BG Okinawa Aff—GDS

Bishop Guertin 2010 Okinawa AffSteckler GDS

Okinawa Aff—GDS

1


Epistemology/Chow Impact

Their Global Project is indebted to a western epistemology which uses its grounding in supposedly universal concepts of reason to cast out all ways of knowing which it perceives as threatening to the perpetuation of world order—proves the harms are fantasies constructed to legitimize global imperialism.Hugh Bartling, Public Policy Studies—De Paul University, 2003“Organizing the New South: Local Ecologies and Autonomous Strategies for Confronting Globalization,” The Mississippi Quarterly. Volume: 57. Issue: 1.

One of the most important contributions of Esteva and Prakash is their pointed skepticism of what they term the "Global Project." This is their term for the market-based ideology and accompanying institutional reforms promoted by Western governments, corporations, and major international institutions. They see the Global Project as being an aberrant form of domination perpetrated by the world's social minorities (meaning those individuals who embrace Western epistemologies)

over the world's social majorities. Using the term "social minorities" to refer to Westerners is an important political move for Esteva and Prakash. To the Westerner's ear, "minority" is reserved for the "other," the foreigner, the immigrant, the person of color. What Esteva and Prakash remind us is that it is actually the Westerner who is the minority in the global context. This minority position is not simply a product of race or ethnicity. The West is also the "minority" in terms of the

proportion of the earth's resources they use and the proportion of the world's wealth they command when compared to the rest of the earth's inhabitants. The West's superiority in acquiring material wealth and consuming natural and human resources has global ramifications. Pollution in the Global South, sweatshop production facilities, and authoritarian governments are the costs the "social majorities" have to endure to sustain the well-being of the Western "minorities." The main problems endured by the social majorities stem from the set of institutions, discourses, jurisprudential structures, and epistemologies that are introduced from the context of the social minority but which are presented as universal, rational, abstract, and unassailable. The ideology of the social minorities--while often variegated in

appearance--has as its fundamental operating mechanism the denigration of the cultures, institutions, and epistemologies of "the other." The goals of education, elections, and human rights are perceived in strictly monomaniacal ways: education requires the construction of schools and curriculum and professional educators; elections require polls, ballots, and centralized institutions for precise counting;

ensuring human rights requires an active state apparatus, codified jurisprudence, judges, and lawyers. Western mechanisms of worldly existence prefigure a unified, liberal subject who is the target of the education system, the electoral system, and the legal system. Rather than accepting this contingent understanding of the human condition as unproblematic and universal, Esteva and Prakash assert alternative models of knowing that can be the base Of a postcolonial politics. The first step in this process is rejecting the unitary subject of homo economicus and marginalizing the dominant discourses of development. For inspiration, Esteva and Prakash look to ways the social majorities have engaged in their own autonomous practices for sustaining communities. Western ways of development are very individualistic and abstract and mechanistic. The practices of the social majorities,

2


by contrast, operate within particular contexts and assert the importance of embodied experience for the human condition. Modern Western institutions and bureaucracies--like the state and the school--are designed, explicitly, to be extra-human. While humans occupy positions within bureaucracies, the functioning of the bureaucratic machine is triumphant and, because of its generalizable and abstract nature, it cannot adequately cultivate the contingencies inherent in the particularities of social interaction. This is important, for all human life and social interaction take place at the level of the particular. No social scientific theory or explanation is ever able to be fully exhaustive, for there are always exceptions or, as positivist social scientists say, "outliers."

B. the result of this disinterested inquiry is genocidal violence—their attempt to fill in the blind spots in our map of all human interaction ensures that we can only see the individuals they debate about as the targets for US bombs.Rey Chow, Humanities and Modern Culture & Media Studies at Brown University, 2006 (The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, 40-1)

Often under the modest apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the “scientific” and “objective” production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special “areas” became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target. In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuit of higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training. Historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so

forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis,

experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war—if, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as

equivalent to the ability to break military codes—is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to “know” the other cultures? Can “knowledge” that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare’s accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims to focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign “self”/“eye”—the “I”—that is the United States,

the other will have no choice but remain just that—a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains by the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the

3


bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber—such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning

of this chapter—will never receive the attention that is due to them. “Knowledge,” however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences. This is one reason why, as Harootunian remark, area studies have been,

since its inception, haunted by the “absence of definable object”—and by “the problem of the vanishing object.”

4


Tickner

The aff’s epistemological understanding of security is based on gendered threat construction—guarantees extinctionTickner 1 [Ann professor at the School of International Relations USC. B.A. in History, U London. M.A. in IR, Yale. PhD in pol sci, Brandeis U Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era]New issues and new definitions of security have been accompanied by calls for new ways of understanding security. Controversy about the meaning of security has been part of a more fundamental debate over broader epistemological issues that, on the critical side, has included questioning the state-centric foundations and assumptions of realism as well as challenging its positivist-rationalist methodologies. Many scholars on the critical side of these epistemological debates claim that these ontological and epistemological issues are highly interrelated. The beginning of the debate over the meaning of security and its expanding agenda, as well as over how to explain conflict and prescribe for its amelioration, was coincidental with the third debate in IR. Scholars on the critical side began to question realism’s explanations for states’ security behavior based on economistic, rational-choice models or natural-science equilibrium models associated with the balance of power. Many claimed that issues of culture and identity must be included in order to gain a fuller understanding of states’ security interests and policies. Poststructuralist scholars began to question the foundational myths of realist worldviews upon which realist explanations of conflict depend. Claiming that theory cannot be divorced from political practice, critics pointed to realism’s complicity in shaping policymakers’ understandings of and prescriptions for U.S. security behavior in the ColdWar world. Walt’s defense of the social-scientific foundations of security studies (mentioned earlier) and his dismissal of other approaches have drawn sharp criticism from critical-security scholars. The ethnocentricism of his review and his description of a field that appears closely allied with U.S. security interests call into question his claim about the field’s ability to “rise above the political” and raises the issue of whose interest security is serving. Edward Kolodziej has claimed that Walt’s philosophically restrictive notion of the social sciences confines the security scholar to testing propositions largely specified by policymakers; it is they who decide what is real and relevant.33 Kolodziej goes on to say that Walt’s definition of science bars any possibility of an ethical or moral discourse; even the normative concerns of classical realists are deemphasized in order to put the realist perspective on scientific foundations. Challenging Walt’s view of the history of the field as a gradual evolution toward an objective, scientific discipline that ultimately yields a form of knowledge beyond time and history, Keith Krause and Michael Williams have claimed that Walt has created an epistemic hierarchy that allows conventional security studies to set itself up as the authoritative judge of alternative claims;34 this leads to a dismissal of alternative epistemologies in terms of their not being “scientific.” Critics claim that issues they consider important for understanding security cannot be raised within a positivist-rationalist epistemology or an ontology based on instrumentally rational actors in a state-centric world. In addition to constraining what can be said about security, a realist-rationalist approach precludes consideration of an ethical or emancipatory politics. For example, Krause and Williams contest realism’s claim that states and anarchy are essential and unproblematic facts of world politics. They suggest that this worldview is grounded in an understanding of human subjects as selfcontained— as instrumentally rational actors confronting an objective external reality. This methodologically individualist premise renders

5


questions about identity and interest formation as unimportant.35 These and other critics claim that issues of identity and interest demand more interpretive modes of analysis. For this reason, critical scholars see the necessity of shifting from a focus on abstract individualism to a stress on culture and identity and the roles of norms and ideas. Such criticisms are being voiced by scholars variously identified as constructivists, critical theorists, and postmodernists. While not all of them reject realism’s state-centric framework, all challenge its assumptions about states as unitary actors whose identities are unimportant for understanding their security behavior. Although certain of these scholars see an incommensurability between rationalist and interpretive epistemologies, others are attempting to bridge this gap by staying within realism’s state-centric worldview while questioning its rationalist epistemology. Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter Katzenstein have argued for what they call “sociological institutionalism”— a view that advocates an identity-based approach, but one that stays within the traditional security agenda, a focus on states, and explanatory social science. Where this approach differs from rationalism is in its investigation of how norms, institutions, and other cultural features of domestic and international environments affect states’ security interests and policies. Conversely, when states enact a particular identity, they have a profound effect on the international system to which they belong.36 Alexander Wendt’s constructivist approach also attempts to bridge the constructivist/rationalist divide. His strategy for building this bridge is to argue against the neorealist claim that self-help is given by anarchic structures. If we live in a self-help world, it is due to process rather than structure; in other words, “anarchy is what states make of it.”37 Constructivist social theory believes that “people act toward objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the objects have for them.”38 People and states act differently toward those they perceive as friends and those they see as enemies. Therefore, we cannot understand states’ security interests and behavior without considering issues of identity placed within their social context. Claiming that realist ontology and its rationalist epistemology are interdependent, more radical versions of critical-security studies reject these bridging attempts. Their calls for broadening the security agenda are made within the context of both a rejection of rationalism and a search for emancipatory theories that can get beyond realism’s skepticism about progressive change and the possibility of an ethical international politics. Poststructuralists claim that when knowledge about security is constructed in terms of the binary metaphysics of Western culture, such as inside/outside, us/them, and community/anarchy, security can be understood only within the confines of domestic community whose identity is constructed in antithesis to external threat.39 This denies the possibility of talking about an international community or an amelioration of the security dilemma since it is only within the space of political community that questions about ethics can be raised. In other words, the binary distinctions of national-security discourse limit what can be said and how it can be discussed. Thus, critical-security studies is not only about broadening the agenda— because, as mentioned earlier, this is possible with a realist framework. According to Ken Booth, critical-security is fundamentally different from realism because its agenda derives from a radically different political theory and methodology that question both realism’s constrained view of the political and its commitment to positivism. Critical-security studies rejects conventional security theory’s definition of politics based on the centrality of the state and its sovereignty. Arguing that the state is often part of the problem of insecurity rather than the solution, Booth claims that we should examine security from a bottom-up perspective that begins with individuals; however, critical-

6


security studies should not ignore the state or the military dimensions of world politics: “What is being challenged is not the material manifestations of the world of traditional realism, but its moral and practical status, including its naturalization of historically created theories, its ideology of necessity and limited possibility, and its propagandist common sense about this being the best of all worlds.”40 When we treat individuals as the objects of security, we open up the possibility of talking about a transcendent human community with common global concerns and allow engagement with the broadest global threats.41 The theme of emancipation is one that runs through much of the criticalsecurity studies literature. Emancipatory critical security can be defined as freeing people as individuals and groups from the social, physical, economic, and political constraints that prevent them from carrying out what they would freely choose to do.42 A postrealist, postpositivist emancipatory notion of security offers the promise of maximizing the security and improving the lives of the whole of humankind: it is a security studies of inclusion rather than exclusion.43 Yet imagining security divested of its statist connotations is problematic; the institutions of state power are not withering away. As R. B. J. Walker has claimed, the state is a political category in a way that the world or humanity is not.44 The security of states dominates our understanding of what security can be because other forms of political community have been rendered unthinkable. Yet, as Walker goes on to say, given the dangers of nuclear weapons, we are no longer able to survive in a world predicated on an extreme logic of state sovereignty, nor one where war is an option for system change. Therefore, we must revise our understanding of the relationship between universality and particularity upon which a statist concept of security has been constructed. Security must be analyzed in terms of how contemporary insecurities are being created and by a sensitivity to the way in which people are responding to insecurities by reworking their understanding of how their own predicament fits into broader structures of violence and oppression.45 Feminists—with their “bottom-up” approach to security, an ontology of social relations, and an emancipatory agenda—are beginning to undertake such reanalyses.

7


Patriarchy-->Extinction

ExtinctionNhanenge 7 [Jytte Masters @ U South Africa, paper submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in the subject Development Studies, “ECOFEMINSM: TOWARDS INTEGRATING THE CONCERNS OF WOMEN, POOR PEOPLE AND NATURE INTO DEVELOPMENT]Technology can be used to dominate societies or to enhance them. Thus both science and technology could have developed in a different direction. But due to patriarchal values infiltrated in science the type of technology developed is meant to dominate, oppress, exploit and kill. One reason is that patriarchal societies identify masculinity with conquest. Thus any technical innovation will continue to be a tool for more effective oppression and exploitation. The highest priority seems to be given to technology that destroys life. Modern societies are dominated by masculine institutions and patriarchal ideologies. Their technologies prevailed in Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and in many other parts of the world. Patriarchal power has brought us acid rain, global warming, military states, poverty and countless cases of suffering. We have seen men whose power has caused them to lose all sense of reality, decency and imagination, and we must fear such power. The ultimate result of unchecked patriarchy will be ecological catastrophe and nuclear holocaust. Such actions are denial of wisdom. It is working against natural harmony and destroying the basis of existence. But as long as ordinary people leave questions of technology to the "experts" we will continue the forward stampede. As long as economics focus on technology and both are the focus of politics, we can leave none of them to experts. Ordinary people are often more capable of taking a wider and more humanistic view than these experts. (Kelly 1990: 112-114; Eisler 1990: 3233; Schumacher 1993: 20, 126, 128, 130).

8


Shepherd

Shepherd 8 [Laura J. Shepherd, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, “Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies,” EBSCO]As discussed above, ideas about masculinity and femininity, dignity and sacrifice may not only be violent in themselves, but are also the product/productive of physical violences. With this in mind, the feminist argument that 'peacetime' is analytically misleading is a valid one. Of interest are the 'in-between days' and the ways in which labelling periods of war or peace as such can divert attention away from the myriad violences that inform and reinforce social behaviour. [W]ar can surely never be said to start and end at a clearly defined moment. Rather, it seems part of a continuum of conflict, expressed now in armed force, now in economic sanctions or political pressure. A time of supposed peace may come later to be called 'the pre-war period'. During the fighting of a war, unseen by the foot soldiers under fire, peace processes are often already at work. A time of postwar reconstruction, later, may be re-designated as an inter bellum– a mere pause between wars (Cockburn and Zarkov, cited in El Jack, 2003, p. 9). Feminist security studies interrogates the pauses between wars, and the political processes – and practices of power – that demarcate times as such. In doing so, not only is the remit of recognisable violence (violence worthy of study) expanded, but so too are the parameters of what counts as IR. Everyday violences and acts of everyday resistance ('a fashion show, a tour, a small display of children's books' in Enloe, 2007, pp. 117–20) are the stuff of relations international and, thus, of a comprehensive understanding of security. In the following section I outline the ways in which taking these claims seriously allows us to engage critically with the representations of international relations that inform our research, with potentially profound implications. As well as conceiving of gender as a set of discourses, and violence as a means of reproducing and reinforcing the relevant discursive limits, it is possible to see security as a set of discourses, as I have argued more fully elsewhere (Shepherd, 2007; 2008; see also Shepherd and Weldes, 2007). Rather than pursuing the study of security as if it were something that can be achieved either in absolute, partial or relative terms, engaging with security as discourse enables the analysis of how these discourses function to reproduce, through various strategies, the domain of the international with which IR is self-consciously concerned. Just as violences that are gendering reproduce gendered subjects, on this view states, acting as authoritative entities, perform violences, but violences, in the name of security, also perform states. These processes occur simultaneously, and across the whole spectrum of social life: an instance of rape in war is at once gendering of the individuals involved and of the social collectivities – states, communities, regions – they feel they represent (see Bracewell, 2000); building a fence in the name of security that separates people from their land and extended families performs particular kinds of violence (at checkpoints, during patrols) and performs particular subject identities (of the state authority, of the individuals affected), all of which are gendered. All of the texts under discussion in this essay argue that it is imperative to explore and expose gendered power relations and, further, that doing so not only enables a rigorous critique of realism in IR but also reminds us as scholars of the need for such a critique. The critiques of IR offered by feminist scholars are grounded in a rejection of neo-realism/realism as a dominant intellectual framework for academics in the discipline and policy makers alike. As Enloe reminds us, 'the

9


government-centred, militarized version of national security [derived from a realist framework] remains the dominant mode of policy thinking' (Enloe, 2007, p. 43). Situating gender as a central category of analysis encourages us to 'think outside the "state security box"' (p. 47) and to remember that 'the "individuals" of global politics do not work alone, live alone or politic alone – they do so in interdependent relationships with others' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 200) that are inherently gendered. One of the key analytical contributions of all three texts is the way in which they all challenge what it means to be 'doing' IR, by recognising various forms of violence, interrogating the public/private divide and demanding that attention is paid to the temporal and physical spaces in-between war and peace. Feminist security studies should not simply be seen as 'women doing security', or as 'adding women to IR/security studies', important as these contributions are. Through their theorising, the authors discussed here reconfigure what 'counts' as IR, challenging orthodox notions of who can 'do' IR and what 'doing' IR means. The practices of power needed to maintain dominant configurations of international relations are exposed, and critiquing the productive power of realism as a discourse is one way in which the authors do this. Sjoberg and Gentry pick up on a recent theoretical shift in Anglo-American IR, from system-level analysis to a recognition that individuals matter. However, as they rightly point out, the individuals who are seen to matter are not gendered relational beings, but rather reminiscent of Hobbes' construction of the autonomous rational actor. '[T]he narrowness of the group that [such an approach] includes limits its effectiveness as an interpretive framework and reproduces the gender, class and race biases in system-level international relationship scholarship' (Sjoberg and Gentry 2008, p. 200, emphasis added). Without paying adequate attention to the construction of individuals as gendered beings, or to the reproduction of widely held ideas about masculine and feminine behaviours, Sjoberg and Gentry remind us that we will ultimately fail 'to see and deconstruct the increasingly subtle, complex and disguised ways in which gender pervades international relations and global politics' (2008, p. 225).In a similar vein, Roberts notes that 'human security is marginalised or rejected as inauthentic [because] it is not a reflection of realism's (male) agendas and priorities' (2008, p. 169). The 'agendas and priorities' identified by Roberts and acknowledged by Sjoberg and Gentry as being productive of particular biases in scholarship are not simply 'academic' matters, in the pejorative sense of the term. As Roberts argues, 'Power relationships of inequality happen because they are built that way by human determinism of security and what is required to maintain security (p. 171). Realism, as academic discourse and as policy guideline, has material effects. Although his analysis employs an unconventional definition of the term 'social construction' (seemingly interchangeable with 'human agency') and rests on a novel interpretation of the three foundational assumptions of realism (Roberts, 2008, pp. 169–77), the central point that Roberts seeks to make in his conclusion is valid: 'it is a challenge to those who deny relationships between gender and security; between human agency (social construction) and lethal outcome' (p. 183). In sum, all three texts draw their readers to an inescapable, and – for the conventional study of IR – a devastating conclusion: the dominance of neo-realism/realism and the state-based study of security that derives from this is potentially pathological, in that it is in part productive of the violences it seeks to ameliorate. I suggest that critical engagement with orthodox IR theory is necessary for the intellectual growth of the discipline, and considerable insight can

10


be gained by acknowledging the relevance of feminist understandings of gender, power and theory. The young woman buying a T-shirt from a multinational clothing corporation with her first pay cheque, the group of young men planning a stag weekend in Amsterdam, a group of students attending a demonstration against the bombing of Afghanistan – studying these significant actions currently falls outside the boundaries of doing security studies in mainstream IR and I believe these boundaries need contesting. As Marysia Zalewski argues: International politics is what we make it to be ... We need to rethink the discipline in ways that will disturb the existing boundaries of both that which we claim to be relevant in international politics and what we assume to be legitimate ways of constructing knowledge about the world (Zalewski 1996, p. 352, emphasis in original).

11


Criticising Masculine Knowledge

Masculine forms of knowledge production cherrypick justifications based on a preconceived androcentric script, which means if we win the aff embodies this epistemological schema it’s a reason to be skeptical of their impact and solvency claimsTickner 1 [Ann professor at the School of International Relations USC. B.A. in History, U London. M.A. in IR, Yale. PhD in pol sci, Brandeis U Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era] Does the fact that states’ national-security policies are often legitimated by appealing to masculine characteristics, such as power and self-help, mean that certain types of foreign-policy behaviors—standing tall, rather than wimping out—are seen as more legitimate than others? Could it be that men who, in the role of defense experts, must employ tough “masculine” language and suppress any “feminized” thoughts when constructing strategic options, come to regard more cooperative choices as unthinkable and co operative behavior as unlikely?58 Carol Cohn claims that the language we use shapes the way we view the world and thus how we act on it. Her analysis of the language of U.S. security experts, whose ideas have been important for mainstream security studies, suggests that this masculine-gendered discourse is the only permissible way of speaking about national security if one is to be taken seriously by the strategic community. This rational, disembodied language precludes discussion of the death and destruction of war, issues that can be spoken of only in emotional terms stereotypically associated with women. In other words, the limits on what can be said with the language of strategic discourse constrains our ability to think fully and well about national security. In their analysis of U.S. policy on bombing Indochina during the VietnamWar, Jennifer Milliken and David Sylvan examine the discourse ofU.S. policymakers. They claim it was gendered.59 When policymakers spoke or wrote about South Vietnam, it was portrayed as weak and feminized, its population as hysterical and childlike; the North Vietnamese, on the other hand, were characterized as brutal fanatics—as manifesting a perverted form of masculinity. The authors claim that bombing policy, responding to these gendered portrayals, was different in each case. While not denying the reality of what policymakers do, Milliken and Sylvan, like Cohn, claim that words have power and, therefore, consequences; the way in which policymakers and scholars construct reality has an effect on how they act upon and explain that reality. Gender-differentiated images are often used in foreign policy to legitimate certain options and discredit others. Therefore, Walt’s aspiration for separating the “political” from the “scientific” is questionable. In other words, theories cannot be separated from political practice.

And, interrogating the gendered assumptions of their advantage and solvency claims solve the aff—it exposes androcentric assumption that allow formulation of better actionsPeterson and Runyan 99 [V. Spike and Anne professor of political science at the University of Arizona and professor of women’s studies at Wright State University, Global Gender Issues, 2nd edition, p. 14-15] Gender issues surface now because new questions have been raised that cannot be addressed within traditional frameworks. The amassing of global data reveals the extent and pattern of gender inequality: Women everywhere have less access to political power and economic resources and less control over processes that reproduce this systemic inequality.

12


Moreover, our knowledge of the world of men and the politics they create is biased and incomplete in the absence of knowledge about how men's activities, including their politics, are related to, even dependent upon, what women are doing--and why. Additionally, recognizing the power of gender as a lens forces us to reevaluate traditional explanations, to ask how they are biased and hence render inadequate accounts. As in other disciplines, the study of world politics is enriched by acknowledging and systematically examining how gender shapes categories and frameworks that we take for granted. This is necessary for answering the new questions raised and for generating fresh insights--about the world as we currently "know" it and how it might be otherwise. Finally, gender-sensitive studies improve our understanding of global crises, their interactions, and the possibilities of moving beyond them. These include crises of political legitimacy and security as states are increasingly unable to protect their citizens against economic, epidemic, nuclear, or ecological threats; crises of maldevelopment as the dynamics of our global economic system enrich a few and impoverish most; and crises of environmental degradation as the exploitation of natural resources continues in unsustainable fashion. These global crises cannot be understood or addressed without acknowledging the structural inequalities of the current world system, inequalities that extend well beyond gender issues: They are embodied in interacting hierarchies of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, and religious identification. In this text, we focus on how the structural inequalities of gender work in the world: how the hierarchical dichotomy of masculinity-femininity is institutionalized, legitimated, and reproduced, and how these processes differentially affect men's and women's lives. We also begin to see how gender hierarchy interacts with other structural inequalities. The dichotomy of masculinity and femininity is not separate from racism, classism, ageism, nationalism, and so on. Rather, gender both structures and is structured by these hierarchies to render complex social identities, locations, responsibilities, and social practices. Gender shapes, and is shaped by, all of us. We daily reproduce its dynamics--and suffer its costs--in multiple ways. By learning how gender works, we learn a great deal about intersecting structures of inequality and how they are intentionally and unintentionally reproduced. We can then use this knowledge in our struggles to transform global gender inequality by also transforming other oppressive hierarchies at work in the world.

13


Framework

Consideration of gender binaries is a prerequisite in the context of military policy—simply the alt’s questioning creates better policy—also this means the alt solves the affCohn et al 5 [Carol Cohn (Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights), Felicity Hill (Peace and Security Adviser to the United Nations Development Fund for Women), and Sara Ruddick (Professor of philosophy and women's studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Social Research), “The Relevance of Gender for Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction”, RCB] This story is not simply about one individual, his feelings and actions; it illustrates the role and meaning of gender discourse in the defence community. The impact of gender discourse in that room (and countless others like it) is that some things are excluded and get left out from professional deliberations. Certain ideas, concerns, interests, information, feelings and meanings are marked in national security discourse as feminine, and devalued. They are therefore very difficult to speak, as exemplified by the physicist who blurted them out and wished he hadn’t. And if they manage to be said, they are also very difficult to hear, to take in and work with seriously. For the others in the room, the way in which the physicist’s comments were marked as feminine and devalued served to delegitimate them; it also made it very unlikely that any of his colleagues would find the courage to agree with him. This example should not be dismissed as just the product of the idiosyncratic personal composition of that particular room; it is replicated many times and in many places. Women, in professional and military settings, have related experiences of realising that something terribly important is being left out but feeling constrained, as if there is almost a physical barrier preventing them from pushing their transgressive truths out into the open. What is it that cannot be spoken? First, any expression of an emotional awareness of the desperate human reality behind the sanitised abstractions of death and destruction in strategic deliberations. Similarly, weapons’ effects may only be spoken of in the most clinical and abstract terms, and usually only by those deemed to have the appropriate professional qualifications and expertise. What gets left out, then, is the emotional, the concrete, the particular, human bodies and their vulnerability, human lives and their subjectivity – all of which are marked as feminine in the binary dichotomies of gender discourse. In other words, gender discourse informs and shapes nuclear and national security discourse, and in so doing creates silences and absences. It keeps things out of the room, unsaid, and keeps them ignored if they manage to get in. As such, it degrades our ability to think well and fully about nuclear weapons and national security, and so shapes and limits the possible outcomes of our deliberations. With this understanding, it becomes obvious that defence intellectuals’ standards of what constitutes “good thinking” about weapons and security have not simply evolved out of trial and error; it is not that the history of nuclear discourse has been filled with exploration of other ideas, concerns, interests, information, questions, feelings, meanings and stances which were then found to create distorted or poor thought. On the contrary, serious consideration of a whole range of ideas and options has been preempted by their gender coding, and by the feelings evoked by living up to or transgressing normative gender ideals. To borrow a strategists’ term, we can say that gender coding serves as a “preemptive deterrent” to certain kinds of thought about the effects and consequences of strategic plans and WMD.vi Ideas about gender shape, limit and distort the national and international political processes through which decisions about WMD are made The impact of ideas about gender extends beyond the realm

14


of the professional discourse of weapons experts; ideas about gender also affect the national and international processes through which decisions are made about the acquisition of weapons, the maintenance of weapons stockpiles, and disarmament initiatives. To see this, we need to treat seriously a phenomenon that is so taken for granted that it is usually unremarked – that both war and weapons are currently associated with masculinity. What does it mean to take this seriously? What effects does this have? One telling example comes from 1990, after Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, during the build-up to the first Gulf War. During a speculative discussion among a group of defence intellectuals and opinion-formers, one declared, “Look, the question is, “Does George [H.W.] Bush have the stones for war?” That is, does he have the masculine strength and courage, is he man enough, to lead his country into war?vii Look at what happens when the question is framed this way. Even though the man who asked this question might not endorse the statement “war is a good thing”, he equated a willingness to go to war with having “stones” – a euphemism for balls, generally regarded as a positive attribute (for a man). Hence “going to war” is given the positive valence that masculinity – being a “real man” – is understood to possess. Even more importantly, this equation carries a deeper implication: not only does it give to waging war some of the positive value attached to masculinity; it also makes it much more difficult not to go to war. By extension, the research, development, production, stockpiling and deployment of weapons and delivery systems – without which going to war is impossible – are also equated with manliness, using gender-resonant language about the importance of “demonstrating our strength and resolve”. As a consequence, it is easier to delegitimise proponents of cutting military spending. Whether their motivations are disarmament or getting rid of expensive weapons programmes that make no military or strategic sense, opponents of military spending are undermined by accusations of being “weak on defence”. They are portrayed as feeble, wimpy or lacking “balls” – the kiss of death in American politics. Another example, from US public discourse after 9/11, is some variation on the theme, “We should bomb `em back to the Stone Age, and then make the rubble bounce.”viii Frequently expressed on talk radio shows or internet discussions, this kind of rhetoric hardly represents a rational strategic calculation; rather, it is about the sheer pleasure and thrill of having so much destructive power. While astounding in its amorality and ignorance, such utterances are meant to elicit admiration for the wrathful manliness of the speaker. The effects of this kind of speech are pernicious. The implication is that to avoid responding to a political crisis by going to war shows a lack of balls. Not to be ready, willing and able to demolish your opponents by “bombing `em back to the Stone Age” is to be weak. In such a charged and masculinised context, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to develop and advocate other forms of security policy.

And, you are not a policy-maker—pretending you are absolves of individual responsibility—ensures the aff’s impacts are inevitable and is an independent reason to vote negKappeler 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence, p. 10-11) We are the war’ does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of `collective irresponsibility’, where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal

15


responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal.’ On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective àssumption’ of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility leading to the well-known illusion of our apparent `powerlessness’ and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens even more so those of other nations have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia- Hercegovina or Somalia since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls òrganized irresponsibility’, upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers: For we tend to think that we cannot `do’ anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions aremade. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of `What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?’ Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as `virtually no possibilities’: what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like Ì want to stop this war’, Ì want military intervention’, Ì want to stop this backlash’, or Ì want a moral revolution.” ‘We are this war’, however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our `non-comprehension’: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we àre’ the war in our ùnconscious cruelty towards you’, our tolerance of the `fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don’t’ our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the òthers’. We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape òur feelings, our relationships, our values’

16


according to the structures and the values of war and violence. “destining” of revealing insofar as it “pushes” us in a certain direction. Heidegger does not regard destining as determination (he says it is not a “fate which compels”), but rather as the implicit project within the field of modern practices to subject all aspects of reality to the principles of order and efficiency, and to pursue reality down to the finest detail. Thus, insofar as modern technology aims to order and render calculable, the objectification of reality tends to take the form of an increasing classification, differentiation, and fragmentation of reality. The possibilities for how things appear are increasingly reduced to those that enhance calculative activities. Heidegger perceives the real danger in the modern age to be that human beings will continue to regard technology as a mere instrument and fail to inquire into its essence. He fears that all revealing will become calculative and all relations technical, that the unthought horizon of revealing, namely the “concealed” background practices that make technological thinking possible, will be forgotten. He remarks: The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing-reserve. (QT, 33) 10 Therefore, it is not technology, or science, but rather the essence of technology as a way of revealing that constitutes the danger; for the essence of technology is existential, not technological. 11 It is a matter of how human beings are fundamentally oriented toward their world vis a vis their practices, skills, habits, customs, and so forth. Humanism contributes to this danger insofar as it fosters the illusion that technology is the result of a collective human choice and therefore subject to human control. 12

17

http://www.questiaschool.com/read/108740194




A2: Realism

Realism is only inevitable in a hypermasculine frameworkPeterson 2k [V Spike, Associate Professor of Political Science @ Arizona, SAIS Review, 20.2, rereading public and private: the dichotomy that is not one, project muse]In addition, relegating womyn to an invisible private sphere lends authority and legitimacy to excluding womyn from political leadership, military activities, and macroeconomic management. The corollary is that womyn are not only denied access to more valued and powerful masculine activities but are also assigned to specific roles and images required to enable, support, and legitimate those activities. Hence, we are encouraged to believe that men lead because womyn are apolitical, men work because womyn are dependents, and [End Page 20] men are strong and go to war because womyn are weak and need protection. In spite of lived experience and material conditions that belie these simplistic renderings, they have rhetorical force and emotional resonance that shape how we live—and how some of us die. A third effect is the assumption, pervasive in politics and international relations, that male experience and perspective represents human experience and perspective. Modern political theory, its models of human nature, the foundational myths of international relations (Hobbes’ state of nature, Rousseau’s stag hunt), 25 and the central constructs it employs (the state, rational actor, national security) are abstractions from exclusively male (and especially elite male) experience. 26 The point is not that these accounts are false in themselves (although this also warrants examination) but that their claim to universality—to represent the human condition and its most pertinent problematics—is empirically and conceptually erroneous. These androcentric accounts distort our understanding of actual social relations by excluding all but elite male experience, by often reifying that experience, and by failing to embed that experience in historical context. Insofar as these distortions occur in the foundations of international relations, the biases they introduce permeate and have consequences throughout the discipline. On the one hand, the male experience and vantage point presupposed is itself selective; it is not “everyman” who produces political theory and participates in power. Because it is elite and typically European men who do so, feminists are not alone in criticizing the generalization of this experience to all of humankind. Other critical voices challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric accounts. 27 On the other hand, these critics typically do not address gender as a structural feature of social hierarchies that is key to the reproduction of elite prerogatives. From a feminist perspective, androcentrism constructs models of human nature and social relations that exclude womyn’s knowing and being, which differ systematically from men’s (due to institutionalized gender hierarchies). In sum, the bias of androcentrism is problematic analytically and politically: it not only reproduces hierarchical assumptions conceptually but also institutionalizes hierarchy in material practices.

Try or die—adhering to inevitability of realism makes war and violence inevitableBlanchard 3 [Eric M. Blanchard, PhD Candidate in the School of International. Relations at the University of Southern California, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory,” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer, 2003), pp. 1289-1312 Jstor]Tickner’s book in particular presents an early feminist critique of the realist tradition and the first step to evaluating prevalent notions of security from a

18


gender-sensitive perspective. With its military focus, IR security studies had become, according to Tickner, a “dysfunctional” response to the challenges of human and environmental security. As Tickner explains, realism stresses rationality, strength, power, autonomy, and independence, qualities as associated with foreign policy and military affairs as they are with masculinity (1992, 3). She problematizes as well the exogeniety of domestic affairs in the realist account and shows how ostensibly objective realist national security studies attempt to explain the causes of war through a discourse that privileges a view based on hegemonic masculinity. While realists take power as the coercive means by which states obtain security at the expense of other states, Tickner suggests instead that an ethos of “mutual enablement rather than domination” could underlie a positive-sum notion of security inspired by peace activism (1992, 65). Like Elshtain, Tickner challenges the realist aversion to morality in IR, questioning the adaptation of a set of public (and thus international) values as a basis for security so wildly at odds with the values we “espouse at home” (1992, 138). Applying gender as a category of analysis to show the possibility of a more comprehensive notion of security, Tickner traces the linkage between the system of international relations (and its theorization) and multileveled, gendered insecurities. Against realism’s assumption of autonomous states and its prescription of self-help in a hostile anarchical environment, Tickner argues that the threats of the nuclear age, cross-border environmental degradation, and evidence of increasing international cooperation demand that interdependence be taken seriously (1992). For Tickner, the assumption that there is order within and anarchy beyond the bounds of the community effects a divide between international and domestic politics that mirrors the public-private split that feminist theorists argue perpetuates domestic violence. Tickner rejects the analytic separation of explanations for war into distinct levels and the identification of security with state borders, arguing that violence at the international, national, and family levels is interrelated, ironically taking place in domestic and international spaces beyond the reaches of law (1992, 58, 193). Feminists in IR find the levels-of-analysis approach particularly inappropriate to their concerns because the problem of the system of patriarchy cannot be addressed solely by reference to particular actors, whether they are men or states (Brown 1988, 473). Recasting the state Like Tickner, many IR feminists problematize the state and raise questions as to its status as protector of womyn. Peterson argues that, in addition to its relegation of sexual violence and its threat to the private domestic realm, the state is implicated in the ways that womyn become “the objects of masculinist social control not only through direct violence (murder, rape, battering, incest), but also through ideological constructs, such as ‘womyn’s work’ and the cult of motherhood, that justify structural violence-inadequate health care, sexual harassment, and sex-segregated wages, rights and resources” (1992c, 46). However, while not denying the possibility of limited protection offered by the state (Harrington 1992), FST contests the notion of protection-“the exchange of obedience/subordination for (promises of) security”-as a justification for state power (Peterson 1992c, 50). Peterson likens the state’s provision of security for womyn to a protection racket, “implicated in the reproduction of hierarchies and in the structural violence against which they claim to offer protection” (1992c, 51). In addition, Stiehm argues that the state typically denies womyn the opportunity to be societal “protectors,” assigning to them the role of “protected” despite the predatory threat often posed by their ostensible guardians (1983a). Governmental attempts to achieve total security versus an

19


external threat can result in predictable oppression: “The problem is that the potential victim is both more accessible and compliant than the marauder. Because the protector is embarrassed and frustrated by his failure to protect, he restricts his protectee instead” (373). By circumscribing the possibilities of the female deployment of legitimate force, the masculine state effectively denies the development of what Stiehm calls a “defender” society, one “composed of citizens equally liable to experience violence and equally responsible for exercising society’s violence” (367). In Gender in International Relations, Tickner introduces an important theme of FST: the recognition of structural violence, a term borrowed from peace research (Galtung 1971), which she uses to designate the economic and environmental “insecurity of individuals whose life expectancy was reduced, not by the direct violence of war but by domestic and international structures of political and economic oppression” (Tickner 1992, 69). Peterson claims that a feminist rethinking of security must first inquire into how structural violence comes to be understood as natural and unproblematic and then work to politicize and reveal the historically contingent nature of such structures (1992a, 49). While womyn have long been peripheral to the decision‐making processes of global capital, the international political economy can render womyn insecure through the gendered division of labor, the discounting of work in the home, the dictates of structural adjustment programs, the ravages of poverty, and the violence of sexual tourism and trafficking in womyn—all issues that generally do not get the attention of orthodox practitioners of IR (see Pettman 1996). Likewise, although the care of the environment, a transnational issue requiring collective action, is not a priority of IR theories that privilege the power and instrumental rationality of nation‐states, Tickner contends that feminist configurations of security must take note of the need for global economic restructuring and urge a shift from the exploitation of nature to the reproduction of nature (1992). Such a global restructuring might start with the recognition that environmental degradation is not gender neutral; womyn are affected disproportionately by environmental insecurity, “especially in developing countries where the link between poverty, womyn’s status (or lack thereof), imposed development policies, and environmental degradation is a complex but intense one” (Elliot 1996, 16).In sum, the foundation of FST combines a rejection of realism, an interrogation of the abstractions of strategic discourse, an awareness of the connection between womyn’s everyday experience and security, a critique of the state, and the recognition of the effects of structural violence with a strong normative and transformative vision, evidenced by its focus on inequality and emancipation. For Sarah Brown, the goal of all IR theory should be “the identification and explanation of social stratification and of inequality as structured at the level of global relations” (1988, 461). Tickner claims that social and gender justice must be at the heart of any enduring peace; political, economic, and ecological relationships characterized by domination and subordination cannot coexist with authentic security (1992, 129). She further proposes that empathy, mediation, and sensitivity, all devalued as feminine principles, could play an important role in building alternative modalities of human behavior. According to Tickner, a shift away from the citizen/warrior/patriot, an exclusionary civic ideal predicated on certain types of wartime sacrifice, and a questioning of the premium placed on military success could aid the development of a less militarized version of national identity, one more conducive to relations with foreign others and to the recognition of the validity of male and female experiential contributions (1992, 137).Reimagining peace and war

20


Conceptually, FST investigates and problematizes the relationships between womyn, security and peace, and war. The unreflective conflation of “peace” with “security” is a dubious move, for it “construes difference as threat” (Runyan and Peterson 1991, 86). Peace, as Elshtain has observed, is an “ontologically suspicious concept” as it is inconceivable without war, and binary understandings of war and peace often rely on degraded notions of the feminine and deny the disharmony and disorder of social and political life (1990). Although war is largely a masculine institution—historically men have been its primary planners and prosecutors—feminist scholars have argued that the complex interrelationship between masculinities and war needs careful investigation. Feminists note that, though drill sergeants and misogynist training are employed in the attempt to turn men into warriors, this conditioning does not convince the majority of men to fire their weapons in battle (Elshtain [1987] 1995, 207; Tickner 2001, 57). For sure, beliefs in the masculinity of war and the inherent aggressiveness of men are undermined by contemporary warfare, which “seems to require, as much as physical aggression, a tolerance of boredom or the ability to operate a computer under stress, characteristics that are neither distinctly `masculine’ nor heroic” (Ruddick 1989, 151–52).Mary Burguieres usefully identifies three possible feminist approaches to peace: a position that accepts stereotypes about male bellicosity and the pacific female nature and espouses the potential peaceful benefits of maternal thinking; one that rejects notions of gender difference and female nonviolence as disempowering to womyn and emphasizes womyn’s right to equal standing on issues of war and peace; and a stance that attacks militarism by rejecting both stereotypes, arguing that “war is rooted in patriarchal, military structures which are supported by the behavior of both men and womyn” (1990, 9). Sara Ruddick argues that feminist politics is consonant with the practice of peacemaking and indeed can catalyze a latent peacefulness in maternal practices focusing on the protection and nurturing of children (1989). However, considering Betty Reardon’s (1985) suggestion that feminist and peace research projects be merged, Sylvester (1987) warns that such a merger may obscure the diversity of womyn’s different relationships with peace seen, for example, between the mother and the womyn warrior.

It’s not inevitableGrondin 4 [David, master of pol sci and PHD of political studies @ U of Ottowa “(Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War,” http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ieim/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf]

In explaining national security conduct, realist discourses serve the violent purposes of the state, as well as legitimizing its actions and reinforcing its hegemony. This is why we must historicize the practice of the analyst and question the “regimes of truth” constructed by realist discourses. When studying a given discourse, one must also study the socio-historical conditions in which it was produced. Realist analysts are part of the subfield of Strategic Studies associated with the Cold War era. Even though it faced numerous criticisms after the Cold War, especially since it proved irrelevant in predicting its end, this subfield retains a significant influence in International Relations – as evidenced, for instance, by the vitality of the journal International Security. Theoretically speaking, Strategic Studies is the field par excellence of realist analyses: it is a way of interpreting the world, which is inscribed in the language of violence, organized in strategy, in military planning, in a military order, and which seek to shape and preserve world order (Klein, 1994: 14). Since they are interested in issues of international order, realist discourses study the balancing

21

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ieim/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf


and bandwagoning behavior of great powers. Realist analysts believe they can separate object from subject: on this view, it would be possible to abstract oneself from the world in which one lives and studies and to use value-free discourse to produce a non-normative analysis. As Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth assert, “[s]uch arguments [about American moderation and international benevolence that stress the constraints on American power] are unpersuasive, however, because they fail to acknowledge the true nature of the current international system” (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002: 31). Thus it would seem that Brooks and Wohlforth have the ability to “know” essential “truths”, as they “know” the “true” nature of the international system. From this vantage point it would even be possible “to set aside one’s own subjective biases and values and to confront the world on its own terms, with the hope of gaining mastery of that world through a clear understanding that transcends the limits of such personal determinants as one’s own values, class, gender, race, or emotions” (Klein, 1994: 16). However, it is impossible to speak or write from a neutral or transcendental ground: “there are only interpretations – some stronger and some weaker, to be sure – based on argument and evidence, which seems from the standpoint of the interpreter and his or her interlocutor to be ‘right’ or ‘accurate’ or ‘useful’ at the moment of interpretation” (Medhurst, 2000: 10). It is in such realist discourse that Strategic Studies become a technocratic approach determining the foundations of security policies that are disguised as an academic approach above all critical reflection (Klein, 1994: 27-28). Committed to an explanatory logic, realist analysts are less interested in the constitutive processes of states and state systems than in their functional existence, which they take as given. They are more attentive to regulation, through the military uses of force and strategic practices that establish the internal and external boundaries of the states system. Their main argument is that matters of security are the immutable driving forces of global politics. Indeed, most realists see some strategic lessons as being eternal, such as balance of power politics and the quest for national security. For Brooks and Wohlforth, balance of power politics (which was synonymous with Cold War politics in realist discourses) is the norm: “The result — balancing that is rhetorically grand but substan- tively weak — is politics as usual in a unipolar world” (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002: 29). National security discourses constitute the “observed realities” that are the grist of neorealist and neoclassical realist theories. These theories rely upon U.S. material power (the perception of U.S. relative material power for neoclassical realists), balance of power, and the global distribution of power to explain and legitimate American national security conduct. Their argument is circular since they depict a reality that is constituted by their own discourse, in addition to legitimizing American strategic behavior. Realists often disagree about the use of force – on military restraint versus military intervention, for example – but the differences pertain to strategies of power, that is, means as opposed to ends. Realist discourses will not challenge the United States’ position as a prominent military power. As Barry Posen maintains, “[o]ne pillar of U.S. hegemony is the vast military power of the United States. […] Observers of the actual capabilities that this effort produces can focus on a favorite aspect of U.S. superiority to make the point that the United States sits comfortably atop the military food chain, and is likely to remain there” (Posen, 2003: 7). Realist analysts “observe” that the U.S. is theworld hegemonic power and that no other state can balance that power. In their analyses, they seek to explain how the United States was able to build and lead coalitions in Afghanistan and Iraq with no other power capable of offering military resistance. Barry Posen “neutrally”

22


explains this by em- phasizing the United States’ permanent preparation for war: I argue that the United States enjoys command of the commons—command of the sea, space, and air. I discuss how command of the commons supports a hegemonic grand strategy. […] Command means that the United States gets vastly more military use out of the sea, space, and air than do others; that it can credibly threaten to deny their use to others; and that others would lose a military contest for the commons if they attempted to deny them to the United States. Command of the commons is the key military enabler of the U.S. global power position. It allows the United States to exploit more fully other sources of power, including its own economic and military might as well as the economic and military might of its allies. Command of the commons has permitted the United States to wage war on short notice even where it has had little permanent military presence. This was true of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 1993 intervention in Somalia, and the 2001 action in Afghanistan (Posen, 2003: 7-9). Moreover, in realist theoretical discourses, transnational non-state actors such as terrorist networks are not yet taken into account. According to Brooks and Wohlforth, they need not be: “Today there is one pole in a system in which the population has trebled to nearly 200” (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002: 29). In their system, only states are relevant. And what of the Al-Qaida terrorist network? At best, realist discourses accommodate an interstate framework, a “reality” depicted in their writings as an oversimplification of the complex world in which we now live (Kratochwil, 2000).7 In their theoretical constructs, these analysts do not address national or state identity in any substantive way. Moreover, they do not pay attention to the security culture in which they as individuals are embedded8. They rarely if ever acknowledge their subjectivity as analysts, and they proceed as if they were able to separate themselves from their cultural environment. From a poststructuralist perspective, however, it is impossible to recognize all the ways in which we have been shaped by the culture and environment in which we were raised. We can only think or experience the world through a cultural prism: it is impossible to abstract oneself from one’s interpretive cultural context and experience and describe “the world as it is”. There is always an interpretive dimension to knowledge, an inevitable mediation between the “real world” and its representation. This is why American realist analysts have trouble shedding the Cold War mentality in which they were immersed. Yet some scholars, like Brooks and Wohlforth, consciously want to perpetuate it: “Today the costs and dangers of the Cold War have faded into history, but they need to be kept in mind in order to assess unipolarity accurately” (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002: 30).

Passive acceptance of realism destroys VTL—it’s not inevitable and we should challenge itAyotte & Husain 5 [*Kevin J. Ayotte, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the California State University, Mary E. Husain, Lecturer in the Department of Communication at the California State University, “Securing Afghan Womyn: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,” NWSA Journal 17.3 (2005) 112-133, Muse]The concept of, and a certain respect for, irreducible difference upon which deconstruction and much of postcolonial theory is founded have often been accused of fostering cultural relativism (e.g., Moghissi 1999, 52–3). While respect for the unique experience, history, and traditions of other cultures is a sentiment to which few would object, cultural specificity should not be used to justify unjust

23


or oppressive practices. Moghissi argues, however, that "the postmodern relativists collude with [End Page 114] the fundamentalists' culturalist solutions to crises of modernity and of modernization" (8). The sweeping generalizations about postmodernism as well as fundamentalism remain problematic in Moghissi's work, yet her worry should resonate with any feminist scholar. No theory should leave us passively accepting behaviors that threaten the basic dignity of human beings. Nonetheless, the attribution of relativism to all theories carrying the whiff of postmodernism needs to be greeted with skepticism.2 The violations of human dignity inflicted upon womyn (and men) all over the globe do, however, require that so-called postmodern frameworks account for the material conditions of discrete historical-cultural contexts. The complementary application of poststructuralist and materialist criticism thus allows for the most comprehensive analysis of the epistemic, physical, and structural effects that follow from U.S. discourses about the oppression of womyn in Afghanistan. The need for such a theoretical rapprochement is especially significant in the feminist study of international relations. Christine Sylvester, for example, warns of the problem faced by some poststructuralist versions of Critical Security Studies that avoid accounting for gender either as a factor in the material conditions under which womyn live or as a symbol for political organizing (1994, 182). Postcolonialism is especially apt for engaging this theoretical divide as it brings to the forefront the intimate relationship between discursive representation and material conditions.

24

BG Okinawa Aff—GDS

Documents

Transcript of BG Okinawa Aff—GDS