationalist tendencies (Taggart, 2000; Mudde, 2007; Bale, 2013). A distinct but substantively related line of research on the United States
has focused on the country's long history of exclusionary politics based on nativist, racist, and fundamentalist ideologies (Higham, [1955]2002; Burris et al., 2000;
Blee, 2002).

The above three approaches have generated many rich insights about the origins and continued importance of nationalist ideology in modern
society. Yet, this classic work has largely ignored the more mundane - but no less important - aspects of everyday nationalism in stable
democratic countries.

Nationalism in Settled Times

As a growing number of studies have demonstrated, the political significance of nationalism is

not limited to periods of major
political transformation or national crisis; nationalism exerts distinct effects on political change in settled
times, although its impact is likely to be more subtle (Swidler, 1986). To understand this process, the analytical lens must
shift from explicit political ideologies to tacit understandings of the nation's symbolic significance
within a given polity. While most citizens of contemporary societies take for granted the legitimacy of the
nation-state form, they often disagree in important ways about what their nation-state means to them. This variation - both within and across
populations and over time - is an important feature of political culture that influences political behavior and drives policy change. Scholars have explored this
dimension of nationalism from two vantage points: first, historical, ethnographic, and interpretive studies have explored the meaning-making processes that
produce and maintain national identification; second, survey-based research has sought to map the variation in nationalist attitudes within and across populations
and to demonstrate the impact of these attitudes on other political beliefs. Together, these approaches have laid the groundwork for a more complete
understanding of nationalism in politically settled times.

Interpretive Studies of Everyday Nationalism

A long line of work in political sociology and political science has focused on how meanings attributed
to the nation affect people's self-understanding and how such conceptions relate to a given country's
overarching political culture. Classic studies in this tradition were based on a functionalist understanding of culture as a coherent system of agreed-
upon values that facilitates social cohesion; this logically implied that the task for nationalism scholars was to uncover each nation's essential and stable cultural
characteristics. For instance, in Continental Divide, Lipset (1990) argues that the national identity of the United States consists of the central tenets of the American
Creed: antistatism, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism. In contrast, Canada - Upset's comparison case -prioritizes a distinct set of principles, including
deference to authority, collectivism, elitism, and group-based particularism. Such large-scale cultural generalizations were typical of postwar scholarship, as
exemplified by the work of Myrdal (1944), Hartz (1964), and the broader enterprise of consensus history.

An influential legacy of the functionalist approach has been the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism, initially made by Friedrich
Meinecke ([1907] 1970) and subsequently elaborated by Hans Kohn (1944). This binary opposition assumes a stable character to national
identity, but differentiates between two alternatives: the first based on ascriptive criteria such as race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, or language
and the second on elective criteria, such as commitment to the country's core ideology, subjective identification with a national community,
and respect for the nation's laws and traditions. This dichotomy has been used to classify the central ideologies of specific nations - with
Germany as the prototype of ethnic nationalism and France of civic nationalism - and occasionally entire world regions.

The view of national culture as stable and homogenous has been challenged by more recent research. Rogers Smith's (1997) work on
citizenship law in the United States, for instance, reveals a layered and often contradictory patchwork of legislation and court decisions
informed by three distinct ideological perspectives (i.e., liberalism, republicanism, and 'ascriptive Americanism'), which have competed for
dominance over the course of American history. Others have critiqued the ethnic-civic distinction on theoretical and empirical grounds for
attributing essential properties to entire countries and regions and glossing over considerable within-country heterogeneity (Kaufmann, 2000;
Shulman, 2002; Bmbaker, 2004; Ceobanu and Escandell, 2008).

Despite its limitations, functionalist research on national identity has generated a number of valuable insights. Perhaps most importantly, it has helped scholars
recognize that even though nationalism has become a hegemonic ideology in modem society, the content of nationalist beliefs can be highly variable. This

work has also highlighted the inherent tendency of nationalism toward social exclusion: given that
nationalism is predicated on a fundamental belief in the unique characteristics of each nation, it
inevitably draws sharp symbolic and social boundaries around national communities based on a range
of arbitrary criteria. Of course, the need for distinguishing between members and nonmembers is necessary for every state's ability to fulfill its core
functions, such as generating tax revenue, managing economic development, providing social programs, and ensuring national security, but how such distinctions
are made and maintained is an important object of study.
 AT: Subjectivity Shift---2NC
No fairness paradox. Yes subjectivity shift.
Alberti ’21 [John; January 28; Professor of English @ Northern Kentucky University; The Ethics of
Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom, “Playing Games with Our Lives:
What Critical Pedagogy Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Games in the Writing Classroom,” pp. 77-93]
Rather than the more conventional (at the time) classroom experience of textbook reading, film watching, worksheets, and lectures, we were
organized into teams that moved through a variety of experiential games: farming, the Constitutioal convention, playing the stock
market, the debates over slavery and abolition. In each unit, we were tasked with solving various problems (Robison’s [2008],
“achievement-bound systems”): keeping a farm afloat in spite of the vagaries of weather and the commodities markets, managing a stock
portfolio, forging a new nation, avoiding or starting a civil war. Our teachers acted as our Dungeon Masters, introducing each round with a new
set of calamities and opportunities (a sudden drought, a market collapse, a political crisis over the expansion of slave labor).

These achievement-bound systems involved a mix of assimilation and critical questioning: we had to play the stock
market game (there was no opting out of the market, and the market equally defined the farming game) and we had to (or were supposed to)
stick to our appointed roles: representative to the convention, abolitionist orator. Yet over
and over instances of challenging
the premises kept arising, especially in the Constitutional convention game, and not always (or even mostly) for what might be
considered intellectually and rhetorically polite reasons. Boredom, a desire for attention, our vexed adolescent relationship to
teacherly/parental approval—all figured in the subversive mix I count as “challenging the premises.”

Instead of undermining the experiment, however, our toggling between trying to solve a problem within
the defined procedures of the game and challenging the premises of these procedures and definitions
of these problems (our not always taking these games “seriously”) only made them all the more
“realistic”—and effective—in highlighting how ego, insecurity, and social status affect and shape these
“real world” games (including the game of the high school classroom). Three takeaways for me from this pre-Oregon Trail educational
gaming experience: important career lessons (never, ever go into farming); the profound impact of the dramatized writing
and speaking practices we engaged in that essentially constituted the games, especially an appreciation for the
power of pathos and ethos; and finally, how this one class remains easily my most memorable (official) pedagogical experience of
high school, one I am still thinking through 45 years later, certainly one definition of what Robison (2008) means by “rich literacy and learning
practices.”
Framework
 FW---Technocracy DA
TECHNOCRACY DA.
Makau ’96 [Josina; 1996; Professor of Humanities and Communication at CSU Monterey
Bay; Responsible Communication: Ethical Issues in Business, Industry, and the Professions,
“Argumentation Instruction in the Face of Global Perils,” p. 140]
Weisel's critique of German education prior to world war II points to another danger of traditional argumentation instruction. Like the Nazi
doctors, students
in traditional argumentation courses are taught "how to reduce life and the mystery of life to
abstraction." Weisel urges educators to teach students what the Nazi doctors never learned -- that people
are not abstractions. Weisel urges educators to learn from the Nazi experience the importance of humanizing their charges, of teaching
students to view life as special, 'with its own secrets, its own treasures, its own sources of anguish and with some measure of triumph.'
Trained as technocrats with powerful sensory skills but little understanding, students participating in traditional
argumentation courses would have difficulty either grasping or appreciating the importance of Weisel's critique. Similarly,
they would have difficulty grasping or appreciating Christian's framework for an ethic of technology an approach that requires above
all, openness, trust and care. The notion of conviviality would be particularly alien to these trained technocrats. Traditionally
trained debaters are also likely to fail to grasp the complexity of issues.

Trained to view problems in black and white terms and conditioned to turn to "expertise" for solutions, students, and
traditional courses become subject to ethical blindness. As Benhabib noted, 'Moral blindness implies not necessarily an evil or
unprincipled person, but one who can not see the moral texture of the situation confronting him or her.' These traditional debaters,
deprived of true dialogic encounter, fail to develop 'the capacity to represent' to themselves the 'multiplicity of
viewpoints, the variety of perspectives, the layers of meaning, etc. which constitute a situation'. They are thus inclined to
lack 'the kind of sensitivity to particulars, which most agree is essential for good and perspicacious judgment.'
Encouraging students to embrace the will to control and to gain mastery, to accept uncritically a sovereign
view of power, and to maintain distance from their own and others 'situatedness,' the traditional
argumentation course provides an unlikely site for nurturing guardians of our world's precious resources. It would appear, in fact, that
the argumentation course foster precisely the 'aggressive and manipulative intellect bred by modern science and discharged
into the administration of things' associated with most of the world's human made perils. And is therefore understandable
that feminist and others critics would write so harshly of traditional argumentation of debate.
 FW---Knowledge Cumulation DA
KNOWLEDGE CUMULATION DA.
Barkin and Sjoberg 21 – *J. Samuel, Associate Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Governance in the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, PhD in IR at Columbia
University, **Laura, British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London, Professor
of Political Science at the University of Florida, Ph.D., University of Southern California School of International Relations; J.D. Boston College Law
School [J. Samuel and Laura, “The Queer Art of Failed IR?,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2021, Vol. 0(0) 1–17, DOI:
10.1177/0304375421989572,]
We argue that knowledge cumulation in IR is a fantasy reified by paradigmatic clusters and the mimicry of
research standards and practices in the natural sciences (e.g., Elman & Elman, 2001, 2003). The “evidence” of “knowledge
cumulation” in IR comes as much from the ritualized practice of research behavior as it does from any “true” or
genuine notion of knowledge cumulation. One has “succeeded” in the enterprise of IR by cumulating knowledge, and the work of
“successful” scholars is by definition cumulated knowledge. Cumulation of knowledge as a standard of success is a condition of possibility for
the desirability of success in the field. That
ritualized practice at once is institutionalized as success and institutionalizes the need for
research success, reified and reproduced by hiring, tenure, merit raise, and promotion standards.
This ritualization is a signifier that what counts as knowledge in the field, in particular research programs and more
generally, is performative (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1990; Weber, 1998)— where standards are set by their utterance and
repetition rather than by some external “objective” standards of (narrowly) good science or (more broadly) good
research (Baudrillard, 1991; Shepherd, 2008; Williams, 2003). Scholars iterate and reify standards of measurement of
knowledge in each piece of scholarship which “succeeds” in the field, and these iterations make it a
paradox for scholars to both occupy the methodological, epistemological, and political space that falls
outside of inherited standards and succeed. Outside -the -mainstream work’s underrepresentation in the places understood to
be publishing “success” is overdetermined, and the correlation between mimicry of traditional scholarship and “success” of critical scholars a
given.
We mean “performative” in the sense that Judith Butler uses it (Butler, 1990, 1993), particularly as she talks about it going hand in hand with a
Foucauldian notion of disciplining,8 where “performativity
cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability
—a regularized and constrained repetition of norms” which resonate as “ritualized production” (Butler,
1993, p. 60). This frames performativity as a “specific modality of power as discourse” (Butler, 1993, p. 139) where
the politics of the signification and the politics of the sign meet, an act of territoralization, of production, of installation—which does not have
to be alone, singular, or unidirectional. Since performatives are their own referent (Butler, 1993, p. 159), they proliferate as manifestations of
the power underlying them and interact relatively on the basis of that relative power. In this context, “performances” are actions and events,
iterations and reifications, and context-specific, which “bring a subject into being” relationally.9
To escape the recursive, performative loop of “disciplinary success,” we argue that it is important to see the
possibility that knowledge cumulation is not, and should not be, a given in IR research. Instead, we argue that
the idea itself is an inherited empty signifier with unspoken content which governs the production of what we understand as disciplinary IR.
Traditionally, the idea of knowledge cumulation is firmly grounded in a neopositivist understanding of social science, in which the role of theory
is to collate observed empirical regularities across cases or what Waltz calls laws (Waltz, 1979). While this interpretation is critiqued in most
critical IR, “cumulation,” in that work, becomes a term without clear conceptual content. The
paradigmatization of IR theorizing
distracts from a particular theory’s internal conditions of possibility by introducing incompatible
conditions of possibility drawn from an inherited disciplinary sociology of what knowledge is and how it
works. As such, any acknowledgment of the idea of cumulativity from within specific exercises in
reflexive IR creates the grounds for necessary failure within those exercises.
The simultaneous rejection of traditional “cumulation” and continued performance of acts of cumulation can be understood by seeing the ways
that silence
frames cumulation in critical IR. We learn from feminist theorists that the unspoken is as important as
if not more important than what is spoken (Charlesworth, 1999; Kronsell, 2006), coming from attention to how
IR’s others are omitted, excluded, kept out, and not mentioned (Agathangelou & Ling, 2004; Tickner, 1988). We argue
that IR’s silences tell us more about the state of knowledge cumulation in the discipline than looking for standards that tell us what we do
know. Accordingly, we ask on principle what any given research program does not take account of and how accounting for those omissions
could changes analysis. We focus on both visible omissions (like the concepts that a research program fails to
incorporate) and invisible omissions. Invisible omissions are those that are unhearable by a research program
— normally left out or ignored by both the researchers that form the core of the research program and their critics (Butler, 2001; Edkins et al.,
2012; Hansen, 2000). By “unhearable,” we mean either that the omitted content falls outside of the boundaries set for dialog or is assumed by
all stakeholders to be by definition irrelevant (for deeper analyses see MacKinnon, 2006; Spivak, 1988). Unlike its visible omissions—variables
that its scholars and their critics have added to, re-operationalized, expanded on, or suggested the inclusion of—invisible omissions are often
not treated as omissions at all within particular scholarly boundaries.10
The discipline’s “collective” standards for knowledge production, then, can be understood as constituted by social
performances of dominance rather than founded on some given or objective notions of what science
should be. Rather than being objective judgments of quality, statements like “this is good science” and
“these results are robust” are signs without referents used to discipline (Baudrillard, 1995). The invisible
disciplining nature of the performative standards of knowledge cumulation is part of the story of Butler’s understanding of performativity. The
other part is attention to who is excluded by claims to knowledge cumulation (generally as well as in specific paradigmatic situations), what is
left out, and on what axes. These disciplinary standards (both in the conventional and Foucauldian sense) make invisible their
own impossibility and their related necessary failure.
For example, a submission to a traditional IR journal in the United States or Western Europe which makes an interesting
argument, but is not in the format of, methodologically acceptable to, inclusive of the same forms of
evidence traditionally used in, and good science to that journal’s traditional reviewers is unlikely to succeed in getting
published.11 This will generally be justified with reference to the “quality” of the piece, and rarely if ever will
questions of sex, race, gender, class, and other axes of exclusion be discussed as producers of the standards that
then exclude on “quality” where “quality” has been set up in a way that excludes all performances of
scholarship which are not mimicry of a particular Western, liberal model (Paolini, 1999).12 Even editors and
reviewers who note the exclusionary effect of these standards will often mourn that and move on,
imagining the only possible alternative being lacking standards, and seeing such a lack of standards as more insidious than
the exclusionary effects of using certain sets of standards. “Knowledge cumulation” then becomes a set of
reified and artificial standards rather than a journey for truth or interest.
The answer to this quagmire is sometimes a liberal politics of inclusion (e.g., Nedal & Nexon, 2018)—how do
“we” get more women, more minorities, and more people from underrepresented places in the world to be able to meet the
standards of good scholarship in the field? That liberal politics of inclusion, while well-intended, can be read
as a (subtle, perhaps accidental) expansion of the violence it (formally) seems to abate. It fails to question the utility of
the existing standards of good scholarship and assumes that those currently excluded would be happy to
change the form, shape, and/ or nature of their scholarship to fit within the (unquestioned/unquestionable)
mold of good scholarship, either loosely or strictly understood. As Puar (2006) argues, liberal “inclusion” to absorb the other within
can be as violent as if not more so than exclusion even as it appears progressive. That violence is the reproduction of
naturalized, bounded identities when identities are liminal and messy when not policed (e.g., Agathangelou,
2013; Haritaworn et al., 2013; Scott, 2013). The bounded nature of IR inclusion excludes liminality, messiness, and outsideness (e.g., Malksoo,
2012).
Expanding the boundaries of IR to include any given particular excluded work maintains an illusion of stability, hiding what is unstable; it
maintains an illusion of certainty, hiding what is in doubt; it maintains an illusion of coherence, hiding the rebellious, the failed, and that which
remains outside (e.g., Sjoberg, 2017). Queer theorizing of the liminality involved in unstable sex/gender identities shows that even that which is
presumed to be the most primordial (sex identity) is really liminality hiding under supposed definition (e.g., Weber, 2016a). Translated to
thinking about inhabitability, this theorizing suggests that the apparent safety of (constituting then occupying) inhabitable space hides liminality
and uncertainty, and perhaps danger, under its supposed (empirical and normative) clarity (Haritaworn et al., 2014). Therefore, “all the
repressive and reductive strategies of power systems are already present in the internal logic of the sign,” such “that violence is an inevitable
byproduct of signification” (Baudrillard, 1981).
In this way, not only do traditional standards of knowledge make invisible their own impossibility, they hide the
violence of IR’s denials of failure and continued insistence on traveling failed paths despite the condemnation of failure and the
privileging of success. IR’s continued recursive enactment of its settled “standards” despite their obvious
failure and exclusiveness makes invisible the raced, classed, and sexed impacts of those standards and
their apparent objectivity. Baudrillard’s work provides a path for navigating this disjuncture between signs (IR’s “standards”) and referents (the
fantastic notion that “good scholarship” exists objectively) (Baudrillard, 1975). He argues that “only ambivalence, as a rupture of value…
sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign… questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding)
and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).” This ambivalence, Baudrillard argues, “brings the political economy of the sign to
a standstill; it dissolves the respective definitions of symbol and referent” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 150).

Endorsing the inclusion of nontraditional perspectives, classifying and categorizing them, and assuming inclusion’s possibility may all have
violent impacts (for discussions of the violences of inclusion see Haritaworn et al., 2013, 2014; Mbembe, 2019). Moving of the signification
“knowledge” from any referent to which it was originally tied makes method and research performances of scholarship, rather than (the
illusive) scholarship itself. If
“research” is a performance of scholarship, “standards” for research serve to
disguise the fantastic nature of knowledge cumulation. As such, there is no space for liminality,
uncertainty, change, inadequacy, and failure in structural rather than passing senses. Yet looking beyond the
discourse of certainty, those pervade IR. A Baudrillardian ambivalence toward research programs and their truth statements can reveal the
recursivity of IR’s standards of knowledge cumulation. This is because condemnation or rejection of any given research program and its truth
statements endorses its assumptions about truth, as well as some of its assumptions about what the international arena is and how it works.
As such, the idea that IR knowledge cumulation can be nothing but fantasy is straightforward. If the reification of
standards of knowledge cumulation is a signification divorced from a referent, where the recovery of the referent
is conceptually and practically impossible, then knowledge cumulation is and will always remain an empty signifier.
The only question is how that empty signifier directs and is directed.
We suggest that, in IR, more often than not, knowledge cumulation directs and is directed by discursive seduction. In Baudrillard’s words,
seduction is “that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from its truth” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). What makes a
discourse of knowledge, of science, and of progress seductive “is its very appearance: the aleatory,
meaningless, or ritualistic and meticulous circulation of signs on the surface, its inflections and its
nuances. All of this effaces the content value of meaning, and this is seductive” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). Therefore, if there could be
an interpretive discourse of knowledge cumulation that reached truth value, that truth value would be selfdefeating, since “the meaning of an
interpretive discourse, by contrast, has never seduced anyone.” This is the fundamental contradiction, in Baudrillard’s terms, that makes
standards for knowledge cumulation in IR internally impossible. He explains that “every interpretive discourse wants to get beyond
appearances; this is its illusion and fraud. But getting beyond appearances is appearance, and is hence subject to the stakes imposed by
seduction, and consequently to its own failure as discourse” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). As such, what is left in/of the failed discourse can
only be the fantastic, and pretensions to success hollow.
Inhabiting a Failure of a Discipline
The need for success and the denial of failure depend on two things: first, both success and failure existing and being identifiable; and second,
presuming a particular normative relationship between success and failure. In IR, as we discussed above, scholars are thought of as successes or
failures according to a complicated metric of disciplinary prestige based on publication outlet, “scientific standards,” and perception of the
change that they have caused in the discipline. Work
is characterized as successful or failed based on whether it
contributes to knowledge cumulation. The discipline itself is understood as successful or failed based on
the aggregation of those measures. On these terms, the emptiness of disciplinary standards and the
impossibility of knowledge cumulation make every piece of scholarship and every scholar in IR a failure
and the discipline along with them.13 To us, the identification of success/failure is impossible.
Still, we focus our approach to “disciplinary IR” around questioning the second assumption, that the normative relationship between success
and failure is such that success is good and desirable and failure is bad. Failure has been insufficiently explored in disciplinary IR, both in
thinking about the disciplinary enterprise and in thinking about the world “out there” which we purport to study.14 Here, we look to theorize
the “upside” of the failure of the disciplinary enterprise of IR. It is, after all, failure that Baudrillard called for, in different words—a willingness
to drop commitment to and passion for a certain end in the recognition that both that end and its opposite are empty signifiers. Queer
theorists have suggested that this sort of failure—failure to live up to expectations which were messy, detached, or a priori untenable—might
be worth celebrating (Halberstam, 2011). We build on these two understandings to embrace failure in IR.
Often failure is thought about as either a final end (something has failed), as a stumbling block on a path to success (if at first you do not
succeed, try, try again), or as a miscalibration (we thought this was success, but really it is failure instead). With Jack Halberstam, we suggest a
normative reinterpretation. Rather than seeing failure as an end point, or as a stopping point on the way to success, it can be
seen as itself a politics, “a category levied by the winners against the losers” and “a set of standards that ensure all future radical
ventures will be measured as cost-ineffective” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 184). Halberstam uses the example of reproductive success. Inherited
wisdom has suggested for a significant amount of time that people should have children—that a heterosexual marriage with biological offspring
is the ideal of success in one’s personal life. That could be taken at face value: success (measured in biological offspring to still-married
heterosexual, cissexual parents) is to be valued, and failure (measured in some other reproductive result) is to be devalued. Or the very
normative value attached to reproductive success is itself a weapon, where associating failure with non-reproduction is a category levied
against the losers by the winners. Redefining all reproductive results as successful or changing which reproductive results are measured as
successful does not change the weaponized, normalizing character of the concept of success. This is a metaphor for IR’s disciplinary sociology,
but it is also directly applicable to IR’s epistemological and methodological engagement with non-heteronormativity
Applied to IR, the normalization of “success” as the thing to which all (researchers) should aspire reifies
membership in the categories of “successful” and “failed” and provides the “successful” with a powerful
weapon to continue to exclude, put down, and delegitimize the “unsuccessful.” The “winners” are by
definition in a normatively superior position compared to the “losers” despite the emptiness of the signification of each category.
Understanding individual pieces of work, individual scholars, or research paradigms as failed (a foil to successful) is a
categorization wielded by those who have already been classified as successful to achieve and perpetuate
the exclusion of those whom they can constitute as inferior. In this way, research success is a category IR’s
winners wield against its losers to perpetuate their position as winners , consciously or unconsciously, against a
background of a disciplinary IR where the standards for research were created largely by white, heterosexual
cis-men and remain largely undisturbed despite the intellectual and representational diversification of IR research and IR scholars.
Failure as a category in IR scholarship serves to “reinscribe and renormalize standards of ‘research success’ which remain unchanged,
unchangeable, and regressive” (Halberstam, 2011). The scholarship that makes unconventional claims to knowledge cumulation (or no claim to
knowledge cumulation) not only fails but constitutes its researchers as failures—which becomes recursive when “we tend to blame each other
or ourselves for the failures of the social structure we inhabit, rather than critiquing the structures… themselves” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 35,
citing Kipnes, 2004). In Halberstam’s view, it
is the system that privileges success, that is, the problem, and failing
within it is an emancipatory possibility which “dismantles the logics of success and failure with which
we currently live” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 2).
Realizing the caging nature of the boundaries of disciplinary success, it is possible to think that failure might be perceived as
something to celebrate and strive toward rather than something which should inspire shame. Halberstam
suggests that “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer
more creative, more cooperative, and more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). In
Halberstam’s view, it is only when the norms and metrics by which we aspire to success become both politicized and
problematized that freedom becomes possible. It is not failing that we as scholars or as people need to learn to do—we fail
all the time. As Halberstam notes, failure is endemic in life and work as “to live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately die,” despite
denial, resistance, and constructs of success (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Instead of needing to learn to fail, we argue, we need to
learn to embrace failure, particularly the collective failure of the enterprise of “disciplinary IR” to achieve or approximate
“knowledge cumulation” generally or the aspirations of particular research programs specifically.
 FW---Racial Battle Fatigue DA
RACIAL BATTLE FATIGUE DA.
Sullivan ’17 [Shannon; 2017; Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy and Health Psychology
at UNC Charlotte; Pragmatism and Justice, “Setting Aside Hope: A Pragmatist Approach to Racial
Justice,” pp. 231-246]

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, significant racial inequalities and anti-black violence continue to be rampant in the
United States. Decades, even centuries, of political and legal struggle have deco lisle to change that fact. This chapter will argue that
black Americans need new tactics and strategies for responding to the white class privilege and white supremacy that
fundamentally structure the country.' They need to increase the number and type of tools in their racial justice toolkit, expanding
beyond liberal faith in civil rights and white people's good intentions to cooperate with racial change. The political and legal work
that black and other people of color (along with some white people) have done to eliminate antiblack racism isn't
working. Pragmatists in particular need to be able to face up to that fact given that we value the practical work that ideas, concepts, and
truths can do. Why then, as Calvin Warren pragmatically asks in the epigraph above, would we expect people fighting racism to keep doing the
same thing? Why would anyone hope that the same failed actions and strategies would mm out any differentia the future? This kind of hope
can function as a cruel optimism that "works" by keeping black people focused on the very thing that undercuts their flourishing
(Warren 2015, 221).

In line with Warren's concerns, I argue that black America' hope that political struggle can achieve racial justice tends to be a harmed emotion
they should avoid. I maim my case in a pragmatist spirit that opposes Comet West's influential argument for black hope In contrast to West, I
contend that pragmatists and others concerned about racial injustice would do better to draw on Derrick Bell's racial realism and Warren's
blank nihilism to develop alternative strategies for addressing antiblack racism In related ways, Bell and Warren urge their readers to reckon
with the permanence of racism and to give up hope that additional political struggle will eliminate it. After exploring their complementary
accounts, I augment them with
concrete evidence from the health sciences that black hope can be physically
harmful to black people, weathering their bodies nod damaging their psychosomatic health such that they
are less able to withstand the inequities of anti-black racism. I conclude by arguing for the advantages of reading Bell's and Warren's claims
about the permanence of racism pragmatically, that is, by assessing the truth of their claims via their effects. The result is the working
hypothesis that black
people will have a much greater chance of developing new practices, habits, and strategies of
flourishing in an anti-black world if they no longer hope that political struggle will eliminate racism.
<<CONDENSED, NONE OMITTED>>
The United States continues to struggle with deeply ingrained racial inequalities and wildly flagrant acts of racialized injustice even after abolishing its Jim Crow laws in the 1960s. From 2014 to 2016, for example, the United States was rocked by news of the violent deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of white police officers: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York; Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina; and the list could go on. (For analysis, see Zack 2015.) Their deaths were soon followed by the fatal
shooting of nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, by the alleged white supremacist Dylan Roof; the burning of several prominent black churches in the South as a possible backlash to calls for South Carolina to stop flying the Confederate flag; and the police shooting of Keith Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The shocking violence against black Americans has occurred against a backdrop of chronic and growing racial inequality that the elimination of legal segregation has done little to address. Examples include
the fact that in 2012, African American women made 64 cents for every dollar that a non-Hispanic white man made (Kerby 2013). Racial disparities in health also exist, for example in disproportionately higher rates of coronary artery disease, diabetes, stroke, HIV/AIDS, and infant mortality for African Americans (Smedley et al., no date). As of 2005, African Americans were incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people (Mauer and King 2007). Black families regularly are the targets of child welfare services that shift black children into foster homes, a process that
fuels the schoolto-prison pipeline since children in foster homes are significantly more likely to go to prison than children who remain with their parents/families (Roberts 2002). A racialized aesthetics continues to benefit white people and penalize people of color: white beauty standards are normative, especially for women, positioning dark-skinned and black women as “the beauty don’ts” in contrast to white women as “the beauty dos” (Bossip 2015). This list could go on. In the face of this discouraging present-day picture, hope for a better future would seem to be vital.
Black hope in particular would appear crucial for enabling black people to carry on in the face of ongoing white domination and racial inequities. On this view, hope for a better world, a world that does not yet exist but that serves as a guiding ideal, is needed to provide the emotional fuel for the hard work that it will take to get closer to that world. To switch metaphors, black hope would seem to emotionally counterbalance the despair that white economic, social, geographical, and other forms of privilege will never end, both the despair of black people who suffer from
white racism and that of white people who call for racism’s demise. As Patrick Shade has argued, “Hoping can be sustaining, nurturing—indeed, advantageous. … And so [in a cynical world] we should salvage the good name of hope and actively promote its life at every turn” (2001, 6, 202). While Shade’s pragmatist theory makes clear that hope must be grounded in present realities, it also depicts hope as tied inextricably to better possibilities in the future. Shade’s positive view of hope complements that of Cornel West. Fighting what he calls “the specter of despair [that]
haunts America,” West (2005) has made the most influential case for the importance of hope for African American people and communities. His criticism of black nihilism develops a conception of hope that is as deeply existentialist as it is pragmatist: it responds to the absurdity of a world that is built on the injustices and cruelties of white slavery, white segregation, white supremacy, and white class privilege. Even more important from West’s perspective, his conception of hope offers an alternative to the despair that he worries has pervaded African American lives. West
appreciates that other emotions such as rage can serve as an antidote to despair, but he instead counsels hope. According to West (1993), the source of the “nihilistic threat” to and “major enemy of black survival in America is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the loss of hope.” For West, hope is the emotion that best describes black Americans’ history of struggle and that can keep black people sane in the ongoing struggles of the present. It is communal and inclusive, striving to make the world a more just place for everyone and particularly to “sustain black
solidarity in the midst of a hostile society” (West 1999, 437). West’s hope is for the end of the “existential alienation, isolation and separation” that is entangled with racist discourses and that plagues many Western cultures (1999, 263). To its credit, West’s particular account of hope is not Pollyannaish. For West, hope is not equivalent to optimism or to any other merely positive feeling. Optimism isn’t tough enough to do the job that black people need, as West (2005) charges: “Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that
things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good. The dominant tendencies of our day are unregulated global capitalism, racial balkanization, social breakdown, and individual depression.” In contrast, hope is actively participant and grounded, but also not bound by what the evidence tells us. Unlike optimism, West explains, “hope looks at the evidence and says, ‘It doesn’t look good at all. Doesn’t look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in
heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever.’ That’s hope” (quoted in A. Smith 2006, 160). Optimism also tends to run out of energy when the going gets difficult. “When you talk about hope, you have to be a long distance runner,” West (2008, 209) insists, because it is going to take time and hard work to make racial progress in the United States. On West’s view, however, significant progress has been made. He would sharply characterize as “narrow” the view that things are no better for black people today than they were in the days of slavery. He
argues that “progressive formations have been the history of black folk” and that additional “progressive possibilities are reemerging” in the twenty-first century (2008, 214). For West, the road toward racial equality might be long, hard, and even difficult to discern, but it can and does lead to a genuinely democratic America that lives up to its constitutional promise of freedom and liberty for all. Black people are crucial to the realization of this possibility according to West, and thus they need to buoy themselves up with hope. In West’s opinion, Americans need to
acknowledge “the degree to which black people in America provide one of the fundamental keys to the future, if the future is going to be about freedom and equality” (2008, 194). West’s ideal of deep democracy in America thus is fueled by black people’s “hope linked to combative spirituality,” which empowers black people to “go against the grain and muster the love and will to resist” (2008, 209). For all the absurdity of white domination and West’s refusal to be optimistic about its defeat, West’s notion of communal hope—like that of most pragmatists, I would surmise
—is deeply humanist. I use “humanism” here in the sense that Albert Camus (1991) characterizes it. As Camus would charge, West’s humanism refuses to believe in the permanence of white racism and/or that the evil of white racism cannot someday be overcome by human struggle. (I will return to Camus below in the context of Bell’s work.) Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call West’s progressivism as much religious as it is pragmatist because of the prophetic Christianity that informs it. Human beings alone might not be able to overcome racist evil; they might
need religious help to do so. Either way, however, West’s existential progressivism/pragmatism is grounded in a conviction that the right thing will happen in the end. However bad things look now, however difficult it is to envision a happy ending, we can go beyond the evidence and engage in heroic actions to create a better future. Racial inequalities might still exist, so the progressive story continues, but think about how our ancestors went against the odds and overcame chattel slavery and Jim Crow. With ongoing political struggle, we also can do that—we can make the
leap. We today can improve the world’s racial situation even further. Don’t give up hope: racial justice can and will be achieved someday. But what if someday never comes? What if, as Bell has argued, the political, legal, and historical circumstances of the United States have made “racism … an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society” and thus “Black people will never gain full equality in this country” (1992a, ix, 12; see also Bell 1992b)? In that case, ongoing hope that political struggle will end racism is a farce: a joke that mocks black people
without their realizing it, hoodwinking them into thinking that better times are on the horizon if they only will suffer and struggle more to reach them. According to Bell, that’s a fair assessment of where things stand in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, and by extension at the beginning of the twenty-first. Federal civil rights laws and policies, such as affirmative action, the desegregation of US schools, voting rights acts (which, notably, were eliminated by the US Supreme Court in October 2013), and fair housing acts, have failed to overcome the
devastating legacy of chattel slavery in the United States. Bell writes in 1992 that the income gap between the rich and poor—a very racially colored gap—was nearing a crisis point, but the gap he was concerned about is a mere sliver compared to the chasm of racial disparities in wealth that exist today (Bell 1992a, 8–9). The economic recession of 2008 was particularly hard on black households in the United States; by 2010 the median net household worth of white American families was twenty-two times that of black American families (Luhby 2012). The water fountain
signs in the United States that say “colored” and “white” may have disappeared, but post-segregation changes such as these do not mean that racial discrimination has disappeared, or even necessarily been weakened. They might mean merely that the form of racial discrimination has changed and, moreover, changed into something largely unofficial and delivered via race-neutral policies and language that only makes white class privilege more difficult to identify and combat. In that case, as Bell predicts, “even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no
more than temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance” (1992b, 373). Black Americans need to accept that white racism is as virulent as ever and that they will always have a “permanent subordinate status” in their country (1992a, 12). Bell realized very soon after the civil rights era that the idea that the United States is making progress against racism tends merely to inflate the egos and assuage the guilt of good white liberals. “The worship of equality rules benefits whites by
preserving a benevolent but fictional selfimage, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope,” Bell observes and then adds, “but I think we’ve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefits” (1992a, 101). Along with the belief that white people and institutions will ever regard or treat black people as equals, black people need to jettison the hopeful expectation that white racism will ever end. Acknowledging “the permanence of [black people’s] subordinate status” in the United States, Bell explains, “allows [black Americans] to
avoid despair, and frees [them] to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfillment and even triumph” (1992b, 373–374). Most people—especially, but not only white people—have yet to acknowledge how resilient white domination is in the United States. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow to “the new Jim Crow” (Alexander 2012), the more white domination changes, the more it stays the same. “Supposedly, the generation that murdered Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till,” Warren dryly
remarks, and this so-called improvement is supposed to encourage black people that even more “progress” in black lives—and deaths—can be achieved (2015, 217). As Warren’s quip suggests, by participating in hopeful political struggle for a future filled with racial equality that likely never will be present, West’s existential pragmatism not only unintentionally benefits white people. It also harms black people by enacting what Warren calls “the politics of hope,” which establishes an insidiously false dichotomy between hope and nihilism. On the logic of political hope, if a
person or group of people doesn’t have a hopeful relationship to the future, then they must be sunk in nihilistic despair. The politics of hope thus “terrifies with the dread of ‘no alternative,’ ” which operates not just via the binary of hope/despair but also by the complementary binaries of “problem/solution” and “action/inaction” (2015, 222). If one hopes and takes action, one can find a future solution to today’s problems. According to the politics of hope, hope is necessary for motivating political action to find answers to racial problems. Giving up hope thus raises the
specter of inaction, of doing nothing and thus accepting the racist status quo. Hopelessness thus is the equivalent of a failed relationship to the future, which in turn is the equivalent of refusing to fight racial injustice. The lure of the always-not-yet solution to present-day racial problems is symptomatic of the metaphysical nature of political hope, according to Warren. Political hope’s future object of racial justice is “not tethered to real history,” which makes it an “object of political fantasy” rather than an achievable goal (Warren 2015, 221). “The objective of the Political is
to keep blacks in relation to this political object—in an unending pursuit of it,” Warren explains, and this pursuit “strengthens the very anti-black system that would pulverize black being” (2015, 221). Black people’s political struggle for this fantastical freedom enables modern societies to pride themselves on their advanced civilization; in this way, black suffering is necessary for modernity’s promises of progress. Freedom as modernity knows it was created by means of chattel slavery, and thus “black emancipation is world destructive” for modernity and its ideals (Patterson
1982; see also Warren 2015, 239). Black suffering cannot be ended without the known world coming to an end, and so the world uses black hope to keep black suffering in place (Warren 2015, 242). While Warren’s argument against the politics of hope primarily targets its metaphysical nature, the destruction of black bodies that he analyzes is no mere abstraction. Neither, of course, are the intractable racial inequalities described by Bell. In both cases, antiblackness involves “the literal destruction of black bodies that provide the psychic, economic, and philosophical
resources for modernity to objectify, forget, and ultimately obliterate Being (nonmetaphysical Being)” (Warren 2015, 327). This occurred initially through the transatlantic transformation of human beings into things (slaves) and then subsequently through other social, legal, and extralegal ways of annihilating black people and communities, including political tactics such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the convict leasing system (2015, 216). Recent developments in the medical health sciences reveal another material way to see how the metaphysical, legal, and economic
destruction of black people via hope is both literal and physical. A concrete connection between hope and poor health and death exists for black Americans, and I now turn to that connection to bodily situate Bell’s and Warren’s accounts. Psychologists and other social scientists in the United States recently have focused on how African Americans cope with so-called mundane racism: not the big-booted racism of chattel slavery, lynching, or even legalized segregation, but rather the more mundane and subtle or “invisible” racial attacks that increasingly are being
documented in post–Jim Crow America. Examples include the student who rolls his eyes in class when he realizes that the black woman at the front of the room will be his professor or the black person checking out at the grocery store who gets hassled to show several forms of identification to cash her check when the white person in front of her did not. In many ways, microaggressions such as these are minor in comparison to the major assaults that African Americans historically have experienced and still do experience. At minimum, racial microaggressions are not
spectacularly horrific in the way that the overt violence of shootings and chokeholds is. But just because we tend not to notice the destructiveness of racial microaggressions does not mean they are trivial. Racial microaggressions can be deadly, although we (especially white people) often don’t recognize or want to acknowledge their violent effects.

<<PARAGRAPH INTEGRITY RESUMES>>

De facto white class privilege in the form of racial microaggressions contributes to people of color's "racial battle fatigue," which entails "the
constant use or redirection of energy for coping against mundane racism which depletes psychological and physiological resources needed in
other important, creative, and productive area of life" (Smith, Hung, and Franklin 2012, 40). Racial
battle fatigue has been linked
empirically to depression, tension, and generalized anxiety disorder in African Americans, and the stress
associated with all of these psychological problems also contributes to physiological weathering that harms black
health, contributing to high rates of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, pre-term birth rates, and
infant mortality to name a few (Smith, Hung and Franklin 2012, 37, 40; D. Smith 2012). The effects of white racism literally get inside and
help constitute the bodies of black people in harmful ways. They wear down the body's various systems by creating a high allostatic
load via stressors that accumulate over time. The results are health problems such as disproportionately high rates of pre-term
birth, infant mortality, cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, and accelerated physiological aging (Blitstein 2009). Racism hurts—literally—and it
also kills
in ways that are subtler but no less deadly than the lyncher's noose or the neighbors Met (Drexler
2007). These effects, moreover, can be transgenerational, physiologically passed onto subsequent generations through various
epigenetic changes (Sullivan 2013).
 FW---Hallucinatory Whiteness DA
HALLUCINATORY WHITENESS DA.
Mathur, 20 [Ritu, Associate Prof. Poly Sci & Geography @ UT-San Antonio, PhD Poly Sci @ York
(Canada), [Link] Disarmament Studies and M.A. Int’l Relations @ Jawaharlal Nehru University (New
Delhi), author of Red Cross Interventions in Weapons Control (Lexington Press, 2017): “Sly Civility and
Institutionalized Humiliation,” Chapter 4 in Civilizational Discourses in Weapons Control (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2020). ISBN: 978-3-030-44943-8]//AD

The idea of political mastery is further reinforced in the consciousness of the West in the nuclear age
with the possession of these weapons even as the use of these weapons evoked a ‘growing sense of
moral unease’ and possibility of ‘fear of revenge’ by Others.19 A ‘second form of colonization’
epitomized as racial etiquette gained ground through practices of sly civility in the nuclear order,20 a
form of psychological colonization that alters cultural priorities within colonized societies and induces
one to generalize that ‘the modern West’ is not just ‘a geographical and temporal entity’ but a
‘psychological category.’21 It encourages a sense of omnipresent, omnipotent, ‘The West is now
everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.’ 22 The racial etiquette
accompanying this psychological orientation is now subtly imbricated in a new ‘political order’ premised
on a ‘norm against noticing’ race,23

**FOOTNOTE 23 STARTS**

Ikenberry, After Victory, 23. Ikenberry

defines ‘political order’ as a governing arrangement comprising of rules,
principles and institutions that define the core relationships between states that are party to the order ;
Short and Kambouri, “Ambiguous universalism,” 270.

**FOOTNOTE 23 ENDS**

Thus a misplaced emphasis on theory-building through simulation, abstraction and deliberate

marginalization of ‘descriptive or historical analysis of the kind that can highlight the racialized
practices constitutive of the current global order’ but which are castigated for
lacking in rigor.
A sense of vulnerability and tolerance is reinforced with the emergence of a ‘new racial etiquette’ that makes it difficult to be overtly racist.24
Practices of sly civility now cloaked neo-racism, racial etiquette or racial pragmatism at play in the new
constitutional order and served to emphasize the need to ‘neutralize the development of race
consciousness,’ and to be ‘racially conscious was to be disruptive if not threatening.’25 These practices of sly civility did not
represent any serious commitment to antiracism but simply sought to depoliticize race relations by considering
them a matter of representation. An effort was made to evade any questions of discrimination and equality by
carefully crafting practices of sly civility without giving up on the idea of political mastery. The
‘imperial cycle began anew, with
atomic bombing—more palatably referred to as “nuclear testing”—of the Marshall Islands, the Sahara,
the Navajo Nation, Maralinga, Moruroa and other colonized spaces.’26
 FW---Disembodiment DA
DISEMBODIMENT DA---scenario planning facilitates temporal control through
mastery, reducing Asian-ness to an object of white desire.
Lin ’22 [Meiya; 2022; Graduate Teaching Fellow at Boston University; “Towards A Cyborg Poetics: Race,
Technology, and Desire in Asian American Science Fiction Poetry,” vol. 1] jchen

Racial Difference & Embodied Time The subject of disjointed time has been dissected to the point of repetition, an
unsubtle sort of irony, and the argument that technology (coupled with various maladies of the current era, such as postmodernity) alters the
experience and function of time is not a new one. Railroads, telephones, and computers, for example, have all stretched and redefined hours
around the work day. The relationship between technology and time, however, is not so simple as modifier and modified. As Warren Liu argues
compellingly, considering that “temporality itself (and not simply the “objects” that measure it) might be understood as a
technology” opens up opportunities for deeper understandings of the relationship between race, desire, and technology (“Queer
Excavations: Technology Temporality, Race” 66). Time is one of several technologies integral to the fantasy of techno-
Orientalism—it is a fraught ideological territory over which the imperial core is determined to reaffirm
its monopoly. At its core, techno-Orientalism is a struggle for control over the future. In discourses of the cyborg, it
is important to note that certain temporalities are often used to denote racial difference. Soft Science and Oculus do not solely respond to
futuristic narratives of techno-Orientalism; both are equally interested in the historical underpinnings of Orientalism. If we understand
Orientalism as an extension of the Euro-American imperial enterprise which weaponizes notions of traditionality and backwardness as
justifications for violence, then relegationto the past denotes a form of temporal displacement which undergirds
the logic of white supremacy. Similarly, if techno-Orientalism, as Roh et al. claim, “completes” the Orientalist project,
then confinement to a hyper technological future functions equally as a method of distance and
dehumanization. The Orient and techno-Orient, then, combine to consign the fantastical East Asia of the American
imagination to a peripheral temporality against which the present temporal landscape (always coded as white
and masculine) is defined. “[I]f temporality is understood as a form of technology,” continues Liu, then “specific techno-Orientalist
tropes… might then more generally be understood themselves as premised on a naturalization of a technologically
mediated ordering that equates temporal with racial difference” (“Queer Excavations” 66). In short, American
representations of East Asia are often presented as either mired in a traditional past or threatening a
hypertechnological future as a method of denoting racial difference. Since (techno-)Orientalism is, in part, a
temporal displacement to the past and future, I believe it is vital to touch on implications of embodiment and disembodiment.
Certain materialist feminisms, claims Jameson, explore the idea that “the reduction to the present can thus also be formulated in terms of a
reduction to the body as a present of time” (712). In other words, isolation to the present moment can be understood as isolation to the
physical body. The
past and future, conversely, are often rhetorically and narratively associated with disembodiment (e.g.
reality as experienced not through the body as a site of processing knowledge but instead mediated through dream,
prophecy, memory, screen, etc.). Such a stance, I believe, is especially interesting in the context of technologically-mediated desire, in which
the white male viewer’s distance from the physical is often key to the pleasure promised by the
cybernetic. Hypertechnological futures portend to facilitate (in the tradition of the Cartesian dualism)
the transcendence of the mind from the physical; a sort of mastering or conquering of the body and its
finitude.7 Though I am cautious of leaning too heavily on discourses of the body, understanding how the constructed binary between
the disembodied past/future and embodied present furthers the techno-Orientalist project can elucidate the
relationship between the poetic cyborg and time. The implicit temporal and increasingly fragile stratification of racial difference central to
Orientalism and techno-Orientalism, then, is organized as follows: the white masculine embodied present versus the East Asian feminine
disembodied past and future. This stratification, however, is exceedingly paradoxical; even if the hypertechnological future represents an
opportunity for the white male protagonist to escape the confines of physicality, the East
Asian subjects encountered in the
future are often painfully tied to their bodies and the violence enacted upon them. Whether embodiment
and disembodiment constitute a pleasurable or desirable experience, then, depends entirely on the body in
question is white and male. This certainly aligns with Chun’s argument that the very insistence of the “binary of
disembodied mind on the one hand, and embodied and Orientalized other on the other” reveals the precarity of
its fabrication. That is to say, a techno-Orientalist cyberspace promises pleasure through transcending the
physical—a promise which is realized and defined against a horde of highly objectified East Asian cyborgs. The
“Orientalized other,” claims Chun, is not afforded distance from the physical; its body—which is, to the white
American observer, one of both extreme pleasure and extreme horror—is central to its role as an object
of desire. However, Chun suggests, the disembodiment promised by cyberspace relies on a level of connectivity between minds which,
on the surface at least, destabilizes stratifications between self and other—and, in the process, fragments the very distinctions of
white self and Oriental other which ground the techno-Orientalist understandings of cyberspace in the first place
(“Orienting Orientalism” 119). Thus, techno-Orientalist applications of embodiment and disembodiment fluctuate
in order to maintain the centrality of white desire. The tensions between human and machine (or, humanized and mechanized)
frequently manifest as uncertainty over the precise location of the border between the two. Often, this distinction is determined by whether or
not the body is a prosthesis which serves to further agency (in the case of the white male liberal subject) or limit it (in the case of the East Asian
cyborg). Both Soft Science and Oculus use language of injury as an assertion of the cyborg’s fraught inseparability from its body, inverting the
traditional techno-Orientalist narrative in which the East Asian cyborg is the passive recipient of the white male protagonist’s desire. At the
same time, however, Choi and Mao’s poetic cyborg struggles to stay grounded in its body. “have you ever been drugged / i mean / not on
purpose,” asks Choi’s cyborg speaker in “Turing Test_Problem Solving” (53). // if you don’t like it here why don’t you go somewhere else i mean
have you stood / laughing / then watched the laugh / unlatch / move / past your skin / ever felt yourself peel / from yourself / like wallpaper /
watched your limbs flop / mechanical crane / saying yes & yes / & bucking / & ligament / i guess have you ever been / too drunk / to be
afraid // please respond to the previous question maybe an injury even / maybe even just a leg / asleep / have you ever tried to shake / your
body / into obedience / tried to shake yourself / back into it // what you are describing are fairly common experiences among humans // now if
we could return to the experiment The tension between embodiment and disembodiment reflects the tension of the very real harm described
by the cyborg speaker and its distance from the experience. The borders between the past and the future, Soft Science and
Oculus reveal, are porous. In “Anna May Wong Rates the Runway,” the speaker describes a future which cannot let go of the past: eager to
escape a past in which she plays only doomed seductresses, twentieth century Chinese actress Anna May Wong arrives in the future only to
discover an eerie repetition of her own 1920s experience. Even the white models all wear their hair in straight bangs. The Asian models, too—
like clones 46 they glide out, lush throats throttled by nephrite. The editors call the pieces “1920s chinoiserie.” (Mao 74) Here, Mao references
the 2014 New York Fashion Week, in which designer Anna Sui designed an entire seasonal collection (indeed referred to as “1920s chinoiserie”)
inspired by Wong’s own fashion (Blanks, “Anna Sui Fall 2014 Ready-to-Wear”). 8 Significantly, chinoiserie is typically associated with fantastical
and frequently unrealistic European ‘reproductions’ of Chinese fashion and design. The 2014 runway show, then, is a misrepresentation of a
misrepresentation; a spectacle of a spectacle, mediated through so many temporalities that its inaccuracy becomes one of the central truths of
the poem. Wong, the speaker of the poem, comments on the irony of a future in which the fashion world cherry picks the glamor of Wong’s
stardom and leaves the unsavory bits untold: These women slip into the diabolical roles I’ve played but don’t pay for it. Now I am someone’s
muse. Good. If temporal difference can also be understood as racial difference, then Wong’s confinement in the poem to an eerily
repetitive past and future is illustrative of the collusion between Orientalism and techno-Orientalism.
Wong’s experience in the future is an extreme form of disembodiment: severed from her own timeline, she watches
as dozens of models wearing her clothing and hairstyle are applauded where she herself was derided. Quite literally, her body is no
longer hers; though in the future Wong achieves the fame and centrality to inspire an entire runway show, she is still not in
control of her image. Representation slips easily into spectacle; while Wong seems on the surface to be somewhat proud of
her influence (“Now I am someone’s muse. / Good.”), she also recognizes that this renown comes with the consequence of the
loss of authority over her own narrative. There is a kind of bitterness to Wong’s commentary, restrained in short lines and
stanzas: “these women / slip into the diabolical roles / I’ve played but don’t pay for it,” she observes. Even in the future, the only
roles available to Wong are “diabolical,” her style reduced to Chinoiserie, and even as muse—as the star of the show—Wong
cannot escape misrepresentation.
 FW---Utopian DA
UTOPIAN DA---their utopic narrative of consequences first IS Yellow Peril. That static
interpretation erases lived realities of Asians sutured in the plan’s narrative.
Jessica Man 18, Master of Arts degree in Asian American Studies, 2018, “"The Perfect Type of
Industry": Apocalyptic Visions of the Asian Century,” [Link]

Without understanding that the Yellow Peril is an apocalyptic mode, and without a persistent critique of how
the state leverages eschatology as a reproductive apparatus, the only frameworks that we can use to understand it are
statist; our understanding becomes temporally delimited by the end-time of the state. Apocalypse is a way of understanding how the state
envisions its persistence beyond that end, and Yellow Peril is itself a racial fiction used to serve that purpose, generating other fictions that
struggle to reconcile an understanding of history as periodic with an understanding of the future as progressive, triumphant, and utopic. It is
apocalyptic and eschatological, and proposes a method of preserving ethno-national power. Eugenic self-
defense is implicated and inherent to the forecasting of precarious conditions.

The entanglement of history with fiction, as well as the understanding of history as a fiction, and of speculationas
fictive work, should compel us to look at cultural production as the production of politicized time. This thesis contends that the
Orientalist racism of the Yellow Peril resides in an economic understanding of time, space, and progression that
generates anxiety about borders, both geopolitical and financial, and that this understanding, as we know it today, comes out
of an historical moment that eyes all over the world looked to as a premonition of the things to come –as an apocalyptic play that
was meant to prefigurethe conditions of the 20thcentury. Its development into the Asian Century requires fundamental
changes to the nature of speculative fictions and methods of subjugation, which we can understand both through legislation and
the speculative contexts that generate it. Future discussions of Orientalist apocalypticism, especially those strains that
entail Yellow Peril and economy, must first look back to the entry of Japan into modernity at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War in
order to understand what sort of future Americans have predicted for themselves, and still predict in different
shapes today. If this is to be a decolonial project, we must also look at how an empire understands post-imperial time in
order to create a vision of the future that interrupts Empire and forecloses the state. We must look critically at what within
us is structurally valued, how that value is reproduced within our imagination, and reconsider what we plan to carry on our
backs through our journey into the eschaton of the Asian Century.
 FW---Melancholia DA
MELONCHOLIA DA---forcing Asian debaters into assimilation produces racial
meloncholia that strips them of personal identity.
David Eng 2k, PhD from Columbia University at Asian America Studies Program; Shinhee Han,
Counseling & Psychological Services of Columbia University and Shirley M. Ehrenkranz School of Social
Work at New York University, 2000, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues,
10(4), pp. 667-700, [Link] , Wpeng

For Asian Americans and other groups of color, suspended assimilation into mainstream culture not only may
involve severe personal consequences; ultimately, it also constitutes the foundation for a type of national
melancholia, a national haunting, with negative social effects. In Senna’s (1998) Caucasia, the ambivalence
characterizing whiteness leaves the narrator with the constant and eerie feeling of “contamination.”4 Writing about the
nature of collective identifications, Freud notes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921): “In a group every sentiment and
act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the
collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes
part of a group” (p. 75). Our dialogue on racial melancholia insists on thinking what happens when the demand to sacrifice personal
to collective interest is not accompanied by inclusion within—but exclusion by—the larger group.

As we know, the formation of the U.S. nation quite literally entailed—and continues to entail—a history of institutionalized
exclusions, from Japanese American internment to immigration exclusion acts legislated by Congress, brokered by the
Executive, and upheld by the Judiciary against every Asian immigrant group.5 For example, from 1882 to 1943, Chinese Americans
experienced one of the longest juridical histories of immigration exclusion as well as bars to naturalization and
citizenship. Yet, few people realize that the first exclusion laws passed against a particular ethnic group were passed
against the Chinese. These laws were followed by a series of further exclusion acts culminating in the 1924 National
Origins Act and the Tyding-McDuffie Act of 1934, which effectively halted all Asian immigration and naturalization. At the same
time, other laws were instituted against miscegenation and ownership of private property.

Discourses of American exceptionalism and democratic myths of liberty, individualism, and inclusion force
a misremembering of these exclusions, an enforced psychic amnesia that can only return as a type of repetitive national
haunting—a type of negative or absent presence (see Cheng, 1997, pp. 51–52). The popular model minority stereotype
that clings to Asian Americans is both a product of—and productive of—this negative or absent presence.6 In its compulsive
restaging, the model minority stereotype homogenizes widely disparate Asian and Asian American racial and ethnic
groups by generalizing them all as economically or academically successful, with no personal or familial problems to speak of. In this manner,
the stereotype works not only to deny the heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity of various Asian American groups
that do not fit its ideals of model citizenry.7 Moreover, it also functions as a national tool that erases and manages the history
of these institutionalized exclusions. The pervasiveness of the model minority stereotype in our contemporary vocabulary works,
then, as a melancholic mechanism facilitating the erasure and loss of repressed Asian American histories and
identities. These histories and identities can return only as a type of ghostly presence. In this sense, the Asian
American model minority subject also endures in the United States as a melancholic national object—as a haunting
specter to democratic ideals of inclusion that cannot quite “get over” the histories of these legislated
proscriptions of loss.
 FW---Procedural Fairness
‘Procedural logics’ are merely ‘procedural rhetorics.’ Ballot solves our offense---
rejecting their research.
Alberti ’21 [John; January 28; Professor of English @ Northern Kentucky University; The Ethics of
Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom, “Playing Games with Our Lives:
What Critical Pedagogy Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Games in the Writing Classroom,” pp. 77-93]

In redefining “serious” games as “persuasive games,” Ian Bogost (2007) places the ethics of gaming front and center and questions the
technocratic descriptors that find their way into game studies theory—such as the aforementioned “procedural logics.” Instead, he exposes
the seemingly neutrality of “procedural logics” by recasting them as “procedural rhetorics.” As with Gee
(2004), Bogost’s (2007) ultimate goals recall Freire (1990): “I argue that video games’ usefulness comes not from a capacity to
transfer social or workplace skills, but rather from their capacity to give consumers and workers a means to critique
business, social, and moral principles” (p. x). Yannuzzi and Behrenshausen (2010) likewise see a Freirean potential for understanding the
potential of gaming as radical critique

as “sites of fun,” video games present an opportunity for the playful negotiation of their logics. Here exists
exploration, reiteration, arbitration, and deprecation as players probe rules, test boundaries. To play video games is
to toy with codes, to structurate. (p. 88)

The phrase “to toy with codes” brings in the radical potential of fun and play in gaming theory as forms of ideological critique with what can
seem the more austere approach of classical radical pedagogy in ways that recall Bakhtin’s (1984) idea of the “carnivalesque.” In less grand
theoretical terms, “sites of fun” describes the anarchic impulse literally at play in our high school learning game. As
we learned the
“rules” of the stock market game, we simultaneously recognized them as just that: the rules of a game, contingent
rather than absolute. In popular terms, this is the strategy of Bart Simpson, the class clown whose “misbehavior,” or refusal to
play the game according to the rules, offers a radical challenge to the rules of the “serious game” of
formal education. More theoretically, this liminal space defines what Mark Taylor (2001) calls “the edge of chaos,” or
“the interplay between order and chaos at work in dissipative structures” (p. 121).
 FW---AT: Fiat
Fiat indoctrinates us to embrace a sovereign view of power that embraces the will to
control while mastering obstacles through technocracy -- that trains us to be
aggressive intellects.
Makau ’96 [Josina; 1996; Professor of Humanities and Communication at CSU Monterey
Bay; Responsible Communication: Ethical Issues in Business, Industry, and the Professions,
“Argumentation Instruction in the Face of Global Perils,” p. 140]
Weisel's critique of German education prior to world war II points to another danger of traditional argumentation instruction. Like the Nazi
doctors, students
in traditional argumentation courses are taught "how to reduce life and the mystery of life to
abstraction." Weisel urges educators to teach students what the Nazi doctors never learned -- that people
are not abstractions. Weisel urges educators to learn from the Nazi experience the importance of humanizing their charges, of teaching
students to view life as special, 'with its own secrets, its own treasures, its own sources of anguish and with some measure of triumph.'
Trained as technocrats with powerful sensory skills but little understanding, students participating in traditional
argumentation courses would have difficulty either grasping or appreciating the importance of Weisel's critique. Similarly,
they would have difficulty grasping or appreciating Christian's framework for an ethic of technology an approach that requires above
all, openness, trust and care. The notion of conviviality would be particularly alien to these trained technocrats. Traditionally
trained debaters are also likely to fail to grasp the complexity of issues.

Trained to view problems in black and white terms and conditioned to turn to "expertise" for solutions, students, and
traditional courses become subject to ethical blindness. As Benhabib noted, 'Moral blindness implies not necessarily an evil or
unprincipled person, but one who can not see the moral texture of the situation confronting him or her.' These traditional debaters,
deprived of true dialogic encounter, fail to develop 'the capacity to represent' to themselves the 'multiplicity of
viewpoints, the variety of perspectives, the layers of meaning, etc. which constitute a situation'. They are thus inclined to
lack 'the kind of sensitivity to particulars, which most agree is essential for good and perspicacious judgment.'
Encouraging students to embrace the will to control and to gain mastery, to accept uncritically a sovereign
view of power, and to maintain distance from their own and others 'situatedness,' the traditional
argumentation course provides an unlikely site for nurturing guardians of our world's precious resources. It would appear, in fact, that
the argumentation course foster precisely the 'aggressive and manipulative intellect bred by modern science and discharged
into the administration of things' associated with most of the world's human made perils. And is therefore understandable
that feminist and others critics would write so harshly of traditional argumentation of debate.
 FW---Critique Solves
VIEW FROM NOWHERE---starting with problem-posing instead of problem-solving
equips students with the tools necessary to create new socio-juridical horizons.
Grear ’15 [Anna; 2015; Professor of Law at Cardiff University; Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the
Age of Environmental Crisis, eds. Anna Grear & Evadnc Gram, “Towards New Legal Futures? In Search of
Renewing Foundations,” Cheltenham: Edward Elgar]
2. BROAD DIRECTIONS FOR A NEW JURIDICAL IMAGINARY

Given the complexity of the current planetary predicament, and given a long and distinctively
patterned history of privilege and predation associated with rationalistic subject-object relations, it seems especially
important to diversify the search for new ways of being by drawing upon a wide range of constituencies and suitably
diverse ecologies of insight. There is a particular need, in this regard, for a deep sensitivity not only to the complexities of the contemporary
situation (with all its commonalities and uneveness) - but also for a profound and consciously chosen epistemic humility.

The present predicament - as posthumanist/new materialist approaches grasp so profoundly - requires

both philosophy and law
to move into a radical encounter with the irreducible complexity, movement, shifts and energies of
living materiality itself. As will become clearer below, there is a related need to make immanent to legal epistemology
a recognition that all our human descriptions of the living world, including our juridical categories, descriptors
and tropes, along with attempts to co-ordinate relations in a living world, function within a greater complexity
irreducible to linguistic or conceptual categories. Legal processes will need accordingly to embrace a new sense of productive
contingency and be open to the destabilisation of habitual assumptions and practices in order to open law to
dynamic insights emerging from the living, breathing engagements of the beings ('human' and otherwise) now
differentially yet commonly situated in front of the current crises.

We begin, appropriately enough, with theoretical inquiry. However, a brief caveat is in order. Theory is misunderstood when it is seen as being
a purely cerebral activity. Philosophising/theorising, like all thinking, is inescapably an act of the embodied
personality - a product of relations in a lived world from which the body is never separated. Theoretical enquiry, in that sense, is always
socio-haptic: the philosopher/theorist, far from being the lonely Cartesian cogito with all-seeing-eye-from- nowhere (so
beloved of Western intellectual myth) is always and everywhere an embodied being, formed socio-bio-eco-relationally. Thus, to 'begin'
with philosophy/theory is not a choice to prioritise the cognitive or to elevate disembodied abstractions.
'Beginning' in this way - in the context of the present reflection - is merely to acknowledge the profound importance of
reaching beyond the tired closures of the foundational philosophical commitments that have brought
the world to its present human and ecological crisis/crises.

Philosophy has always been a pivotal site for the re-imagination of the world, and it is important to give
theoretical reflection its place in the search for a renewing socio-juridical imaginary. Theory - at its best - as bell
hooks has observed, is a 'location for healing'. Theory is the practice of thinking differently - of asking transgressive questions, of moving
beyond sedimented patterns and of challenging the dominant order of thought in the world to reach for
possible worlds otherwise. Theory understood in this resistive sense is thus precisely that which, in Rhadakrishnan's terms, 'states and
elaborates the conditions of its non-acceptance of the world. [It] cannot be an acquiescence in the status quo ... [the sole condition of its
legitimacy is that it possesses an] ineluctable and dissenting worldliness'.

It’s neurologically verified.

Ingram 13, [Dr. Brett Ingram, PhD in communication from UMass Amherst, Professor of
Communication at UMass Amherst, (Dr. Ingram’s research focuses on the embodied and non-rational
aspects of rhetorical and cultural phenomena; he is especially interested in the affective dynamics at
play in our interactions with political media, the link between rhetorical violence, brain trauma, and
subjectivity, and the relationship between addiction and ideology. His scholarly projects seek to disclose
vectors of influence that are often overlooked in the humanities, for the purpose of developing more
sophisticated critical interventions into destructive social practices.),
[Link]
“Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience,” 2013] [Link].
Rhetoric scholars are apt to employ linguistic schema such as Burke’s terministic screens, rather than affective-corporeal theories such as
Damasio’s somatic markers, to explain how our perceptions of objects and events are conditioned by cultural experience. However, when put in
conversation, the two theories can enrich each other, because language is encoded in biological scripts in the plastic brain. Terministic screens
are mental operations that select aspects of reality that fit into the ideological worldview one has adopted, and deflect aspects of reality that
contradict it (Burke 1966: 45). An understanding of the relationship between affect, memory, and language helps to explain why the brain
selects one set of terministic screens over other possible screens. While we may be intellectually cognizant of the possibility of multiple
perspectives on reality, we do not consciously weigh each perspective’s viability every time we encounter a new event or object, and then
choose which one we wish to hold up to the influx of experience. Instead, our brain chooses for us according to internalized somatic markers,
and delimits the parameters of the field of cognitive thought on which we will subsequently play. When confronted with words
or
symbols that have become deeply entrenched through repetition or emotion, reflexive memory takes
over, draws on intuitions, and bypasses brain regions responsible for reason and critical thought. Science
writer Chris Mooney explains how this influences political thought: Memory, as embodied in the brain, is conceived of as a network,
made up of nodes and linkages between them, and what occurs after an emotional reaction is called spreading activation. As
you begin to call a subject to mind (like Sarah Palin) from your long-term memory, nodes associated with that subject
(“woman,” “Republican,” “Bristol,” “death panels,” “Paul Revere”) are activated in a fanlike pattern—like
a fire that races across a landscape but only burns a small fraction of the trees. And subconscious and automatic emotion starts
the burn. It therefore determines what the conscious mind has available to work with—to argue with. The
(brain makes this determination based on which conclusion will deliver a jolt of neurochemical
stimulation, or, in other words, which will immediately produce a satisfying affective outcome. Bruce Wexler
writes, “Consonance between internal and external structure is experienced as pleasurable, while dissonance is an unpleasant source of
psychophysiological tension” 144). The brain will often construct perceptions and interpretations of events that reinforce its preconceived
notions, because doing triggers the release of neurochemicals it craves. This is often at odds with intellectual concerns, such as ethics, reason,
or logic. We must here recall that what is “satisfying”
to the brain is not synonymous with what makes us “happy”
or “joyous,” nor is it necessarily connected to securing a happy future. Rather, it is the pure physiological
arousal that comes from a flood of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, an arousal manifested in a mental state
of reduced cognition—mindlessness. With repeated exposure to a politics of mindlessness, the brain is
reconstituted, via somatic markers, in such as a way as to automatically “screen out” alternative models
of political discourse. This may explain why the emotional political rhetoric emanating from media outposts such as The O’Reilly Factor,
Hannity, The Rush Limbaugh Show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and The Ed Show garner higher ratings and exert greater influence on
the culture than more deliberative, thoughtful programs like The Jim Lehrer NewsHour and Charlie Rose. One of the more “striking and
unsettling conclusions derived from research into physiological and affective functioning in relation to politics” is that “automatic or even
‘machinic’ processes” in the brain and body “drive the majority of political behavior” (Pruchnic 2008: 171). For
example, neurological studies of political partisanship indicate that the greater immersion one has in the political media, the less critical one
becomes. Furthermore, after repeated exposure to affectively charged political rhetoric, the brain
becomes addicted to the state
of simplistic thinking, or mindlessness, that it achieves via the neurochemical flows this rhetoric induces.
In order to feed its addiction, the brain actively rejects information that might prompt it to change its ways. In a series of brain scans of political
partisans who were asked to consider “obviously” contradictory statements by the politicians they supported, Dr. Drew Westen found that
partisans’ brains reverted to the comfort zone of long-held biases—they could easily identify the contradictions in the statements made by the
opposition’s candidate, or by neutral figures such as actors, but when it came to politicians they supported, they failed to perceive the
contradiction. This result held true with both Republicans and Democrats. What was most surprising, though, was that these acts of willful
ignorance gave people a neurochemical buzz. Westen writes Once partisans had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural
circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on. The partisan brain didn’t seem satisfied in
just feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased
“reasoning.” These reward circuits overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their “fix,” giving new meaning to the term
political junkie. (xiv, emphasis in original) The “political junkie” is colloquial designation that, if taken literally instead of figuratively, offers
insight into the ways in which ideological beliefs become embodied and intransigent.21 For the addict, the appeal of the substance to which he
is addicted comes from the substance’s capacity to reduce cognition and critical thinking—this appears to be true whether the substance in
question is speed or speech. As
addiction deepens, the addict’s ability and willingness to be “talked out of” his
compulsive behavior declines. An outside observer of the addict’s situation may inform him that certain drugs or ideas are bad for
him, and present him with facts, figures, and case studies that testify to the veracity of this argument, but such efforts are likely to be in vain,
because the addict does not suffer from confusion, he is in the thrall of certainty, and his certainty is reinforced each time he is exposed to the
substance. Habituated
engagement with any substance, be it material or symbolic, can produce a state of
addiction in which the user loses the critical capacity to make reasoned judgments concerning all
matters related to the substance. The addict eventually develops a tolerance to the high it produces, and consequently he
requires increasingly elevated levels of stimulation in order to maintain equilibrium, and experiences
disorientation and agitation if the substance is withdrawn. Doidge explains that tolerance “can develop in happy lovers as they get used to each
other” just as it develops in a drug user. This is because all
addictions, be they to symbolic substances or material substances, are
established by the brain’s ever-increasing hunger for the neurotransmitter dopamine, and “[D]opamine likes novelty” (Doidge
116). This means that the stakes must be constantly raised in order to stave off withdrawal—the addict needs more intense quantities or
qualities of the substance. If
the substance in question is emotional political rhetoric, the craving may be satisfied
by increasingly hyperbolic and incendiary expressions of terror and rage. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, both
recovering drug addicts, refashion themselves as drug dealers, ingeniously adept at feeding the cravings of conservative political junkies. The
neurochemistry of dopamine fuels the system in our brain that is related to appetitive excitement, the sort of stimulation we feel when we
imagine something that we desire. This affective tension evoked by the appetitive system is different from the feeling triggered by the
satisfaction of desire, such as we experience after sex or a good meal. The neurochemistry of satisfaction is based on endorphins, which are
chemically related to opiates such as heroin and morphine. Endorphins produce a peaceful, euphoric state; they mark the cessation of desire.

Peer-reviewed studies prove a statistical correlation between the action of the plan,
its representations of a Chinese threat, and national Anti-Asian sentiments.
He and Xie 22 [Qian and Yu; Qian He is a postdoctoral research associate at the Center on
Contemporary China, Princeton University. Ph.D. in sociology from the Department of Sociology at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, [Link]. in economics (highest academic honor) from the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, M.A. in sociology from Columbia University. Current research intersects the
substantive areas of International Migration, Social Stratification, Culture, Intergroup Relations, and
Asian/Asian American Studies; Yu Xie earned his bachelor’s degree at Shanghai University of Technology,
and two master’s degrees and a doctoral degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bert G.
Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology, Faculty appointment at the Princeton Institute of
International and Regional Studies, Princeton University; November 14, 2022; Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science, Vol. 119, No. 47; Published by PNAS; DOI:
[Link] adhi

As this case suggests, hostility toward Chinese in China potentially drives many hate incidents targeting East
Asians in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, partly due to the pandemic’s infamous Chinese origin. The
phenotypic resemblance among East Asians potentially presents a visual cue evoking the anti-Chinese
attitudes of some Americans and triggering attacks. In light of frequent media coverage of such hate attacks in the United
States targeting East Asians during the pandemic (4), we ask whether Americans hold stronger nationality-based prejudices
against Chinese in China compared to other East Asians, and if yes, why. To address these questions, we conducted a
randomized online survey experiment with a nationally representative adult sample in the United States. We aim to disentangle
nationality-based prejudices against Chinese in China from potential prejudices against East Asians in
general and to examine connections between nationality-based prejudices against Chinese in China and strained US–China relations during
the pandemic.
Recent researchhas examined widespread anti-Asian (5–8) and xenophobic (5, 9, 10) attitudes as COVID-19
outbreaks swept over the United States, with findings on spillover prejudices toward other domestic
racial-ethnic minorities (11). Another strand of research has documented the link between COVID-19 and Americans’
attitudes toward China, as China failed to curb initial domestic COVID-19 outbreaks from spreading abroad (12, 13). There remains a
crucial missing link between these two strands of literature, however. Considering the close connections between COVID-19’s Chinese origin
and the widely witnessed antagonism toward Asians, it is essential to incorporate US–China relations into examining US
domestic attitudes toward East Asians (14). A study that bridges the interwoven domestic anti-Asian racism and its international
underpinnings could help further our understanding of racial-ethnic tensions in the globalized world.

Perceived national threats arising from international conflicts often foment sentiments of outgroup derogation toward minority groups
associated with specific national origins. US history presents numerous examples of this. Notably, when Japan became a national
enemy of the United States following its Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, Americans frequently called Japanese
“rats” and “monkeys” and widely viewed them as deceitful, treacherous, and cruel (15, 16). Amid public
suspicion over Japanese Americans’ loyalty to the United States and fear of retaliation, under Executive Order 9066, around 120,000
Japanese descendants in the United States were forced into internment camps in 1942. Similarly, in the
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by foreign Islamic extremists, stereotypes of Muslims as violent and
untrustworthy gained popularity among Americans (17). Meanwhile, the United States saw a dramatic increase in
hate crimes targeting domestic Arab and Muslim groups (18). These historical instances confirm findings
from the intergroup relations literature that perceptions of inferior trustworthiness and morality are
integral facets of outgroup prejudices that categorically separate “us” from “them,” “right” from
“wrong,” and “light” from “darkness” (19–22). Indeed, major international conflicts often activate a “moral
filter” that unifies derogative perceptions of citizens in a hostile foreign nation and domestic minorities from that nation to
safeguard the homeland’s collective interests.

Leveraging the links between US–China relations and East Asian stereotypes, this study
examines the patterns and perceptual
bases of Americans’ varying prejudices against East Asian subgroups. Empirical tests of intergroup threat
theory have indicated that threat perceptions propel negative stereotypes against outgroups (23–27), so that
individuals with stronger threat perceptions hold stronger prejudices . In light of the deterioration of US–
China relations, which started before COVID-19 and was greatly exacerbated by the pandemic (28), we expect that Americans
who perceive China as more threatening will exhibit stronger prejudices against Chinese in China . While
most previous studies have studied Asians as a racial category (29), we disaggregate East Asians by nationality groups to derive insights into
how and why Americans might view East Asian subgroups differently. Our analysis
focuses on nationality-based prejudices
against Chinese, the largest Asian-origin group in the United States today (30) and also the most
frequent victims in hate-incident reports during the pandemic (31). Our findings have significant bearing on recent
experiences of social marginalization faced by Chinese Americans and other East Asians in US society.

Materials and Methods

Experiment Design.

We conducted a randomized experiment as part of an online survey on the social consequences of COVID-19, with the full study protocol
approved by Princeton University’s Institutional Review Board. In May 2021, we fielded the Internet-based survey to about 4,000 participants
who were representative of the US adult population via Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel (SI Appendix, section 1 provides a detailed survey methodology
and sample descriptions). At the beginning of the survey, we informed prospective participants of the main research objectives and our
organizational affiliation to obtain their consent to participate. The experimental treatments involved displaying a randomly generated fictitious
profile, which consisted of an East Asian male headshot with a text description, followed by questions prompting respondents to evaluate this
person. Specifically, our three-dimensional experimental design generated a male profile by randomly manipulating information stimuli
regarding 1) nationality (Chinese, Japanese, or Asian American), 2) facial expression (happy, neutral, or angry), and 3) occupation (low status,
medium status, or high status), yielding 27 unique combinations with equal assignment probability. We used photos of the same man to avoid
confounding effects of facial features (32).
For the experiment’s core manipulation dimension of nationality, we randomly displayed one of the three locations for the fictitious profile:
Beijing, China; Tokyo, Japan; or New York City, the United States. We designated the locations as nationality cues for a Chinese in China, a
Japanese in Japan, and an Asian American in the United States. This dimension is intended to reveal potential variations in Americans’ attitudes
toward the three East Asian nationality groups.

According to the stereotype content model (SCM) literature, perceived warmth and competence are two key dimensions that reliably predict
individuals’ social judgments of unfamiliar persons (33–35). We accordingly took three different photos of our model for the fictitious person as
he altered his facial expressions among being happy, neutral, or angry (shown in SI Appendix, section 8). We randomly displayed one of the
three photos in the experiment. We proxied the man’s competence level with one out of three randomly displayed occupations of different
socioeconomic status (SES): “janitor” for low SES, “computer programmer” for medium SES, and “medical doctor” for high SES.

After priming our survey subjects with information regarding the portrayed man’s nationality, warmth, and competence, we asked the
participants to rate him across four perception outcomes. We asked the following four questions: “How trustworthy/moral/competent/warm
do you think he is?” While the questions on trustworthiness and morality aimed to capture varying degrees of outgroup prejudice, the
questions on competence and warmth helped perform SCM-motivated manipulation checks for our experimental conditions. We adopted a
numerical scale ranging from “1 = Not at all” to “7 = Very much” for all questions.

Survey Design.

Toward the end of the 25-min survey, we included six survey items to gauge participants’ multidimensional perceptions of China’s threats to
the United States. The battery of questions about China threats included the following: 1) “How much is China a threat to the US economy?” 2)
“How much is China a threat to Americans’ intellectual property rights?” 3) “How much is China a threat to Americans’ privacy?” 4) “How much
is China a threat to the American way of life?” 5) “How much is China a threat to American democracy?” 6) “How much is China a threat to the
security of the US?” We adopted these questions to capture threat perceptions in the six substantive domains where research and media
reports suggest that Americans may perceive national-interest conflicts with China (36, 37). We used an 11-point scale ranging from “0 = No
threat at all” to “10 = Very serious threat” for all threat-related questions.

Results

Main Experiment.

The results from the experiment indicate that average ratings across all four perception outcomes were consistently the lowest for Chinese in
China compared to Japanese in Japan and East Asian Americans (SI Appendix, Fig. S1). While displaying similar patterns, the nationality
gradients in trustworthiness and morality were larger in magnitude than those in warmth and competence. In Table 1, we present pairwise
comparisons of mean ratings differences by nationality groups. The t tests contrast the three pairwise comparisons: Asian Americans versus
Chinese, Asian Americans versus Japanese, and Chinese versus Japanese. These pairwise comparisons confirm the persistently lower ratings of
Chinese relative to Asian Americans or Japanese, whereas differences between the ratings of Asian Americans and Japanese were negligible.
Thus, on average, Americans do not see equal “otherness” or “foreignness” in all East Asians. Rather, they view Chinese in China more
negatively than Japanese in Japan and Asian Americans, especially in terms of perceived trustworthiness and morality.

The experiment additionally yielded differential ratings by occupation and facial expression. The observed patterns by occupation were
inconsistent across the four perception outcomes. The participants saw the janitor (the lowest-SES occupation) as more trustworthy/moral and
warmer than the two higher-SES occupations (SI Appendix, Fig. S2). A different pattern emerged in perceived competence, where the computer
programmer was the most highly regarded by a small margin. The surprising result that the computer programmer is perceived as most
competent may partly reflect Americans’ perception of Asians’ high proficiency with computer programming. Greater warmth of facial
expression was consistently associated with more favorable ratings across the four perception outcomes (SI Appendix, Fig. S3). In line with the
existing SCM literature, friendliness helps win hearts and minds, but socioeconomic achievement does not (33–35).
To further assess the relative importance of nationality, occupation, and facial expression in determining ratings, we ran separate regression
models predicting the four perception outcomes along those three dimensions. As Fig. 1 shows, whereas there were no coherent relationships
between occupation and ratings, warmth of facial expression was the most predictive across the four perception outcomes. Despite being
smaller in magnitude, the adverse treatment effects of Chinese nationality on ratings were consistent and robust.

Heterogeneous Treatment Effects by China-Threat Perceptions.

To evaluate the relationship between Americans’ perceptions of Chinese in China and their perceptions of China threats, we classified
respondents into three terciles by summing their China-threat scores from the six survey items (SI Appendix, Fig. S4). We then performed
subgroup analyses to assess the “Chinese” and “Japanese” treatment effects across the low-threat, medium-threat, and high-threat subgroups,
with “Asian American” as the reference group. Fig. 2 visualizes those heterogeneous nationality treatment effects separately for the four
perception outcomes.
Shown in Fig. 1, the average treatment effect of the individual’s nationality as “Chinese in China” on his perceived trustworthiness was −0.34.
As Fig. 2 shows, the effect broken down by perceived China-threat levels was −0.19 for the low-threat
subgroup, −0.34 for the medium-threat subgroup, and −0.54 for the high-threat subgroup. Perceived morality
exhibited similar patterns. While the average treatment effect of “Chinese in China” on perceived morality was
−0.32, the group-specific effects were −0.25 for the low-threat subgroup, −0.27 for the medium-threat
subgroup, and −0.49 for the high-threat subgroup (all substantively and statistically significant). We
identified qualitatively similar yet markedly flatter gradients across the three China-threat subgroups in ratings of perceived competence of
Chinese in China but inconsistent patterns for perceived warmth. These results
validate our initial hypothesis regarding the
effect of China threats on perceptions of Chinese in China (SI Appendix, Tables S1–S4 report the sample descriptive
summaries followed by full results).

Variations across Local Political Contexts.

We further investigated whether the experimental results varied by local political environment. Local political environment was proxied by
county-level Republican vote shares in the 2016 presidential election (that is, votes share for Donald Trump). The results, presented in Fig. 3,
suggest that local political environment predicts perceptions of East Asians, especially in terms of trustworthiness and morality. As the
proportion of Republican voters in a country increases, trustworthiness and morality perceptions decline for all three East Asian subgroups,
implying a growing tendency to view them as outgroups. However, the corresponding declines in ratings differed across our three nationality
groups, being most pronounced for Asian Americans and least pronounced (almost flat) for Chinese in China.

Because the rating declines were steepest for Asian Americans and flattest for Chinese, the overall negative perceptual gap attributed to
Chinese in China diminished as the proportion of Republican voters in a given county increased. In predominantly Republican-voting counties,
residents on average perceived the three East Asian groups unvaryingly as one outgroup. By contrast, residents in predominantly Democrat-
voting counties on average exhibited more negative perceptions of Chinese in China relative to Asian Americans, despite broadly viewing East
Asians more favorably as a whole (SI Appendix, Tables S5 and S6 report the full results). Beyond confirming prior findings on Republicans’
generally more conservative attitudes toward foreigners (38), this analysis reveals more subtle differences in prejudices against East Asians
based on national origins across county-level political partisanship divides.

Conclusions and Discussion

The sharp rise in the public’s hostility toward Asians in the United States during COVID-19 has been well
documented in the existing literature. Yet, most prior studies have overlooked the essential link between anti-Asian
hate and the evolving US–China relationship, a dynamic bilateral tie vital to both countries and the
world at large. Instead of broadly treating Asians as a race, we highlight Americans’ distinct prejudices against Chinese in China relative to
Japanese in Japan and Asian Americans. Our experimental design leveraged randomly manipulated visual and text-based stimuli to assess the
effect of nationality treatment on participants’ perceptions. The experiment uncovered
consistent nationality-based
prejudices toward Chinese among the three East Asian nationality groups, especially regarding perceived
trustworthiness and morality. These findings provide broader implications for understanding the frequent verbal and physical attacks on East
Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. To illustrate, in
manipulated experimental environments we
revealed much stronger prejudices toward Chinese relative to other East Asians by priming the fictitious
person’s nationality as Chinese. In real life, however, most Americans possess little personal knowledge of
Asians they meet for the first time. Thus, physical appearance often serves as a vital visual cue to infer
otherwise unknown national origin, as in Maria Ha’s experience. Following this logic, considering Americans’
blaming emotions toward the Chinese earlier in the pandemic, many hate incidents victimizing other
East Asians may be partly driven by misdirected hostility toward Chinese.
Integrating the experiment results with survey questions gauging multidimensional China-threat perceptions, we demonstrate that
prejudices toward Chinese are more pronounced among Americans perceiving greater national-interest
threats from China. Prior historical studies have provided qualitative evidence that minority groups from particular national origins
often become subjects of prejudice during international conflicts. Our survey experiment demonstrates that Americans’ differential
threat perceptions of China, America’s strongest global competitor today, condition their perceptions of Chinese as a
less-moral outgroup. To some extent, nationality-based prejudices against Chinese today are reminiscent of
Americans’ low trust of and antagonistic attitudes toward prospering Japan in the 1980s (39). This revival of
East Asian stereotypes suggests that the American public’s widely shared view of China as a national adversary might linger on beyond the
COVID-19 pandemic. Our study provides quantitative
causal evidence substantiating relationships between US–
China bilateral ties and stereotypes about Chinese nationals.
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