Orientalism K

1NC Shell
China threat discourse constitutes a political myth- it has
permeated policy making, media, and daily conversations the
plan is perceived as authoritative knowledge but it is nothing
more than an extension of the yellow peril narrative that
perpetuates orientalism
Song, 15 (Securitization of the China Threat Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account, The China Review, Vol. 15, No.
1 (Spring 2015), 145169, Weiqing SONG, associate professor of political science at the University of Macau, received his Ph.D. in
political science from the University of Siena, Italy. His research interests include European politics, Chinese foreign policy, and
Chinas post-socialist regime. His research has appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed journals.)

In the mythical mode, an agent securitizes the

China threat by talking to the general public , trying to reach out to as many people
as possible. This determines the nature of the myth as reality discourses that
usually exist in popular genres and the mass media . The following is a typical myth as reality text: Im
5. Securitizing the China Threat as Political Myth

travelling from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean to meet the pioneers of this extraordinary migration. Ill be finding out from Africans what
they think about the influx of Chinese. And Ill be hearing some tall tales. Youre telling me the Chinese are selling inflatable chickens? Ill
be investigating allegations of human right abuses in one of the worlds most dangerous countries. And asking just how the rise of China
is changing Africa. What will it mean for the rest of the world. Ill visit the worlds biggest mine, shipping millions of tons of iron ore to
China, and see how Chinas incredible hunger for resources threatens the worlds largest rainforest. And Ill be travelling across the Americas
to see how Chinas expansion is devastating Americas industrial heartlands. So how is the relentless rise of China upsetting the balance of
67
world power? And what it will mean for us all? A consummate storyteller, the BBC news reporter and

presenter Justin Rowlatt asks a number of questions at the beginning of his

narration of the BBCs widely watched 2011 documentary The Chinese Are Coming.
During the documentary, Rowlatt travels across three continents (Africa, South America, and North America) to investigate the world-

The rise of China is shown to have serious consequences,

due to the expansion of its economic power, its inexhaustible search for resources,
and the exponential growth of its outward migration. The documentary implies that
Chinas precipitate development is posing an unprecedented challenge to both
mankind and the planet at large. However, many of the developed states in the
West showed a similar scale of expansion at earlier stages in their development,
through more direct colonial rule. Why is China, then, perceived to pose such a
huge threat to much of the world? This question highlights another kind of speech
act involved in identity building. It is interesting for analysts to consider the identity or identities that a particular piece
wide expansion of Chinas influence.

of language is being used to enact (i.e., to persuade an audience to recognize an identity or identities as opera- tive). What identity or
identities does a particular use of language attribute to others, and how does this help the speaker or writer to enact his or her own
68
identity? It matters little whether the content communicated is factual. The real purpose is to convince an audience of its urgency and
consequently persuade them to take action. The mode of securitization here is based on political myth. One cannot falsify political myths
69
because they are not a matter of scientific hypothesis but rather the expression of a determination to act. This mode uses

rhetoric, visual spectacle and other kinds of art, rituals, and social practices, among
other forms of communication. It relies to a large extent on ascriptive factors such
as ethnicity, race, culture, and civilization. In contrast to the scientific and
analogical modes, the mythical mode of securitization pursues a logic that is
psychologically intuitive rather than logically deductive or inductive. In extreme
cases, it can be bluntly discriminatory. In the mode of political myth, the China
threat issue is structurally incorporated by a group of securitizers into the basic
discourses of culture and civilization. The issue does not appear to be a question of security because it is assigned to
a broader context wherein a country as different as China is expanding its reach throughout the world. However, the real purpose

of the mythical mode of securitization is again to construct the China threat as

such, and ultimately to call for action against it. Securitizers working in this mode
thus promulgate political myths about the issue. A myth is rendered specifically
political not by its content but by the relationship between a given narrative and
the political conditions of a given group.70 In the documentary titled The Chinese
Are Coming, the securitizers use a differentiating logic to construct China as a
country, nation, and culture/civilization that is quite alien to the West. When Chinese sailors
in the harbor of Luanda offer to share their lunch with the narrator, for example, he merely observes that their style of cooking is unfamiliar. A
more dramatic scene occurs at Kafue, a large wildlife national park in Zambia. Some chopsticks and a hanko (seal in Japanese), both
made of ivory, are presented to the audience. Although there is no evidence of the market(s) to which these items are exported, the blame for
the killing of elephants in Africa is attributed to China. The conclusion is then drawn that there are aspects of Chinese culture that
represent a threat to the very wildlife the tourists come to see. Similarly, another study provides evidence that most Western attempts to
portray Chinese firms as cruel, unconcerned with human rights, and the worst employers in Africa are highly inaccurate, with
71
methodological mistakes and elemen- tary empirical errors. It is clear that the essence of a political myth does not lie in its
truthfulness, but rather in how it is articulated to compel attention and action. The above are only a few examples of a series of acts of
72
exclusion and marginalization perpetrated by Western agents seeking to construct China as culturally alien. The linking method is also
used in this process. For example, in an act of narrativized reality wherein Rowlatt takes the same railway route as British colonizers from
Angola into the heartland of Africa to tell the story of the Chinese in Africa today, China is alleged to be following Britains footsteps in
73
colonizing the African continent. The reality of Chinese neocolonization is narrated as real; narrative serves more as the means by which
74
the status of reality is conferred on an event. Through similar narrative activities, securitizers try to construct a figured world, or a story
of a simplified world that equates typicality with veracity. In this figured world, the Chinese identity is differentiated from the Western
model of the normal and linked with a threatening other. It is conceived as an expanding power, growing at a phenomenal speed and

As a political myth, the securitization of the China threat

operates within a corresponding epistemic terrain. It targets the general public, an
audience as wide and as large as possible. Again, effective securitization relies on
the use of language appropriate to context and audience. Securitization discourses
in this mode are not confined to the linguistic sphere ;75 they may include, for
example, signs, images, and rituals. The BBC documentary is typical in its deployment of a wide variety of
posing many challenges to the world.

discourses, such as interviews, nonverbal communication, written text, and signs. The documentary provides a clear visual illustration
of the allegation that a growing China is encroaching on the globe. In attemp- ting to arouse an emotional response from the general public,
the docu- mentary includes stories told by ordinary people, accompanied by vivid pictures and signs. The securitizers hope that raising
consciousness of and inspiring an emotional response to the so-called China threat will elicit action to prevent it. The success of a political
76
myth lies not only in its production, but rather, and foremost, [in] its reception. Indeed, the work of myth can be characterized as
77
a system of productionreceptionreproduc- tion.
In other words, this process of securitization coagulates and reproduces
78
79
significance; it should then be able to address the specifically political conditions in which the intended subjects live, and the
meanings they share as a community. This process is fully implemented in The Chinese Are Coming. In terms of substantial modality,
agents working in the political- myth mode aim to securitize the sheer comprehensiveness of the threat posed by China, which is represented
as covering a wide range of social spheres. In addition to its military, strategic, and political threats, China is imagined to endanger
economic, environmental, social, and cultural development worldwide. Rowlatt concludes at the end of the BBC docu- mentary that Chinas
expansion into the world is transforming not just the global economy but also the balance of world power. The price that is being
paid is made clear, including the environmental damage this rush for resources is wreaking and the undermining of local busi- nesses
almost everywhere. He concludes that the 21st century will certainly be Chinas century, and that the rise of China will profoundly affect
people all over the world. In economic terms, the world economy as a supranational referent object is perceived to be existentially
threatened by China, whose own economy undermines the rules, norms and institutions that constitute a liberal market, based on free
competition and rule compliance.80

In the documentary, for example, the narrator describes

the legions of construction workers from China building vast new structures across
Africa, who work 24 running hours, all the time. Chinas economic rise is also
represented as affecting the highly industrialized United States, where discomfort
is turning to despair in Americas industrial heartlands . The audience witnesses
Chinas use of unfair trade measures to put the traditional steel industry out of
business, generating unemployment in the communities that have been tied to
these factories for generations. Comparably, Chinas thirst for natural resources is
depicted as a major threat to the environment . In the environmental sector, there are a wide range of possible

referent objects, from concrete outcomes like the survival of individual species or types of habitat to broader issues such as the
81
maintenance of the global climate system and biosphere. In the BBC documentary, these referent objects are well documented: the killing
of elephants for ivory products in the national park of Zambia, the incredible hunger for resources that threatens the Amazon, the
worlds largest rainforest, and so on. Faced with a panoramic view of an enormous mine carved out of the previously tree-covered rainforest,
audiences are inevitably struck by the devastation caused by Chinese companies. It does not matter whether this devastation is truly attribut-

In the mode of
political myth, the China threat is also represented as affecting the social sector,
where the referent objects under threat are large-scale collective identities.82
These identities may extend beyond the state to nations, religions, cultures, and
civilizations. In The Chinese Are Coming, the identity of China is clearly differentiated from that of the West: it has unfamiliar food,
able to China. The manner of the presentation is much more important than the veracity of the content.

different ways of doing business, human rights abuses, no respect for local culture, and so on. This is most vividly reflected in the report of a
protest made by a number of U.S. citizens outside a Confucius Institute sponsored by the Chinese government, which teaches Chinese
language and culture to the children of U.S. citizens. The narrator reports that people believe Beijing to be using these classes to smuggle proChina propaganda into U.S. classrooms; they are opposed to the Chinese governments trying to brainwash U.S. youth by insidious methods

Here, the so-called China threat is represented as a political

myth, in whose construction the method of differentiation plays a dominant role.
Securitizers working in the political myth mode make an effort to stimulate intuitive
and psychological responses from their audience to heighten the latters
consciousness of the China threat. Disseminated as authoritative knowledge of
news reports, a comprehensive set of threats are securitized through the
recounting of political myths derived from the notorious yellow peril narrative in
Western history. Power in this mode of securitization appears in its most intellectual
form in the clash of civilizations thesis, according to which future conflicts in the
globalizing world will probably take place along cultural and civiliza- tional lines, as
these are constituted by fundamental factors such as history, language, ethnicity,
tradition, and religion. This thesis involves the securitized argument that cultural
identities are central to a world with a shifting balance of civilisations, in which
cultural affinities and differences shape the alliances and antagonisms. 83 If this act of
of misinformation in U.S. schools.

securitization succeeds, a clash of civilizations will in fact be more likely.

Engagement frameworks are not neutral it creates a

hierarchy in which they must rely on us in order to evolve

Pan 2004, Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the
Australian National University, Discourses of China in International Relations: A
Study in Western Theory as (IR) Practice, August 2004
At first sight, and given its emphasis on order and cooperation rather than
confrontation, this policy might well have a positive impact on Sino-Western
relations and hold a better chance of bringing about the long cherished goal of
convergence.118 But, as I will argue in the pages that follow, it is almost as likely to
promote instability and conflict in Sino-Western relations as is the more
confrontational human rights/democracy policy. The problem, again, is that at the
core of this policy is an asymmetrical or hierarchical relationship of power enacted
by the self/Other discourse of China as opportunity. The crucial conduit of this
engagement policy has been free trade facilitated through a variety of multilateral
economic institutions and international regimes. These institutions and regimes, as
Robert Gilpin notes, are undergirded often by rules that represent the desires of
Western Europe and the United States to reassert the positions they have lost over

the past several decades in the international system.119 Consequently, these

frameworks within which China is to be dealt with are far from neutral. The
implication is that China is not treated as an equal partner, but rather as an entity
needing to be engaged: the intimation being that without our engagement or
involvement, China could remain mired in isolation and underdevelopment, or even
degenerate into chaos and instability. Robert Ross, for one, proposes that there would never have
been a democracy movement in the spring of 1989 without Western interaction with the Chinese economy.120
This, I argue, is another way of saying what Lehmann has said, the liberal global economic agenda must prevail
and must be driven by the industrialized countries.121 Since engagement aims at making China do what we want
it to do,122 ultimately there is a price to pay on the part of China. This has been vividly demonstrated by one of
the most important cases of engagement, notably, the admission of China into the WTO. In the long-drawn-out
process of joining this organisation, China had been subjected to harsher and more rigorous terms of entry than any
other WTO member. Operating in a way reminiscent of the Open Door policy at the turn of the twentieth century,
the Western powers, led by the U.S., made a concerted effort to share the offers made to them by China and to
ensure their accession standards set for China were consistent. 123 Aiming to use Chinas accession as a template
for other transition economies, they demanded that Chinas membership be based on commercially viable
terms.124 As a consequence, China, now finally a member, needs not only to abide by all of the WTO rules, but
also to undertake extra obligations that exceed normal WTO standards.125

Chinese threat construction assumes a knowable and

essentially violent Chinese Otherthis Western lens makes
militarization and conflict inevitable.
Pan 2004 (Chengxin, PhD Poli. Sci. and Intl Relations @ Australian Natl U, The
"China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other
as Power Politics, in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 29)
Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the
purpose of a particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how
this literature represents a discursive construction of other, instead of an "objective"
account of Chinese reality. This, I argue, has less to do with its portrayal of China as
a threat per se than with its essentialization and totalization of China as an
externally knowable object, independent of historically contingent contexts or
dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of
China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist,
ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless
interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted,
(neo)realism is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on
the modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come
to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist selfidentity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the sphere of
insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo)realists argue, "the
gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other," (45) and "All other
states are potential threats." (46) In order to survive in such a system, states
inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent
what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of relations of
universality/particularity and self/Other." (47) The (neo)realist paradigm has
dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in
particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop
of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or
international relations than China itself." (48) As a result, for those experts to know

China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by
asking only a few questions such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense
and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular
emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes,
"Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most
prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's
overall future military power compared with that of the United States and other East
Asian regional powers." (49) Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an
absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The (neo)realist
emphasis on survival and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with
the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to define itself as the
indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As
James Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an
eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an effective
American foreign policy." (50) And this self-identification in turn leads to the
definition of not only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and
uncertainty per se as threats. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush
repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is
instability." (51) Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a
high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness
will result?" (52) Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now
automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and
Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility
that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a
source of danger. (53) In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write:
If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe
a sigh of relief? Not entirely.... Drawing China into the web of global
interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot
guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of
economic consequences.... U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan
Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all.
The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it
must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a
multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies,
overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the
spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been
labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War
environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the
prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and more just world order, nothing
seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China," (55) argues
Samuel Kim. And such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S.
self-construction, because it seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global
consequences such as China could justify U.S. indispensability or its continued world
dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China (as a
threat) was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has
lost its bearings and that requires a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission
(Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)." (56)

The alt is to vote neg and reject the 1ACs framing of Chinese
threats. Rejecting the 1ACs reality of China is critical to
open an alternate interpretation of geopolitics- its empirically
proven we can change how we know China
Pan 2004 Chengxin Pan, Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University,
PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the Australian National
University, 2004 (Discourses of China in International Relations, Doctoral Thesis
for the Australian National Unviersity)
But as I have indicated throughout this study, it is largely this kind of achievement that has acted as a profound
impediment to the understanding of their object of study in terms of a social construct in which they have played a

mainstream China scholars continue to be trapped in a cycle of selffulfilling, dangerous, and paradoxical theory and practice, with their scientific
realism allowing no way out of its own logic. While having recognised the selffulfilling consequences of the China threat thesis, neoconservative commentator
Robert Kagan, for example, continues to fall back on an objectivist approach to
China in terms of what it is. Consumed by the question of what if the prophecy has already been
vital part. As such,

fulfilled? Kagan advises Americans to take the emerging confrontations with China seriously.15 As noted already,
by concentrating on the pitfalls of Western theory and practice, I have not advocated ignoring problems in Chinese

Such problems, however discursively constructed, do exist in reality .

But to recognise this point is not the same as saying that they represent fixed,
essential things about which we can do nothing other than accepting them as the
way things are. Insofar as the China threat is real, I have sought to illustrate that it
is always contingent, changeable, and therefore amenable to different
understandings and responses. Moreover, given that a Sino- American military confrontation would be
foreign relations.

unimaginably costly and disastrous for both sides (and increasingly for the world at large), as China scholars we are
indeed obliged to do something about the so-called already fulfilled threat, if there is one, beginning above all with
modifying the very ways we give meaning to China. This of course would require reciprocal and sustained meaning-

Together we might help contribute to the development

of perhaps a not so frightening China, a country which we need not necessarily love,
but nor need we fear. While this might be considered as idealist, wishful thinking by
some, it is indeed how the Sino- U.S. rapprochement in the 1970s came into
existence. As noted in Chapter 4, as a result of significant change in American Cold War
discourse on China, Communist China was able to respond positively to Richard
Nixons new China policy overture, thereby effectively closing the overly
antagonistic chapter of Cold War confrontation in Sino- U.S. relations. By the same token,
giving practice by the Chinese as well.

in the post-Cold War era, while Beijings missile exercises in the Taiwan Strait might well be seen as threatening and
unwise, one commentator has astutely suggested that Had Bill Clinton projected a constancy of purpose and vision
in China policy in 1993-1994 he might not have been challenged in the Taiwan Strait in 1995-1996 with missile

This is why alternative ways of understanding and dealing with China are
needed. And it is in this context that I have set out to write this thesis, in the belief that China as a global
actor does not have to be the way it is. For this reason, this thesis has made no pretension to be
exercises.16

a politically neutral, value-free endeavour. Like the orthodox literature, it is itself a kind of discourse with practical

has sought self-consciously not to take sides in

accordance with the ready-made, totalised categories of the West and China, but
rather to problematise them, and to explain and emphasise that the search for
alternative, less dichotomised ways of perceiving and dealing with Sino-Western
relations cannot continue to be deferred . While this thesis has not been specifically designed to offer
implications. But as a practical intervention, it

such alternatives, it has nevertheless indicated in various ways that alternatives are not only necessary and
possible, but also existent. As stated at the outset of this thesis, scholars such as Tani E. Barlow, Bruce Cumings,

others, have already begun exploring some ways of

interpreting Sino-Western relations beyond the conventional discursive and
methodological boundaries. Many works I have used in advancing my arguments throughout this thesis
Rey Chow, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, among

could further serve as possible examples in this regard. And in addition, although this thesis is largely critical in
tone, it has not been entirely negative.

By criticising and questioning the conventional study of

China, it has, if mainly indirectly, suggested how Chinas international relations
could be studied differently. In this sense, I hope that it could make a small contribution not only to an
important filed of study but also to the improvement or reconstruction of Sino-Western relations. For all this , there
is no easy alternative answer nor magic solution to the problems discussed here.
For example, while it may be useful and understandable to advocate bringing in
more Chinese scholars or more inside views to the so far Westerndominated field
of Chinese foreign relations studies as an antidote to its predicament,17 it is wrong
to assume that Chinese voices from the inside are necessarily closer to Chinese
realities.18 For, as I have suggested in this study, the ways in which the Chinese
perceive themselves and the world are often already coloured by orthodox Western
discourses, and may therefore be part of the problem, rather than the solution. This
is not to endorse an anything goes attitude on studying Chinas foreign relations.
Quite the opposite. For the range of social meanings which can be attached to a certain thing is not
limitless, and under certain circumstances, it is obvious that some interpretations appear truer than others.

it is the different practical consequences associated with different

interpretations that matter. Thus, my point here is that while different meaning-giving
strategies could all have certain real-world implications, some implications are more
dangerous than others. Therefore, when we assign some particular meaning to China, we
need to remind ourselves of its potential practical effec t, and incessantly bear in
mind that such effect, if dangerous, may in some degree be undone if a different,
more constructive meaning is given. In short, however tempting it might be, we
cannot here return to the kind of Hobsons choice between either a new fixed,
definite solution or no alternative at all to the continued reign of the conventional
meaning-giving regime. Rather, the choice lies in constantly recognising, on the one
hand, the impossibility of having a detached, Gods-eye view of some fundamental
truth, and on the other hand, the possibility of formulating nuanced, self-reflective,
and responsible ways of seeing an inherently changing world. Such choice, as I have
demonstrated in this thesis, is not only clearly possible but also imperative in the
study of a complex China amid the volatility, danger, as well as vast potential of
contemporary global politics. A choice which might indeed hold the key to world
peace in the decades to come.
Ultimately,

2NC Overview

2NC Blocks

AT: China Real Threat

China is a threat because our discursive construction of it as a
threat.
Chengxin Pan, Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the
Australian National University, Discourses of China in International Relations: A
Study in Western Theory as (IR) Practice, August 2004
From the beginning, this China threat, I suggest, is not a result of its actual
challenge to the West or the United States per se, but primarily a discursive
dimension of the neorealist construction of the American self in terms of global
supremacy and indispensable leadership. As Huntington makes it clear, Chinese hegemony will
reduce American and Western influence [in Asia] and compel the United States to accept what it has historically
attempted to prevent: domination of a key region of the world by another power.49 In the absence of such selffashioning, most of Chinas neighbours, which might arguably be more vulnerable to a China threat if there is one,
have traditionally adopted a much less alarmist view on the Middle Kingdom.50 Thus, Chinas real challenge for
America, as Yu Bin notes, is perhaps more psychological and conceptualthat is, how to deal with a major power
whose rise is not necessarily guided by Washington, unlike the post-World War II rise of Japan and Germany.51
Also, it can be argued that the existence of an enemy is indispensable to the continued imagination of the
indispensable nation. In Charles Fraziers novel Cold Mountain, Inman, a soldier returning home from battle during
the American Civil War, pondered the question: What is the cost of not having an enemy?52 Such a cost, then,
seems very high indeed, for at stake here is what is seen as the fundamental modern Western/American selfidentity as a (global) rational being and indispensable leader. Heroic leadership would not be so needed if there was
little left to fight for. Clearly mindful of this, Georgi Arbatov, Director of Moscows Institute for the Study of the USA
and Canada, told a U.S. audience the year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall: We are going to do something

for the U.S. to

live without an identity-defining enemy is terrible indeed, Arbatov was only half
right, for the enemy itself often has no control over its status as an enemy. Rather,
as noted before, it is primarily a ready-made discursive category built into the
American self-imagination. With this discursive category as the analytical framework
for understanding other actors on the world stage, Western and particularly
American scholars did not simply discover a China threat out there; it was
cognitively constructed beforehand.
terrible to youwe are going to deprive you of an enemy.53 While he correctly noted that

AT: Authors Correct

Their authors are biased-The knowledge on China is funded by
the military industrial complex which only seeks to maintain its
need you should be skeptical of the affs truth claims
(Pan 12) Chengxin Pan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Deakin
University, Australia, Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics Western
Representations of Chinas Rise 2012, Pg 76 - 83
The political economy of the China fear no doubt has something to do with the Cold War mentality, political selfinterests, and even greed on the part of politicians and defence contractors. However, those factors alone cannot
legitimately sustain military Keynesianism unless the fear is sanctioned by objective knowledge. In other words,
the political economy manifested in the China syndrome cannot be the sole work of the military-industrial

demonstrating a classic case of the desire/power/knowledge nexus, it

relies on the valuable service provided by the China-threat knowledge community.
This epistemic community allows Sinophobia an aura of objective truth, credibility
and urgency, through which public support can be easily galvanised for the power
elite and their various political economic agendas under the unquestioned guise of
defending national security against an existential threat . If Congressmen, the military
services, and defence contractors so far have had much luck in securing the massive military budgets
they have wanted, they should thank not China, but this knowledge community for its
contribution of the weapon of truth. As Andrew Bacevich notes, intellectuals, through
their imagination of self and Other, have played a key role in the continuation of
military Keynesianism. He rightly points out that Militarism qualifies as our very own work,
a by-product of our insistence on seeing ourselves as a people set apart,
unconstrained by limits or by history .51 Thus, the China threat paradigm as a particular scheme of
self/Other construction is central to US military Keynesianism. From the beginning, the military-industrial
complex has been a military-industrial-academic complex, of which the
knowledge-producing community of the China threat paradigm is a fullypaid-up member. Figuring prominently in this China-threat knowledge community
are think tank fellows, opinion leaders, as well as university academics. By
way of workshops, reports, media commentaries, opinion pieces,
congressional testimonies, books, and journal articles, they contribute to the
constant production of the danger code on China and a prevailing structure of
feeling within which the political economy of fear in the US and the West more
generally can operate without a hitch. Some members of the China-threat knowledge
community maintain the umbilical cord between knowledge and power by speaking
directly to power and for power. They may be called embedded experts ,52 who hold
public office in the national security apparatus . For example, after George W. Bushs election
complex. Rather,

victory in 2000, Bush acknowledged that his administration borrowed twenty of the best people from the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) for state service in Americas hour of need.53 In all, the neoconservative Center for
Security Policy (CSP) supplied twenty-two former advisers or board members to the same administration.54 It is
unnecessary to add that the AEI and the CSP are both home to some of the most outspoken commentators in the

Other embedded experts come from leading

universities. Aaron L. Friedberg, well-known for his view of the China threat, is a professor of politics and
China-threat knowledge community.

international affairs from Princeton Universitys Woodrow Wilson School (WWS) whose graduate programmes

In his other
life, Friedberg served as Dick Cheneys National Security Advisor on China
Affairs from 2003 to 2005 and was appointed to the Department of Defenses (DoD) Defense Policy Board in
proudly boast the rather accurate and fitting ambition of preparing future public service leaders.

Wolfowitz, an architect of the US policy on China as

a strategic competitor. Before becoming Deputy Secretary of Defense from 20012005, Wolfowitz
2007. Another good example is Paul

was the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, a
School originally founded by Paul Nitze, a senior government official who was instrumental in shaping US defence
policy on the basis of the Soviet threat during the Cold War. During the George W. Bush presidency, the Chinathreat knowledge community led by some prominent neocons became immensely influential. But the
knowledge/power nexus is by no means unique to the Bush administration. As exemplified by the so-called Blue
Team, the China-threat knowledge community was politically active throughout the Clinton years in the 1990s.
Named after the side that represents the US in the Pentagons war games (the unnamed foe is called the Red
Team), the Blue Team was a loose community of members of Congress, top congressional staff, Republican political
operatives, former intelligence officers, journalists, think-tank analysts, historians and scholars, some of whom were
tenured professors at the countrys most prestigious universities.55 Through this informal yet powerful network,
China

threat experts from top universities and leading think tanks were able to
collectively exert steady influence on Americas national security establishment .
Manifested in the service of power by the priesthood of China-threat experts, the
power/knowledge nexus is not a one-way street . In essence, it is a symbiotic relationship, for the
production of such knowledge cannot be detached from the power arrangement it serves. Therefore, any
understanding of this connection would be incomplete without looking at how this particular China knowledge is

Though specific knowledge about the China threat

may be the work of university academics and think tank analysts, its conceptual
and financial ancestry can often be traced back to the military-industrial complex
and the national security state, which, whether explicitly or implicitly, help delineate
the intertextual, paradigmatic boundaries of what kind of questions can be asked,
what topics are off limit, and even what counts as legitimate knowledge . Just as area
defined, promoted, and regulated by power.

studies in the US were shaped by power, ideology and geopolitics, so too is this powerful China paradigm in
contemporary China watching. Indeed, the discursive production of the China threat makes for a sizeable

Some of the most prominent players in this industry include both

individual scholars and such media outlets as the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Wall Street
knowledge industry.

Journal, The Washington Times, and Encounter Books, a San Francisco-based publishing house. A self-promotion
material produced by the Weekly Standard offers a rare insight into part of the operation of this industry. Thanks to
a unique VIP distribution system, a select list of the most powerful men and women in government, politics, and the
media receive the publication via hand-delivery on Sunday morningjust in time for the nationally televised talk

Many hawkish and neoconservative

think tanks such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the AEI are behind
these media outlets and marketing operations . Those think tanks, pivotal in the
production of the China threat knowledge, in turn are staffed by retired politicians,
generals, and intelligence officers from the political establishment through what
some have called the revolving door phenomenon . That is, former government officials,
shows, thus boasts the neoconservative flagship magazine.56

military servicemen, and defence industrialists (re)join the ranks of professors and research fellows at universities
and think tanks, thereby bringing the influence of power directly to the process of knowledge production. A quick
glance at the signatures on the PNACs 1997 founding statement reveals a rogues gallery of intransigent
hardliners who are mainly exgovernment and ex-Pentagon officials in the Reagan era. Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, William Bennett, I. Lewis Libby and Eliot Cohen are only some of the most recognisable
luminaries. And there is no prize for guessing what kind of knowledge those officials-turned-nationalsecurity gurus
would bring to the understanding of China. The 2000 PNAC report, entitled Rebuilding Americas Defenses:
Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century, insists that China is the potential enemy. The reports author,
Thomas Donnelly, once worked as a professional staff member at the US House of Representatives Committee on
National Security. Later, he became a Director at Lockheed Martin before his move through the revolving door again
to a post at the AEI.57 The AEI, the CSP, and the Heritage Foundation, all key sources of the China-threat knowledge
in the forms of policy briefs, research reports and opinion pieces, tell a similar story. One China specialist at the AEI,
Dan Blumenthal, was previously senior director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia in the Secretary of Defenses Office
of International Security Affairs. Another AEI China expert, the late James Lilley, was formerly a CIA station chief in
Beijing, Director of the American Institute in Taiwan, and Ambassador to China. Harvey Feldman, Distinguished
Fellow in China Policy at the Heritage Foundation, was once Director of the Office of the Republic of China Affairs
and one of the architects of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. The ubiquitous China commentator John J. Tkacik, Jr.,
also at the Heritage Foundation, previously served with the US Foreign Service in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland
China. At the CSP, which is directed by former Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, on its Board of Directors was once

Charles M. Kupperman, former vice president of Strategic Integration & Operations, Missile Defense Systems, at
Boeing. Its Advisory Council, meanwhile, is regarded by some commentators as a virtual Star Wars hall of fame,
almost entirely made up of former Star Warriors from the Reagan administration.58 To highlight the symbiotic link
between power and knowledge in a significant section of China watching is not to suggest that practitioners cannot
make a worthy contribution to the scholarly field of China studies, or that all research on the China threat is
necessarily tainted by the influence of the power apparatus. Harold Isaacs, the author of the classic study Scratches
on Our Minds, was affiliated with the CIA-assisted Center for International Studies at MIT, but his proximity to the
government, as Ido Oren notes, did not stop him producing a rigorous and high-quality study of American views of
China and India.59 In some cases, close encounters with power may even make one a sharp critic of it, as in the
case of Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire, who once worked as a consultant for the
Office of National Estimates of the CIA.60 However, more often than not, even with the best intention of distancing
oneself from the political establishment, it is difficult for people with previous experience in the government and
especially the military-industrial complex to divest themselves completely of the influence of power and its
prevailing ideology, normative concerns and cognitive habits. On the China-threat front, the views of many
practitioners turned scholars, closely aligned with the vested interests of their former employers, testify to this
power/knowledge entanglement. One aspect of such entanglement concerns research grants and donations.

According to a 2002 report by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the DoD is the
third largest funder (after the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation) of
university research, which accounts for more than 60 per cent of defence basic
research.61 Similarly, a significant share of the funding received by lobbying think
tanks comes from hardline foundations and defence companies . In its 1998 annual report,
where the CSP acknowledged the financial support it had received since its founding, virtually every weaponsmaker made it to the list, ranging from Lockheed Martin (and before their merge, Lockheed and Martin), Boeing and
TRW to General Dynamics, Rockwell International and Northrop Grumman (and in its pre-merge incarnations,
Northrop and Grumman). As indicated in the reports charts, about one quarter of the Centers annual incomes

The military-industrialacademic nexus is evident also in many university based research projects on
China. For example, after the end of the Cold War, studies on the strategic implications
of Chinas rise have benefited from sizeable grants from the largely conservative,
anti-Communist foundations such as the Smith Richardson, Bradley, Scaife, and Olin Foundations.63 The
flowed from corporations, of which half came from defence contractors.62

John M. Olin Foundation, which funded the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University (Samuel
Huntington was its Founding Director), was set up by a chemical and munitions manufacturer. Some more reputable
social sciences foundations, which maintain a keen interest in sponsoring China-related studies, have been revealed
as once cover organisations for the CIA. Their influence on the direction of disciplines is as important as that of
government funding on research during the Cold War.64 The DoDs Minerva Initiative provides another potential
financial boon to the China-threat knowledge community. This initiative is modelled on the US National Defense
Education Act introduced at the early stage of the Cold War. Initially coming with a $50 million research fund up for
grabs, it calls upon university academics to offer their expertise on several Pentagon nominated security challenges
such as religious and cultural changes in the Islamic world and the development of the Chinese military and
technology.65 Co-administered by the National Science Foundation, the project states that it seeks a diverse range
of views, but its aim is to foster a new generation of engaged scholarship in the social sciences that seeks to meet
the challenges of the 21st century.66 It is too soon to tell how this Initiative, first launched in 2008, may come to
shape the outcomes of its funded studies on China. Thus far, there is only one China-related project funded by this
Initiative. However, if Project Camelot in the 1960s established by the US Army is anything to go by, it does not
inspire much confidence in either its neutrality or promised intellectual diversity.67 Consider, for example, the
administrative setup of the Minerva Initiative. With the condition that Pentagon officials sit on each peer-review
panel, this almost certainly guarantees that the funded proposals are as diverse as the worldview and strategic
agenda of the military-industrial complex would allow, even though the Pentagon often keeps a low-profile in
running those research projects. Where foreign sources share similar political interests in the politics of fear vis--vis
China, the production of the China threat knowledge in the US often become a transnational joint venture. As

many China research programmes in the US have received grants

from Taiwanese foundations and business leaders, many of whom are also political
leaders.68 During his time as a senior vice president at the AEI, John Bolton was paid $30 000 over
three years in the mid-1990s by Taiwans government for research papers on Taiwans UN
Lawrence Soley notes,

membership issues.69 It is often said that those who pay the piper call the tune. Where a research project fails to
meet the funding bodys expectation, not only does the prospect of securing further funding diminish dramatically,
but existing funding can also be withdrawn as a punishment. In June 2001, US National Intelligence Council (NIC)
fired the RAND Corporation from a classified project ordered by Congress to assess Chinas future military

Tenets hardline
view on China, as evidenced in his annual presentations on current and projected
national security threats to Congress, had been well known . But RANDs findings,
though depicting China as a growing military power, stopped short of calling it a
clear and present danger, thereby failing to offer the kind of conclusion the NIC had
desired. One analyst familiar with the project later complained that people at the NIC, themselves under pressure
capabilities. The NIC reports directly to the CIA Director, who at the time was George Tenet.

from Republican Hawks in Congress, want China to be 10 feet tall.70 This little episode provides an interesting
glimpse into the sometimes decisive role of power in the constitution of China knowledge in the US as well as the
role of desire in that power/knowledge nexus. Heavily dependent on government (especially Pentagon) funding and
for fear of missing out on future contracts, RAND and other think tanks might have learned a lesson or two. The
RAND-type incident in China watching does not happen very often, but its rarity seems to be a sign of the already
tacit cooperation between knowledge and power, rather than a clear indication of the independence of China

the broad political consensus of the military-industrialacademic complex, having circulated in the mainstream imagination for generations
and obtained a degree of cultural and institutional hegemony, has rendered overt
political control largely unnecessary. IR, as Peter Monaghan notes, is one of a number of
fields that are so interwoven with the federal government, particularly with military
and intelligence agencies, that they cannot avoid aping the political ideology
of those agencies. 71 Consequently, for all the claims of the China threat paradigm
to be scientific knowledge and objective truth, it has its roots in power and is wellsuited to the service of power. By taking note of the power/knowledge nexus in the construction and
knowledge from power. In any case,

function of the China threat knowledge, I do not suggest that every single piece of work in the China threat genre
is written under the decree of the Pentagon in exchange for funding and/or political patronage. As noted above, the
nexus often takes multiple forms, some of which are subtler, less visible and less direct than others. Indeed, it is in
the interest of both knowledge and power that their liaison be kept as covert as possible. This is what Foucault
means by the subtle mechanisms in the production of knowledge where the exercise of power becomes
capillary.72 In his account of the relationship between the state, the foundations, and international and area
studies during the Cold War, Cumings used the term going capillary to describe how, through small, everyday and
local avenues, such as decisions on who gets tenure, who edits prestigious journals, which research project gets
funded, and which textbooks are adopted, power was able to maintain its presence so that people do things
without being told, and often without knowing the influences on their behavior.73 Also, once taking on a life of its
own, knowledge can span an intertextual, disciplinary and institutional web within which it can self-generate,
ostensibly removing itself a step further from power. Thus far, I have critically examined the
power/knowledge/desire nexus in the case of the China threat paradigm. In doing so, I do not imply that the
solution lies in the pursuit of pure knowledge and neutral scholarship on the part of those China watchers, who
should shun government agencies, which in turn should stop funding social science research altogether. In the fields
of social sciences at least, there is no such thing as pure knowledge, disconnected totally from desire and power.
Indeed, as examined at the beginning of this book, pure social knowledge is neither possible nor even desirable. I
am not against the power/knowledge/desire nexus per se; rather, my point is that we, as producers of knowledge,
should guard against the possibility of being misused and abused by power which often serves special interests. We
should be self-conscious and sensitive to the consequenceshowever unintended or even well-intendedof our

If all knowledge is linked to power in one way or another, it may

beg the question of why the China threat paradigm has been singled out here for
criticism. The reason, I submit, is that not all knowledge/power nexuses are equal in
terms of their intertextual influence or practical and moral implications . As noted above,
associated with the China threat knowledge has been a particular kind of political
economy of fear. It not only lays the discursive foundation for military Keynesianism,
but also has profound and even dangerous repercussions for Sino-Western relations
in general and US-China relations in particular. When acted upon by foreign policymakers, the China threat paradigm runs the risk of turning into a selffulfilling prophecy, an issue which will be examined in the next chapter.
knowledge as practice.

AT: Cede the Political

1. Our criticism does not work to preclude the state, only the
representations of China in the 1AC.
2. Turnindividual action is key to effective policy making,
when we constantly construct threats around China in our
policy, it only prompts China to be more aggressive
thats [Pan] from the overview
3. No solvencyInstitutional approaches empirically fail:
Iraq, Afghanistan, attempts to spread Democracy in the
Arab Spring, the Kyoto Protocal, the Copenhagen
Conference, the Civil Rights Act, all of these are examples
of institutional failure.
Failure to question representations results in serial policy
failure
Dillon and Reid 2K Michael Dillon and Julian Reid Global Governance, Liberal
Peace, and Complex Emergency. By: Dillon, Michael, Reid, Julian, Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political, 03043754, Jan-Mar2000, Vol. 25, Issue 1
More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a
policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of

Policy domains reify the problematization of life in

by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into
"problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the
continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the
basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client
populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market
for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel
knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains.
certain ways

problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit
to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any

Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy

problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for
policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy
sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is
constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted
"problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological
and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so
fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely
ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists
precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely
what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to
circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control
than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want.
Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous
search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they
encounter with life, is problematizable.

constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no simple

shortcoming that science and policy --and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial
policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that
fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a
process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have
continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very

global
liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the
resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and
knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it
deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth,
opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed
ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.
changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus,

4. If we win that representations shape reality, this comes as

a prerequisite to political action.

2NC AT: Perms

The permutation severs. The alternative criticizes the
representation of the China threat, make them defend their
representations of the 1AC.

Epistemology DA
The permutation footnotes our criticism- bracketing it off
allowing assumptions to remain unchallenged
Richard K. ASHLEY, Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University,
AND R.B.J. WALKER, Professor of International Relations at the University of
Victoria, 1990 [Conclusion: Reading Dissidence/ Writing the Discipline: Crisis and
the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies, International Studies
Quarterly, Volume 34, Available Online via JSTOR, p. 370]
These fragments of critical readings provide but a few examples of increasingly
familiar ways in which scholars of international relations and the social sciences in
general often interpret, interrogate, and reply to works of dissidence that speak
from disciplinary margins. No doubt other examples could be offered. We think
these fragments suffice, however, to illustrate a considerable range of likely critical
responses that spans from left to right. Five things about these snippets are notable.
First, such critical commentary is not typically offered or received as the normal,
proper activity of a discipline or tradition, however that discipline or tradition be
defined. Such commentary is typically encountered in a footnote, a review essay, a
contribution to the occasional symposium on the disciplines future, a reading seminar, or the banter and sideplay of professional conferences. Rarely is it encountered
as the main theme of a refereed journal article or a formal research presentation at
a professional meeting. In brief, such commentary is offered as parenthesis. It is put
forth as a pause that is occasioned by the passing encounter with the moment of
dissidence and that is bracketed and set off from the real projects to which the
commentators and their audiences are soon to return. Second, when critical
comments such as these are offered, they are typically pronounced in a cool,
collected, self-assured voice of an I or we that neither stumbles nor quavers
with self-doubt. Sometimes, this posture of self-assurance takes the form of
nonchalance, even indifference, as if the commentary were roughly comparable to a
remark about the shrubbery overgrowing the side of a highway one travels. An air of
nonchalance is difficult to sustain, however, when dissident events disturb a sense
of direction or when marginal works of thought pose questions that are difficult to
ignore. On such occasions, equanimity often gives way to exasperation tinged with
embarrassment, a sense that it would be better if these things did not have to be
said, a regret that voices of dissidence-though sometimes raising interesting
questions-are somehow oblivious to the obvious things that truly refined scholars
should already know. On still other occasions, such as conversations between
teacher and student, when the addressee of these critical readings cannot yet be
presumed to be a mature member of the profession, an air of cool detachment
might be replaced by a tone of sobriety, even solemnity, that reminds the
potentially wayward novice that the reading is a kind of vow that he, like all
members, must earnestly recite. Yet all these reading postures-nonchalance,
exasperation, solemnity during the rite of passage-have something in common. As
gestures in themselves, they at once presuppose and indicate the same location.
These postures indicate that such critical remarks belong not at the center of the

discipline where its serious and productive work is proudly presented and logically
weighed, but at its boundaries, at its edges, at the thresholds or checkpoints of
entry and exit. They indicate, in the same stroke, that the disciplines territorial
boundaries are already marked, that the difference between outside and inside is
already given, and that the discipline, the tradition, the everybody who knows and
agrees with this reading is already assuredly there.

This results in worse epistemological crimes

Der Derian 95James, A Reinterpretation of Realism: Geneology, Semiology,
Dromology in International Theory: Critical Investigations , page 374
But what happens - as seems to be the case to this observer - when the 'we'
fragments, 'realism' takes on prefixes and goes plural, the meaning of meaning
itself is up for grabs? A stop-gap solution is to supplement the definitional gambit
with a facile gesture. The IR theorist, mindful of a creeping pluralism, will note the
'essentially contested' nature of realism - duly backed up with a footnote to W. B.
Gallie or W E. Connolly - and then get down to business as usual, that is, using
realism as the best language to reflect a self-same phenomenon. This amounts to
an intellectual plea of nolo-contendere: in exchange for not contesting the charge
that the meaning of realism is contestable, the IR 'perp' gets off easy, to then turn
around and commit worse epistemological crimes. In honor of the most notorious
benefactor of nolo-contendere in recent American legal history, we might call this
the 'Spiro-ette effect' in International Relations.

2NC Framework

2NC FW
Counter-Interpretation: The aff must defend the political
implications of the plan as well as the epistemological and
methodological groundings of the 1AC.
The role of the judge is to adopt the role of a critical
intellectual to question the claims of the 1ACthats best
A. Ground The affirmative team must defend the entirety of
the 1AC, not just select parts. Negative ground is only to
prove that the affirmative is not desirable.
B. Best Policy Making The benefit of learning and
incorporating Kiritkal discussions into our politics radically
transforms our understanding of what it means to be political
C. Predictability If we have specific links to the aff, its
predictable, and any arbitrary interpretation that negatives
must defend a policy is the real unpredictability.
D. Perms Check
And, fiat is illusory- no coherent reason why simulating the
case is good. Instead, you default to what you have control
over, which is the discourse of this round. If we win the affs
knowledge production is flawed, you vote neg on presumption.

The role of the ballot should be to assume the position of a

critical intellectual- debate is primarily an academic activity.
The signal sent intellectually outweighs any specific policy
proposal the judge is not a policy makers and your decision
does not influence policy decisions
Jones 99, professor of international politics at Aberystwyth University, 1999
(Richard Wyn, Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a
counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and
interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is
accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, every
relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogic relationship (Gramsci 1971: 350).
Discussing the relationship of the philosophy of praxis to political practice, Gramsci claims: It [the theory] does
not tend to leave the simple in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher
conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and simple it is not in order to restrict
scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an
intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of
small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative

intellectual-moral bloc should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party a body he described as the
modern prince. Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians,
and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey
toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramscis relative optimism
about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was
predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage
the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led
Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social
change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of
quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s
between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the
deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains
a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce
all other forms of domination for example, in the case of gender to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to
do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation
and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms
of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and
problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive
development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways
in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with
ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined,
vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the infallible party has
obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern
Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of
support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation
that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially

History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been

positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a
particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred
in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered
as resources of hope for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that
ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical
interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of
critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the
peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals
(the alternative defense school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism .
Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant
discourses of strategy and security , a far more important result in the long run. The
synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both
working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As
disastrous.

Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term common security originated in the contribution of peace researchers to
the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the

Initially,
mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it
certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of
common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities,
Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982).

including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security
specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet institutchiks members of the
influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau
1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently

able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in

order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, in response
to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the
ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207).

Similar pressures even

had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan
administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence.

It was the American peace movement and what became known as the freeze
campaign that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies.
(Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the
combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and

it did at least have a substantial impact on

ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of
alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union . Through various East-West links, which included
arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of
Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such
substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that

attendant notions as nonoffensive defense (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel
1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences).

This group,

including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and
Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup
and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachevs subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for

new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in EastWest relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (the interaction of
ideas and material reality). But what is significant is that the Soviets commitment to common
security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in
the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern
Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the
former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common
example, that

security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its

This points to an interesting and potentially

important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security,
and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military
services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of
the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a
potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official
expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997).

circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997
demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates

critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role a significant one at that
in making the world a better and safer place . Second, it points to potential future
addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in
particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society . CRITICAL
that

SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject
aspects of Gramscis theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his
emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of
their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic
intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with
different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for

Said captures this broader orientation when

he suggests that critical intellectuals are always tied to and ought to remain an
organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless,
the unrepresented, the powerless (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means
placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the
present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the
agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison detat the prism through
which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition . If all
theory is for someone and for some purpose, then critical security studies is for
emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward

the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless, and its purpose is their
emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the
previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift
in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part
of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But

the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of
theorizing even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such
as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures can become a
force for the direction of action. Again, Gramscis work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci
advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and
economic orders, or, in Gramscis terminology, historic blocs (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted
Machiavellis view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is
produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of
common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for
Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social
realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the
West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marxs well-worn
phrase, All that is solid melts into the air. Gramscis intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure
that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a war of position (Gramsci
1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal

social change requires a slow, incremental,

even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an
alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this
democracies, any successful attempt at progressive

process by helping to undermine the natural, commonsense, internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn
helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs
created. I contend that Gramscis strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of
critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY

If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of

position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the
enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse.
This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an
immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the
justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the
security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on
their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of
those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence
reproduce, the prevailing world order . This challenge entails teasing out the often
subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments
while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into
mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist faade. In this sense,
proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucaults notion of specific
intellectuals who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing regime of
truth (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more
STUDIES

familiar Quaker lines of speaking truth to power (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the
eisteddfod lines of speaking truth against the world. Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do,
sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that strategists must be prepared to speak truth
to power (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that,
whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their
power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted.

critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated

by Adorno, that the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth
Furthermore,

(cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy
is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, every relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogic

relationship (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus,

by

criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of

security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously
playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to
the development of a counterhegemonic position . There are a number of avenues of avenues
open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to
foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other
possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of
the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage.
Nancy Fraser argues: As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical
counterculture . As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into
whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps
significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic

Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances
when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but , in the final analysis,
because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay
at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such unobtrusive yet insistent work does not in
itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of
collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their
educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide
support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By
providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views,
critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social
movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are
aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean
peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are
harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New

Pugh cites the importance of the visits of

critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the countrys
political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989:
Zealands antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C.

108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of
security and strategy drew strength and succor from each others efforts. If such critical social movements do not
exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist
need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the
1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work
undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts
developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin
and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in
Adornian terms of the a message in a bottle, but in this case, contra Adornos expectations, they were picked up
and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be nave to understate the
difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these
problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues
that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing professionalisation of academic life (Said

Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security

and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays in all senses to stick
with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary
preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so
prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security
specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War
(Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for new targets for
old weapons). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of
1994: 49-62).

security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing

dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can
connect with the practices of social movements and become a force for the
direction of action. The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical
thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably
playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to
critical security studies.

And, YOU STILL DEFAULT NEG. EVEN IF THEY WIN A SUPERIOR

FRAMEWORK, ITS ONLY A REASON TO REJECT OUR FILTER, NOT
OUR ARGUMENT OR THE TEAM. YOU STILL WEIGH OUR IMPACT
AND LINK CLAIMS AS A CASE TURN.
And, under their framework we still win. Their instance of
engagement is rooted in the idea of Western expansion. This
creates an asymmetrical system parodied by the engagement
and control of China thats the 1st Pan 04 card.
Now, framing issue: winning framework means the
ALTERNATIVE IS IRRELEVANT the debate is a YES/NO question
about whether the knowledge the affirmative produced is true
or not its about what the aff SHOULD HAVE done.