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Framing abuse of surveillance power as merely a failure of legal accountability obscures the neoliberal social relations that sustain the surveillance state. Connecting surveillance with broader systems of neoliberal violence is necessary for sustainable solutions. Giroux, Ryerson distinguished visiting professor, 2015(Henry, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State”, Cultural Studies, 29.2, Taylor and Francis)

Yet, the neoliberal authoritarian culture of modernity has also created a social order in which participation in surveillance culture becomes self-generated, aided by a public pedagogy produced and circulated through a machinery of consumption that encourages transforming dreams into data bits. Such bits then move from the sphere of entertainment to the deadly serious and integrated spheres of capital accumulation and policing as they are collected and sold to business and government agencies who track the populace either for commercial purposes or out of fear of a possible threat to established institutions of power. Modernity in this instance has been updated, wired and militarized. The surveillance state with its immense data-mining capabilities represents a historical rupture from the foundational principles of modernity, with its emphasis on enlightenment, reason and the ideals of justice, equality, freedom and democracy – however flawed. Investment in public goods was once seen as central to a social contract that asserted all citizens should have access to those provisions, resources, institutions and benefits that expanded their sense of agency and social responsibility. But modernity is now driven by the imperatives of a savage neoliberal political and economic system that embrace what Charles Derber and June Sekera (2014) call a ‘public goods deficit’ in which ‘budgetary priorities’ are relentlessly pushed so as to hollow out the welfare state and drastically reduce social provisions as part of a larger neoliberal counter-revolution to lower the taxes of the rich and mega-corporations while selling off public good to private interests. Debates about the meaning and purpose of the public and social good have been co-opted by a politics of fear, relegating notions of the civic good, public sphere and even the very

word ‘public’ to the status of a liability, if not a pathology (Cruz 2012, p. 58). The new modernity and its expanding surveillance net subordinates human needs, public goods and justice to the demands of security and commerce – working in tandem to promote the accumulation of capital at all costs. Fear has lost its social connotations and no longer references fear of social deprivations such as poverty, homelessness, lack of health care and other fundamental conditions of agency. Fear is now personalized, reduced to an atomized fear that revolves around crime, safety, apocalypse and survival . In this instance, as the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once warned, modernity now privileges ‘a disgraceful combination of “private opulence and public squalor”’ (qtd. in Derber and Sekera 2014). This is not surprising given the basic elements of neoliberal policy, which as Jeremy Gilbert (2013) indicates, include the: privatization of public assets, contraction and centralization of democratic institutions, deregulation of labor markets, reductions in progressive taxation, restrictions on labor organization, labor market deregulation, active encouragement of

competitive and entrepreneurial modes of relation across the public and commercial sectors. (pp. 11–12) The contemporary citizen is now primarily a consumer and entrepreneur wedded to the belief that the most desirable features of human behaviour are rooted in a ‘basic tendency towards competitive, acquisitive and uniquely self-interested behavior which is the central fact of human social life’ (Gilbert 2013, p. 9). Social cynicism and societal indifference accelerate a broken culture in which reason has been replaced by consumer-fed hallucinatory hopes (Augstein 2011). With the foundations of democracy under siege, privacy is no longer viewed as a principled and cherished civil right. On the contrary, privacy has been absorbed and transformed within the purview of a celebrity and market-driven culture in which people publicize themselves and their innermost secrets in order to promote and advance their personal brand. Surveillance and its accompanying culture of fear produce subjects that revel in being watched, turning the practice of surveillance into just another condition for performing the self. Every human act and behaviour is now potential fodder for YouTube, Facebook or some other social network. Privacy has become a curse, an impediment that subverts the endless public display of the self. Zygmunt Bauman (qtd. in Bauman and Lyon 2013) echoes this sentiment in arguing that: These days, it is not so much the possibility of a betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but the opposite: shutting down the exits. The area of privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or her own juice; forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to wring out and tear

away the secrets from behind the ramparts of privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody's shared property and a property everybody wishes to share. (p. 28) Privacy has mostly become synonymous with a form of self-generated, non-stop performance – a type of public relations in which privacy is valued only for the way it makes possible the unearthing of secrets, a cult of commodified confessionals and an infusion of narcissistic, self-referencing narratives. All of these activities indirectly serve to expand the pleasure quotient of surveillance, while normalizing practices and modes of repression that Orwell could never have imagined. Where Orwell's characters loathed the intrusion of surveillance, today: We seem to experience no joy in having secrets, unless they are the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our egos by attracting the attention of researchers and editors of TV talk shows, tabloid front pages and the … covers of glossy magazines …. Everything private is now done, potentially, in public – and is potentially available for public consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet ‘can't be made to forget’ anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell phone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people's views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private. (Bauman and Lyons 2013, p. 33)

The loss of privacy, anonymity and confidentiality has had the adverse effect of providing the basis for what Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyons (2013, pp. 13–14) call the undemocratic process of ‘social sorting’ in which different populations are subject to differential treatment, whether this means being protected by the state or being subjected to state power. This security regime works against a growing number of individuals and groups, ranging from immigrants and low-income minorities to the chronically unemployed who are considered disposable. Precarity, mobility, flexibility and deregulation all function to disempower large segments of the population who now have to be controlled, if not contained. No longer content to play out its historical role of a modernized panopticon, the modern state has become a militarized and

multilayered source of insecurity, entertainment and commerce. In addition, this new stage of modernity is driven not only by the need to watch, but also the will to punish. Under the regime of neoliberal capitalism, the expansion of government and corporate surveillance measures become synonymous with new forms of antidemocratic governance and an intensification of material and symbolic violence (Gitlin 2013, Ferguson et al. 2013). The dynamic of neoliberal modernity, the homogenizing force of the market, a growing regime of repression, and an emerging police state have produced more sophisticated methods for surveillance and the mass suppression of the most essential tools for dissent and democratic action: ‘the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse’ (Karlin 2013). Fear, harassment, the crushing of dissent and mass incarceration become part of a zombie politics in which the machineries of death expand their reach in order to

justify a whole new range of injustices and an accompanying culture of cruelty. Since 9/11, the destruction of privacy in the USA has been driven by an intensification of the fear of dissent. This fear is paired with a deep-seated suspicion of others, especially those non-white populations who are poor or non-Christian, and anyone who might question American exceptionalism . Such underlying

fears sanction social exclusion and promote widespread religious and racial discrimination, fuel the expansion of the punishing state and have become a unifying thread of the secret regimes of surveillance. Rather than waging a war on terrorists, the neoliberal security state wages a war on dissent in the interest of consolidating class power. Whistleblowers are not only punished by the government; their lives are also turned upside down in the process by private surveillance agencies and major corporations which increasingly share information with the government and do their own spying and damage control. The merging of corporate and state surveillance systems updated with the most sophisticated shared technologies has resulted in illicit counter-intelligence operations, industrial espionage and attacks on pro-democracy movements such as Occupy as well as on other non-violent social movements protesting a range of state and corporate injustices (Boghosian 2013, Price 2014). Those who stand to benefit from massive concentrations of wealth, power and income harbour a deep fear and suspicion of democracy and have come to rely on the authoritarian and punishing state to impose forms of civil and social death on anyone who threatens their power. Indeed, the notion that the US Government should be used largely to punish rather than nurture or protect its citizens has amplified in recent years. At least ‘36 states have passed state terrorism statutes, essentially mini-PATRIOT ACTS’ (Geovanis 2014), designed primarily to criminalize various forms of dissent. The use of repressive legislation to quell and punish peaceful protests was also on full display in Oklahoma where XL pipeline opponents now face state terrorism charges for ‘dropping glitter inside a building during a peaceful banner drop’ (Geovanis 2014). Law-abiding citizens and ‘those with dissenting views within the law can be singled out for surveillance and placed on wide-ranging watch lists relating to terrorism’ (Ward 2013). This type of illegal spying in the interest of closing down dissent by peaceful protesters has less to do with national security than it has to do with mimicking the abuses and tactics used by the Stasi in East Germany during the cold war. It is worth repeating that Orwell's vision of surveillance and the totalitarian state looks tame next to the emergence of a corporate–private–state surveillance system that wants to tap into every conceivable mode of communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be banked in vast intelligence storage sites around the country and then use that data to repress any vestige of dissent (Schneier 2013). Phone calls, emails, social networks and almost every other vestige of electronic communication are now being collected and stored by corporate and government organizations such as the NSA and other intelligence agencies. Snowden's exposure of the massive reach of the surveillance state with its biosensors, scanners, face-recognition technologies, miniature drones, high-speed computers, massive data-mining capabilities and other stealth technologies made visible ‘the stark realities of disappearing privacy and diminishing liberties’ (Epstein 2013). But the NSA and at least 16 additional intelligence agencies are not the only threat to privacy, freedom and democracy. Corporations now have their own data-mining offices and deploy their staff and new surveillance technologies largely to spy on anyone who questions the abuses of corporate power. For instance, in response to the Snowden affair, the Bank of America assembled 15–20 bank officials and retained the law firm of Hunton & Williams in order to devise ‘various schemes to attack WikiLeaks and [journalist Glenn] Greenwald whom they thought was about to release damaging information about the bank’ (Gupta 2013). The emergence of fusion centres exemplifies how power is now a mix of corporate, local, federal and global intelligence agencies, all sharing information that can be used to stifle dissent and punish pro-democracy activists. What is clear is that this combination

of gathering and sharing information often results in a lethal mix of anti-democratic practices in which surveillance now extends not only to potential saboteurs, but also to all law-abiding citizens. Indeed, the political identity of citizens within a democracy collapses in the presence of new digital technologies with optical scanners that are capable of reducing everybody to mere physical objects of state control. Rather than being defined through one's relations to others and the larger society, citizens are defined increasingly under regimes of surveillance through an amalgam of unlimited biometric information including fingerprints, retina scans, genetic codes and other biological data assembled from technologies once ‘conceived for criminals’ (Agamben 2014). Giorgio Agamben (2014) argues that in a post-9/11 world, ‘biological identity’ takes primacy over political identity and ‘the unspoken principle which rules our society can be stated like this: every citizen is a potential terrorist’. The war on terrorism has become a war of terror turning every social space into a war zone and every member of society into a suspect. Meanwhile, absorbed in privatized orbits of consumption, commodification and display, Americans vicariously participate in the toxic pleasures of consumer culture, relentlessly entertained by spectacles of violence in which, as David Graeber (2012) suggests, the police ‘become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture … watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view’ (p. 119). New technologies that range from webcams and spycams to biometrics and the Internet drilling reinforce not only the fear of being watched, monitored and investigated, but also encourage a propensity towards adopting such technologies for one's own use. What is profoundly disturbing in this new intimacy between digital technologies and cultures of surveillance is their predatory nature as they probe for unseen, intimate connections to the most personal and private areas of people's lives, while their victims more or less unwittingly leave themselves exposed by publishing and documenting their interests, identities, hopes and fears online in massive quantities (Deibert 2013, Zeese and Flowers 2013). Public outrage seems to disappear, with few exceptions, as the state and its corporate allies do little to protect privacy rights, civil liberties and a culture of critical exchange and dissent. Even worse than shutting down a culture of questioning, the state embraces forms of domestic terrorism. Violence in this case becomes the preferred antidote to the demanding work of reflection, analysis, dialogue and imagining the points of views of others. The war against dissent waged by secret counter-intelligence agencies is a mode of domestic terrorism in which, as Graeber (2012) has put it, violence has become ‘the preferred weapon of the stupid’ (pp. 116–17). Within this sinister web of secrecy, suspicion, state-sanctioned violence and illegality, the culture of authoritarianism thrives and poses a dangerous threat to democratic freedoms and rights. It also poses a threat to those outside the USA who in the name of national security are subject to ‘a grand international campaign with drones and special operations forces that is generating potential terrorists at every step’ (Chomsky 2013). Behind this veil of concentrated power and secrecy lies not only a threat to privacy rights, but the very real threat of violence on both a domestic and global level. In the USA, there is a long history of state surveillance being used to commit illegal acts ranging from falsely accusing people of crimes and destroying social movements to committing deadly crimes. For example, there has been extensive research published on the FBI counterterrorism programme launched by J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s until it was dismantled in the 1970s. Although not much has been written about the Church and Pike committees, in the 1970s they exposed a wave of illegal surveillance and disruption campaigns carried out by the FBI and local police forces, most of which were aimed at anti-war demonstrators, the leaders of the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers. While a number of laws implementing judicial oversight for federal wiretaps were put in place, they have been since systematically dismantled under the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations. Documentation of the nefarious illegalities committed by the Clinton and Bush administrations has been made by journalists such as Daniel Ellsberg and Seymour Hersh. In the present historical moment, it is almost impossible to imagine that wiretapping was once denounced by the FBI or that legislation was passed in the early part of the twentieth century that criminalized and outlawed the federal use of wiretaps (Price 2013, pp. 10–14). As the renowned anthropologist David Price (2013) points out, while there was a steady increase in federal wiretaps throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was ‘in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 [that] the American public hastily abandoned a century of fairly consistent opposition to govern wiretaps’ (p. 10). As the historical memory of such abuses disappears, repressive legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and growing support for a panoptical surveillance and ‘homeland’ security state has increased to the point of dissolving the line between the private and the public. Fuelled by a culture of fear and its underside, the Obama administration has tilted the balance between security and civil liberties largely in favour of the former, with a managed emphasis on a one-dimensional notion of safety and security. The US Government, now in the control of elite and right-wing extremists, has embraced a mode of lawlessness evident in the forms of foreign and domestic terrorism that utterly undercut the obligations of citizenship, justice and morality. For example, Glenn Greenwald, who was one of the first journalists to divulge Snowden's revelations about the NSA's secret ‘unaccountable system of pervasive surveillance’ (Snowden 2013) has been accused outright by Representative Peter King of New York, along with a number of others, of being a terrorist (Weigel 2013). In the UK, the new head of MI-5, the British intelligence service, mimicked the US Government's distrust of journalists, stating that the stories The Guardian published about Snowden's revelations ‘were a gift to terrorists’ and thereby reinforcing the notion that whistleblowers and journalists might be colluding with terrorists, if not terrorists themselves (qtd. in Davidson 2013). Similar comments about Edward Snowden have been made in the USA by a number of members of Congress who have labelled Snowden a traitor, including US Senators Dianne Feinstein, John McCain and Saxby Chambliss and House Speaker John Boehner as well as former Vice President Dick Cheney (Logiurato 2013). More ominously, ‘Edward Snowden told German TV … about reports that US Government officials want to assassinate him for leaking secret documents about the NSA's collection of telephone records and emails’ (Kirschbaum 2013). Issued as an official response to Snowden, Obama's January 2014 speech on reforms to the NSA serves as a text that not only demands close reading, but also becomes a model illustrating how history can be manipulated to legitimate the worst violations of privacy and civil rights, if not state- and corporate-based forms of violence. In the speech, Obama uses a reference to Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty in order to highlight surveillance as a noble ideal marshalled in the interest of freedom. He thereby provides a historical rationale for the emergence of the massive spying behemoths such as the NSA that now threaten the fabric of US democracy, not just terrorists. Of course, what Obama leaves out is that Paul Revere and his accomplices acted ‘to curtail government power as the main threat to freedom’ (Scheer 2014). Obama provides a sanitized reference to history in order to bleach the surveillance state both of its criminal past and its expansionist ambitions and to convince the American public that, as Michael Ratner (2014) states, ‘Orwellian surveillance is somehow patriotic’. Other politicians, such as Representative Mike Ford and Senator Dianne Feinstein, are more than willing to label anyone exercising free speech, including legitimate whistleblowers, as traitors, while keeping silent when high-ranking government officials distort the truth, such as when James Clapper Jr., the Director of National Security, lied to a Senate Intelligence Committee. Obama's appeal to the American people to trust those in the highest positions of government and submit to corporate dominance regarding the use of the mammoth power of the surveillance state makes a mockery out of the legitimate uses of such power, any vestige of critical thought and historical memory. The USA has been lying to its people for over 50 years, and such lies extend from falsifying the reasons for going to war with Vietnam and Iraq to selling arms to Iran in order to fund the reactionary Nicaraguan Contras. Why should anyone trust a government that has condoned torture, spied on at least 35 world leaders, supports indefinite detention, places bugs in thousands of computers all over the world, kills innocent people with drone attacks, enlists the post office to log mail for law enforcement agencies and arbitrarily authorizes targeted assassinations? (Turley 2012, Ball 2013, Nixon 2013, New York Times 2014). Or, for that matter, why should Americans trust a President who instituted the Insider Threat Program, which was designed to get government employees to spy on each other and ‘turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches’ (Taylor and Landay 2013), which includes ‘any unauthorized disclosure of anything, not just classified materials’? (RazFx Pro 2013). As noted above, the incorrigibility of the politics of surveillance was on full display when the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper Jr., assailed Edward Snowden before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in late January 2014, insisting that Snowden had done grave damage to the country and that his leaks not only undermined national security but aided terrorists groups. Clapper provided no evidence to support such a charge. Of course, what he did not mention was that as a result of Snowden's revelations the American public is now aware that they are being spied upon by the government, in spite of the fact that they are not suspects in a crime and that governments around the world have condemned the indiscriminate and illegal spying of US intelligence agencies. In a bizarre comment, Clapper also accused Snowden ‘of hypocrisy for choosing to live in Russia while making public pronouncements about “what an Orwellian state he thinks this country is”’ (qtd. in Mazzetti and Sanger 2014). Recklessly, Clapper then implied that Snowden is a Russian spy and that he had available to him a wide range of choices regarding where he might flee following his public revelations of NSA secret illegalities. By suggesting that Snowden's living in Russia somehow serves to cancel out his critique of the authoritarian practices, policies and modes of governance, Clapper's comments reveal both an astonishing lack of self-reflection at the agency and the lies and innuendo the NSA will engage in to deflect or justify acts of criminality that are now a matter of public record. More chillingly, the NSA's scapegoating mechanisms come into full view when Clapper insinuated that ‘Snowden is conspiring with journalists, rather than acting as their source’ (Calderine 2014). This is a serious accusation designed to ratchet up a climate of fear by suggesting that reporters such as Glenn Greenwald and others working with Snowden were participants in a crime and should thus be subject to criminal reprisals. In the end, such arguments, coupled with the blatant Washington cover-up of the scope and reach of the Orwellian panoptic complex, testify to the degree to which the government will resort to fear mongering in order to silence dissent. The Orwellian nightmare exposed by the revelations of Snowden, Hammer, Manning and others provides only a small window into the workings of the NSA and the global surveillance state and says very little about the other 16 massive intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. What the American public does know is that the Obama administration has greatly extended the web of secrecy; has pursued a relentless attack on government whistleblowers; and, in the face of egregious illegalities committed by the FBI, NSA and CIA in the past, has instituted reforms that border on being laughable. Moreover, the Obama administration now promotes its own regime of lawlessness, evident in indiscriminate drone attacks, the suppression of civil liberties and targeted assassinations that include Americans. In a move dripping with irony, the Obama administration points to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, created after the hearings held by Senator Frank Church into government abuse, as a much needed reform, when in fact the court operates in secret and has proved to be a rubber stamp for just about any demand issued by the national security state. The message here for the American people is clear: secrecy is a virtue for which there is no democratic accountability, and the government can do whatever it wants in the name of security and waging the war on terrorism. Under the rubric of battling terrorism, the US Government has indeed waged a war on civil liberties, privacy and democracy, while turning a blind eye to the ways in which the police and intelligence agencies infiltrate and harass groups engaged in peaceful protests, particularly treating those groups denouncing banking and corporate institutions as criminal entities (Gitlin 2013). The government has also done nothing to restrict those corporate interests that turn a profit by developing and selling arms, promoting war and investing in surveillance apparatuses addicted to the mad violence of the war industries. What does it mean to trust a government wedded to a permanent state of war? As Hardt and Negri (2012) put it: we seem to have entered stage of history in which the state of war is never-ending, shifting from high to low intensity and back again. The global security regime under which we live does not establish a state of peace but rather makes permanent a war society, with suspensions of rights, elevated surveillance, and the enlistment of all in the war effort. (p. 58) The security state with its manufactured fears does not engender or deserve trust, but ongoing collective resistance. Unfortunately, such legal illegalities and death-oriented policies are not an Orwellian fiction, but represent a more complex manifestation of the world Orwell presciently described regarding surveillance and its integration with totalitarian regimes. The existence of the post-Orwellian state, where subjects participate willingly and surveillance links state power hand-in-hand with global corporate sovereignty, should muster collective outrage among the American public. It should generate massive individual resistance and collective struggles aimed at the development of social movements designed to take back democracy from the corporate–political–military extremists who now control all the commanding institutions of American society. Putting trust in a government that makes a mockery of civil liberties is comparable to throwing away the most basic principles of our constitutional and democratic order. As Jonathan Schell (2013) argues: Government officials, it is true, assure us that they will never pull the edges of the net tight. They tell us that although they could know everything about us, they won't decide to. They'll let the information sit unexamined in the electronic vaults. But history, whether of our country or others, teaches that only a fool would place faith in such assurances. What one president refrains from doing the next will do; what is left undone in peacetime is done when a crisis comes. As the line between authoritarian power and state governance evaporates, repression intensifies and increasingly engulfs the nation in a toxic climate of fear and self-censorship in which free speech, if not critical thought itself, is viewed as a practice too dangerous in which to engage. The NSA alone has become what Scott Shane (2013) has called an: electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes. Intelligence benefits are far outweighed by the costs entailed by illegal use of the Internet, telecommunication companies and stealth malware for data collection and by government interventions that erode civil liberties and target individuals and groups that pose no threat whatsoever to national security. More specifically, the government's refusal to prosecute government officials who torture; engage in illegal kidnappings; spy on Americans without due cause; dispatch secret operations forces wherever it wants; and illegally gather intelligence on hundreds of world leaders, business executives and foreign companies, such as Brazil's Petrobias oil firm, sends a clear message to those who run the national security state that they can act with impunity. President Obama updates and ‘elaborates President George W. Bush's notions of pre-emptive strike by claiming the further privilege to order the killing of any citizen overseas who is believed to be a terrorist or a friend of terrorists’ (Lapham 2012). In Obama's post-Orwellian authoritarian state, the unifying message is that that lawlessness has become normalized and that whatever the national security state does, however horrific, nasty and illegal, those who run it and carry out its policies and practices will not have to face a court of law and be prosecuted. State governance has been freed from the rule of law. History offers alternative narratives to those supported by the new authoritarians. Suppressed memories have a way of surfacing unexpectedly at times and, in doing so, can pose a dangerous challenge to official narratives and the normalization of forms of tyranny, including the mechanisms of a surveillance state defined by a history of illegal and criminal behaviour. As the mainstream press recently noted, the dark shadow of Orwell's dystopian fable was so frightening in the early 1970s that a group of young people broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole as many records as possible, and leaked them to the press. None of the group was ever caught (Goodman 2014b). Their actions were not only deeply rooted in an era when dissent against the Vietnam War, racism and corporate corruption was running high, but also suggestive of an era in which the politics of fear was not a general condition of society. Large groups of people were mobilizing in diverse sites to make power accountable on a number of fronts, extending from college campuses to the shaping of foreign policy. The 1971 burglary made clear that the FBI was engaging in a number of illegal and criminal acts aimed primarily against anti-war dissenters and the African-American community, which was at that time giving a voice in some cities to the Black Power movement. What the American people learned as a result of the leaked FBI documents was that many people were being illegally wiretapped and that anti-war groups were being infiltrated. Moreover, the leaked files revealed that the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King Jr. as well as a number of other prominent politicians and activists. A couple of years later, Carl Stern, an NBC reporter, followed up on the information that had been leaked and revealed a programme called COINTELPRO, which stands for Counterintelligence Program, that documented how both the FBI and CIA were not only secretly harassing, disrupting, infiltrating and neutralizing leftist organizations, but also attempting to assassinate those considered domestic and foreign enemies (Goodman 2014a). COINTELPRO was about more than spying: it was an illegally sanctioned machinery of violence and assassination (Churchill and Vander Wall 2001, People's History of the CIA 2013). In one of the most notorious cases, the FBI worked with the Chicago police to set up the conditions for the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two members of the Black Panther Party. Noam Chomsky (qtd. in Goodman 2014a) has called COINTELPRO, which went on from the 1950s to the 1970s, ‘the worst systematic and extended violation of basic civil rights by the federal government’ and comparable to ‘Wilson's Red Scare’. As a result of these revelations, Senator Frank Church conducted Senate hearings that both exposed the illegalities the FBI was engaged in and helped to put in place a number of policies that provided oversight to prevent such illegalities from happening again. Needless to say, over time these oversights and restrictions were dismantled, especially after the tragic events of 9/11. What the young people were doing in 1971 is not unlike what Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers are doing today: making sure that dissent is not suppressed by governments, especially ones that believe power should only reside in the hands of the state and financial elites, and all attempts to make authoritarian power accountable should be repressed at any cost. Many of the young protesters in the 1970s were influenced by the ongoing struggles of the Civil Rights movement and one of them, John Raines, was heavily influenced by the theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed by the Nazis. What is crucial about the FBI incident is that it not only revealed the long historical reach of government surveillance and criminal activity designed to quash dissent, but it also provided a model of civic courage demonstrated by young people who acted on their principles in a non-violent way to stop what they considered to be machineries of civil and social death. As Glenn Greenwald (2014) argues, COINTELPRO makes clear that governments have no qualms about ‘targeting citizens for their disfavored political views and trying to turn them into criminals through infiltration, entrapment and the like’ and that such actions are ‘alive and well today in the United States’. Governments that elevate lawlessness to one of the highest principles of social order reproduce and legitimate violence as an acceptable mode of action throughout a society. Violence in American society has become both its heartbeat and nervous system, paralyzing democratic ideology, policy and governance and perhaps even the very idea of politics. Under such circumstances, the corporate–surveillance state becomes symptomatic of a form of tyranny and authoritarianism that has corrupted and disavowed the ideals and reality of a substantive democracy. While the Snowden affair brought the state's capacity for spying and corruption to a level of public consciousness previously unknown, the media responded by alerting individuals to potential threats to their privacy. Media coverage did little or nothing to provide a larger context that might stir a collective response to the surveillance state that currently has American democracy under siege. Virginia Eubanks (2014) rightly argues that the practices of state and corporate surveillance should be seen as more than a violation of individual privacy rights. Any attempt to protect the privacy of American citizens must consider the longer history of how many Americans have never been safe from the state and its intrusions. For this reason, surveillance should be seen as a civil rights issue because its practice is separate and unequal. As she points out, for: most people privacy is a pipedream. Living in dense urban neighborhoods, public housing, favelas,

prisons, or subject to home visits by caseworkers, poor and working people might wish for more personal space but they don't make Snowden's mistake of assuming that privacy is ‘what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be’. Regimes of surveillance must be held accountable for their wide-ranging violations of human rights and democratic values beyond individual privacy rights, including the ways they have undermined: internationalism, active citizenship, access to information, freedom of expression, democratic governance, civic participation, multilateralism, inclusivity and non-discrimination, plurality, cultural diversity, freedom of speech …. Seeing privacy as the cornerstone for democracy is a kind of naiveté we can no longer excuse nor afford. (Eubanks 2014) In a similar manner, the renowned

intellectual historian Quentin Skinner insists that limiting critiques of surveillance to charges of violated privacy does not account for the underlying cause: abusive power. On this point, Skinner (qtd. in Skinner and Marshall 2013) is worth quoting at length: The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it's true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It's no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won't necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power. Under the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to privacy, but the fact that the public is subject to the dictates of arbitrary power – and a power it no longer seems interested in contesting. It is not simply the existence of unchecked power, but the wider culture of political indifference that puts at risk the broader principles of liberty

and freedom which are fundamental to democracy itself. The dangers of the surveillance state far exceed attacks on privacy and warrant much more than simply a discussion about balancing security against civil liberties. Any understanding of the growth of the surveillance state must be connected to a growing culture of violence, the criminalization of social problems, the depoliticization of public memory, the militarization of American society and the rise of the punishing state with its secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture and one of the largest prison systems in the world, all of which ‘are only the most concrete, condensed manifestations of a diffuse security regime in which we are all interned and enlisted’ (Hardt and Negri 2012, p. 23). The authoritarian nature of the corporate–state surveillance apparatus and security system in the USA, with its ‘urge to

surveil, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet’ (Engelhardt 2013), can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are

connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public schools, the expansion of super-max prisons, the hyper-militarization of local police forces, the

rise of the military–industrial–academic complex, and the increasing labelling of dissent as an act of terrorism (see Giroux 2011, 2012, 2014). Undeniably, one of the most dreadful consequences of neoliberal modernity and its culture of surveillance is the ideological war being waged in order both to eliminate any public spheres capable of educating the public to hold power accountable and to dissolve all social bonds that entail a sense of responsibility towards others. In such circumstances, politics has not only become dysfunctional and corrupt in the face of massive inequalities in wealth and power, but it has also been emptied out of any substantive meaning. At the same time, ‘citizenship has become depoliticized, reduced to an act of producing, consuming, and discarding without pause, hastening the exhaustion of life and the depletion of resources’ (Crary 2013, p. 17). As surveillance and fear become a constant condition of American society, there is a growing indifference, if not distaste, for politics among large segments of the population. This distaste is purposely manufactured by the ongoing operations of political repression against intellectuals, artists, non-violent protesters and journalists on both the left and right. Increasingly, as such populations engage in dissent and the free flow of ideas, whether online or offline, they are considered dangerous to the state and become subject to the mechanizations of a massive security apparatuses designed to monitor, control and punish dissenting populations.

Neoliberalism guarantees extinction and social crisis – the judge has an intellectual obligation to evaluate the social relations that underpin the plan prior to evaluating the outcome of the policy – vote negative because the system the aff partakes in is fundamentally unethical Molisa, Philosophy PhD, 14 (Pala Basil Mera, “Accounting For Apocalypse Re-Thinking Social Accounting Theory And Practice For Our Time Of Social Crises And Ecological Collapse,” http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10063/3686/thesis.pdf?sequence=2)

Ecologically too, the situation is dire. Of the many measures of ecological well-being – topsoil loss, groundwater depletion, chemical contamination, increased toxicity levels in human beings, the number and size of “dead zones” in the Earth’s oceans, and the accelerating rate of

species extinction and loss of biodiversity – the increasing evidence suggests that the developmental trajectory of the dominant economic culture

necessarily causes the mass extermination of non-human communities, the systemic destruction and disruption of natural habitats, and could

ultimately cause catastrophic destruction of the biosphere. The latest Global Environmental Outlook Report published by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the GEO-5 report, makes for sobering reading. As in earlier reports, the global trends portrayed are of continuing human population growth, expanding economic growth,6 and as a consequence severe forms of ecological degradation (UNEP, 2012; see also, UNEP, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2007). The ecological reality described is of ecological drawdown (deforestation, over-fishing, water extraction, etc.) (UNEP, 2012, pp.

72, 68, 84, 102-106, ); increasing toxicity of the environment through chemical and waste pollution, with severe harm caused to human and non-human

communities alike (pp. 173- 179); systematic habitat destruction (pp. 8, 68-84) and climate change (33-60), which have decimated the number of species on Earth, threatening many with outright extinction (pp. 139-158). The most serious ecological threat on a global scale is climate disruption, caused by the emission of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, other industrial activities, and land destruction (UNEP, 2012, p. 32). The GEO-5 report states that “[d]espite attempts to develop low-carbon economies in a number of countries, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to increase to levels likely to push global temperatures beyond the internationally agreed limit of 2° C above the pre-industrial average temperature” (UNEP, 2012, p. 32). Concentrations of atmospheric methane have more than doubled from preindustrial levels, reaching approximately 1826 ppb in 2012; the scientific consensus is that this increase is very likely due predominantly to agriculture and fossil fuel use (IPCC, 2007). Scientists warn that the Earth’s ecosystems are nearing catastrophic “tipping points” that will be marked by mass extinctions and unpredictable changes on a scale unseen since the glaciers retreated twelve thousand years ago (Pappas, 2012). Twenty-two eminent scientists warned recently in the journal, Nature, that humans are likely to have triggered a planetary-scale critical transition “with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience”, which means that “the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations” (Barnofsky et al., 2012). This means that human beings are in serious trouble, not only in the future, but right now. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide concentration was about 280 parts per million (ppm). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates concentrations could reach between 541 and 970 ppm by the year 2100. However, many climate scientists consider that levels should be kept below 350 ppm in order to avoid “irreversible catastrophic effects” (Hansen et al., 2008). “Catastrophic warming of the earth” would mean a planet that is too hot for life – that is, any life, and all life (Mrasek, 2008). We need to analyze the above information and ask the simple questions: what does it signify and where will it lead? In terms of the social crises of inequalities, the pattern of human development suggests clearly that although capitalism is capable of raising the economic productivity of many countries as well as international trade, it also produces social injustices on a global scale. The trajectory of capitalist economic

development that people appear locked into is of perpetual growth that also produces significant human and social suffering. In terms of the ecological situation, the mounting evidence from reports, such as those published by UNEP, suggest that a full-scale ecocide will eventuate and that a global holocaust is in progress which is socially pathological and biocidal in its scope (UNEP, 2012; see also, UNEP, 1997, 1999,

2002, 2007). Assuming the trends do not change, the endpoint of this trajectory of perpetual economic growth, ecological degradation, systemic

pollution, mass species extinction and runaway climate change, which human beings appear locked into, will be climate apocalypse and complete biotic collapse. Given the serious and life-threatening implications of these social and ecological crises outlined above, it would be reasonable to expect they should be central to academic concerns, particularly given the responsibilities of academics as intellectuals. As the people whom society subsidizes to carry out intellectual work,7 the primary task of academics is to carry out research that might enable people to deepen their understanding of how the world operates, ideally towards the goal of shaping a world that is more consistent with moral and political principles, and the collective self-interest (Jensen, 2013, p. 43). Given that most people’s stated philosophical and theological systems are rooted in concepts of justice, equality and the inherent dignity of all people (Jensen, 2007, p. 30),

intellectuals have a particular responsibility to call attention to those social patterns of inequality which appear to be violations of such principles, and to call attention to the destructive ecological patterns that threaten individual and collective well-being. As a “critic and

conscience of society,” 8 one task of intellectuals is to identify issues that people should all pay attention to, even when – indeed, especially when – people would rather ignore the issues (Jensen, 2013, p. 5). In view of this, intellectuals today should be focusing attention on the hard-to-face realities of an unjust and unsustainable world. Moreover, intellectuals in a democratic society, as its “critic and conscience”, should serve as sources of independent and critical information, analyses and varied opinions, in an endeavour to provide a meaningful role in the formation of public policy (Jensen, 2013c). In order to fulfil this obligation as “critic and conscience,” intellectuals need to be willing to critique not only particular people, organizations, and policies, but also the systems from which they emerge. In other words, intellectuals have to be willing to engage in radical critique. Generally, the term “radical” tends to suggest images of extremes, danger, violence, and people eager to tear things down (Jensen, 2007, p. 29). Radical, however, has a more classical meaning. It comes from the Latin –radix, meaning “root.” Radical critique in this light means critique or analysis that gets to the root of the problem. Given that the patterns of

social inequality and ecocidal destruction outlined above are not the product of a vacuum, but instead are the product of social systems, radical critique simply means forms of social analysis, which are not only concerned about these social and ecological injustices but

also trace them to the social systems from which they emerged, which would subject these very systems to searching critiques. Such searching critique is challenging because, generally, the dominant groups which tend to subsidize intellectuals (universities,

think tanks, government, corporations) are the key agents of the social systems that produce inequalities and destroy ecosystems

(Jensen, 2013, p. 12). The more intellectuals choose not only to identify patterns but also highlight the pathological systems from which they emerge, the greater the tension with whoever “pay[s] the bills” (ibid.). However, this may arguably be unavoidable today, given that the realities of social inequality and ecological catastrophe show clearly that our social systems are already in crisis, are pathological, and in need of radical change.9 To adopt a radical position, in this light, is not to suggest that we simply need to abolish capitalism, or to imply that if we did so all our problems would be solved. For one thing, such an abstract argument has little operational purchase in terms of specifying how to go about struggling for change. For another thing, as this thesis will discuss, capitalism is not the only social system that we ought to be interrogating as an important systemic driver of social and ecological crises. Moreover, to adopt a radical position does not mean that we have any viable “answers” or “solutions” in terms of the alternative institutions, organizations and social systems that we could replace the existing ones with. There is currently no alternative to capitalism that appears to be viable, particularly given the historical loss of credibility that Marxism and socialism has suffered. As history has shown, some of the self-proclaimed socialist and communist regimes have had their own fair share of human rights abuses and environmental disasters, and the global left has thus far not been able to articulate alternatives that have managed to capture the allegiances of the mainstream population. Furthermore, given the depth, complexity, and scale of contemporary social and ecological crises, I am not sure if there are any viable alternatives or, for that matter, any guarantees that we can actually prevent and change the disastrous course of contemporary society. I certainly do not have any solutions. What I would argue, however, is that if we are to have any chance of not only ameliorating but also substantively addressing these social and ecological problems, before we can talk about alternatives or potential “solutions”, we first need to develop a clear understanding of the problems. And, as argued above, this involves, amongst other things, exploring why and how the existing social systems under which we live are producing the patterns of social inequality and ecological unsustainability that make up our realities today.10 To adopt a radical stance, in this light, is simply to insist that we have an obligation to honestly confront our social and ecological predicament and to ask difficult questions about the role that existing social systems might be playing in producing and exacerbating them.

Intellectuals ought to take the status quo as an opportunity to delegitimize violence rather than make it useable through the affirmative-representations are critical to shaping the political outcomes-our scholarship is comparatively better at deescalating war and environmental destruction Dalby, Carleton geography professor, 2011(Simon, “Peace And Geopolitics: Imagining Peaceful Geographies”, November, http-server.carleton.ca/~sdalby/papers/PEACEFUL_GEOGRAPHIES.pdf

Thinking intelligently about peace within the discipline of geography requires us to juxtapose our aspirations to a peaceful world, one beyond war and at least the most egregious injustices of structural violence, with careful analysis of how the world is being changed so that useful advocacy is possible. Contrary to arguments that construct a real world of politics separate from peace activism, one commonly formulated in terms of an autonomous realm of the international, the arguments from both critical international relations thinking as well as the early critical geopolitics discussions were precisely that the reasonings of politics are part of politics, and that thinking carefully about the ontological framings invoked in political discourse matter as part of the political world that constitutes the

possible options for political actors. The task for scholars in present times, as so often in the past has to be to keep aspiration,

analysis and advocacy in creative tension; wishful thinking has to be avoided at each stage, but if intellectual activity is to be useful in making a more peaceful world then naivety is no help. Analysis can channel aspiration into useful advocacy precisely by acting as an antidote to either emotional impulse or thoughtless heroic gestures. It is crucial to the task of the academic and as such linking academic activity directly into practical action is simply part of our trade. Teaching matters greatly here, and careful advocacy of peaceful possibilities is key to teaching critical geopolitics. The scholarly research both on territory

and war as well as discussions of environmental degradation and its security implications both show clearly that how these issues are handled matters greatly . Confrontation is not inevitable; political initiatives toward cooperation rather than real politik lead to constructive solutions. Continuing to challenge determinist arguments that argue otherwise remains a key task for

geographers (Kearns 2009). Delegitimization of violence is a key part of all this. Ending death penalties, reducing physical abuse, torture, Amnesty International campaigns and international solidarity in the face of suffering as well as extending the norms of politics and the appropriate cultural modes acceptable for ruling. It is precisely the failure of the US to live up to supposedly higher civilizational standards in Abu Graib, Guantanamo and now in the targeting

of drone weapons that undermines its legitimacy in many places (Gregory 2010,Hannah 2006). Coupled with the great lengths to which the U nited

States has gone to render its actions legitimate , and to avoid potential problems with the international criminal court, matters of legality offer considerable options for activist geographers to contribute to changing societal norms away from militarism . The links to critical legal geographies need further attention too; jurisdiction matters (Gregory 2006)! The overall conclusion from this paper is that geographers should never forget that politics is prior to all the other discussions and understanding peace in the context of particular forms of politics is not unrelated to the forms of rule and authority invoked in particular situations. Contextualisations continue to matter greatly; there are complex geographies to all this. The world is changing rapidly but shaping that change is a matter of practical initiatives, and peacemaking. This simple point should never be forgotten neither should the opposite point that war may happen despite good intentions. No doubt in the next few years there will be further reflections on the processes that lead to the outbreak of the First World War, The Guns of August in Barbara Tuchman’s (1962)famous terms, or what Niall Ferguson (2006) discusses in terms of metaphors of a train wreck. Building institutions that can negotiate and cooperate in the face of destabilizing crises events matters greatly, notwithstanding the popular animosity towards governments built up by a generation of neo-liberal ideology and right wing populist movements generously funded by those with an interest in turning states into the tools of capital. In the face of endless neo-Malthusian fears of scarcities and disruptions to come, the possibilities of a more peaceful world remain achievable in many places. Challenging fearful cartographies , refusing the designation of difference and distance as necessarily dangerous has long been part of the geographers’ potential contribution, as Nick Megoran reminds us all frequently with his repeated invocation of Peter Kropotkin’s (1885)statement concerning what geography ought to be. Thinking long and hard about the diffusion of military technologies and the possible ways geographers might usefully contribute to the discussions of arms control, not least the key point about the implicit geopolitics in the supposedly technical arrangements of weapons limitation verifications matters too (Dalby 2011b). Arms control needs very much more attention. Ultimately geopolitics is crucial in that if the dominant mappings of politics continue to specify the world in terms of territorial domains of rule in rivalry with one another, and with military force as the ultimate arbiter, then the possibilities of its use remain on the agenda. Realists will argue that this is inevitable. But if the pacification of international national, or perhaps that should be inter-imperial, relations that the United Nations system has begun, is extended then the possibilities of a pacific geopolitics open up. Now the challenge is to see new modes of rule that deal with the most important mappings of an interconnected globe where ecological matters require mappings of interconnection rather than borders of autonomous entities (Dalby 2009b).Who decides the future of the planet matters greatly , but politics remains at least so far a matter of who decides long before it is a matter of what gets decided over. That too is a

matter for peaceful geographers to tackle; the fate of the earth is at stake, and as a discipline with aspirations to study it as humanity’s home, our

attention is certainly warranted. In the circumstances of rapid global change and the potential disruptions that are coming, we now have additional compelling reasons to work towards making Santayana’s dismal assertion concerning the inevitability of war a thing of the past.

Perm – 2NC

The link is premised on their curtailment of surveillance—they cannot sever the ideology the plan is invested in—that would make being neg impossible—abandoning the AFF in the 2ac moots all preparation

The AFF does not engage in the necessary connecting and delegitimizing of surveillance practice as a system of violence but rather views it as a failure of legal safeguards-that’s Giroux and Dalby.

Legalism crowds out deeper political solutionsSchlanger, Michigan law professor, 2014(Margo, “The Problem With Legalism in the Surveillance State”, 11-7, http://justsecurity.org/17163/problem-legalism-surveillance-state/)

In total, hundreds of people spend all or most of their workdays on IC compliance and oversight. These overseers and the IC agencies consistently examine the legalistic “can” question: “Can we (lawfully) do X?” By contrast, those same institutions have until recently devoted little attention to the non-legalistic “should” question: “Should we do X?” President Obama himself has in recent months recognized that this is a problem, responding to a question about surveillance at a press conference, “Just because we can do something doesn’t

mean we necessarily should.” I agree. Legalism prioritizes rule-following; it focuses on “rules” and “rights” rather than “policy” and “interests.” Once something acquires the status of a “right,” it functions as a trump. Under intelligence legalism, if a civil liberties interest is not important enough to trump security—that is, it is not deemed a legally protected “right”—that interest gets little or even no weight.

As a result, legalism may actually obstruct what should be the dispositive policy question: Does harm to civil liberties and privacy caused by proposed intelligence programs outweigh any security gains? Law’s limited ambition The Constitution Consider, first, the Constitution, as interpreted by the courts. Those who answer charges of surveillance abuse by emphasizing the constitutionality of the contested conduct—which is to say, nearly every federal official who has defended the NSA in recent months—are essentially arguing that constitutional law sets not individual rights minimums, but rather the correct civil

liberties policy. The problem is that to assume “constitutional” and “good” are the same is to mistake the role of constitutional law. The distance between “constitutional” and “good” is a matter of both method and purpose. Methodologically, many of the constitutional considerations—precedent, text, framers’ intent, and so on—are irrelevant to policy evaluation. Courts may also “lack the institutional capacity to easily grasp the privacy implications of new technologies they encounter,” as Orin Kerr has argued. But even when courts include policy analysis in their decision-making, constitutional decisions at least purport to be more about “can” than about “should.” That is why Fourth Amendment case law, notwithstanding its policy-heavy reasonableness inquiry, is formulated to give the government a good deal of leeway—both for mistakes and for differences of opinion. Indeed, it to be expected that courts are likely to err on the side of non-intervention in constitutional cases. Declaring something to be a “right” ups the stakes considerably, closing off partial solutions. So courts are, at the margins, understandably reluctant to so declare. What about non-constitutional law? Might statutory law—which can then be implemented via intelligence legalism—be the best way to fill whatever liberty gap remains after constitutional adjudication? FISA, for example, imposes a probable cause requirement for domestic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes, as the Supreme Court hinted in the Keith case might someday be required as a matter of constitutional law. But that’s it, substantively. Optimal policy requires calibration of privacy and surveillance—surveillance should be conducted only when its security benefits outweigh its privacy infringement. FISA includes no such constraint. To be sure, FISA directs the NSA to minimize infringements on “unconsenting United States persons”—but only insofar as such minimization is “consistent with the need of the United States to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information.” Thus, FISA categorically gives security more weight than liberty; its text directs that any foreign intelligence “need” can trump privacy. You may be thinking that the Congress that enacted FISA chose to put a thumb on the scale for security because it believed FISA’s trump card for security constituted optimal policy. In other words, perhaps the 1978 Congress saw FISA as closing whatever civil liberties gap it thought needed closing. The historical record suggests otherwise. Reformers in the 1970s made clear that they didn’t intend for congressional protection of civil liberties against surveillance to end with FISA. Rather, the Church Committee’s view was that on top of FISA, executive-congressional disclosure would facilitate future interventions to minimize the prospective use of liberty-infringing techniques. Congressional disclosure has not in practice fulfilled these hopes. A lack of legislative expertise and the usually low political salience of intelligence—both themselves rooted in secrecy—have meant that post-FISA congressional interventions have not played much of a role in protecting civil liberties. Perhaps the Snowden disclosures have shifted the political economy enough for Congress to pass a rights-protective measure in response, but that is still hypothetical. Besides, even if Congress does update surveillance rules to be more liberty-protective, such an action will only temporarily align “can” with the reformers’ ideas about “should” and only for high-salience issues. For issues that have not made it into the press, or for issues in the future, there will always be a disjunction between what is legal and what even members of Congress would find to be, on full and public consideration, appropriate policy. Areas of surveillance practice that have not so far leaked—or in which executive practice changes—will persist, and therefore so will a civil liberties gap. Executive orders Next in rank after the Constitution and statutes come executive orders. One of Executive Order 12333’s purposes is to fill the civil liberties gap left by constitutional and statutory law. The order expressly states: “Set forth below are certain general principles that, in addition to and consistent with applicable laws, are intended to achieve the proper balance between the acquisition of essential information and protection of individual interests.” But 12333 cannot live up to that goal. For one thing, its status as an executive order renders it both less visible and more easily weakened. More important, even if 12333 adequately covered civil liberties interests in 1980, it—along with its associated AG Guidelines—is now out of date. Unsurprisingly, given the generally low visibility of intelligence matters, there was until the Snowden disclosures little appetite to update either 12333 or other sources of executive self-regulation to address new challenges to liberty. Despite the enormous changes that have taken place in the scope of surveillance since 1980 and the advent of “big data” methods, there have been no substantive liberty-protecting changes ever made to the order. Some procedural protections have been added, and notable efforts to weaken the protection of U.S. Person information were fended off. But instead of substantive protections that might be useful in light of technological changes, all that has been added since 1980 is language swearing fealty to laws that were already binding: “The United States Government has a solemn obligation, and shall continue in the conduct of intelligence activities under this order, to protect fully the legal

rights of all United States persons, including freedoms, civil liberties, and privacy rights guaranteed by Federal law.” Lawyers Are Not Civil Libertarians Putting substantive law to one side, the effect of intelligence legalism within the IC is to allocate much decision-making to lawyers instead of policymakers and other practitioners. A growing shelf of articles and books document and even celebrate the lawyers who now populate the military, the CIA, and

the Department of Justice’s National Security Division. Might all these lawyers push the intelligence enterprise toward appropriate balancing of liberty and security, even in the absence of specific law or doctrine declaring that as the required outcome? I doubt it. The emerging evidence suggests that IC counsel are implementers of two major sets of values—fiduciary/counselor, and rule of law—but not civil liberties. Tocqueville’s much older observations about lawyers remain apropos–not of all lawyers, but of the legal profession most generally: “If they prize freedom much, they generally value legality still more. They are less afraid of tyranny than of arbitrary power, and provided the legislature

undertakes of itself to deprive men of their independence, they are not dissatisfied.” And when lawyers are given a say in policy, their legal sign-off frequently stands in as sufficient justification for the policy. To quote Jack Goldsmith, describing the Bush administration’s aggressive stance on a variety of national security topics, the role of lawyers was part of why “‘What should we do?’ . . . often collapsed into ‘What can we lawfully do?’” Bandwidth and Legitimation Theorists and observers in a variety of fields have developed the broad critique that law and its concomitant rights orientation may have the counterintuitive impact of decreasing the welfare of rightsholders—or, in a more modest version of the point, may ameliorate some set of harms but undermine more ambitious efforts . Focusing particularly on litigation, they argue that it is

inherently a timid enterprise, and yet it crowds out other more muscular policy approaches. At the NSA, rights occupy the “liberty” field because of a mundane factor: attention bandwidth. After all, even large organizations have limited capacity. NSA’s legal compliance is such an enormous task that little room remains for more conceptual weighing of interests and options. Of the dozen-plus offices that do compliance or civil liberties work, just two—the Civil Liberties and Privacy Office at the NSA, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board—are currently playing a policy rather than strictly a compliance role. They are also, not coincidentally, the newest and smallest. I think that this bandwidth issue is also driven by a more conceptual, less practical, factor: that rights

talk hides the necessity of policy judgments and, by its purity, diverts attention from that messier field. Morton Horwitz explains the point: A . . . troubling aspect of rights discourse is that its focus on fundamental, inherent, inalienable or natural rights is a way of obscuring or distorting the reality of the social construction of rights and duties. It shifts discussion away from the always disputable issue of what is or is not socially desirable. Rights discourse . . . wishes us to believe instead that the recognition of rights is not a question of social choice at all, as if in the normative and constitutional realm rights have the same force as the law of gravity. By comparison with judicially enforceable rights, other methods of advancing individual liberty look feeble, contingent, jury-rigged. An accusation of illegality becomes the required first bid for any policy discussion, and a refutation of that accusation ends play. This dynamic is very much in evidence in the response to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s (PCLOB) report on FISA Section 702. When the PCLOB declined to opine that Section 702 surveillance is illegal, its report found little traction. Rights discourse stunts needed policy discourse. In addition, judicial review legitimates the American surveillance system. That is why surveillance proponents immediately point to court supervision when they want to suggest that everything is fine. Court involvement is offered as evidence of both legality and appropriateness; indeed, the two are conceptually merged. My point is not that FISA Court legitimation is phony. In fact, judicial review has real if limited effects on the system. Yet the oversight gain carries with it a cost; the existence of judicial review makes political change more difficult. The point is not that law accomplishes nothing for its purported beneficiaries. If that were true, it could not legitimate. But gains from rights may—and in the surveillance situation

clearly do—make gains from politics less available. To sum up, neither the Constitution nor FISA aims to optimally balance security and liberty—and well-understood difficulties in congressional intelligence oversight mean that new statutes are unlikely to fill that gap. Likewise the existing foundational Executive Order, 12333, is at the very least out-of-date. Accordingly, intelligence legalism and its compliance mindset, cannot achieve optimal policy. Its concomitant empowerment of lawyers is real and important, but does not deputize a pro-civil-liberties force. Indeed, legalism actually both crowds out the consideration of policy and interests (as opposed to law and rights), and legitimates the surveillance state, making it less susceptible to policy reform.

Links swamp the permutation---it instrumentalizes the alternative which only masks the plan’s violent governmentality---internal contradictions means it inevitably fails Sjoberg, Florida political science professor, 2013(Laura, “The paradox of security cosmopolitanism?”, Critical Studies on Security, project muse)

Particularly, Burke suggests that security cosmopolitanism ‘rejects a procedural faith in strongly post-Westphalian forms of government and democracy’ (p. 17) and reiterates that such an approach includes ‘no automatic faith in any one institutional design’ (p. 24). This seems to move away from one of the prominent critiques of, in Anna Agathangelou and Ling’s (2009) words, the ‘neoliberal imperium,’ as reliant on Western, liberal notions of governance to the detriment of those on whom such a form of government is imposed. Burke clearly problematizes this imposition, framing many of the serious problems in global politics as a result of ‘choices that create destructive dynamics and

constraints’ (p. 15) at least in part by Western, liberal governments – characterizing modernity as culpable for insecurity. At the same time, the solution seems to be clearly situated within the discursive framework of the problem. Burke suggests that there should be a primary concern for ‘effectiveness, equality, fairness, and justice – not for states, per se, but for human beings, and the global biosphere’ (p. 24). Unless the only problem with modernity is the post- Westphalian structure of the state (which this approach does not eschew, but claims not to privilege), then this statement of values might entrench the problem. Many of the ideas of equality, fairness, and justice that come to mind with the (somewhat rehearsed) use of those words in progressive politics are inseparable from an ethos of enlightenment modernity. This may be problematic on a number of levels. First,

it may fail to interrupt the series of choices that Burke suggests produce a cycle of insecurity. Second, it may fold back onto itself in the

recommendations that security cosmopolitanism produces. This especially concerned me in Burke’s discussion of how to end ‘dangerous processes,’ where he places ‘greater faith in the ethical, normative, and legal suppression of dangerous processes and actions than in formalistic or procedural solutions’ (p. 24). It seems to me that there is a

good argument that ‘suppression’ is itself a ‘dangerous process,’ yet Burke’s framework does not really include a mechanism for internal critique . Another problem that seems to confound security cosmopolitanism is evaluating the relationships between power, governance, and governmentality. There are certainly several ways in which Burke uses a notion of the state that distinguishes security cosmopolitanism from the mainstream neoliberal literature. For example, he characterizes the ‘state as an entity whose national survival depends on its global participation, obligations, and depen- dencies,’ (citing Burke 2013a, 5). This view of the state sees it as not only survival-seeking (in the neo-neo synthesis sense) but also dependent on its positive interactions with other states for survival. Burke’s approach to government/governance initially appears to be global rather than state-based, another potentially transformative move. For example, he sees the job of security cosmopolitanism as to ‘theorize and defend norms for the respon- sible conduct and conceptualization of global security governance’ (p. 21). At the same time, later in the article, Burke suggests entrenching the current structure of the state. His practical approach of looking for the ‘solidarity of the governing with the governed’ seems to simultaneously interrogate the current power structures and reify them. Burke says: Such a ‘solidarity of the governed’ that engages in a ‘practical interrogation of power’ ought to be a significant feature of security cosmopolitanism. At the same time, however, security cosmopolitanism must be concerned with

improving the global governance of security by elites and experts. (p. 21) This attachment to the improvement of existing structures of governance seems to be at the heart of what I see as the failure of the radical potential in the idea of security cosmopolitanism. When discussing how the power dynamics between the elite and the subordinated might change, Burke suggests that ‘voluntary renunciation of the privileges and

powers of both state and corporate sovereignty will no doubt be a necessary feature of such an order’ (p. 25). Relying on the voluntary renunciation of power by the powerful seems both unrealistic and not particularly theoretically innovative. This seems to be at the center of a

paradox inherent in security cosmopolitanism: Faith in the Western liberal state is insidious, but the Western liberal state does not have to be. Modernity causes insecurity, but need not be discarded fully. Some universalizations are dangerous, others are

benign. Dangerous processes must be stopped, even if by dangerous processes. Moral entrepreneurship is the key, but ther e is no clear foundation for what counts as moral. The security cosmopolitanism critique is inspired by consequentialism, but lacks deontological foundations despite deontological implications. Burke calls for (and indeed demands) to ‘take responsibility for it’ (p. 23) in terms of ‘both formal and moral accountability’ (p. 24). In so doing, he endorses (Booth’s vision of) ‘moral progress’ (p. 25), despite

understanding the insidious deployment of various notions of moral progress by others. Security cosmopolitanism, then, is a proclamation for radical change that is initially stalled by its internal contradictions and further handicapped by its lack of capacity to enact the very sort of radical change Burke sees it as fundamental to righting the wrongs he sees in the world. The result seems to be the (potential) reification of existing governments/governmentality through what essentially appears to be a non-anthropocentric ‘human security’ which cannot be clearly distinguished from current notions of human security (p. 15). It appears to remain top-down and without clear moral foundation while claiming significant improvement over existing approaches. This appearance/seduction of improvement without real promise for change might be more insidious than the

nihilism of which many post-structuralists are accused, as it seductively appears to solve a problem it does not solve.

Links

Hegemony

Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy---the strategy omnipotence sees threats to empire everywhere, which necessitates constant violence---you have an obligation to place the structural violence that hegemony invisibilizes at the core of your decision calculusMcClintock, UW-Madison women and gender studies professor, 2009(Anne, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, Small Axe, March, project muse)

By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the “war on terror.” I have come to feel that we cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US government has committed itself after 9/11—two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured —unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment , that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with respect to power . Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of impending attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and nightmarish quality of the “war on terror,” a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war,

for “terror” is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere “ a consensual hallucination,” 4 and the US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere. I have

come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes— the modern “slave-ships

on the middle passage to nowhere”—that have come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more

aggressively as an overt empire, does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry , as well as the claims of political responsibility , not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the “exceptional nation” to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people,

an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are “we,” the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute “us”? We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the United States as the uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of vision and the hauntings of

popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of official history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies. —Donald Rumsfeld Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violence—the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast—without understanding the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently , to manifest itself across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadter’s famous identification of the US

state’s tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence . The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or Hegelian “cunning of reason,” nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national “terror dream.” 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have “psyches” or an “unconscious”; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as “paranoid” if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the

paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized

institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body , the methods by which schools , the military, training camps— not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate media—instill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call “the enemy deficit.” I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantánamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carby’s brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the “Barbarians” Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution. —C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians” The barbarians have declared war. —President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient déjà vu. To what dilemma are the “barbarians” a kind of solution?

Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafy’s insight is that an imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians. It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empire’s borders in the first place. On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part. And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those people were a kind of solution. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished. Where were the enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of the military colossus? “And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?” By rights, the thawing of the cold war should have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external threat had simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: “It’s no use having an army that did nothing but train,” he said. “There’s got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for.” Dick Cheney likewise complained: “The threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult to ascertain.” Colin Powell agreed: “Though we can still plausibly identify specific threats—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like that—the real threat is the unknown, the uncertain.” Before becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the post–cold war dearth of a visible enemy: “We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there.” It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American

Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require “a catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” 12 The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a political casus belli and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: “There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph.” In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, “Now we can perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden.” After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, “America will have a continuing interest

and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before.” Charles Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. “We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era,” he declared. “It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism.” 13

Legalism – 2NC

Technical legal solutions to surveillance issues are a shell game which locks in exceptionalism. The 1AC re-enforces an ideology of insecurity that lays the groundwork for future abuse by the neoliberal surveillance state. Williams, Northeastern law professor, 2007(Daniel, “After the Gold Rush-Part I: Hamdi, 9/11, and the Dark Side of the Enlightenment”, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970279)

This fearsome sort of legality is largely shielded from our view (that is, from the view of Americans---the ones wielding this legality) with the veil of democracy, knitted together with the thread of process jurisprudence . Within process jurisprudence,

there is no inquiry into the fundamental question: allocation of power between the branches to accomplish . . . what ? It is very easy to skip that question, and thus easy to slide into or accept circular argumentation.31 With the focus on the distribution of power, arguments about what to do in this so-called war on terror start off with assumptions about the nature of the problem (crudely expressed as violent Jihadists who hate our freedoms) and then appeal to those assumptions to justify certain actions that have come to constitute this “war.” The grip of this circularity, ironically enough, gains its strength from the ideology of legality, the very thing that the Court seeks to protect in this narrative drama, because that ideology fences out considerations of history, sociology, politics , and much else that makes up the human experience. What Judith Shklar observed over forty years

ago captures the point here: the “legalism” mindset--which thoroughly infuses the process jurisprudence that characterizes the Hamdi analysis--produces the “urge to draw a clear line between law and nonlaw” which, in turn, leads to “the construction of ever more refined and rigid systems of formal definitions” and thus “serve[s] to isolate law completely from the social context within which it exists.” 32 The pretense behind the process jurisprudence--and here pretense is purpose--is the resilient belief that law can be, and ought to be, impervious to ideological considerations. And

so, the avoidance of the “accomplish . . . what?” question is far from accidental; it is the quintessential act of legality itself.33 More than that, this “deliberate isolation of the legal system . . . is itself a refined political ideology, the expression of a preference” that masquerades as a form of judicial neutrality

we find suitable in a democracy.34 If the Executive’s asserted prerogative to prosecute a war in a way that will assure victory is confronted with the prior question about what exactly we want to accomplish in that war --if, that is, we confront the question posed

by Slavoj Zizek, noted at the outset of this article—then the idea of national security trumping “law” takes on an entirely different analytical hue. Professor Owen Fiss is probably right when he says that the Justices in Hamdi “searched for ways to honor the Constitution without compromising national interests.”35 But that is a distinctly unsatisfying observation if what we are concerned about is the identification of what exactly those “national interests” are.36 We may not feel unsatisfied because, in the context of Hamdi, it undoubtedly seems pointless to ask what we are trying to accomplish, since the answer strikes us as obvious. We are in a deadly struggle to stamp out the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda, and more generally, terrorism arising from a certain violent and nihilistic strain of Islamic fundamentalism. Our foreign policy is expressly fueled by the outlook that preemptive attacks is not merely an option, but is the option to be used. In the words of the Bush Administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy document, “In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”37 O’Connor and the rest of the Court members implicitly understand our foreign policy and the goal to be pursued in these terms, which explains

why the Hamdi opinion nowhere raises a question about what it is the so-called “war on terror” seeks to accomplish. After all, the stories we want to tell dictate the stories that we do tell. We want to tell ourselves stories about our own essential goodness and benevolence, our own fidelity to the rule of law; and that desire dictates the juridical story that ultimately gets told. Once one posits that our foreign policy is purely and always defensive, as well as benevolent in motivation,38 then whatever the juridical story—even one where the nation’s highest Court announces that the Executive has no blank

check to prosecute a war on terror—the underlying reality inscribed upon the world’s inhabitants, the consequences real people must absorb somehow, is one where “the United States has established that its only limit on the world stage will be its military power.”39 As

O’Connor sees it, the real problem here is that, given that the allocation-of-power issue is tied to the goal of eliminating the terrorist threat, we have to reckon with the probability that this allocation is not just an emergency provision, but one that will be cemented into our society, since the current emergency is likely to be, in all practicality, a permanent emergency.

But to say we are in a struggle to stamp out a terrorist threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism, and to say that “the only path to safety is the path of action,” conceals--renders invisible, a postmodernist would likely put it--an even more fundamental, and more radical, question: the allocation of power that the Court is called upon to establish is in the service of eliminating a terrorist threat to accomplish . . . what? The

standard answer is, our security, which most Americans would take to mean, to avert an attack on our homeland, and thus, as it was with Lincoln, to preserve the Union. And so, we accept as obvious that our dilemma is finding the right security-liberty balance. The problem with that standard answer is two-fold. First, it glosses over the fact that we face no true existential threat, no enemy that genuinely threatens to seize control over our state apparatus

and foist upon us a form of government to which we would not consent. That fact alone distinguishes our current war on terrorism from Lincoln’s

quest to preserve the Union against secession.40 Second, this we-must-protect-the-Homeland answer is far too convenient as a conversation stopper. When the Bush Administration=’ National Security Strategy document avers that “the only path to safety is the path of action,” we ought to ask what global arrangements are contemplated through that “path of action.” When that document announces that “this nation will act,” it surely cannot suffice to say that the goal is merely eliminating a threat to attain security. All empires and empire-seeking nations engage in aggression under the rubric of self-defense and the deployment of noble-aims rhetoric. These justifications carry no genuine meaning but are devices of the powerful and the privileged, with the acquiescence and often encouragement by a

frightened populace, to quell unsettling questions from dissenters within the society.41 Stop and think for a moment, how is it that the nation with the most formidable military might--the beneficiary of the hugest imbalance in military power ever in world history --is

also the nation that professes to be the most imperiled by threats throughout the world, often threatened by impoverished peasant societies (Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Granada, etc.)?42 An empire must always cast itself as vulnerable to attack and as constantly being under attack in order to justify its own military aggression. This is most acutely true when the empire is a democracy that must garner the consent of the populace, which explains why so much of governmental rhetoric concerning global affairs is alarmist in tone. The point is that quandaries over constitutional interpretation--ought we be prudential, or are other techniques more closely tied to the text the only legitimate mode of constitutional adjudication--may very

well mask what may be the most urgent issue of all, which concerns what exactly this nation’s true identity is at this moment

in world history, what it is that we are pursuing. Whereas Sanford Levinson has courageously argued that “too many people >venerate= the Constitution and use it as a kind of moral compass,”43 which leads to a certain blindness, I raise for consideration an idea that Hamdi suppresses, through its narrative techniques, which is that

too many people “venerate” this nation without any genuine consideration of the particular way we have, since World War II, manifested ourselves as a nation. I join Levinson’s suspicion that our Constitution is venerated as an idea, as an abstraction, without much thought given to its

particulars. It is important to be open to the possibility that the same is true with regard to our nation--the possibility that we venerate the idea of America (undoubtedly worth venerating), but remain (willfully?) ignorant of the particulars of our actual responsibility for the health of the planet and its inhabitants.44 To openly consider such issues is not anti-American--an utterly absurd locution--for to suggest that it is amounts to a denial that U.S. actions (as opposed to rhetoric that leeches off of the promise and ideal of “America”) can be measured by some yardstick of propriety that applies to all nations.45 The very idea of a “yardstick of propriety” requires a prior acceptance of two ideas: one, that we are part of something larger, that we are properly accountable to others and to that larger circumstance; and two, that it is not a betrayal or traitorous for a people within a nation to look within itself.46 Issacharoff and Pildes, the most prominent process theorists, observe that process jurisprudence may be inadequate to address the risk that we “might succumb to wartime hysteria.”47 I would broaden that observation so as to be open to the possibility that

the risk goes beyond just wartime hysteria, that our desire for security and military victory, rooted in our repudiation of a genuine universal yardstick of propriety that we willingly apply to ourselves (often called American exceptionalism48)--which means that security and military victory are not ipso facto the same thing--could easily slide us into sanctioning a form of sovereignty that is dangerously outmoded and far out of proportion to what circumstances warrant. Process jurisprudence supposedly has the merit of putting the balance of security and liberty into the hands of the democratic institutions of our government. But what it cannot bring into the field of vision--and what is

absolutely banished from view in Hamdi--is the possibility that the democratic institutions themselves, and perhaps even the democratic culture generally, the public

sphere of that culture, have been corrupted so severely as to reduce process jurisprudence to a shell game.49 More

specifically, the formal processes of governmentality responding to crisis is judicially monitored, but the mythos of our national identity, particularly the idea that every international crisis boils down to the unquestioned fact that the United States at least endeavors to act solely in self defense and to promote some benevolent goal that the entire world ought to stand behind, is manufactured and thus some hegemonic pursuit in this global “war on terror” remains not just juridically ignored, but muted and marginalized in much of our public discussions about it.50 Under process jurisprudence, it is the wording of a piece of legislation, not the decoding of the slogan national security, that ultimately matters. And under process jurisprudence, fundamental decisions have already been made--fundamental decisions concerning the nature of our global ambitions and the way we will pursue them--before the judiciary can confront the so-called security-liberty balance, which means that the analytical deck has been stacked by the time the justiciable question---that is, what we regard as the justiciable question---is posed. Stacking the analytical deck in this way reduces the Court members to the role of technicians in the service

of whatever pursuit the sovereign happens to choose.51 This is why it is worth asking what many might regard as a naive, if not tendentious, question: is it true that in the case of Hamdi and other post-9/11 cases, the judiciary’s quandary over allocation of power is actually in the service of genuine security, meaning physical safety of the populace? Does the seemingly obvious answer that we seek only to protect the safety of our communities

against naked violence blind us to a deeper ailment within our culture? Is it possible that the allocation of power, at bottom, is rooted in a dark side of our Enlightenment heritage, an impulse within Legality that threatens us in a way similar to the Thanatos drive Freud identified as creating civilization’s discontent?52 Perhaps Hamdi itself, as a cultural document, signals yet another capitulation to the impulse to embrace a form of means-ends rationality that supports the Enlightenment drive to control and subdue.53 Perhaps what Hamdi shows is that 9/11 has not really triggered a need to recalibrate the security-liberty balance, but has actually unleashed that which has already filtered into and corrupted our culture—Enlightenment’s dark side, as the Frankfurt School understood it54’’and is thus one among many cultural documents that ought to tell us we are not averting a new dark age, but are already in it, or at least, to borrow a phrase from Wendell Berry, that we are “leapfrogging

into the dark.” 55 It is impossible, without the benefit of historical distance, to answer these questions with what amounts to comforting certitude. But they are worth confronting, since the fate of so many people depends on it, given our unrivaled ability and frightening willingness to use military force. Our culture’s inability to ask such questions in any meaningful way, as opposed to marginalizing those who plead for them to be confronted, is somewhat reminiscent of how early Enlightenment culture treated scientific endeavors. “Science,” during the rise of Enlightenment culture, rebuffed the why question, banished it as a remnant of medieval

darkness, because the why-ness of a certain scientific pursuit suggested that certain domains of knowledge were bad, off-limits, taboo. The whole cultural mindset of the

Enlightenment was to jettison precisely such a suggestion. That cultural mindset produced a faith all its own, that all scientific pursuits, and by

extension all human quests for knowledge, will in the end promote human flourishing. It has taken the devastation of our planet to reveal the folly of that faith, a blind-spot in the Western mind. It may turn out, as a sort of silver lining on a dark cloud, that the terrorism arising from Islamic jihadists may do something similar.

Legitimacy

The discourse of legitimacy masks the violence of hegemony---the affirmative’s commitment to US leadership recreates gendered national identity that codes the US as a the masculine shepherd of the global-liberal architecture---turns the case because gendered security binaries are the root of executive overreach Landreau, New Jersey gender studies professor, 2011(John, Obamas My Dad: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism, www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/viewArticle/landreau/408

Both during his campaign, and in his presidential inauguration speech, Barack Obama promised a " new beginning" in American foreign and national security policy (especially in relation to the Middle East) that would both keep us safe from enemies and "restore our moral standing" (Obama, Acceptance). In particular, this new beginning promised to distance U.S. foreign policy from the grim (and largely illegal) features of the Bush administration's "war on terror" such as the executive sanctioning of the

torture of prisoners, the maintenance of a gulag of foreign detention centres where prisoners could be treated outside the guidelines of U.S. and international law, and illegal secret initiatives such as the program to assassinate Al-Qaeda operatives directed by Vice President Cheney (Mazzetti and Shane). In his first day in the White House, on January 22, 2009, Obama issued three executive orders that followed through on this promise.[2] In addition to these early executive orders, in the days and months following his election Obama showed great rhetorical sensitivity to the wide-spread negative perception in the Middle East of U.S. imperial behavior and designs, its uncritical support of Israel, and its disregard for civilian casualties and for the civil rights of prisoners. In an effort to reverse the tide of anti-American feeling, Obama's first post-inaugural interview was given to Hisham Melhem of Al Arabiya TV news (Interview). This was followed in April and May by major addresses in Ankara and Cairo whose primary intended audience was Middle Eastern and, more broadly, Islamic. Both of these speeches articulate a new rhetoric of hope for U.S.-Middle Eastern relations. In the speech to the Turkish parliament, for example, Obama declares:¶ I [...] want to be clear that America's relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree [...]. (para. 38)¶ Hope for a new era of U.S Middle East relations is here embodied by an attitude of respect, by a willingness to negotiate differences and find areas of mutual interest, and by an explicit criticism of the unilateral and monologic focus of the Bush administration on the 'war on terror'.¶ This apparent change in direction in national security and foreign policy seems to be characterized by an alternate version of presidential masculinity and by an alternate telling of the myth of American exceptionalism. Many have commented on the muscular character of George W. Bush's rhetoric of war and national security. Indeed, his policies in what he called the 'war on terror' depended almost exclusively on what Joseph Nye famously called "hard power", and were justified rhetorically by a conspicuously militarist and masculinist narrative about America's role in world history and politics.[3] In contrast to the "[...] stern projection of a tough national persona" (Ivie and Giner 288) in Bush's rhetoric and policies, Obama seems to articulate a gentler, more reasoned approach to national security and terrorism that includes the use of 'hard' military power but also depends importantly on 'soft' power in the form of diplomacy, international cooperation, and an emphasis on human rights, economic stability and political freedom. Ivie and Giner

argue that the success of Obama's rhetorical appeal to 'soft' power during the 2008 presidential campaign was due to his ability to

harness and resignify the deeply-resonant myth of American exceptionalism for a more democratic and

community-minded projection of America's role in world affairs. In Obama's version of national security, they write:¶ A less tragic sense of order mandated a reduced sense of guilt and thereby decreased the need for redemption via the cult of killing. This expression of national mission in more democratic and practical terms indicated, at least "logologically," the possibility of aligning public culture with a more global and constructive perspective on matters of national security. It revealed the possibility of a founding myth reformed to relax the lethal grip of the Evil One on the conscience of a nation that might do more good in the world if it were burdened less by tragic guilt.[4] (296)¶ This conclusion requires a retrospective reassessment in the light of Obama's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. How do we reconcile Obama's seemingly dramatic shift from progressive presidential candidate who was proud to have

opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, and who abolished the use of torture and illegal detention in his first day in office, to the president who in

December 2009 made the decision to pursue and significantly escalate military violence in Afghanistan? How do we reconcile Obama's seemingly contradictory use of both the soft rhetoric of hope and diplomacy and the hard rhetoric of fear and military violence in his national security statements and speeches?¶ In the analysis that follows I argue that while Obama at times articulates a softer version of foreign policy, and seems to perform a softer, more inclusive presidential masculinity in the area of global politics and terrorism, this does not fundamentally signify a different orientation to national security as some have argued. I emphasize how Obama's rhetoric and policies fall within the standard rhetorical oscillations that constitute the myth of American exceptionalism and presidential masculinity, and that those oscillations are principally and most significantly oriented by the more militarist and conventionally masculinist versions of the myth.¶ Presidential Masculinity in the Democratic Nomination Speech¶ Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008 marks the formal shift of his campaign focus from Democratic Party voters towards a national audience, and from his rivalry with Hillary Clinton to a campaign against John McCain. In terms of Obama's national security rhetoric, this is a fascinating moment because, in this new broader context, he makes an attitudinal shift to a more militarized and masculinized mode of speech. In fact, Obama's performance of soft masculinity on issues of national security during the primary campaign was an opportune product of the moment that did not reflect the principal orientation of his thinking.[5] This is quite clear in the nomination speech as he shifts his campaign towards a more conservative national audience, and directs his attention from a female rival to a male rival with military credentials.¶ Obama's first sentence about foreign policy in the nomination speech concerns his own stature and ability to lead American troops into battle, and to battle John McCain for the position of commander in chief. "If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next commander-in-chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have." (para. 79) What is most interesting about this lead-in to the topic of national security, terrorism, and foreign policy is that its main rhetorical function is to emphasize Obama's masculine capability. It does this by declaring his presidential mettle, but also through the performance of an 'I dare you' challenge to his political adversary. It seems to say, 'if you want to fight, then let's fight. Bring it on!'¶ Why does Obama begin this section of the speech with a flexing of muscle? In part, it has to do with the histrionics of presidential campaigns, and in this particular campaign with the anticipated challenge to Obama's military masculinity from John McCain, a candidate with a powerful story of military bravery and heroism to his credit. At the same time, the foregrounding of presidential masculinity in terms of the resolve and capacity to lead the armed forces into battle is

nothing unusual. The most significant human protagonist in the narrative of American exceptionalism is almost always the figure of the president. This is especially true in times of danger, crisis or war. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. To him goes the job of protecting the national family from outside threats and danger. To do this effectively, he must be brave, decisive and rational. He cannot afford to be feminized by being overly emotional or

sympathetic to others; he cannot succumb to doubts, or become scared to act (Cohn, Cuordileone, Hopper, Lakoff, Sylvester, Tickner, Young). It is to this mythos that Obama's beginning performance of masculinity in the speech belongs. In the new context of a national audience, it stands out as a deeply-felt and vigorously articulated orientation towards national security.¶ After this initial show of male plumage, Obama continues the foreign policy section of the nomination speech by contrasting his youthful masculinity to McCain's elderly, bumbling masculinity.¶ For -- for while -- while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats that we face. When John McCain said we could just muddle through in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. (para. 80-81)¶ While McCain turns his sights away from the target, Obama stands up. While McCain muddles, Obama works to finish the fight and "take out" bin Laden if he's "in our sights." In the subtly crafted metaphor of aiming a gun at an enemy that organizes the passage, McCain appears as a distracted old soldier who aims at the wrong target and is generally confused. In contrast, vigorous and youthful, Obama stands up purposely, aims at the target, and fires. These metaphors all work to highlight the differences between McCain and Obama in terms of their embodiment of a properly militarized masculinity: which candidate can stand up, correctly identify the enemy, and fire the necessary shots to kill him.¶ Obama criticizes McCain for standing alone in "stubborn refusal" to recognize the realities of the conflict (that it is with al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, not in Iraq), and therefore for lacking judgment. This lack of judgment is also narrated in terms of a contrast between a youthful and an aging masculinity: "We need a president who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past." (para. 84) Obama declares. The contrast between a man who grasps at the past and one who "faces" the future is coded with messages about age and masculinity: youthful, confident stepping forward into the future versus old, unsteady back-stepping towards the past. At stake in this contrast is which strategy will "defeat" the enemy. "You don't defeat -- you don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in 80 countries by occupying Iraq", (para. 85) Obama argues. These are enemies who must be killed in order to protect the nation. To do this requires a commander-in-chief with masculine resolve and courage who can lead us into battle. This is not work for touchy-feely idealists who want to understand, communicate, and negotiate. And Republicans, Obama points out proudly, are not the only ones with the proper testicular size to lead the army into battle: "We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe." (para. 87) As in his opening statement, part of the effectiveness of these lines is their performance of a kind of "I'm up to the challenge masculinity" that talks tough, is aggressive with challengers ("don't tell me"), and does not back down. The rhetoric of American exceptionalism and presidential masculinity foregrounded here in the nomination clearly constitutes the dominant note of continuity in Obama's national security thinking. This is most evident in his two speeches from December 2009 in which he justifies his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan as the following discussion will show.¶ Reasons for War: the December 1, 2009 Speech at West Point¶ Obama's December 2009 speech at West Point argues for the strategic necessity and ethical correctness of increased war effort in Afghanistan on the basis of history. The history begins with the 19 Al Qaeda operatives who committed the terrorist atrocities on 9/11 and moves quickly to focus on the Taliban who provided them with a secure base from which to operate. After 9/11, as Obama tells the story, we made great military inroads against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but then mistakenly turned our attention to Iraq. This provided an opening for the Taliban, and for Al Qaeda, who are now coming back into Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Afghan government cannot fight them off and therefore, he says, summing it all up: "In short, the status quo is not sustainable" (para. 12). How does a rudimentary history like this serve as an explanation or justification for war? What is the mediating logic?¶ The over-simplification of contemporary U.S and Afghan history entailed in this schematic narrative is head-spinning.[6] But, even putting that aside, if one accepts the history at face value, it is still the case that our commitment to war is left unexplained and unjustified by the narrative. The history begins with 19 terrorists, and ends with the large-scale military action on the part of the United States. Should it not take a lot more than saying, 'well, the Taliban are gaining momentum and, remember, they are best friends with Al Qaeda' to justify the deployment of 100,000 U.S. troops, predator drones strikes all over northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, full involvement of the CIA, major flows of capital and materiel, and huge contracts with private military contractors like XE Services (aka Blackwater)? Obama's historical narrative simply does not add up to a political argument for this kind of war, and for this kind of outlay of capital.¶ As a justification for war, it seems, rather, to be structured like a myth in the sense that Roland Barthes gave the word. Myth, according to Barthes, is paradoxically

effective because, formally, it works like an alibi. It is an explanation based on an absence of evidence and meaning rather than its presence. In an alibi (the accused was absent not present at the scene) the meaning and the evidence are always elsewhere (121-127).

Obama's narrative amounts to a mythological explanation for war in the sense that its significance lies not in the history itself but in the formal seriousness of a president telling a story to justify war. That is, its significance lies in the rhetorical gesture that serves to remind the audience of the president's authority as commander in chief and of his role to defend the nation from harm. By telling this story the president in effect quotes an array of motives, intentions, plot sequences and characters that are formally full even if their content in this instance is misleading or empty. To paraphrase Hayden White, in this case the content is the form. Here, the details of the story of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan are significant to the extent that they play a role in a larger narrative already familiar to the American audience: the Unites States stands for peace and prosperity, freedom and democracy but sometimes it is attacked by evil enemies whose irrational desire is to destroy all that is good. In that circumstance, the president must protect the national family through the use of military violence. War is the best and, in fact, the only way to make ourselves secure.¶ Following this schematic historical narrative with which he begins the West Point speech, Obama reassures the audience that his final decision to escalate the war was taken only after a serious and difficult deliberative process. This process, he says, "has allowed me to ask the hard questions, and to explore all the different options, along with my national security team, our military and civilian leadership in Afghanistan, and our key partners. And given the stakes involved, I owed the American people -- and our troops -- no less." (para. 13) The image of the president very seriously asking questions, exploring options, and consulting experts is one intended to produce a sense of citizen confidence both in the decision and in the decider (as George W. Bush famously called himself) again without revealing any of the details or particulars that constitute the decision. The rhetorical appeal here is essentially charismatic and depends on thick cultural associations with the president as benevolent paternal authority, and as rational but determined protector of the nation. The tone of the passage is that of a father reassuring his family that the big decision he has made today was made with great care, and with their communal welfare in mind.¶ Obama's stress on his careful deliberation process but not on the content of the deliberation is reminiscent of Iris Marion Young's emphasis on the "logic of masculinist protection" in national security thinking. This is a logic that connects the protective role of the father in the patriarchal family with the role of commander in chief. In both cases, she argues that one of the prices exacted by benevolent masculinist protection is that the protected woman/feminized citizen must concede "critical distance from decision-making autonomy." (120). In other words, if the fatherly president's allegiance to citizens and soldiers is expressed in the mindfulness with which he makes communal decisions of this magnitude, then it is equally true that our allegiance to the father-president is expressed in our acceptance of his authority and judgment to do what is best for us in these circumstances. The allegiance to the father quickly becomes the measure of our patriotism. As a rhetorical strategy, then, Obama's description of the seriousness of his decision-making process serves to legitimate his decision to escalate war through an appeal to an image of protective presidential masculinity. This appeal interpellates the audience in the role of a complicit, feminized citizenry that needs such fatherly protection.[7]¶ After the scant historical review, and a summary of where we are and why we are obliged to go to war, Obama devotes a good portion of the West Point speech to making a series of sequential points, statements of fact, and reasoned arguments. For example, he gives three specific goals for the Afghan intervention, and outlines how those goals will be achieved and how it will all be paid for. He also identifies three possible objections to the escalation and gives reasoned arguments for why these criticisms are incorrect. In sum, he says "As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests." (para. 37).As feminist International Relations scholars have argued, to talk about war

in rationalist terms as Obama does here tends to divert attention from the cruelties of war , and to imagine the truth of war " abstracted from bodies "Ruddick 132). It becomes difficult, in this context, to focus on, or give weight to, the terrible details of war, and in particular to the death and destruction that modern wars exact mostly from civilians not soldiers.[8] As a rhetorical performance, the description of war in terms of rational sequences and formulas also tends to give authority to the rhetorician himself by distancing him from feminized forms of emotionality or care work (Cohn).¶ Obama ends his speech with the conclusion that presidential war speeches commonly have: an eloquent and solemn call to unity and patriotism. "Now, let me be clear: None of this will be easy. The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will be an enduring test of our free society, and our leadership in the world." (para. 41) The logic of a bond between our free society and our leadership in the world is presupposed rather than described or explained. Like all heroes, the hero of the exceptionalist narrative faces a test. In this instance, he is us, and our essential quality of being a free society is linked to our dominance in the world.¶ Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great-grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs. We have spilled American blood in many countries on multiple continents.We have spent our revenue to help others rebuild from rubble and develop their own economies.We have joined with others to develop an architecture of institutions -- from the United Nations to NATO to the World Bank -- that provide for the common security and prosperity of human beings.¶ We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes. But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades -- a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, and markets open, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress and advancing frontiers of human liberty.¶ For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations.We will not claim another nation's resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.What we have fought for -- what we continue to fight for -- is a better future for our children and grandchildren. And we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity (para. 47-49).¶ Unlike other world powers, we are benevolent , seeking only that which will make the world a better place. We are, that is to say, a world power but not a world empire. Our history shows this: our military violence

and our leadership have underwritten global security for over sixty years. Strangely, though, our fatherly sacrifice to protect the world from harm is sometimes misunderstood, and "we have not always been thanked for our efforts." Who are the unthankful and what is their story? In the standard-issue exceptionalist narrative, they are the enemies of freedom, the sowers of chaos, and the ideologically possessed. Obama certainly believes this. At the same time, the statement that "we have not always been thanked for our efforts" also expresses a deep anxiety about the details and the stories that are erased by the great father's version of history.¶ Making War, Talking Peace: The Nobel Peace Prize Speech¶ The Nobel Prize acceptance speech, given just nine days after Obama's announcement of the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, provides a fascinating expansion of the plot of "American as good vs. foreign as evil" that informs the narrative justification for war in the West Point speech. In this speech, Obama contextualizes both American exceptionalism in general, and his specific decision to expand the war in Afghanistan, in a sweeping historical narrative of global progress. "At the dawn of history," Obama declares, "war was routinely pursued between tribes and peoples quite simply as a way of 'seeking power and settling disputes." (para. 6) Later, as "man" progressed, legal and diplomatic efforts were made in an attempt to regulate war and the way it was pursued. Obama invokes just war theory citing it as one of the principle ways in which humans have tried to regulate and civilize war. In Obama's narrative, the United States is located at the upper end of this historical progression because it is the United States that has provided the leadership to produce the global "architecture" of peace in the form of the United Nations, support for human rights, nuclear arms reductions, and so on. Elaborating on the schematic history of the United States that appeared in the West Point speech, Obama says¶ The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will.We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity (para. 18).¶ J. Ann Tickner argues that the idea of enlightened self interest corresponds to a masculinist model of international relations in which states are systematic and instrumental they are competitive " profit maximizers that pursue power and autonomy in an anarchic world system."(52) In this context, if international cooperation exists, it is explained not in terms of community or an interdependent notion of security and welfare, but rather in terms of rational choice and enlightened self-interest . Here, in

Obama's version, we shoulder the burden of world peace and prosperity both heroically (with American blood and military power) but also as rational actors. We act not as an imperial power, but as a benign power exercising rational choices in a dangerous world in order to protect our interests. By virtue of the incantatory power of the exceptionalist narrative, our interests are identical with democratic values and the cause of economic justice.¶ The awkward context of the Nobel Prize speech both clarifies and complicates Obama's justification of war. While acknowledging the "moral force" of the theory of non-violence, he also argues that "evil does exist in the world" and that a realist assessment of the world "as it is" sometimes requires violence. This part of the speech is quite subtle, shuttling back and forth between the recognition that war is terrible and the insistence that it is sometimes necessary. The notion that war is sometimes just and sometimes necessary for building peace is modified throughout with an appeal to "responsibility" and to the rational, measured use of military violence . Obama argues that "all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace." (para. 26) The rationalist tone of responsibility and militaries with clear mandates is matched by Obama's framing of the philosophical question of war and peace as a matter of human imperfection. The ideals of peace are beautiful, but in the world as it is human beings are not perfect. They sometimes act unaccountably and irresponsibly. And sometimes they must be stopped from perpetrating evil.¶ At the end of the speech, Obama signals what for him is the chief human imperfection that is at the root of so much of the world's violence. He says,¶ As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we're all basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families. ¶ And yet somehow, given the dizzying pace of globalization, the cultural leveling of modernity, it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities -- their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict.At times, it even feels like we're moving backwards.We see it in the Middle East, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews seems to harden.We see it in nations that are torn asunder by tribal lines.¶ And most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan.T hese extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war (para. 47-49).¶ In the context of globalization, what jams the machine is fear of loss of identity. This fear also gets in the way of our universal human aspirations for peace and prosperity. The most notable example of this kind of fear is, of course, the terrorism practiced by al Qaeda. This is a fear underwritten by megalomania: the idea that violence is mandated by God. What is striking about this passage is that it plots opposition to globalization as fear of change, almost as a kind of primitive or childish clinging to identity in a world whose universal characteristics are evident. But can this be the whole story? Can one explain the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, as Obama appears to do here, as irrational fear of loss of identity? Is opposition to capitalist globalization American-style, and under the paternal arm of American power, always and everywhere a form of childishness or partial vision?¶ In his concluding comments, Obama quotes Martin Luther King's 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he talks about the moral necessity of striving for what ought to be rather than accepting things as they are. This is an eloquent but highly impertinent frame for the speech. In his Nobel address, King soundly rejects those versions of history organized around notions of necessary violence. Accepting the prize on behalf of the entire civil rights movement, King says:¶ After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the

answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love (para. 4).¶ King clearly rejects the idea that civilization sometimes requires violence, or that violence can sometimes be just or moral. Love, in King's terms, is antithetical to the discourse of innocence, guilt, power and violence that constitutes the narrative of American exceptionalism. Instead, King's ethic of love is consonant with Judith Butler's critique of violence:¶ The violent response is the one that does not ask, and does not seek to know. It wants to shore up what it knows, to expunge what threatens it with not-knowing, what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of its world, their contingency, their malleability. The nonviolent response lives with its unknowingness about the Other in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question opens is finally more valuable than knowing in advance what holds us in common, as if we already have all the resources we need to know what defines the human, what its future life might be (35).¶ This is precisely what is wrong with the narrative of American exceptionalism, and with Obama's obligation to it. A story whose plot is organized entirely around the character of its hero does not seek to know. It is narcissistic. It shores up what it knows in fear of the Other, and in this gesture reconfirms that its view of the world is the truth. Obama seems oblivious to the contradictions in his assertion of American power as he struggles here to articulate the oxymoron of peace through war . In the end, what "makes sense" in his justification for war is the cultural and political sense that adheres to the image of embodied presidential masculinity, and to his military leadership performed in patriotic service to America's heroic global mission.¶ Conclusion¶ Obama's national security policies and rhetoric are, to be fair, significantly different in many ways than Bush's. Nonetheless, he steeps his

rhetoric of hope for a new foreign policy in the old, familiar language of American exceptionalism. This illustrates how the political logic of a militarized and masculinized nation, presidency and citizenry has proved to be more enduring, significant and powerful than the strategy differences that have divided Democrats and Republicans over the last 60 years. It is important also because the cultural logic of American exceptionalism guaranteed by military power makes so many questions difficult to ask because the questions themselves seem absurd, effeminately nave, or simply out of rhetorical limits. These are unasked questions such as what violence was required to achieve our affluence and power? How can that violence be justified? Are there models for world peace, prosperity and freedom other than America's dominance and "leadership?" Does military power and violence produce security? What constitutes security? Is invulnerability a legitimate security goal? Is the authority of Commander-in-chief one that automatically adheres to the presidency at all times, or should the executive be more limited in its power as originally envisioned in the Constitution? Is citizenship best characterized in terms of a militarized and masculinized patriotism? Can terrorism be fought with large-scale military tactics?¶ Of course, it is impossible to know all the ins and outs of how Obama and his advisors reached the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. For those who voted for Obama over Clinton during the Democratic primary campaign because of his

clear-spoken commitment to a different kind of foreign policy, the decision is disappointing to say the least. In the final analysis, when the decision was made, and its justification needed to be formulated into public rhetoric, what is clear is that the Obama administration felt at home in and oriented by - the old language of American exceptionalism. Familiar orientations, as Sara Ahmed argues, are an "effect of inhabitance." That is, their sense, their familiarity and their surety are products of their alignment with an already aligned world (7). My argument here is that the sense Obama makes of war is indebted to and made possible by - the familiarity and common-sense orientation of American exceptionalism. If the militarism and masculinism of his national security logic seem sensible or reassuring, it is because they are oriented in deeply familiar ways . The rhetoric of war and national security also works, of course, to recreate the familiar orientation from which it emerges. As Susan Jeffords argues, in the post-Vietnam context, heroic narratives about the war had the decisive (but indirectly manifested) effect of "remasculinizing American culture." This is why the work of disorientation that is proposed by feminist International Relations scholars and activists with its specific focus on the hidden injuries of gender in the familiar discourses of war and security is so important. It is also why it is so difficult.¶ I have argued that Obama's war logic is oriented by, and serves to reorient us towards, a national mythology grounded in narratives of glorified violence and masculinity. The difficulty of challenging and disorienting that

prevailing narrative is eloquently described by Jorge Luis Borges in his story "The South." The story serves as an apt allegory of the mythology of American

exceptionalism with its multiple commitments to masculinity and violence, and for the ways this mythology works to make military violence the

seemingly inevitable and sensible locus where the national story is both resolved and reinvigorated. The main character in "The South" is named Juan Dahlmann. Dahlmann feels "deeply Argentine" despite the fact that his paternal grandfather was a northern European immigrant. Dahlmann's patriotic sense of identity involves, among other things, having purchased a little ranch in the south that had once been in his mother's family. Dahlmann lives in Buenos Aires, and for him the south has tremendous symbolic resonance as that place that retains the masculinist features of national mythology: the pampa, the gaucho, the singing bard, the tavern, the duel. Dahlmann dreams about the ranch and its old house, and takes comfort in imagining it waiting for him on the pampa, even though he never really gets a chance to actually go there. One day, Dahlmann is struck gravely ill with a terrible infection and is hospitalized with high fever. As is typical of so many of Borges' stories, it is impossible to tell if the subsequent narrated events are products of his hallucinatory state or are really happening to him. In any event, after some days of medical intervention, he is released and boards a train towards the south to convalesce at his ranch. He arrives, enters a tavern where he eats barbeque and drinks wine, and then is taunted by some young men who have been drinking too much. Although the bar owner tells him to pay them no mind, Dahlmann confronts them as any traditional male character in a gaucho story would be required to do. In seeming recognition of his decisive entrance into one of the enduring storylines of nationalist mythology (the knife fight between men at a watering hole on the pampa), the ancient gaucho in the corner of the bar who until now has remained motionless as if frozen in time, becomes "ecstatic" and throws him a dagger. The rest is preordained: Dahlmann will walk out of the tavern with a knife in his hand, he will fight bravely, and then die with the stranger's blade in his gut. It is, the narrator says, "as if the South had decided that Dahlmann should agree to the duel." (203) When he picks up the dagger, he feels two things: first, "that this almost instinctive act committed him to fighting" and, second, "that, in his clumsy hand, the weapon would not serve to defend him, but rather to justify their killing of him" (Borges, 203 translations mine).¶ For me, "The South" is a story about the masculinist mythology of national identity and violence. Intricate and contradictory is it dream or reality? the myth exercises its force both from within on Dahlmann's imagination and from without on his body. The logic of a militarized and masculinized rhetoric of national security, in concert with the economic logic of our military budget and the imperial logic of our global ambition, serves as our "south" leading us onward towards the use of large-scale military violence as if in a dream from which we cannot wake . We cannot hear the warnings of the barkeep who tries to tell us that we do not have to kill or be killed in this instance. Like Dahlmann, our politicians even the less

bellicose among them when faced with security threats simply cannot imagine any alternative to masculinist bravado and the duel to the death.¶ "The South", then, is a cautionary tale. As long as presidents and politicians dare not challenge the role of the military budget as the primary organizing principle of our economy, and as long as the militarized and masculinized ideology of American exceptionalism remains the almost unitary language with which we speak of national security and foreign policy, there should be no surprise when ostensible doves from

the Democratic Party such as Barack Obama pursue large-scale military campaigns in places like Afghanistan, and seem to do so as readily as their reputedly hawkish counterparts in the Republican Party. Alternate strategies to large-scale military violence require new story-lines of national identity and national security. We need to give ourselves a choice about whether taking up the knife is what the situation calls for . We need to ask questions about how we got into such a situation in the first place. We need to create alternatives to the logic that defines security as killing or being killed.

Clearly, rhetoric plays a significant role in preparing these choices. But, as Obama's performance indicates, it is unlikely that our presidents and our politicians will do the rhetorical work necessary to disorient the prevailing exceptionalist narrative and reorient the debate towards the ethos of human security . It falls to us - citizens, activists and intellectuals - to turn our political rhetoric away from antagonisms that require violence towards the democratic task of contending with opponents with whom we share the world.

Privacy

Approaching privacy legally and individually instead of socially as a common good traps it in a paradigm that reinforces neoliberal subjectivity. Coll, Geneva sociology professor, 2014(Sami, “Power, knowledge, and the subjects of privacy: understanding privacy as the ally of surveillance”, Information, Communication & Society, 17.10, Taylor and Francis)

In following the adaptation of Foucault’s model of the dispositive of power to privacy, companies and governments should be considered the main actors of the regulation of a ‘practice of privacy’, as medical institutions have been regulating a ‘practice of sexuality’. In a way, data protection policies (created by companies or governments) make people feel at ease with the spread of the information society now at the core of modern capitalism, without blocking the economic market (Kessous & Rey, 2007). For Regan, it ‘can in fact be alibi on the part of public power wishing to avoid the new problems brought about by the development of enormous data files’ (Regan, 1995, p. 219). For example, in the ‘Montreux Declaration (2005)’, a reference document produced and used by privacy commissioners and privacy advocates from all over the world, there is no fundamental critique of the information society. While expressing concerns about surveillance practices, the report mentions that the development of the information society must not be hindered in any way. Even though privacy commissioners have shown an increasing concern about surveillance practices (Madrid Privacy Declaration, 2009), the global direction is still set to embed privacy within modern informational capitalism. Like the artistic critique during the 1960s and 1970s (Boltanski &

Chiapello, 2005), privacy as a critique of information society has been assimilated and reshaped by and in favour of capitalist structures, notably by being over-individualized. First a political and literary critique, then defended by non-profit organizations, it is now included in each company’s policy – especially Internet giants (Bennett, 2008) – to the extent that privacy seems to have become, somehow, a consumer good (Rey, 2012, p. 158). As Kessous (2012, p. 79) suggests, the current ‘sanctuarisation of privacy’ (our translation) has become conditional to the well-being of the economy. Indeed, although it could be approached as a common, public, and collective value (see Regan, 1995), privacy is continuously the subject of a drive towards individualization, occurring notably through the so-called individual empowerment that lies at the very centre of the self-determination principle. With the growth of the information society and its economical ‘partner-in-crime’, relationship marketing, companies will continue collecting massive amounts of data. Data mining has become more sophisticated and now allows marketers to infer significant knowledge and sensitive data about consumers from ‘innocuous’ raw data. This is why the debate on data protection is considered highly relevant and as the main way to protect an individual’s privacy. Even the majority of most critical privacy scholars (see, e.g. Gilliom, 2011; Regan, 2011) agree that facing the lack of solutions to abuses of personal data use, the ‘regime of privacy’ (Bennett, 2011a) and its resources already in place must certainly still be defended. As Stalder (2011, p. 508) argues, while being very critical of the concept of privacy, ‘it would be foolish to give up such resources in exchange for, well, what?’. Indeed, the history of privacy policies shows many successes in preventing the worst surveillance practices from being used (Bennett, 2011b). However, as was also made clear in our study on loyalty programmes, privacy advocates, reflexive consumers, and consumers experiencing privacy as an everyday life experience do not share the same perspective. Aside from this empirical study, many authors have already focused on different theoretical aspects of privacy (Holvast, 2007, p. 738), which leads to different perspectives. The perception of privacy is controversial, and any attempt to provide a univocal definition of it must be considered an act of power. Because we depicted privacy as a tool of governance in the sole context of Swiss loyalty cards and because almost two-thirds of the interviews were conducted with women,4 some precautions should be taken about the generalizability of our study. However, we think that our argument demonstrates at the very least that surveillance issues cannot be simplified any longer into a duality between one’s privacy and surveillance systems. Broaching surveillance only in terms of privacy threat is potentially detrimental and can paradoxically reinforce it, since privacy and surveillance are not antagonistic (Stalder, 2002);

rather, they seem to work together in the deployment of the surveillance society. The more that is said about privacy, the more consumers focus on their individuality, reinforcing the care of the self, described by Foucault (1986),

which shapes them as the subjects of control. One way to counter this tendency and to make privacy less easy to grab and control would be to pursue the work of scholars who have been trying to approach it as a common good, rather than considering it only as an individual resource to be protected against potential invasions (Regan, 1995; Westin, 2003). That might address Tocqueville’s early concern expressed in the second volume of Democracy in America (2004). According to him, liberal societies place too much importance on intimacy and individuality, which weakens the public action that maintains common goods like freedom and democracy. Indeed, if the notion of privacy remains trapped within an individualistic perspective, it might be related to an inappropriate and over-individualized conception of freedom. Concretely, compared to the interests of a national economy or to the security of the state, privacy, as a private value, is likely to be neglected – because, as argued by Westin (2003), ‘when society does not accept certain personal conduct, it is saying this is not a matter of private choice and does not allow a claim of privacy’ (p. 433).5 Privacy as an individual resource, which every individual should ‘learn’ to protect thanks to the self-determination principle,

cannot compete with political concerns such as the wealth and security of the state. Only a conception of privacy oriented in terms of a collective good can possibly balance measures meant to serve these overwhelming interests. In other words, as argued by Regan (1995, p. 221), privacy should not only aim to protect the individual, but also the society and its democratic values. This study aimed to demonstrate that when privacy policies are reduced to the selfdetermination principle, a risk is taken to shape it as a tool of power and governance . Privacy and its definition must urgently be understood as a struggle of power between the promoters of a model of informational capitalism based on surveillance of citizens and consumers, and those who would prefer to promote privacy as a common good that could lead society to more democracy and freedom. Since Big Data is going to be a revolution in the way we produce knowledge,

make decisions, and govern people through massive data collection and analysis (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013), the normativity of privacy we wanted to discuss in this article must be more than ever at the centre of the debates.

Surveillance

The surveillance state is a product of consumerism—the AFF is merely a legitimation project. Finley, Barry University sociology and criminology professor, 2014(Laura, “Digital Blackwater”: The National Security Administration, Telecommunications Companies and State-Corporate Crime”, State Criminal Journal, 3.2, proquest)

Although some have expressed concern or even outrage, many Americans remain apathetic about the privacy violations occurring through the NSA-corporate collusion (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2013). One factor that might encourage large numbers of Americans to simply defer to power and support the intrusion of their privacy has to do with the prevailing culture of consumerism that characterizes the US society. As has been argued by various critics, for the last several decades, the US (and other societies) are increasingly “consumer societies” in which citizens (i.e., people with political rights and obligations who are civically engaged and partake in the decisions and processes that shape society) have been largely replaced by consumers (see, e.g. Bauman 1998; Giroux 2008). Convincing people – through advertising, the educational system, popular culture, etc. – that their primary role in life is that of a consumer discourages critical thinking and steers human agency to the trivial confines of “purchasing preferences”. Within a consumer society, the rhetoric of commodities permeates social life (Dore and Weeks 2011). In effect, society becomes little more than a huge marketplace of consumers and sellers, all of whom are looking after their own commercially defined interests. This state of affairs, according to Henry Giroux (2008), undermines critical thinking, erodes social bonds and fosters apathy. In a consumer society, happiness, success and fulfilment are typically measured by people’s purchasing power and material possessions (Durning 1992; Schor 1998). However, because the satisfaction that comes with material consumption is typically short lived, encouraging people to remain reliable consumers involves constantly enticing them with new products (Bauman 1998). Through this process of continuous enticement with mostly trivial commodities, people are discouraged from spending time seriously questioning the society in which they live. As a result, many are distracted and ultimately excluded from the

more significant decisions that affect their lives. It is precisely this sort of alienation that pacifies many people and encourages them to simply “fit” into the realm of acceptable options dictated by the political and economic elite. These acceptable options – which typically involve things like choosing between various ice-cream flavours, types of cars or political candidates – are ultimately all “consumer choices” that reflect the prevailing status quo but are nonetheless typically regarded as indicators of “freedom”. Considering this association often made between consumer choice and “freedom”, it is no wonder that there has been no concerted effort in the US to oppose the fact that most private and public settings have been increasingly turned into what George Ritzer (2005) has described as “sites of consumption”. According to Ritzer, in the past several decades, settings that were traditionally not associated with shopping, such as schools, airports and private homes, have been turned into settings of consumption. With respect to the latter, Ritzer (2005: x) suggests that “even our homes have become means of consumption, penetrated by telemarketing, junk mail, catalogs, home shopping television, and cybershops”. Most importantly, the purpose of this discussion is that the implied invasion of privacy that inevitably comes with these new developments has become normative. For example, although a Pew study found that most US adults fear identity theft when shopping online, this practice has become increasingly popular (Horrigan 2008). What this might also suggest is that many Americans are willing to accept the risks of having their privacy invaded in the interest of playing their roles as consumers from the comfort of their home. The urge to consume, in short, might trump everything else – including the value that many people place on privacy. This consumerist mindset might thus be partly responsible for why many Americans support or are indifferent about surveillance practices. From a consumer’s point of view, this is simply the “cost” of security. In sum, the NSA’s widespread surveillance of US citizens is the result of the continued neoliberal practice of deregulation and weakening oversight of government programmes. The ease with which such programmes can be approved by FISA Court without public knowledge, the widespread ideology that collecting metadata will keep the country safe from terrorism and the willingness the average US citizen has to freely give up their rights for greater convenience and an alleged sense of security are all key factors that underscore why the state-corporate collusion has expanded so rapidly and is in such deep contrast to rights articulated in international human rights treaties. Given that corporations are not subject to even the same weak and problematic oversights as are required for governmental programmes, many have expressed grave concern about President Obama’s recent recommendation that the data collected by the NSA be stored with private companies. Rather than eliminating the programmes that violate human rights, President Obama continued to trump up fear of a terrorist attack, making nine references to September 11 in his January 2014 speech in which he was to present “reforms” (Matthews 2014). Instead, critics assert that the President’s primary goal was not to address the problems with widespread surveillance of innocent people but rather to restore faith in the NSA (Matthews 2014). It seems that serious change is nowhere in sight.

Technological Competitiveness

Positioning private companies and state surveillance agencies as opponents masks the social relations of neoliberalism and the state-corporate nexus that normalizes the ideology of surveillance. Price, Saint Martin anthropology professor, 2014(David, “The New Surveillance Normal”, July-August, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/the-new-surveillance-normal/)

The past two decades brought an accelerated independent growth of corporate and governmental electronic surveillance programs tracking metadata and compiling electronic dossiers. The NSA, FBI, Department of Defense, and CIA’s metadata programs developed independently from, and with differing goals from, the consumer surveillance systems that used cookies and consumer discount cards, sniffing Gmail content, compiling

consumer profiles, and other means of tracking individual Internet behaviors for marketing purposes. Public acceptance of electronic monitoring and metadata collection transpired incrementally, with increasing acceptance of corporate-based consumer monitoring programs, and reduced resistance to governmental surveillance. These two surveillance tracks developed with separate motivations, one for security and the other for commerce, but both desire to make individuals and groups legible for reasons of anticipation and control. The collection and use of this metadata finds a synchronic convergence of intrusions, as consumer capitalism and a U.S. national security state leaves Americans vulnerable, and a world open to the probing and control by agents of commerce and security. As Bruce Schneier recently observed, “surveillance is still the business model of the Internet, and every one of those companies wants to access your communications and your metadata.”7 But this convergence carries its own contradictions. Public trust in (and the economic value of) cloud servers, telecommunications providers, email, and search engine services suffered following revelations that the public statements of Verizon, Google, and others had been less than forthright in declaring their claims of not knowing about the NSA monitoring their customers. A March 2014 USA Today survey found 38 percent of respondents believed the NSA violates their privacy, with distrust of Facebook (26 percent) surpassing even the IRS (18 percent) or Google (12 percent)—the significance of these results is that the Snowden NSA revelations damaged the reputations and financial standing of a broad range of technology-based industries.8 With the assistance of private ISPs, various corporations, and the NSA, our metadata is accessed under a shell game of four distinct sets of legal authorizations. These allow spokespersons from corporate ISPs and the NSA to make

misleading statements to the press about not conducting surveillance operations under a particular program such as FISA, when one of the other authorizations is being used.9 Snowden’s revelations reveal a world where the NSA is dependent on private corporate services for the outsourced collection of data, and where the NSA is increasingly reliant on corporate owned data farms where the storage and analysis of the data occurs. In the neoliberal United States , Amazon and other private firms lease massive cloud server space to the CIA, under an arrangement where it becomes a share cropper on these scattered data farms. These arrangements present nebulous security relationships raising questions of role confusion in shifting patron–client relationships; and whatever resistance corporations like Amazon might have had to assisting NSA, CIA, or intelligence agencies is further compromised by relations of commerce. This creates relationships of culpability, as Norman Solomon suggests, with Amazon’s $600 million CIA data farm contract: “if Obama orders the CIA to kill a U.S. Citizen, Amazon will be a partner in assassination.”10 Such arrangements diffuse complicity in ways seldom considered by consumers focused on Amazon Prime’s ability to speedily deliver a My Little Pony play set for a brony nephew’s birthday party, not on the company’s links to drone attacks on Pakistani wedding parties.

The Internet developed first as a military-communication system; only later did it evolve the commercial and recreational uses distant from the initial intent of its Pentagon landlords. Snowden’s revelations reveal how the Internet’s architecture, a compromised judiciary, and duplexed desires of capitalism and the national security state are today converging to track our purchases, queries, movements, associations, allegiances, and desires. The rise of e-commerce, and the soft addictive allure of social media, rapidly transforms U.S. economic and social formations. Shifts in the base are followed by shifts in the superstructure, and new generations of e-consumers are socialized to accept phones that track movements, and game systems that bring cameras into the formerly private refuges of our homes, as part of a “new

surveillance normal.”11 We need to develop critical frameworks considering how NSA and CIA surveillance programs articulate not only with the United States’ domestic and international security apparatus, but with current international capitalist formations. While secrecy shrouds our understanding of these relationships, CIA history provides examples of some ways that intelligence operations have supported and informed past U.S. economic ventures. When these historical patterns are combined with details from Snowden’s disclosures we find continuities of means, motive, and opportunity for neoliberal abuses of state intelligence for private gains. The NSA and the Promise of Industrial Espionage Following Snowden’s NSA revelations, several foreign leaders expressed outrage and displeasure upon learning that the NSA had spied on their governments and corporations, yet there has been little consideration of the meaning of the NSA’s industrial spying. The NSA is not the only government-based international hacking unit spying on global competitors. In China, the Shanghai Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398 purportedly targets U.S. corporate and government computers, with hacking campaigns supposedly seeking data providing economic or strategic advantage to the Chinese government or private businesses. Israel’s Cyber Intelligence Unit (known as ISNU, or Unit 8200) has been linked to several political and economic hacking operations, including the Stuxnet worm and a recent attack on the Élysée Palace. While many Western analysts take for granted that such economic espionage networks exist elsewhere, there is little analysis of the possibility that the NSA’s surveillance will be used by rogue individuals or agencies seeking economic advantages. Yet the leveraging of such information is a fundamental feature of market capitalism. Last January, Snowden told the German ARD television network that there is “no question that the U.S. is engaged in economic spying.” He explained that, for example, “if there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and they’ll take it.”12 Snowden did not elaborate on what is done with such economic intelligence. Snowden has released documents establishing that the NSA targeted French “politicians, business people and members of the administration under a programme codenamed US-985D” with French political and financial interests being “targeted on a daily basis.”13 Other NSA documents show the agency spying on Mexican and Brazilian politicians, and the White House authorized an NSA list of surveillance priorities including “international trade relations” designated as a higher priority than counterespionage investigations.14 Leaked NSA documents include materials from a May 2012 top secret presentation “used by the NSA to train new agents step-by-step how to access and spy upon private computer networks—the internal networks of companies, governments, financial institutions—networks designed precisely to protect information.”15 One leaked NSA PowerPoint slide mentions the US$120 billion a year giant Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras with a caption that “many targets use private networks,” and as the Brazilian press analysis pointed out “Petrobras computers contain information ranging from details on upcoming commercial bidding operations—which if infiltrated would give a definite advantage to anyone backing a rival bidder—to datasets with details on technological developments, exploration information.”16 In response to Snowden’s disclosures, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted the NSA collects financial intelligence, but claimed it was limited to searches for terrorist financial networks and “early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy.”17 In March 2013 Clapper lied to Congress, claiming that the NSA was not collecting “data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”18 He has more recently claimed the NSA does not “use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”19 Over the course of several years, the NSA’s Operation Shotgiant hacked into the servers of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Shotgiant initially sought to learn about the People’s Liberation Army’s ability to monitor Huawei’s client’s communications, but the NSA later installed hidden “back doors” in Huawei’s routers and digital switches—the exact activities that the U.S. government had long warned U.S. businesses that Huawei had done.20 Such operations raise the possibility of the NSA gaining knowledge to be used for economic gain by the CIA, NSA employees, or U.S. corporations. When pressed on these issues, a White House spokesperson claimed “we do not give intelligence we collect to U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line. Many countries cannot say the same.” After this NSA operation was revealed, Huawei senior executive William Plummer noted that “the irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.”21 There are many historical examples of intelligence personnel using

information acquired through the course of their work for personal gain, such as selling intelligence information to another power. But what we need to focus upon is a qualitatively different phenomenon: the use of such information for corporate profit or market speculation. In 1972, while investigating Nixon’s presidential campaign finance irregularities, the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee discovered documents indicating that Northrop had made a $450,000 bribe to Saudi Arabian air force generals to help secure a $700 million Northrop F-E5 jet contact. Retired CIA agent Kim Roosevelt (then running a multinational consulting firm operating in Saudi Arabia) denied any involvement in these bribes, but the investigation uncovered documents establishing that Roosevelt used his CIA connections for financial gain. The Senate subcommittee examined correspondence from Kim Roosevelt and Northrop officials, finding “repeated references to ‘my friends in the CIA’ who were keeping him posted about the moves of commercial rivals.”22 After the subcommittee focused its attentions on other more significant instances of CIA illegal activities, Roosevelt faced no legal consequences for these activities. The most rigorous study to date documenting intelligence data being used for economic gains in stock market trading was recently published by economists Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu. The authors developed empirical measures to determine whether classified knowledge of impending CIA operations has historically been used to generate profits in this manner.23 Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu recognized that most regimes historically overthrown by CIA coups had nationalized industries that were once privately held by international corporations; post-coup these industries returned to the previous corporate owners. Therefore, foreknowledge of upcoming coups had a significant financial value in the stock market. The authors developed a series of measures to detect whether, during past CIA coups, there were detectible patterns of stock trading taking advantage of classified intelligence directives, which were known only to the CIA and President. Their study selected only CIA coups with now declassified planning documents, which attempted to install new regimes, and in which the targeted pre-coup governments had nationalized once-private multinational industries. They sampled five of twenty-four identified covert CIA coups meeting these three criteria: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960–1961), Cuba (failed Bay of Pigs coup, 1961), and Chile (1973). Daily stock returns of companies that had been nationalized by the governments targeted by CIA coups were used to compare financial returns before presidential coup authorizations and after the coups. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu found that four days after the authorization of coups their sample of stocks rapidly rose (before public awareness of these coming secret coups): for Congo there was a 16.7 percent increase on the day of the authorization, and a 22.7 percent return from the baseline four days later. The Guatemala stocks showed a 4.9 percent increase upon coup authorization, a 16.1 percent increase four days later, and 20.5 percent seven days later; the Iranian stocks rose 7.4 percent four days after authorization, 10.3 percent seven days later, and 20.2 percent sixteen days later. They found evidence of significant economic gains occurring in the stock market, with “the relative percentage benefit of the coup attributable to ex ante authorization events, which amount to 55.0% in Chile, 66.1% in Guatemala, 72.4% in Congo, and 86.9% in Iran.”24 Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu concluded that “private information regarding coup authorizations and planning increased the stock prices of expropriated multinationals that stood to benefit from regime change. The presence of these abnormal returns suggests that there were leaks of classified information to asset traders.”25 By focusing on trading occurring at the point of the top secret presidential authorizations, they found that gains made from stock buys at the time of authorizations “were three times larger in magnitude than price changes from the coups themselves.”26 It remains unknown whether those profiting were lone individuals (either CIA employees or their proxies), or whether these investments were conducted by the CIA to generate funds for its black ops. We do not know how such past measures of intelligence-insider profiteering do or do not relate to the NSA’s present global surveillance operations. While Snowden released documents (and stated that more will be forthcoming) indicating NSA surveillance of corporations around the world, we do not understand how the NSA puts to use the intelligence they collect. Even with these leaks the NSA largely remains a black box, and our knowledge of its specific activities are limited. Yet, the ease with which a middle-level functionary like Snowden accessed a wealth of valuable intelligence data necessarily raises questions about how the NSA’s massive data collections may be used for self-serving economic interests. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu establish past insider exploitations of intelligence data, and with the growth of insider-cheater capitalism of the type documented in Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys, and expensive private inside-the-beltway newsletters, there are tangible markets for the industrial espionage collected and analyzed by the NSA and CIA under these programs. Snowden, after all, was just one of tens of thousands of people with access to the sort of data with extraordinary value on floor of global capitalism’s casinos. Theorizing Capitalism’s

Pervasive Surveillance Culture Notions of privacy and surveillance are always culturally constructed and are embedded within economic and social formations of the larger society. Some centralized state-socialist systems, such as the USSR or East Germany, developed intrusive surveillance systems, an incessant and effective theme of anti-Soviet propaganda. The democratic-socialist formations, such as those of contemporary northern Europe, have laws that significantly limit the forms of electronic surveillance and the collection of metadata, compared to Anglo-U.S. practice. Despite the significant limitations hindering analysis of the intentionally secret activities of intelligence agencies operating outside of public accountability and systems of legal accountability, the documents made available by whistleblowers like Snowden and WikiLeaks, and knowledge of past intelligence agencies’ activities, provide information that can help us develop a useful framework for considering the uses to which these new invasive

electronic surveillance technologies can be put. We need a theory of surveillance that incorporates the political economy of the U.S. national security state and the corporate interests which it serves and protects. Such analysis needs an economic foundation and a view that looks beyond cultural categories separating commerce and state security systems designed to protect capital. The metadata, valuable private corporate data, and fruits of industrial espionage gathered under PRISM and other NSA programs all produce information of such a high value that it seems likely some of it will be used in a context of global capital. It matters little what legal restrictions are in place; in a global, high-tech, capitalist economy such information is invariably commodified. It is likely to be used to: facilitate industrial or corporate sabotage operations of the sort inflicted by the Stuxnet worm; steal either corporate secrets for NSA use, or foreign corporate secrets for U.S. corporate use; make investments by

intelligence agencies financing their own operations; or secure personal financial gain by individuals working in the intelligence sector. The rise of new invasive technologies coincides with the decline of ideological resistance to surveillance and the compilation of metadata.

The speed of Americans’ adoption of ideologies embracing previously unthinkable levels of corporate and state surveillance suggests a continued public acceptance of a new surveillance normal will continue to develop with little resistance. In a world where the CIA can hack the computers of Senator Feinstein—a leader of the one of the three branches of government—with impunity or lack of public outcry, it is

difficult to anticipate a deceleration in the pace at which NSA and CIA expand their surveillance reach. To live a well-adjusted life in contemporary U.S. society requires the development of rapid memory adjustments and shifting acceptance of corporate and state intrusions into what were once protective spheres of private life. Like all things in our society, we can expect these intrusions will themselves be increasingly stratified, as electronic privacy, or illegibility, will increasingly become a commodity available only to elites. Today, expensive technologies like GeeksPhone’s Blackphone with enhanced PGP encryption, or Boeing’s self-destructing Black Phone, afford special levels of privacy for those who can pay.

Impact

2NC Impact OV

Neoliberalism removes an ethical grammar– it can only comprehend costs and benefits through the individual which means it ignores mass violence towards the 99% – that comes first because all of the AFFs impacts are based on ethical appeals as well which means there is no coherent RFD for the AFF if they are unethical -- that’s Monia

Structural violence comes first – its like dark matter in physics – it structures all of politics but its also invisible – if you don’t evaluate systems of violence before hypothetical war scenarios then future explosions of war and state collapse like ISIS and the Arab spring will be inevitable because you would have ignored the underlying factor motivating conflictSzentes, Corvinus professor emeritus, 2008(Tamas, “Globalisation and prospects of the world society”, 4-22, http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf)

It’s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the world, undermining security even in the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued,

extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources badly needed for development, --many “invisible wars” are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and

malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical terror,

organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious

minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that --the “war against Nature”, i.e. the

disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on,

causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and “invisible wars” we find striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international tensions, thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars. It is a commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or before war, and

cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However, no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of [hu]mankind – because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make “survival studies”. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an

almost permanent crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural,

cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final catastrophe or a common solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such

profound intra-society and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated . Like a single spacecraft, the

Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies, the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural environment.

Neolib has no concept of intrinsic value – it instrumentalizes the environment which leads to deadzones, topsoil loss, deforestation, overfishing – impact is extinction -- that’s Monia - all external from warming, turn their blackouts scenario because its based on eviro stressors

Environment – 2NC

Neolib undermines the basis for environmental resilience Queally, citing Professor Steffen, 15 (Jon Queally, staff writer, citing Professor Will Steffen, a researcher at the Centre and the Australian National University, Canberra, who conducted a study on this published January 2015“That Was Easy: In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth,” 1-16, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/16/was-easy-just-60-years-neoliberal-capitalism-has-nearly-broken-planet-earth)

Related to the findings of the first study, the second report examines what it calls the "Great Acceleration" and is an assessment of the speed and influence that specific factors have had in damaging the planetary systems described in Planetary Boundaries 2.0. Using a series of indicators, the study compares the

relationship, over time, between 12 'socio-economic factors'—including economic growth (GDP); population; foreign direct investment; energy

consumption; and water use—on one side with 12 'Earth system trends'—like the carbon cycle; the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity—on the other. Using what it calls a "planetary dashboard," the research charts the spread and speed of human activity from the start of the industrial revolution in 1750 to 2010, and the subsequent changes in the Earth System – e.g. greenhouse gas levels, ocean acidification, deforestation and biodiversity deterioration. The analysis found that

increased human activity—and "predominantly the global economic system"—has unseated all other factors as the primary driver of change in the Earth System, which the report describes as "the sum of our planet's interacting physical, chemical, biological and human processes."

The most striking, i.e. "accelerated," changes to that system have occurred in the last sixty years. "It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a geological force at the planetary-scale," said Steffen, who also led the Acceleration study. The

conclusion that the world's dominant economic model—a globalized form of neoliberal capitalism, largely based on international trade and fueled by extracting and

consuming natural resources—is the driving force behind planetary destruction will not come as a shock, but the model's detailed description of how this has worked since the middle of the 20th century makes a more substantial case than many previous attempts. "When we first aggregated these datasets, we expected to see major changes but what surprised us was the timing. Almost all graphs show the same pattern. The most dramatic shifts have occurred since 1950. We can say that around 1950 was the start of the Great Acceleration," says Steffen. "After 1950 we can see that major Earth System changes became directly linked to changes largely related to the global economic system. This is a new phenomenon and indicates that humanity has a new responsibility at a global level for the planet." The paper makes a point to acknowledge that consumption patterns and the rise of what has become known as the Anthropocene Era does not fall equally on the human population and its examination of the economic system which is underpinning planetary destruction is one rife with inequality, in which certain populations consume at vastly higher levels than others. According to the report, "The new study also concludes that the bulk of economic activity, and

so too, for now, the lion's share of consumption, remain largely within the OECD countries, which in 2010 accounted for about 74% of

global GDP but only 18% of the global population. This points to the profound scale of global inequality, which distorts the distribution of the benefits of the Great Acceleration and confounds international efforts, for example climate agreements, to deal with its impacts on the Earth System." A worrying trend, notes the paper, is how a growing global middle class—exemplified by those in the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—is an increasing threat to the planet as the consumer mindset established in the OECD nations, particularly the U.S., spreads. In an interview with the Guardian, Steffen spoke clearly about the

overall impacts of the two new studies as he sounded the alarm over humanity's trajectory. "People say the world is robust and that’s true, there will be life on Earth, but the Earth won’t be robust for us," he said. "Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system , it’s not based on fact . There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s

a problem." "It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then

collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today." What increasing amounts of strong evidence shows, he said, is that

there are "tipping points" the human race should simply not "want to cross."

Neoliberal environmentalism is a contradiction in terms – economizing environmental protection leads to cherry picking which undermines the holism inherent in ecology – the alternative needs to come before the AFF Churchill 14—Ieuan, “Environmentalism in crisis: neoliberal conservation and wilderness romanticism,” International Socialism, Issue 142, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=966&issue=142

The fundamental problems with Juniper’s work relate to his choice of pro-capitalist mechanisms for environmental salvation. It is this, however, that explains why the book received vigorous endorsement from the upper echelons of environmental NGOs such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and plaudits from various corporations including Nestlé. For these admirers, the value of Juniper’s work is that it advocates “pragmatic” solutions to the environmental crisis—

the development of new markets in environmental conservation through partnerships between NGOs, corporations and neoliberal governments. In this respect, Juniper’s work sits alongside that of other previously radical environmentalists such as Tim Flannery8 and Mark Lynas9 who now

argue that the exit from our crisis lies through the corporate world, not against it. Lynas, for example, in his book The God Species, adopts an approach that “does not necessarily imply any limit to human economic growth or productivity… Nor does it necessarily mean ditching capitalism, the profit principle, or the market, as many of today’s campaigners demand”.10 The thread that links all these works, and the emerging trend for neoliberal conservation, stems from a very crude process of abstraction. When practised well,

conservation ecology is inherently dialectical because it is concerned with dynamic change, the historical interplay between humanity and nature, and the

abstraction and recombination of ecological traits and concepts at various levels from the genetic to the landscape. In contrast, those proposing to break down ecological outputs into various anthropocentric “services” threaten to oversimplify the dynamism and holism inherent within ecology. Whatever “service” neoliberal conservationists may choose to promote for the market, they cannot

hide from the fact that these ecological outputs are the product of ecological unity in the round. An ecosystem can produce several “services”—but any attempt to commodify just one or two will subject the ecosystem concerned to the distorting impact of speculative capitalism. In effect, Juniper and others are arguing for the disaggregation of ecosystem functionality—the division of any given ecosystem into its “service” roles in water, food, fuel, cultural and cash provision. In direct contradiction to their acknowledgement of the need for functioning holistic ecology, these

neoliberal environmentalists are on the verge of artificially breaking ecosystems down into tradable “service” units. The assumptions that this can be rationally achieved are based on existing markets in carbon trading, the trading of “wetland credits” in the United States, the UN’s Reducing Emissions from

Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) process, and the new ideas of so-called biodiversity offsetting. All these mechanisms are portrayed as effective despite growing evidence to the contrary , and the fact that they lead to the promotion of fictitious commodities.11 As far back as 1996 David Harvey anticipated today’s particular neoliberal conversion within

environmentalism and warned of the consequences of this final capitulation to the logic of capital: Appeal to monetary valuation [of nature] condemns us, in short, to a world view in which the ecosystem is viewed as an “externality” to be internalised in human action only via some arbitrarily chosen and imposed price structure or regulatory regime.12 Harvey’s prophetic comment is vitally important because it exposes the fundamental contradiction between monetary valuation and ecology. It also helps us to identify the class-bound qualities of emergent neoliberal environmentalism. Thus the ecosystem services agenda can be interpreted as a pretty cynical process of mystification—an ideological narrowing of our dialogue over the nature of Earth’s ecology and its human interactions—that serves the interests of corporations seeking to “green” their image, and the consultants lining up to prove how money can be made from

ecological catastrophe (Tony Juniper is himself an “adviser” in this field).13 The agenda is also inherently anti-democratic. In defining chosen “ecosystem services”

and their qualities, environmentalists and economists will soon start selecting the particular units and functions of ecosystems that represent profitable “services”. The determination of such is taking place with little or no input from those who are actually managing important ecosystems through their livelihoods, or the rest of us who benefit from healthy ecological outputs.

This hands the science of ecology over to an elite whose interests will quickly align themselves with the cementing and continuation of this industry—with its attendant technocrats, markets and dividends. As far as our understanding of ecology is

concerned, the timing couldn’t be worse. Because of capitalism’s devastating ecological impact, and its inherent bias towards reductionist, corporate-sponsored science, it has simply not been possible to ascertain the true nature of ecosystem function. Juniper’s uncritical adoption of a neoliberal “ecosystem service” position will push us even further from this capacity—in stark contrast to the espoused hopes

and desires of today’s conservationists and environmentalists. As a practising conservationist, I would also add that Juniper’s approach is starting to distort our efforts on the ground. Conservation has taken a generation to reach consensus over the fact that emphasis upon the ecosystem is fundamentally correct. But even before we have a chance to consider the implications of this, or to orient our conservation efforts to reflect what we can

glean from ecosystem functionality, the “ecosystem services” agenda threatens to straitjacket us into a paradigm of neoliberal economism through over-simplification and a dash for cash. This genie will be difficult to put back in the bottle. Once ecosystems, their functions and their constituent parts become artificially disaggregated and effectively privatised, they will become subject to the normative pressures of commodity fetishism. Already this approach is redefining nature as merely “natural capital” and organisations such as Environment Bank are pushing new markets in so-called “biodiversity offsetting” as a means of enhancing profits for landowners—confirmation that commodification of ecosystem units and functions lies at the heart of the “ecosystem services” paradigm.14 Furthermore, their historical and cultural significance

to humanity will disappear, rendering their functions subservient to the artificial priorities of speculative capital. This agenda, unchallenged, will compound rather than alleviate our ecological crisi s, and place ecological understanding in the hands of a corporate-sponsored elite —

further widening the ecological rift through dispossession and alienation. In short, it threatens to place environmentalism on the wrong

side of the class struggle.15 The rightward political drift of mainstream environmentalism has been barely acknowledged outside of pretty narrow academic circles.16 We desperately need serious environmentalists to expose the dangerous fallacies embedded within neoliberal ecology, not least because if the supporters of environmental organisations—that now number in their millions—knew of the corporate takeover of their groups they would probably despair. For many, membership of an environmental campaign or conservation group represents a desire for ecological protection from the forces of commodification. As David Harvey has noted: “We have loaded upon nature, often without knowing it, in our science as in our poetry, much of the alternative desire for value to that implied by money”.17

War – 2NC

Liberalism and democracy have increased war – it’s at the same intensity as before WWI – econometric analysis proves Harrison, Economics Professor, 11 (Mark, Department of Economics and CAGE, University of Warwick Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Nikolaus Wolf, Centre for Economic Policy Research, “The Frequency of Wars,” http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/ehr2011postprint.pdf)

The evidence suggests that, normalized by the number of countries in the world, the risk of war is lower today than at the end of the

nineteenth century. Normalized by the number of planets we have to share, however, it is of the same frequency (if not intensity) as during World War I. There has been a steady upward trend in the number of bilateral conflicts over 130 years. Existing explanations of the resort to war in terms of the political incentives facing rulers subject to varying moral and cultural norms and

constitutional arrangements, widespread in modern political science and political economy, are clearly both necessary and productive. We argue that an emphasis on preferences and incentives, which we call the demand side of the decision for war, cannot fully or convincingly explain the aggregate picture. It is necessary also to consider the supply side – the capacity for war. In this sense, we conclude, if the frequency of conflict has been increasing, it may be not because we want it; more likely, it is ‘Because we can’. The rising frequency of bilateral conflicts is reflected right across the global distributions of countries by size and wealth. Wealthier countries have not been responsible for more than their share of military interventions. If their share has risen over time, it is at a rate that is all but imperceptible. Countries that are economically above the median of the economic size distribution have contributed more than their share, but the upward trend of the overall frequency is also present among countries that are smaller (and poorer) than the median. The upward trend may turn out to have been driven by things we would otherwise welcome as global improvements . For example, the hunger for political participation and national self-determination has been satisfied in many troubled regions, and this has led to the formation of new states. The growing number of states is an important explanatory factor in the rising frequency of wars, but this does not make the trend a statistical artifact because the number of states is not exogenous. In modern times just as much as in the Middle Ages, new states have been born amid conflict. The demand for statehood is also a demand for the capacity to engage in national self-determination by force, and each new state has added a focus for potential conflict. With the downfall of empires, moreover, democracy has become more typical – and, with democracy comes improved fiscal capacity. As a result, countries that adopt democracy are likely to be able to raise taxes or borrow more in order to promote national adventures without recourse to domestic repression. With more

borders there is more cross-border trade. Beyond this, moreover, falling trade costs are another modern boon that has allowed many countries to benefit from specialization and increased economic interdependence. Wider markets have in turn increased the scope

for smaller countries to self-insure against asymmetric shocks. A moral hazard that we associate with insurance, however, is that the insured can then engage in risky behavior at lower cost . In the same way, small states that reduce risks through multilateral exchange may become more inclined to risky action in bilateral relations. To complete the picture,

continuously rising global productivity has lowered the costs of production and consumption – and destruction, too. We see lessons for policy and history. In policy terms, democracy is good, but without nation there is no democracy, and nation-building is a double-edged process. Similarly, falling trade costs and wider multilateral exchange have been powerful promoters of economic growth and development, but may also have cheapened war. How can we encourage democracy to spread in ways that don’t offer gains to nation-building adventurists? How can we lock countries into regional or global trade without freeing their hands for confrontational foreign adventures at shorter range? These questions may hold some of the keys to a peaceful twenty-first century. For history, we have identified some unsolved problems in the relationship between economic progress and organized violence, and we have proposed some answers. An underlying issue is that our historical categories and statistics have been limited by the existence of states and their borders. In historical reality, there is a continuum of violence from organized crime through civil conflict to inter-state warfare. As violence flows from one category to another, it drops out of one specialist field and one dataset and pops up in others. There is a unified process to which the formation and destruction of states and state borders is endogenous. This process challenges historians and social scientists to work together to understand it.

Prefer our data – their methods don’t count US led interventions, instigated coups, or civil conflicts caused by neoliberalism as war Herman, Finance Prof @ University of Pennsylvania, 14 (Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, “Reality Denial : Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence,” Global Research, 7-28-14, DOA: 1-23-14, http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066)

As we have noted, Pinker employs the “preferential method” of research, uncritically using sources that support his claims and ideological agenda, and ignoring or criticizing harshly those that take positions incompatible with his. In our favorite example, he often cites John Mueller’s work, but never mentions this same author’s 1999 article with Karl Mueller that claims the UN-U.S. “sanctions of mass destruction” against Iraq were historically unique mass killers of civilians, a strategic silence almost surely determined by the fact that the U.S.

and its democratic allies were the killers.[162] Pinker never mentions Amartya Sen or Jean Drèze, both distinguished scholars whose work often covers ground similar to Pinker’s in Better Angels, again almost surely because Sen and Drèze deal with structural violence under capitalism, do not regard the Mao-era famine in China as a case of deliberate mass killing, and contend that deaths in India under the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation” of its capitalist system greatly exceeded China’s famine deaths. Separately, Sen also stresses the diversity and tradition of tolerance within Islam, as Pinker never does, and writes that the “hard sell of ‘Western liberalism’” notwithstanding, the “valuing of freedom is not confined to one culture only, and the Western traditions are not the only ones that prepare us for a freedom-based approach to social understanding,”[163] Instead, Pinker and his sources focus only on Islam’s backwardness and violent proclivities, and “What went wrong?” There is no index reference to Sen or Drèze in Better Angels, but there are eight indexed references to Rudolf Rummel in Pinker’s book, and four works by Rummel are listed in Pinker’s bibliography, including the website for Rummel’s work at the University of Hawaii. A far-right fanatic, Rummel’s blog, A Freedomist View, rivals that of the Birchers. In the first year of the Obama presidency, Rummel called Obama a “1960’s anti-war, socialist-radical activist” who believes “in love not war,” and he assailed Obama for putting a crimp in the use of torture, thereby “undermining intelligence operations” by the good guys. Rummel also warned that Obama’s plans called for “unnecessarily closing Guantanamo detention camp by January 22, 2010 as a sop to world and domestic leftist opinion”—a fear that has yet to be realized.[164] Rummel even wrote that Obama and his associates were carrying out a coup d’etat in the United States, and he was worried that under leftwing pressure the United States might fail to save Afghanistan, just as the left had forced a regrettable U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam four decades earlier.[165] In what purports to be his scholarly work, Rummel writes that “U.S. democide in [the Vietnam] war is most difficult to calculate,” but finds that “A prudent figure may be 5,500 overall.”[166] In contrast, he estimated that the “communist” government of North Vietnam was responsible for 1,669,000 democidal deaths in the war, or more than 300 times as many as killed by the U.S. war machine. This remarkable pair of claims is based on two factors: Rummel’s requirement that in order for deaths to count as “democide,” the killing of non-combatants must be carried out by agents acting on behalf of a government, with the clear intent to kill members of a targeted population;[167] and Rummel’s own deep ideological belief that whereas communist regimes target and kill non-combatants on a regular and systematic basis, the U.S. government meticulously upholds the laws of war and strives to protect civilians (with the rarest exceptions). Free-fire zones,[168] high-level saturation bombing, destruction of villages in order to “save them,” napalm, cluster bombs, the use of “six times” the tonnage of “bombs and shells” against Vietnam (South and North) than it used during all of World War II (acknowledged by Rummel[169]), and the widespread application of chemical weapons to destroy civilian crops (Operation Ranch Hand), the last causing crippling damage to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese children,[170] fail to resonate with Rummel, for whom it remains an article of faith that the United States did not deliberately harm civilians in the war (and does not as a matter of policy). “[W]hat many…sources label as [U.S.] atrocities or massacres may, by the Geneva Conventions and other accepted rules of warfare, be legitimate military actions or accidents of war,” he counters. Indeed, the “most important fact of this bombing was the scrupulous care with which targets were selected and bombed,” with the United States limiting “attacks to purely military targets….” “Civilians were killed,” he concedes, “but these deaths were collateral to bombing military targets….”[171] These are truths that Rummel accepts for no reason other than that they pertain to his government and to the communist enemy, and possess a kind of self-evident status for him. This is extreme fanaticism masquerading as scholarship. In contrast with Sen and Drèze, Rummel writes that more than 35 million people were “murdered” in the “Chinese Communist Anthill,” and of the famine victims he writes that “27 million starved to death,” every one of them “sacrificed for the most massive, total social engineering projects ever forced on any society in modern history….”[172] But Rummel says what Pinker wants to hear, so while Sen is ignored, Rummel is promoted to serious authority and his numbers are used profusely and uncritically in Better Angels. In a similar fashion, Pinker makes lavish use of the estimates of a contingent of mainly government- and foundation-funded experts devoted, like him, to showing that war has been declining in importance—especially in the more civilized, lighter-skinned parts of the world—and is becoming less harmful even to the darker-skinned peoples in the countries under attack. The claims of these individuals and groups are often as preposterous as Rummel’s—even if they are better at keeping their right-wing biases under wraps. One of Pinker’s major government-funded sources is the Human Security Report Project (HSRP) at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada).[173] HSRP’s Report 2009/2010 advanced many of the global themes reiterated in Better Angels, in particular the decline of interstate wars since the “end of the Cold War” and the development of a new “global security architecture.”[174] It is revealing that HSRP makes only one mention of NATO in its entire report: As one of the “international organizations…[that] have increased the number of their peace operations” during the same years.[175] Like Pinker, HSRP lauds the alleged “democratic peace” that has seen the number of “democracies” double while the number of dictatorships was cut-in-half. HSRP admits that the “democratic peace thesis” has some holes in it, because although “democracies” no longer fight wars among themselves, “they frequently fight nondemocracies.”[176] Never-mind who starts these wars, what real purposes they advance, and whether they are consistent with the UN Charter and international law, their targets are bad guys—“non-democracies,” “rogue states,” “failed states,” “terrorist havens,” and the like. The 50 NATO member and partner states contributing troops and materiel to the U.S. war in Afghanistan as of early 2012[177] were engaged in “counterterrorism,” “peacemaking,” “security,” and “state-” and “democracy-building.” The fact that troops from this many countries were participating in these alleged missions thus cannot be regarded as counter-evidence for the “New Peace” and the “democratic peace,” but rather as support for both of them.[178] The Western Great Powers are good. The development of “Islamic political violence” is a “particular source of disquiet for security planners in the West,” the HSPR adds, as “in 2008 four of the five most deadly conflicts in the world—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia—pitted Islamic insurgents against national governments and their U.S. and other supporters.”[179] Like the “democratic peace,” which remains peaceful even though the “democracies” go right on attacking other countries, the Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani, and Somali theaters remain deadly due to “Islamic political violence,” not due to the attacks by the United States and its allies. Among Pinker’s sources, definitional sleights-of-hand such as these abound. A 2011 paper by the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO) concluded in its comparison of its own work and that carried out by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Sweden (UCDP) that both “datasets agree that the severity of war, as measured by the annual battle deaths,

has decreased over the past twenty years,” and that “it seems evident that war is waning.”[180] But the strength of these claims is exaggerated greatly by the fact that the UCDP and PRIO focus on direct or “battle-related deaths” to the exclusion of deaths that can be far more numerous during wartime, but are not directly related to actual battles.[181] “Direct deaths…conform to our basic intuition of what it means for an agent to be responsible for an effect that it causes,” Pinker argues in defense of this method, “namely that the agent foresees the effect, intends for it to happen, and makes it happen via a chain of events that does not have too many uncontrollable intervening variables.” He continues:[182] The problem with estimating indirect [or non-battle-related] deaths is that it requires us to undertake the philosophical exercise of stimulating in our imagination the possible world in which the war didn’t occur and estimating the number of deaths that took place in that world, which then is used as a baseline. And that requires something close to omniscience….If Saddam Hussein had not been deposed, would he have gone on to kill more political enemies than the number of people who died in the intercommunal violence following his defeat?…Estimating indirect deaths requires answering these sorts of questions in a consistent way for hundreds of conflicts, an impossible undertaking. (299-300) Not only is this a disingenuous argument, and Pinker’s counter-example of Iraq outlandish, but Pinker himself doesn’t believe it, as he and his sources violate it whenever they deal with communist regimes. For these regimes (e.g., Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot), attributing indirect, non-combat-related deaths to a deliberate plan requires no imaginative leap at all—the communists are maximally guilty for all of them, and estimating deaths poses no methodological problems. (See “Communism versus Capitalism,” above.) Like Rummel, the HSRP, UCDP, and PRIO minimize U.S.- and Western-led warmaking and killing . Indeed, so systematic are the UCDP and PRIO labors to this end[183] that they treat the U.S. role in the wars in the Koreas (1950-1953)[184] and Vietnam (1954-1975)[185] as “secondary,” that is, as merely providing support to the governments of South Korea and South Vietnam, even though the U nited States established these governments (in 1945 and 1954), and bore overwhelming responsibility for most of the killing and destruction in the wars. (Also see “’Islamic Violence’,” above, for how the UCDP-PRIO minimizes the U.S. role in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past decade.) In the same dataset, the U.S. overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 is treated as an “internal” armed conflict between the Arbenz government and the “Forces of Carlos Castillo Armas,” with the U.S. role suppressed.[186] The violence generated by the counterinsurgency regimes of Guatemala (1965-1995)[187] and El Salvador (1979-1991)[188] is once again treated as the result of “internal” armed conflicts, with no mention of the crucial U.S. role in arming , training , and supporting these regimes. In Nicaragua, the U.S. role first in supporting the Somoza dictatorship against the Sandinistas rebels (1978-1979) and later in creating and supporting the Contras and the FDN against the Sandinista government (1980-1989) is also suppressed.[189] Many other examples could be added. In contrast, the Soviet role in Hungary (1956)[190] and later Afghanistan (1979)[191] is treated as “primary,” with these armed conflicts classified as “ interstate ,” that is, as occurring between the Soviet Union and Hungary and Afghanistan, with both initiated by acts of cross-border Soviet aggression. It is on the basis of methodologies as politicized as these that the “Long Peace,” the “New Peace,” and the “Democratic Peace” have been constructed . Among Pinker and the rest of the “waning of war” cadre, the imperial role of the United States simply disappears.

To the extent they are right about trade and peace, it only works with social democracies, not through neoliberalism Mousseau, Koc IR professor, 2012(Michael, “A Market-Capitalist or a Democratic Peace?,” in What Do We Know About War, second edition, ed. Vasquez, p. 207-208)

This chapter explored the state of theory and evidence on the capitalist peace and its prospects for explaining the democratic peace. Two kinds of capitalist peace theories were distinguished, the free-market and the social-market, yielding four observable causal

mechanisms: trade, capital openness, and size of private sector as free-market theories, and contract-intensive economy as the social-market theory. Analyses of

these causal mechanisms indicate that the free-market theories are not viable explanations for the democratic peace or the

peace among the advanced industrial nations, primarily because none of them correlate substantially with democracy or developed democracy; they

do not even correlate much with each other. Only the social-market measure of contract-intensive economy correlates moderately with democracy and developed democracy. Application of the theories to the case of the Falklands/ Malvinas War yields similar results: this war appears as

an anomalous case for the trade (Weede 1996) and capital openness (Gartzke et al. 2001) models, while the public sector model (McDonald

2007) identifies Britain as a non-capitalist state; only the social-market model (Mousseau 2000) offers an account for this conflict. Finally, analyses of fatal

militarized interstate disputes from 1961 to 2001 corroborate that the democratic peace is spurious, with contract-intensive economy

the more likely explanation for both democracy and the "democratic" peace. The free-market theories also face problems of internal and external validity. Regarding internal validity, to account for a peace between developed nations, all of these theories

critically assume that free markets cause economic development. Yet the scientific evidence tells us this is not so (Gurr, Jaggers, and Moore 1990). Regarding external validity, for all but the most myopic observers of global affairs it is clear that the peace among the advanced capitalist nations is much more than restraint due to the high cost of killing each other (Weede 1996), fear of each other's resolve (Gartzke et al. 2001), or the credibility in their commitments (McDonald 2007). These theories may be correct, but it is apparent that these nations do more than just tolerate each other; they are friends. This is evident from the fact that whenever a capitalist economy takes a turn for the worse, the other capitalist nations seek to boost it back up, overcoming collective action problems with negotiations enhanced by shared norms of equity and law. The capitalist nations are not better balancers: they do not balance. They do not simply read each other's signals better or send or receive better information: they know that other capitalist nations will never attack them. Indeed, the very image

of war today between France and Germany is comical, yet until they became market capitalist only five decades ago these two nations slaughtered each other with seeming zeal roughly every generation.

Framework

Framework – 2NC

1 Counter-interpretation—the AFF has to defend the plan and its assumptions—this is key to neg ground—if the AFFs starting point is incorrect, we shouldn’t have to debate from it-it decks policy making by beginning from the false premise that the Federal government is the only subject of politics.

2. Focus on the assumptions underpinning the AFF BEFORE the hypothetical benefits of the plan – the law was designed by elites with capital interests in mind, that means its use replicates neoliberal ontologyShantz, Kwantlen Polytechnic University criminology professor, 2013(Jeff, “In Defense of Radicalism”, Radical Criminology, http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc/article/view/34/html).

Anti-radicalism is inherently elitist and anti-democratic. It assumes that everyone, regardless of status, has access to channels of political and economic decision-making, and can participate in meaningful ways to address personal or collective needs. It overlooks the exclusion of vast segments of the population from decisions that most impact their lives and the unequal access to social resources that necessitate, that impel, radical changes. Activists, as well as sociologists and criminologists, must defend radicalism from below as the necessary orientation to struggle against injustice, exploitation, and oppression and for alternative social relations. Actions should be assessed not according to a legal moral framework provided by and reinforced by state capital (for their own benefit). Assessment should be made on real impacts in ending (or hastening the end of) injustice, exploitation, and oppression, on the weakening of state capital. As Martin Luther King suggested, a riot is simply the language of the unheard. Self-righteous moralizing and reference to legal authority, parroting the voices of state capital, is an abdication of social responsibility for activists. For sociologists and

criminologists it is an abandonment of the sociological imagination which in its emphasis on getting to the roots of issues has always been radical (in the non-hegemonic sense). Critical thinkers and actors of all stripes must defend this radicalism. They must become radicals themselves. Debates should focus on the effectiveness of perspectives and practices in getting to the roots of social problems, of uprooting power. They should not center on fidelity to the law or bourgeois morality. They should not be constrained by the lack of imagination of participants or by the sense that the best of all worlds is the world that power has proposed. Again, radicalism is not a tactic, an act, an event. It is not a matter of extremes, in a world that takes horrifying extremes for granted. It is an

orientation to the world. The features of radicalism are determined by, and in, specific contexts. This is the case now in the context of mass mobilizations, even popular uprisings against statist austerity offensives in the service of neoliberal capitalism. Radicalism always threatens to overflow attempts to contain it. It is because it advances understanding-poses social injustice in stark relief-that it is by nature re/productive. It is, in current terms, viral.

3. Logic -- ideology comes first – if the logic that underpins the AFF is problematic than the way it will be deployed will be equally ineffective – their framework is just a way to artificially insulate the AFF from testing which is a conservative tactic.

4. Focusing on the way neoliberalism constitutes subjects that create the conditions for abuse, violence and war is the only way to cause broad sustainable social transformation. Giroux, Ryerson distinguished visiting professor, 2015(Henry, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State”, Cultural Studies, 29.2, Taylor and Francis)

Dissent is crucial to any viable notion of democracy and provides a powerful counterforce to the dystopian imagination that has descended like a plague on American society, but dissent is not enough. In a time of surging authoritarianism, it is crucial for everyone to find the courage to translate critique into the building of popular movements dedicated to making education central to any viable notion of politics. This is a politics that does the difficult work of assembling critical formative cultures by developing alternative media, educational organizations, cultural apparatuses, infrastructures and new sites through which to address both the range of injustices infecting the USA and the forces that reproduce them. The rise of cultures of surveillance along with the defunding of public and higher education, the attack on the welfare state and the militarization of everyday life can be addressed in ways that allow people to see not only how such issues are related to casino capitalism and the racial-security state, but also what it might mean to make such issues meaningful in order to make them critical and transformative. As Charlie Derber (2014) has written, knowing ‘how to express possibilities and convey them authentically and persuasively seems crucially important’ if any viable notion of resistance is to take place. The current regime of surveillance is reinforced through a new mass

sensibility in which people surrender themselves to both the capitalist system and a general belief in its call for security. The corporate–surveillance state does not simply repress subjectivity, but constitutes it through a range of

cultural apparatuses ranging from schools and the mainstream media to the Internet. The primary concern here is the educative nature of politics: that is, what people believe and how their individual and collective dispositions and capacities to be either willing or resistant agents are shaped. As Stanley Aronowitz (2014b) argues, the fundamental question is subjectivity. He writes: The fundamental question is subjectivity. How have the people introjected or resisted domination? What are the fundamental influences on how they become social and political actors? The invocation to rational discourse, however, necessary, is insufficient. What is lacking is an explanation for the absence of a struggle for genuine alternatives to the prevailing set-up, including a debate on why protest and resistance, even when it grips the popular imagination does not lead to a genuine challenge to power. The answer to these questions goes beyond the thesis of mass ignorance. It requires an exploration of subjectivity, a journey that embraces, to be sure, an historical, geographic and political economic analysis, but also requires plumbing the dimensions of depth psychology to the regions of the political and cultural unconscious. (Aronowitz 2014b, p. 44) Nothing will change unless the left and progressives take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the USA. The power of the imagination, dissent and the willingness to hold power accountable constitute a major threat to authoritarian regimes. Snowden's disclosures made clear that the authoritarian state is deeply fearful of those intellectuals, critics, journalists and others who dare to question authority, expose the crimes of corrupt politicians and question the carcinogenic nature of a corporate state that has hijacked democracy. This became even more evident in the insults and patriotic gore heaped on Manning and Snowden. How else to explain the responses to Snowden's initial disclosures about the NSA on the part of both government and intelligence agencies which fixated on ‘a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyber defence sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy’? (Broder and Shane 2013). Joel F. Brenner (qtd. in Broder and Shane 2013), a former inspector general of the NSA, made it very clear that the real challenge Snowden represented was for intelligence agencies to make sure that a generation of young people was not taught to think critically or question authority. As Brenner put it, young people have to ‘adjust to the culture’ – in this case, by working for a national security apparatus that takes over their consciences as well as their brains (qtd. in Broder and Shane 2013). What Brenner made clear was that the corporate–security state provides an honourable place for intellectuals who are willing to live in a culture of conformity, and probably much more to any who endorse a regime that happens to be engaged in a range of illegalities that threaten the foundations of democracy. In this case, as Arthur Koestler (qtd. in Howe 1990) said some years ago, conformity becomes ‘a form of betrayal which can be carried out with a clear conscience’ (p. 29). At the same time, the state imposes its wrath on those who reject subordinating their consciences to the dictates of authoritarian rule.

5. Tautology – their defenses of putting the plan first are self-referential – they presuppose the value of policymaking and therefore say we need to put it first so we can learn how to be better policymakers – their fairness impacts cannot be separated from the ideology served by that concept of fairness because it is never neutral

6. Examining social injury before the law results in better policies – proves the ALT solves AND our framework results in better portable skills than theirs. Michalowski, Northern Arizona criminology professor, 2010(Raymond, Keynote Address: Critical Criminology for a Global Age,” Western Criminology Review 11(1):3-10, http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v11n1/Michalowski.pdf)

Some years ago, I had suggested that a possible alternative to legalist and deviance-based approaches to the critique of domination might be the concept of analogous social injury (Michalowski 1985). Specifically, analogous social injuries are actions that produce “death, injury, financial loss, fear, emotional distress or deprivation of the rights of political participation that arc equivalent or greater in gravity to similar consequences resulting from actions defined as criminal by law” (Michalowski 2007). As a starting point in the conception of our subject matter this approach directs criminologists to actively seek , identify, and analyze social forces that generate individual, collective, and organizational actions whose injurious consequences are equivalent to actions defined as crime by law. It is in this space between accepting and condemning socially injurious actions that states reveal the truth and the contours of domination. Put simply, murder kills people. War kills people. Thus, why nations commit war and who arc its victims ought be at least as central to criminological inquiry as why and whom individuals murder. Similarly, robbery, burglary, and theft use force or guile in ways that make people poorer. Many practices fostered by neo-liberal capitalism also use force or guile to make people poorer (Perkins 2005). Thus, I suggest, it makes little sense, but for the ideology of domination, to claim that robbery , burglary, and theft are legitimate topics of criminological inquiry', but global manipulations of credit, the expropriation of hereditary lands or resources under the guise of development, or mandated “structural adjustments” that impoverish many while benefiting few, are not. John Braithwaitc (1985:18) once suggested that casting such a

broad net is an effort to shape criminological inquiry to fit individual moral preferences. However, I suggest that the concept of analogous social injury docs just the opposite. It substitutes an analytic measure - degree of injury - for the moral and political preferences inherent in all legal systems. Those attempting to begin their inquiry from an analogous social injury standpoint would, of course, face the challenge of making a compelling factual ease that the injuries being studied arc indeed analogous in the gravity of injury to criminal acts. Doing this, in itself, however, would play an important role in expanding the horizons of criminological inquiry. A critical criminology formed around a broad vision of social injury is well suited to the challenge of pursuing social justice in the twenty-first century . The globe has been reshaped into a highly integrated, if fragile, capitalist network, with a class structure arrayed as much across nations as within them. While domination remains to be challenged within the advanced capitalists states, I suggest that the dominion that advanced states exert over those situated lower in the global class structure is an even graver challenge to the ideals of social justice that animate critical criminologies of all flavors. Insofar as many of these injurious actions exist in the “space between laws” created by international structures of dominance and subaltern states , it is imperative that critical criminology transcend legalism and strike out toward a new vision that begins with social injury, not with law. As we reveal the discrepant choices through which political systems tolerate grave harms while aggressively repressing lesser ones , we contribute to peeling back the many layers of ideological construction that normalize domination. While doing so does not automatically provoke justice or limit domination, it does contribute to the formulation of new understandings and new policy options to be tried when and if the political climate surrounding justice policy undergoes significant change .

A2: Policy Relevance

Neoliberalism is what sets the terms for policy relevance – their framework rigs the game in favor of the autonomous subject – critique itself is an alternative because it produces new knowledge that disrupts unequal power relationships – vote neg for the act of criticism itself – any attempt to immediately fold it into the plan dooms its emancipatory potential Wilbert and Hoskyns, Professor of Planning and Professor of Architecture, 4 (Chris, Department of Planning, Anglia Polytechnic University, and Teresa, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, “‘Say Something Constructive or Say Nothing at All’: Being Relevant and Irrelevant in and Beyond the Academy Today,” doa: 12-24-14, http://www.praxis-epress.org/rtcp/cwth.pdf)

As mentioned earlier, concurrent with developments for and against the dominating notions of ‘globalism’, many recent academic articles have called for critical geographers to engage with policy to a much greater extent, arguing that there is an intellectual bias against policy research (along with in-depth empirical work) and that the critical cultural approaches adopted in geography have little practical policy or social relevance at all (Martin 2001). In some cases this may be at least debatable. Yet, we think the attempt to discuss what relevance is here has further problems running through it. One fore-mentioned problem is around what Michael Pacione (1999, xii) argued was a new opportunity for academics to have influence in policy at a time when there is also greater possibility for a socially informed ethic to inform policy formulation. Yet, he also admits that ‘the acceptance and implementation of research findings is dependent upon the state’s ideological stance in relation to the issues under investigation’, implying this is currently more favorable to critical geographers’ influences. In the British government case, as

with many others, this ideological stance has been seen to be one of promoting neoliberalism in both form and intent, though

in more integrative ways than have previously been sought. We would argue such policies deserve to be thoroughly critiqued, challenged and struggled against for what they are doing and what they open on to. Such openings include the wider ways they accommodate power to the market and corporate interests, making possible not only the increasing privatization of public services (including education), but also the re-imposition of work discipline amongst many other factors. But if there is also a temptation to be ‘positive’, and ‘constructive’ in terms of engagement with official policy, there is also

the potential that we can all too easily be always drawn into trying to make such policies less bad, where we accept as legitimate the ground such policy sets out. While we would not dismiss such approaches, we feel that limiting ourselves in such ways takes us again into a realm of potential limitation of what is possible to the ‘new realism’ of neoliberalism. Yet, there are other ways we can think of what could be constructive forms of critique, and many geographers are working to do this. One sense, refers back to the kind of work we mentioned at the beginning which seeks to surpass the activist/academic opposition. For example, this could follow the kind of ‘third space’ approach advocated so well by Routledge (1996). This is obviously strongest when there is strong sympathy with the aims of a particular group, and yet also seeks to engage in what Gunn would term a ‘rigorous conversation’ by means of immanent critique, one which lacks the constraints of methodology therefore allowing no categorical holds to be barred (Gunn 1989, 104-5). But Paul Routledge rightly points to how difficult this can be in the context of the increasing workload faced in universities amongst other factors. Other researchers have also shown how engagement can be undertaken in fieldwork and how activist experience can be used to highlight inadequacies of some theories (Halfacree 1999), as well as how practical changes can be a part of academic work . Such studies show the growing strength of critical geographies, a strength which goes beyond previous radical

geographies, but also reconnects with the spirit of these. But again in our view the many moves towards making academic work policyrelevant carry potential problems. For it seems all too easy to go from what some regard as ‘theoretical narcissism’ to a supposed relevance which leaves behind many of the strengths of some cultural approaches. This point has also been made recently by Anderson and Smith in their call for more emotional geographies, and their questioning of why policy based work is not more interested in post-rationalist ways of thinking and practicing (Anderson and Smith 2001, 7). Moreover, we would suggest there is often a distinction to be made between a critical geography that intervenes and a policy oriented geography which is supposedly relevant. One of the problems with engaging with policy is that the very people who are the subjects of policy are all too easily simply read back into a series of pre-determined categories set by policy makers and their interpreters. In such ways we find that while researchers are mapping what Kitchin and Hubbard

(1999, 195) term the ‘exclusionary landscape’, they often do so from the same situated perspectives as policy makers, failing to see how things may look ‘from below’ in its differing forms. Here a brief example from architecture and planning of the difficulty of engaging with policy can perhaps help provide a little illustration. Public participation has been one of the key factors of the public face of the King’s Cross redevelopment in north London where the new Channel Tunnel Rail link is currently being built, and where large areas of ‘disused’ railway lands are being re-developed (see Deckha 2003 for a recent overview of redevelopment in King’s Cross). The most recent practices of public participation that have taken place here took three forms: meetings, consultation documents and workshops. Through these media it appeared that there was an opportunity to provide a forum for local people to be involved in the decision making concerning the development of the old railway lands. The reality however was that there was again a curious lack of critical politics involved in the policy and implementation of participation. Moreover, voices of resistance to the development of the area have been systematically sidelined, co-opted, or physically removed from the area. It could be argued that decisions had already been made by business and local planning authorities and that participation was about ‘manufacturing consent’. For example, recent consultation documents, which were heralded by the main developers (Argent St. George) as highly innovative took the form of framed questions in multiple choice format that looked visually impressive, but highly constrained possible responses, which in any case were to have no binding impact upon decision-making. Parallel with the King’s Cross redevelopment, participatory workshops were run by the London based Architecture Foundation in developing new methodologies of participation with different groups of local people also in the King’s Cross area of north London. Whilst some of these approaches were genuinely innovative, we found that meetings had been set up with groups of ‘old people’, ‘black women’,

‘children under 10’, and other seemingly ‘social’ categories. On the one hand this could be seen to be ‘inclusive’, as it sought to give a voice to some groups that may be deemed to often be ‘excluded’, on the other such divisions seemed somewhat limited and contrived (see Deckha 2003, 51). We think these categories were partly drawn because they seemed to be ‘relevant’, but also because group members could easily be identified. But not only did this socially divide people according to very questionable categories (such as leisure categories being taken to represent everyday life, or by ‘ethnic’ grouping) which presupposed shared interests in such groups, but not across them, it also denied more political subjectivities by dividing local people in such ways. One way of reading this situation would be that this could have been a deliberate attempt to deny multiple, and cross-generational, or class based senses of identities and connections. More likely, of course, it was a lack of critical thinking in approach to policy – in this

case a European wide policy focused on encouraging participation in urban policy. We would argue that this lack of critical practice is symptomatic of many architectural and planning based approaches to participation and policy, perhaps a situation that many critical geographers would think they would not find themselves in, but which can all to easily be produced when working with other partners. There are numerous other examples which we could relate here of supposed attempts at participation of local communities through policies such as Single Regeneration Budgets or New Deal for Communities, schemes which have involved academics who have failed or been unwilling to question basic policies, or even to define what participation might be, beyond some vague sense of ‘acting’, ‘involvement’ or ‘awareness’. That is, participation of local people has tended to be viewed as being about people acting as agents in urban design, regeneration or development, or else being passive, often without analysing these constructions adequately (see Turner and Michael 1996). Yet, there is another sense of course about such local people being enacted, through all kinds of processes and mediations which are often not part of the action that local people are allowed, or can get, into. These are problems that a critical sense of policy and practice need increasingly to be attuned to. Here we want to reiterate the point that we are not against policy focused geography per se. We do however object to continued sterile brandishing of the term relevance in ways that to us seem narrow, exclusionary and morally judgmental without being reflexive about the situatedness of such judgements. We would like to dispose of the notion of relevance, it being a fairly redundant discourse and an increasingly closed off spurious debate. We also find that, often because of increased work pressures or constraints placed on funding, policy related research can lack a critical edge. That is that the critical work of the academy can be ‘accidentally lost’ in the process of engagement with policy. Perhaps this just makes life simpler, or maybe it is just too hard a struggle working with other agencies continually limiting

possibilities set against the aforementioned restrictions of academic labour. But we argue it is too easy for critique to become left out of policy work, and even to be rendered ‘illegitimate’ within policy networks. Academics do not just have to get more involved in mainstream policy ‘relevant’ oriented work to be doing meaningful work ‘beyond the academy’ today. Geographer’s involvement in political work in social movements such as the anti-globalisation movements amongst others, show great possibilities for working beyond, within and across education sectors more generally. French geographers in particular seem to be setting an agenda here. We might want to say such engagements are equally as ‘relevant’ as other policy work, but that would kind of miss the point.

A2: Util Good

Impossible to maintain democratic accountability in a world of util. Sales, Syracuse law professor, 2014(Nathan, “NSA SURVEILLANCE: ISSUES OF SECURITY, PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTY: ARTICLE: Domesticating Programmatic Surveillance: Some Thoughts on the NSA Controversy”, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, Summer, lexis)

Anti-unilateralism is important for several reasons. To take the most obvious, Congress and the courts can help prevent executive overreach. n48 The risk of abuse is lessened if the executive branch must enlist its partners before commencing a new surveillance initiative.

Congress might decline to permit bulk collection in circumstances where it concludes that ordinary, individualized monitoring would suffice, or it might authorize programmatic surveillance subject to various privacy protections. In addition, inviting many voices to the decision-making table increases the probability of sound outcomes. More

participants with diverse perspectives can also help mitigate the groupthink tendencies to which the executive branch is sometimes [*534] subject. n49 If we're going to engage in programmatic surveillance, it should be the result of give and take among all three branches of the federal government, or at least between its two political branches, not the result of executive edict.

Alternative

Solvency – 2NC

Vote negative—only systemic critique solves the root cause of their advantagesHogeveen and Woolford 6—Bryan, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, and Andrew, Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba “Critical Criminology and Possibility in the Neo-liberal Ethos,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Volume 48, Number 5, September/Septembre 2006, pp. 681-701

Our argument should not be taken as fodder for criminologists who wish to sidestep "the political." We believe that today there is an enormous amount to do in all domains where alterity is (r)ejected and the powerful dispossess the marginalized in full face of the law (indeed, employing law to this end). It is in relation to this call of the other, or the dispossessed and downtrodden - those ravaged by the neo-liberal ethos - that calls to "justice" and for responsibility emerge. However, we do not offer an ontological substitute but counter that the possibilities of alternatives should remain open, even as "(they remain] empty, living on borrowed time, awaiting the content to fill [them] in" (Zizek 2000: 324). But our purposeful refusal to advance an a priori replacement or to utter the name of "the" universal subject of humanity who will liberate the totality should not be confused with a loss of nerve. Ours is a radical proposal - especially in criminological circles. What has been taken and understood as critical engagement - particularly as it relates to politics and its supporting ideologies - has been concerned with a priori rejection of all things present and ancient, such that new dogmas may take their place (Kristeva 1999).Interventions must develop in context, rather than approaching a particular (political) problem with a ready-made grid of intelligibility to lay over it and through which to judge its ultimate success (or failure?). To do otherwise holds the distinct possibility of legitimizing all manner of calamity and oppression in the name of the revolution or the spirit of the times. Merleau-Ponty's (1946) “wager," for example, seems to suggest Stalin's show trials were defensible in light of the greater good of revolutionary ends. If not legitimizing calamity, we can certainly question upon which “universal" sensibility foundations, criteria, and judgements are founded (Pavlich 2001a). Emancipatory gestures predicated upon revolutionizing the present in accordance with axiomatic idioms are negations that contain the trace of the present and threaten to swallow the drive to be otherwise whole. That is, such and such proposals are created out of the cloth of "the what is." The present becomes the muse and the spectre of the revolution. Instead of breaking beyond the present, reactive policy is forever fettered to it.Instead of employing one or another yardstick to judge the success and failure of critical moments, it is necessary to affirm and denounce the world as it is - "not to weigh out as best one can equal amounts of submission and revolt, and always end up halfway between reform and accommodation, but to wake the world into place" (Nancy 1997: 158). That is, to manifest an art of critique that involves destabilizing seemingly well-anchored relations into new patterns of being that do not pander to established social logics or rely upon reactive judgements. Taken thus, criminology would multiply, not judgements about existing policy, programs, institutions, or societal structures, but logics of being ; "it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invert them sometimes - all the better" (Foucault 1997: 323). Indeed, one could conceive a criminal justice beyond criminal justice, without recourse to law(yers), institutionalization, probation, and so on, which would take social harm , incivility, and environmental destruction to task without affirming its absolute certitude. This world would never remain still but would be perpetually (re)opened to its own aporias, irrationalities, and internal contradictions.Achievements that accrue from political engagement should never be considered fait accompli, such that the criminologist can sit back and admire her or his work. There is much to do. The outcomes of complacency are evident in the discourse of multiculturalism. Canada's version may seem, on first reading, an opening to the "other" that welcomes and offers hospitality. But, as Nandana Dutta (2004) argues, this position permits complacency and smugness to creep into our relations with the other. That is, with the Multiculturalism Act in tow, Canada as a country is a priori immune from claims of racism and intolerance. In other words,multiculturalism is finally reducible to a bland “rights-for-all" or a “live and let live" state that is quite immune to the other because, instead of celebrating difference and inviting a minutely calibrated response, it simply tolerates it. (Dutta 2004: 439)Multiculturalism is, then, an alibi for the continued inequalities between dominant and other. We are in no way negating the emancipatory effects of "multiculturalism" and its corresponding ontic, but we are making the point that every emancipatory step must be followed by reflexivity and further emancipatory movement. As it stands, the Multiculturalism Act promises that "every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination ... and guarantees those rights and freedoms equally to male and female persons" (Preamble). However, spending an hour in docket court or in your local remand centre will put an end to any illusion of tolerance and respect for/of the other heralded by the act. Quite simply, some groups are more equal than "others."As a result, we can never fully be aware in advance what is to be accomplished and to what ends, but the logic of intervention and investigation never closes off dialogue, debate, and critique. Rather, "each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret the very foundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited" (Derrida 1997:62). This mode of analysis permits us to think the political and think emancipation by granting space - even if it is cramped - to manoeuvre beyond the symbolic and hegemonic. But what will become of the criminal-justice field or of multiculturalism - even if they remain tied to these signs - is not something we can know in advance, and we can no longer be lulled into believing that we can predict or command the movement of the carnivorous beast. We can, however, act and intervene

in a way that allows for the possibility of some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract buttressing the established order, which, in effect, will disrupt the peaceful (symbolic) order of things.Efforts should not be directed solely toward fighting politically correct battles for inclusion that, while important in their own right, in effect maintain the foundational ontology of the neo-liberal order. Capital is expanding with increasing ruthlessness, leaving poverty, racism, homelessness, and general social misery in its wake. Attending to the latter while neglecting the former's complicity in fostering conditions ripe for the spread of the vilest oppression diverts our attention. Thus, intervention should not fall into the trap of conceiving of programs that work well within the current ethos (Zizek 1999). Rather, it is imperative to extend critique and thought beyond current ontological limits into the open spaces beyond criminal justice, law, and multiculturalism, using irrationality and contradictions as chaperon and source of urgency. We are certain that today's criminal justice is spawning new and potentially more explosive contradictions. A long series of facts comes immediately to mind, including, but not limited to, the gross over-representation of Aboriginal peoples in the system, the almost exclusive targeting of the poorest segments of the population by the state's policing arm, and the eerie absence of the most powerful from the courtroom - other than as officials whose main purpose it is to adjudicate and pass judgement upon the marginalized. The contradictions of criminal justice overflow the levies constructed to lend it the appearance of propriety, justice, fairness, blindness, and inevitability. The criminal-justice field is none of these things. It is in this realization that a criminology of possibility intervenes , unveiling the irrationalities and contradictions of the system in order to disrupt ontology and rethink the possibility of justice beyond what is.

The question of your relation to legal methodology is more important than legalist reforms themselvesGlennon, Tufts international law professor, 2014(Michael, “National Security and Double Government”, Harvard National Security Journal, http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf)

V. Is Reform Possible? Checks, Smoke, and Mirrors Madison, as noted at the outset,543 believed that a constitution must not only set up a government that can control and protect the people, but, equally importantly, must protect the people from the government.544 Madison thus anticipated the enduring tradeoff: the lesser the threat from government, the lesser its capacity to protect

against threats; the greater the government’s capacity to protect against threats, the greater the threat from the government. Recognition of the dystopic implications of

double government focuses the mind, naturally, on possible legalist cures to the threats that double government presents. Potential remedies fall generally into two categories. First, strengthen systemic checks, either by reviving Madisonian institutions—by tweaking them about the edges to enhance their vitality— or by establishing restraints directly within

the Trumanite network. Second, cultivate civic virtue within the electorate. A. Strengthening Systemic Checks The first set of potential remedies aspires to tone up Madisonian muscles one by one with ad hoc legislative and judicial reforms, by, say, narrowing the scope of the state secrets privilege; permitting the recipients of national security letters at least to make their receipt public; broadening standing requirements; improving congressional oversight of covert operations, including drone killings and cyber operations; or strengthening statutory constraints like FISA545

and the War Powers Resolution.546 Law reviews brim with such proposals. But their stopgap approach has been tried repeatedly since the Trumanite network’s emergence. Its futility is now glaring. Why such efforts would be any more fruitful in the future is hard to understand. The

Trumanites are committed to the rule of law and their sincerity is not in doubt, but the rule of law to which they are committed is largely devoid of meaningful constraints.547 Continued focus on legalist band-aids merely buttresses the illusion that the Madisonian institutions are alive and well—and with that illusion, an entire narrative premised on the assumption that it is merely a matter of identifying a solution and looking to the Madisonian institutions to effect it. That frame deflects attention from the underlying malady. What is needed, if Bagehot’s theory is correct, is a fundamental change in the very discourse within which U.S. national security policy is made. For the question is no longer: What should the government do? The questions now are: What should be done about the government? What can be done about the government? What are the responsibilities not of the government but of the people? A second approach would inject legal limits directly into the

Trumanites’ operational core by, for example, setting up de facto judges within the network, or at least lawyers able to issue binding legal

opinions, before certain initiatives could be undertaken.548 Another proposed reform would attempt to foster intra-network competition among the Trumanites by creating Madisonian-like checks and balances that operate directly within the Trumanite network.549 The difficulty with these and similar ideas is

that the checks they propose would merely replicate and relocate failed Madisonian institutions without controlling the forces that led to the hollowing-out of the real Madisonian institutions. There is scant reason to believe that pseudo-Madisonian checks would fare any better. Why would the Trumanite network, driven as it is to maintain and strengthen its autonomy, subject itself behind the scenes to internal Madisonian constraints any more readily than it publicly has subjected itself to external Madisonian constraints? Why, in Bagehot’s terms, would the newly established intra-Trumanite institutions not become, in effect, a new, third institutional layer that further disguises where the real power lies? Indeed, intra-Trumanite checks have already been tried. When questions arose as to whether Justice Department lawyers inappropriately authorized and oversaw warrantless electronic surveillance in 2006, its Office of Professional Responsibility commenced an investigation—until its investigators were denied the necessary security clearances, blocking the inquiry.550 The FBI traditionally undertakes an internal investigation when an FBI agent is engaged in a serious shooting; “from 1993 to early 2011, FBI agents fatally shot about seventy ‘subjects’ and wounded about eighty others—and every one of those [shootings] was justified,” its inspectors found.551 Following the NSA surveillance disclosures, President Obama announced the creation of an independent panel to ensure that civil liberties were being respected and to restore public confidence—a panel, it turned out, that operated as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA.552 Inspectors general were set up within federal departments and agencies in 1978 as safeguards against waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality,553 but the positions have remained vacant for years in some of the government’s largest cabinet agencies, including the departments of Defense, State, Interior, and Homeland Security.554 The best that can be said of these inspectors general is that, despite the best of intentions, they had no authority to overrule, let alone penalize, anyone. The worst is that they were trusted Trumanites who snored through everything from illegal surveillance to arms sales to the Nicaraguan contras to Abu Ghraib to the waterboarding of suspected terrorists. To look to Trumanite inspectors general as a reliable check on unaccountable power would represent the ultimate triumph of hope over experience. “Blue-ribbon” executive commissions also have been established, but they have done little to check the power of the Trumanite network. Following disclosures of illegal CIA domestic surveillance by the New York Times,555 President Ford created a commission within the Executive Branch to, as he put it, “[a]scertain and evaluate any facts relating to activities conducted within the United States by the Central Intelligence Agency which give rise to questions of

compliance with the” law.556 Vice President Nelson Rockefeller headed the commission.557 Rockefeller’s driving resolve to “ascertain and evaluate” was disclosed in a confidential comment to William Colby, then Director of Central Intelligence, that Colby recalled in his memoirs. “Bill,” Rockefeller asked him privately, “do you really have to present all this material to us?” 558 He continued: “We realize that there are secrets that you fellows need to keep and so nobody here is going to take it amiss if you feel that there are some questions that you can’t answer quite as fully as you feel you have to.”559 The Commission’s report said nothing about the CIA’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, though it did reaffirm the findings of the Warren Commission.560 A third

internal “check,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, subsists formally outside the executive branch but for all practical purposes might as well be within it; as noted earlier, it approved 99.9% of all warrant requests between 1979 and 2011.561 In 2013, it approved the NSA collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, none of whom had been accused of any crime.562 An authentic check is one thing; smoke and mirrors are

something else. The first difficulty with such proposed checks on the Trumanite network is circularity; all rely upon Madisonian

institutions to restore power to Madisonian institutions by exercising the very power that Madisonian institutions lack. All assume that the Madisonian institutions, in which all reform proposals must necessarily originate, can somehow magically impose those reforms upon the Trumanite network or that the network will somehow merrily acquiesce. All suppose that the forces that gave rise to the Trumanite network can simply be ignored. All assume, at bottom, that Madison’s scheme can be made to work—that an equilibrium of power can be achieved—without regard

to the electorate’s fitness. Yet Madison’s theory, again,563 presupposed the existence of a body politic possessed of civic virtue. It is the personal ambition only of officeholders who are chosen by a virtuous electorate that can be expected to translate into institutional ambition. It is legislators so chosen, Madison believed, who could be counted upon to resist encroachments on, say, Congress’s power to approve war or treaties because a diminution of Congress’s power implied a diminution of their own individual power. Absent a virtuous

electorate, personal ambition and institutional ambition no longer are coextensive. Members’ principal ambition564 then becomes political survival, which means accepting, not resisting, Trumanite encroachments on congressional power. The Trumanites’ principal ambition, meanwhile, remains the same: to broaden their ever-insufficient

“flexibility” to deal with unforeseen threats—that is, to enhance their own power. The net effect is imbalance, not balance. This imbalance has suffused the development of U.S. counterterrorism policy. Trumanites express concerns about convergence, about potentially dangerous link-ups among narco-terrorists, cyber-

criminals, human traffickers, weapons traders, and hostile governments.565 Yet their concerns focus largely, if not entirely, on only one side of Madison’s ledger —the

government’s need to protect the people from threats—and little, if at all, on the other side: the need to protect the people from the government. As a result, the discourse, dominated as it is by the Trumanites, emphasizes potential threats and deemphasizes tradeoffs that must be accepted to meet those threats. The Madisonians themselves are not troubled about new linkages forged among the newly-created components of military, intelligence, homeland security, and law enforcement agencies—linkages that together threaten civil liberties and personal freedom in ways never before seen in the United States. The earlier “stovepiping” of those agencies was seen as contributing to the unpreparedness that led to the September 11 attacks,566 and after the wearying creation of the Department of Homeland Security and related reorganizations, the Madisonians have little stomach for re-drawing box charts yet again. And so the cogs of the national security apparatus continue to tighten while the scaffolding of the Madisonian institutions continues to erode. It is no answer to insist that, whatever the system’s faults, the Madisonian accountability mechanisms have at least generated a political consensus.567 Even if consensus exists among the Madisonians themselves, the existence of a public consensus on national security policy is at best doubtful.568 Further, if the application of Bagehot’s theory to U.S. national security policy is correct, whatever consensus does exist at the political level is synthetic in that it derives not from

contestation among the three branches of the federal government but from efforts of the Madisonian institutions to remain in sync with the Trumanite network. That network is the moving force behind any consensus. It has forged the policies that the consensus supports; it has orchestrated Madisonian support. Finally, even if real, the existence of a Madisonian/Trumanite consensus says nothing about the content of the consensus—nothing about whether Madison’s second great goal of protecting the people from the government has been vindicated or defeated. Autocracy can be consensus-based. The notion of a benign modern-day consensus on national security policy is, indeed, reminiscent of the observation of Richard Betts and Leslie Gelb who, reviewing

agreements that emerged from national security deliberations during the Johnson Administration, concluded that “the system worked.”569 Well, perhaps; the result was Vietnam. The second difficulty with legal and public-opinion based checks on the Trumanite network is the assumption in Madison’s theory that the three

competing branches act independently. “[I]t is evident that each department should have a will of its own,” says The Federalist.570 This is achieved by ensuring that each is “so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others.”571 Different policy preferences will obtain because the three Madisonian branches will act upon different motives. But when it counts, the branches do not. Each branch has the same ultimate incentive: to bring its public posture into sync with the private posture of the Trumanites.572 The net effect is “balance,” after a fashion, in the sense that the end result is outward harmony of a sort easily mistaken for Madisonian-induced equipoise. But the balance is not an equilibrium that results from competition for power among three branches struggling “for the privilege of conducting American foreign policy,” as Edward S. Corwin memorably put it.573 The “system” that produces this ersatz consensus is a symbiotic tripartite co-dependence in which the three Madisonian branches fall over themselves to keep up with the Trumanites. The ostensible balance is artificial; it reflects a juridical legerdemain created and nurtured by the Trumanite network, which shares, defends, and begins with the same static assumptions. Bagehot relates the confidential advice of Lord Melbourne to the English Cabinet: “It is not much matter which we say, but mind, we must all say the same.”574 The Madisonian institutions and the Trumanite network honor the same counsel. There is a third, more fundamental, more worrisome reason why the Madisonian institutions have been eclipsed, as noted earlier in this Article.575 It is the same reason that repairs of the sort enumerated above likely will not endure. And it is not a reason that can be entirely laid at the feet of the Trumanites. It is a reason that goes to the heartbeat of democratic institutions. The reason is that Madisonian institutions rest upon a foundation that has proven unreliable: a general public possessed of civic virtue. Civic virtue, in Madison’s view, required acting for the public interest rather than one’s private interest.576 Madison, realist that he was, recognized that deal-making and self-interest would permeate

government; this could be kept in check in part by clever institutional design, with “ambition . . . to counteract ambition”577 among governmental actors to maintain a power equilibrium. But no such institutional backup is available if the general public itself lacks civic virtue—meaning the capacity to participate intelligently in self-government and to elect officials who are themselves virtuous.578 Indeed, civic virtue is thus even more important,579 Madison believed, for the public at large than for public officials; institutional checks are necessary but not sufficient. Ultimately, the most important check on public officials is, as Madison put it, “virtue and intelligence in the community . . . .”580 Institutional constraints are necessary but not sufficient for the survival of liberty, Madison believed; they cannot be relied upon absent a body politic possessed of civic virtue.581 Madison was not alone in this belief, though other leading political theorists have since put it differently. Minimal levels of economic wellbeing, education, and political intelligence,582 Bagehot believed, are essential conditions for the universal franchise and “ultra-democracy,” as he called it, that has come to exist in the United States.583 Lord Bryce observed that “[t]he student of institutions as well as the

lawyer is apt to overrate the effect of mechanical contrivances in politics.”584 The various repairs that have been proposed—and, ultimately, the very

Madisonian institutions themselves—are in the end mechanical contrivances. Whatever their elegance, these “parchment barriers,” as Madison described laws that stand alone,585 cannot compensate for a want of civic virtue. Bagehot concurred: “No polity can get out of a nation more than there is in the nation . . . .” “[W]e must first improve the English nation,” he believed, if we expect to improve Parliament’s handiwork.586 This insight was widely shared among 19th-century English constitutionalists. John Stuart Mill (whose work on the English Constitution was published shortly before Bagehot’s) shared Bagehot’s and Bryce’s doubts about the ultimate impotence of free-standing legal rules. “In politics as in mechanics,” Mill wrote, “the power which is to keep the engine going must be sought for outside the machinery; and if it is not forthcoming, or is insufficient to surmount the obstacles which may reasonably be expected, the confidence will fail.”587 The force of these insights was not lost on prominent American jurists. Learned Hand wrote that “[l]iberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”588

Rejection is more than shallow negativity—refusing their terms of discussion by interrupting that legal discourse is key to un-cede the politicalCalkivik, Minnesota political science PhD, 2010

(Emine Asli, “Dismantling Security”, http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/99479/1/Calkivik_umn_0130E_11576.pdf)

It is this self-evidence of security even for critical approaches and the antinomy stemming from dissident voices reproducing the language of those they dissent from that constitutes the starting point for this chapter, where I elaborate

on the meaning of dismantling security as untimely critique. As mentioned in the vignette in the opening section, the suggestion to dismantle security was itself deemed as an

untimely pursuit in a world where lives of millions were rendered brutally insecure by poverty, violence, disease, and

ongoing political conflicts. Colored by the tone of a call to conscience in the face of the ongoing crisis of security, it was not the time, interlocutors argued, for self-indulgent critique. I will argue that it is the element of being untimely, the effort, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “to brush history against the grain” that gives critical thinking its power.291 It might appear as a trivial discussion to bring up the relation between time and critique because conceptions of critical thinking in the discipline of International Relations already possess the notion that critical

thought needs to be untimely. In the first section, I will tease out what this notion of untimeliness entails by visiting ongoing conversations within the discipline about critical thought and political time. Through this discussion, I hope to clarify what sets apart dismantling security as untimely critique from the notion of untimeliness at work in critical international relations theory. The latter conception of the untimely, I will suggest, paradoxically

calls on critical thought to be “on time” in that it champions a particular understanding of what it means for critical scholarship to be relevant and responsible for its times. This notion of the untimely demands that critique be strategic and respond to political exigency, that it provide answers in this light instead of raising more questions about which questions could be raised or what presuppositions underlie the questions that are deemed to be waiting for answers. After elaborating in the first section such strategic conceptions of the untimeliness of critical theorizing, in the second section I will turn to a different sense of the untimely by drawing upon Wendy Brown’s discussion of the relation between critique, crisis, and political time through her reading of Benjamin’s “Theses

on the Philosophy of History.”292 In contrast to a notion of untimeliness that demands strategic thinking and punctuality, Brown’s exegesis provides a conception of historical materialism where critique is figured as a force of disruption, a form of intervention that reconfigures the meaning of the times and “contest[s] the very senses of time invoked to declare critique ‘untimely’.”293 Her exposition overturns the view of critique as a self-indulgent practice as it highlights

the immediately political nature of critique and reconfigures the meaning of what it means for critical thought to be relevant.294 It is in this sense of the untimely, I will suggest, that dismantling security as a critique hopes to recover. I should point out that in this discussion my intention is neither to construct a theory of critique nor to provide an exhaustive review and evaluation of the forms of critical theorizing in International Relations. Rather, my aim is to contribute to the existing efforts that engage with the question of what it means to be critical apart from drawing the epistemological and methodological boundaries so as to think about how one is critical.295 While I do not deny the importance of epistemological questions, I contend that taking time to think about the meaning of critique beyond these issues presents itself as an important task. This task takes on additional importance within the context of security studies where any realm of investigation quickly begets its critical counterpart. The rapid emergence and institutionalization of critical terrorism studies when studies on terrorism were proliferating under the auspices of the so-called Global War on Terror provides a striking example to this trend. 296 Such instances are important reminders that, to the extent that epistemology and methodology are reified as the sole concerns in defining and assessing critical thinking297 or “wrong headed refusals”298 to get on with positive projects and empirical research gets branded as debilitating for critical projects, what is erased from sight is the political nature of the questions asked and what is lost is the chance to reflect upon what it means for critical thinking to respond to its times. In his meditation on the meaning of responding and the sense of responsibility entailed by writing, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that “all writing is ‘committed.’” 299 This notion of commitment diverges from the programmatic sense of committed writing. What underlies this conception is an understanding of

writing as responding: writing is a response to the voice of an other.In Nancy’s words, “[w]hoever writes responds” 300 and “makes himself responsible to in the absolute sense.”301 Suggesting that there is always an ethical commitment prior to any particular political commitment, such a notion of writing contests the notion of creative autonomy premised on the idea of a free, self-legislating subject who responds. In other words, it discredits the idea of an original voice by suggesting that there is no voice that is not a response to a prior response. Hence, to respond is configured as responding to an expectation rather than as an answer to a question and responsibility is cast as an “anticipated response to questions, to demands, to still-unformulated, not exactly predictable expectations.”302 Echoing Nancy, David Campbell makes

an important reminder as he suggests that as international relations scholars “we are always already engaged,” although the sites, mechanisms and quality of engagements might vary.303 The question, then, is not whether as scholars we are engaged or not, but what the nature of this engagement is. Such a re-framing of the question is intended to highlight the political nature of all interpretation and the importance of developing an “ethos of political criticism that is concerned with assumptions, limits,

their historical production, social and political effects, and the possibility of going beyond them in thought and action.”304 Taking as its object assumptions and limits, their historical production and social and political effects places the relevancy of critical thought and responsibility of critical scholarship on new ground. It is this ethos of critique that dismantling security hopes to recover for a discipline where security operates as the foundational principle and where critical thinking keeps on contributing to security’s impressing itself as a self-evident condition. Critical Theory and Punctuality Within the context of International Relations, critical thought’s orientation toward its time comes out strongly in Kimberley Hutchings’s formulation.305 According to Hutchings, no matter what form it takes, what distinguishes critical international relations theory from other forms of theorizing is “its orientation towards change and the possibility of futures that do not reproduce the hegemonic power of the present.”306 What this implies about the nature of critical thought is that it needs to be not only diagnostic, but also self-reflexive. In the words of Hutchings, “all critical theories lay claim to some kind of account not only of the present of international politics and its relation to possible futures, but also of the role of critical theory in the present and future in international politics.” 307 Not only analyzing the present, but also introducing the question of the future into analysis places political time at the center of critical enterprise and makes the problem of change a core concern. It is this question of change that situates different forms of critical thinking on a shared ground since they all attempt to expose the way in which what is presented as given and natural is historically produced and hence open to change. With their orientation to change, their efforts to go against the dominant currents and challenge the hegemony of existing power relations by showing how contemporary practices and discourses contribute to the perpetuation of structures of power and domination, critical theorists in general and critical security studies specialists in particular take on an untimely endeavor. It is this understanding of the untimely aspect of critical thinking that is emphasized by Mark Neufeld, who regards the development of critical approaches to security as “one of the more hopeful intellectual developments in recent years.”308 Despite nurturing from different theoretical traditions and therefore harboring “fundamental differences between modernist and postmodernist commitments,” writes Neufeld, scholars who are involved in the critical project nevertheless “share a common

concern with calling into question ‘prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized.’” 309 The desire for change—through being untimely and making the way to

alternative futures that would no longer resemble the present—have led some scholars to emphasize the utopian element that must accompany all

critical thinking. Quoting Oscar Wilde’s aphorism—a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, Ken Booth argues for the need to restore the role and reputation of utopianism in the theory and practice of international politics. 310 According to Booth, what goes under the banner of realism—“ethnocentric self-interest writ large”311 — falls far beyond the realities of a drastically changed world political landscape at the end of the Cold War. He describes the new reality as “an egg-box containing the shells of sovereignty; but alongside it a global community omelette [sic] is cooking.”312 Rather than insisting on the inescapability of war in the international system as political realists argue, Booth argues for the need and possibility to work toward the utopia of overcoming the condition of war by banking on the opportunities provided by a globalizing world. The point that critical thought needs to be untimely by going against its time is also emphasized by Dunne and Wheeler, who assert that, regardless of the form it

takes, “critical theory purport[s] to ‘think against’ the prevailing current” and that “[c]ritical security studies is no exception” to this enterprise.313 According to the authors, the function of critical approaches to security is to problematize what is taken for granted in the disciplinary production of knowledge about security by “ resist[ing], transcend[ing] and defeat[ing] … theories of

security, which take for granted who is to be secured (the state), how security is to be achieved (by defending core ‘national’ values, forcibly if necessary) and from whom security is needed (the enemy).”314 While critical theory in this way is figured as untimely, I want to suggest that this notion of untimeliness gets construed paradoxically in a quite timely fashion. With a perceived disjuncture between writing the world from within a discipline and acting in it placed at the center of the debates, the performance of critical thought gets evaluated to the extent that it is punctual and in synch with the times. Does critical thought provide concrete guidance and prescribe what is to be done? Can it move beyond mere talk and make timely political interventions by providing solutions? Does it have answers to the strategic questions of progressive movements? Demanding that critical theorizing come clean in the court of these questions, such conceptions of the untimely demand that critique respond to its times in a responsible way, where being responsible is understood in stark contrast to a notion of responding and responsibility that I briefly discussed in the introductory pages of this chapter (through the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and David Campbell). Let me visit two recent conversations ensuing from the declarations of the contemporary crisis of critical theorizing in order to clarify what I mean by a timely understanding of untimely critique. The first conversation was published as a special issue in the Review of International Studies (RIS), one of the major journals of the field. Prominent figures took the 25th anniversary of the journal’s publication of two key texts—regarded as canonical for the launching and development of critical theorizing in International Relations—as an opportunity to reflect upon and assess the impact of critical theory in the discipline and interrogate what its future might be. 315 The texts in question, which are depicted as having shaken the premises of the static world of the discipline, are Robert Cox’s 1981 essay entitled on “Social Forces, States, and World Orders”316 and Richard Ashley’s article, “Political Realism and Human Interests.”317 In their introductory essay to the issue, Rengger and Thirkell-White suggest that the essays by Cox and Ashley—followed by Andrew Linklater’s Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations318 —represent “the breach in the dyke” of the three dominant discourses in International Relations (i.e., positivists, English School, and Marxism), unleashing “a torrent [that would] soon become a flood” as variety of theoretical approaches in contemporary social theory (i.e., feminism, Neo-Gramscianism, poststructuralism, and post-colonialism) would get introduced through the works of critical scholars.319 After elaborating the various responses given to and resistance raised against the critical project in the discipline, the authors provide an overview and an assessment of the current state of critical theorizing in International Relations. They argue that the central question for much of the ongoing debate within the critical camp in its present state—a question that it cannot help but come to terms with and provide a response to—concerns the relation between critical thought and political practice. As they state, the “fundamental philosophical question [that] can no longer be sidestepped” by critical International Relations theory is the question of the relation between “knowledge of the world and action in it.”320 One of the points alluded to in the essay is that forms of critical theorizing, which leave the future “to contingency, uncertainty and the multiplicity of political projects” and therefore provide “less guidance for concrete political action”321 or, again, those that problematize underlying assumptions of thought and “say little about the potential political agency that might be involved in any subsequent struggles”322 may render the critical enterprise impotent and perhaps even suspect. This point comes out clearly in Craig Murphy’s contribution to the collection of essays in the RIS’s special issue. 323 Echoing William Wallace’s argument that critical theorists tend to be “monks,”324 who have little to offer for political actors engaged in real world politics, Murphy argues that the promise of critical theory is “partially kept” because of the limited influence it has had outside the academy towards changing the world.Building a different world, he suggests, requires more than isolated academic talk; that it demands not merely “words,” but “deeds.”325 This, according to Murphy, requires providing “knowledge that contributes to change.”326 Such knowledge would emanate from connections with the marginalized and would incorporate observations of actors in their everyday practices. More importantly, it would create an inspiring vision for social movements, such as the one provided by the concept of human development, which, according to Murphy, was especially powerful “because it embodied a value-oriented way of seeing, a vision, rather than only isolated observations.”327 In sum, if critical theory is to retain its critical edge, Murphy’s discussion suggests, it has to be in synch with political time and respond to its immediate demands. The second debate that is revelatory of this conception of the timing of critical theory—i.e., that critical thinking be strategic and efficient in relation to political time—takes place in relation to the contemporary in/security environment shaped by the so-called Global War on Terror. The theme that bears its mark on these debates is the extent to which critical inquiries about the contemporary security landscape become complicit in the workings of power and what critique can offer to render the world

more legible for progressive struggles.328 For instance, warning critical theorists against being co-opted by or aligned with belligerence and war-mongering, Richard Devetak asserts that critical international theory has an urgent “need to distinguish its position all the more clearly from liberal imperialism.”329 While scholars such as Devetak, Booth,330 and Fierke331 take the critical task to be an attempt to rescue liberal internationalism from turning into liberal imperialism, others announce the “crisis of critical theorizing” and suggest that critical writings on the nature of the contemporary security order lack the resources to grasp their actual limitations, where the latter is said to reside not in the realm of academic debate, but in the realm of political practice.332 It is amidst these debates on critique, crisis, and political time that Richard Beardsworth raises the question of the future of critical philosophy in the face of the challenges posed by contemporary world politics.333 Recounting these challenges, he provides the matrix for a proper form of critical inquiry that could come to terms with “[o]ur historical actuality.”334 He describes this actuality as the “thick context” of modernity (“an epoch, delimited by the capitalization of social relations,” which imposes its own philosophical problematic—“that is, the attempt, following the social consequences of capitalism, to articulate the relation between individuality and collective spirit”335 ), American unilateralism in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the growing political disempowerment of people worldwide. Arguing that “contemporary return of religion and new forms of irrationalism emerge, in large part, out of the failure of the second response of modernity to provide a secular solution to the inequalities of the nation-state and colonization,”336 he formulates the awaiting political task for critical endeavors as constructing a world polity to resist the disintegration of the world under the force of capital.It is with this goal in mind that he suggests that “responsible scholarship needs to rescue reason in the face irrational war”337 and that intellectuals need to provide “the framework for a world ethical community of law, endowed with political mechanisms of implementation in the context of a regulated planetary economy.”338 He suggests that an aporetic form of thinking such as Jacques Derrida’s—a thinking that “ignores the affirmative relation between the determining powers of reason and history”339 —would be an unhelpful resource because such thinking “does not open up to where work needs to be done for these new forms of polity to emerge.”340 In other words, critical thinking, according to Beardsworth, needs to articulate and point out possible political avenues and to orient thought and action in concrete ways so as to contribute to progressive political change rather than dwelling on the encounter of the incalculable and calculation and im-possibility of world democracy in a Derridean fashion. In similar ways to the first debate on critique that I discussed, critical thinking is once again called upon to respond to political time in a strategic and efficient manner. As critical inquiry gets summoned up to the court of reason in Beardsworth’s account, its realm of engagement is limited to that which the light of reason can be shed upon, and its politics is confined to mapping out the achievable and the doable in a given historical context without questioning or disrupting the limits of what is presented as “realistic” choices. Hence, if untimely critical thought is to be meaningful it has to be on time by responding to political exigency in a practical, efficient, and strategic manner. In contrast to this prevalent form of understanding the untimeliness of critical theory, I will now turn to a different account of the untimely provided by Wendy Brown whose work informs the project of dismantling security as untimely critique. Drawing from her discussion of the relationship between critique, crisis, and political time, I will suggest that untimely critique of security entails, simultaneously, an attunement to the times and an aggressive violation of their self-conception. It is in this different sense of the untimely that the suggestion of dismantling security needs to be situated. Critique and Political Time As I suggested in the Prelude to this chapter, elevating security

itself to the position of major protagonist and extending a call to “dismantle security” was itself declared to be an untimely pursuit in a time depicted as the time of crisis in security. Such a declaration stood as an exemplary moment (not in the sense of illustration or allegory, but as a moment of crystallization) for disciplinary prohibitions to think and act otherwise—perhaps the moment when a doxa exhibits its most powerful hold. Hence, what is first needed is to overturn the taken-for-granted relations between crisis, timeliness, and critique. The roots krisis and kritik can be traced back to the Greek word krinõ, which meant “to separate”, to “choose,” to “judge,” to “decide.”341 While creating a broad spectrum of meanings, it was intimately related to politics as it connoted a “divorce” or “quarrel,” but also a moment of decision and a turning point. It was also used as a jurisprudential term in the sense of making a decision, reaching a verdict or judgment (kritik) on an alleged disorder so as to provide a way to restore order. Rather than being separated into two domains of meaning—that of “subjective critique” and “objective crisis”—krisis and kritik were conceived as interlinked moments. Koselleck explains this conceptual fusion: [I]t wasin the sense of “judgment,” “trial,” “legal decision,” and ultimately “court” that crisis achieved a high constitutionalstatus, through which the individual citizen and the community were bound together. The “for and against” wastherefore present in the original meaning of the word and thisin a manner that already conceptually anticipated the appropriate judgment. 342 Recognition of an objective crisis and subjective judgments to be passed on it so as to come up with a formula for restoring the health of the polity by setting the times right were thereby infused and implicated in each other.343 Consequently, as Brown notes, there could be no such thing as “mere critique” or “untimely critique” because critique always entailed a concern with political time: “[C]ritique as political krisis promise[d] to restore continuity by repairing or renewing the justice that gives an order the prospect of continuity, that indeed ma[de] it continuous.”344 The breaking of this intimate link between krisis and kritik, the consequent depoliticization of critique and its sundering from crisis coincides with the rise of modern political order and redistribution of the public space into the binary structure of sovereign and subject, public and private.345 Failing to note the link between the critique it practiced and the looming political crisis, emerging philosophies of history, according Koselleck, had the effect of obfuscating this crisis. As he explains, “[n]ever politically grasped, [this political crisis] remained concealed in historico-philosophical images of the future which cause the day’s events to pale.”346 It is this intimate, but severed, link between crisis and critique in historical narratives that Wendy Brown’s discussion brings to the fore and re-problematizes. She turns to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and challenges conventional understandings of historical materialism, which conceives of the present in terms of unfolding laws of history.347 According to Brown, the practice of critical theory appeals to a concern with time to the extent that “[t]he crisis that incites critique and that critique engages itself signals a rupture of temporal continuity, which is at the same time a rupture in political imaginary.”348 Cast in these terms, it is a particular experience with time, with the present, that Brown suggests Benjamin’s theses aim to capture. Rather than an unmoving or an automatically overcome present (a present that is out of time), the present is interpreted as an opening that calls for a response to it. This call for a response highlights the idea that, far from being a luxury, critique is non-optional in its nature. Such an understanding of

critical thought is premised on a historical consciousness that grasps the present historically so as to break with the selfconception of the age. Untimely critique transforms into a technique to blow up the present through fracturing its apparent seamlessness by insisting on alternatives to its closed political and epistemological universe.349 Such a conception resonates with the distinction that Žižek makes between a political subjectivity that is confined to choosing between the existing alternatives—one that takes the limits of what is given as the limits to what is possible—and a form of subjectivity that creates the very set of alternatives by “transcend[ing] the coordinates of a given situation [and] ‘posit[ing] the presuppositions’ of one's activity” by redefining the very situation within which one is active.”350 With its attempt to grasp the times in its singularity, critique is cast neither as a breaking free from the weight

of time (which would amount to ahistoricity) nor being weighed down by the times (as in the case of teleology).351 It conceives the present as “historically contoured but not

itself experienced as history because not necessarily continuous with what has been.”352 It is an attitude that renders the present as the site of “non-utopian possibility” since it is historically situated and constrained yet also a possibility since it is not historically foreordained or determined.353 It entails contesting the delimitations of choice and challenging the confinement of politics to existing possibilities . Rather than positing history as existing objectively outside of narration, what Brown’s discussion highlights is the intimate relation between the constitution of political subjectivity vis-à-vis the meaning of history for the present. It alludes to “the power of historical

discourse,” which Mowitt explains as a power “to estrange us from that which is most familiar, namely, the fixity of the present” because “what we believe to have happened to us bears concretely on what we are prepared to do with ourselves both now and in the future.”354 Mark Neocleous concretizes the political stakes entailed in such encounters with history—with the dead—from the perspective of three political traditions: a conservative one, which aims to reconcile the dead with the living, a fascist one, which aims to resurrect the dead to legitimate its fascist program, and a historical materialist one, which seeks redemption with the dead as the source of hope and inspiration for the future.355 Brown’s discussion of critique and political time is significant for highlighting the immediately political nature of critique in contrast to contemporary invocations that cast

it as a self-indulgent practice, an untimely luxury, a disinterested, distanced, academic endeavor. Her attempt to trace critique vis-à-vis its relation to political time provides a counter-narrative to the conservative and moralizing assertions that shun untimely critique of security as a luxurious interest that is committed to abstract ideals rather than to the “reality” of politics—i.e., running after utopia rather than modeling “real

world” solutions. Dismantling security as untimely critique entails a similar claim to unsettle the accounts of “what the times are” with a “bid to reset time.”356 It aspires to be untimely in the face of the demands on critical thought to be on time; aims to challenge the moralizing move, the call to conscience that arrives in the form of assertions that saying “no!” to security , that refusing to write it, would be untimely. Rather than succumbing to the injunction that thought of political possibility is to be confined within the framework of security, dismantling security aims to open up space for alternative forms, for a different language of politics so as to “stop digging” the hole politics of security have dug us and start building a counter-discourse. Conclusion As an attempt to push a debate that is fixated on security to the limit and explore

what it means to dismantle security, my engagement with various aspects of this move is not intended as an analysis raised at the level of causal interpretations or as an attempt to find better solutions to a problem that

already has a name. Rather, it tries to recast what is taken-for-granted by attending to the conceptual assumptions, the historical and systemic conditions within which the politics of security plays itself out. As I tried to show in this chapter, it also entails a simultaneous move of refusing to be a disciple of the discipline of security. This implies overturning not only the silent disciplinary protocols about which questions are legitimate to ask, but also the very framework that informs those questions. It is from this perspective that I devoted two chapters to examining and clarifying the proposal to dismantle security as a claim on time. After explicating, in Chapter 4, the temporal structure that is enacted by politics of security and elaborating on how security structures the relation between the present and the future, in this chapter, I approached the question of temporality from a different perspective, by situating it in relation to disciplinary times in order to clarify what an untimely critique of security means. I tried to elaborate this notion of the untimely by exploring the understanding of untimeliness that informs certain conceptions of critical theorizing in International Relations. I suggested that such a notion of the untimely paradoxically calls on critical thought to be on time in the sense of being punctual and strategic. Turning to Wendy Brown’s

discussion of the relation between critique and political time, I elaborated on the sense of untimely critique that dismantling security strives for—a critique that goes against the times that are saturated by the infinite passion to secure and works toward taking apart the architecture of security.