a.

Policy experts are key to the managerial system of

power the only way to fight this is to train us to
question assumptions rather than produce policy
research
Hayes 06 (Floyd W. Hayes, senior lecturer in Political Science and
African-Americ Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Politics of Knowledge:
Black Policy Professionals in the Managerial Age, A Companion to AfricanAmerican Studies, edited by Gordon & Gordon, p. 452)
In the face of increasing multitudes of impoverished and unwanted urban
residents, the new social order is rapidly becoming a garrison-prison
state, which is characterized by the increasing militarization of the

police, the dramatic growth of prisons, and the unrestrained police

murder and incarceration of Black and Latinos (see F. Donner 1990; D.
Garland 2001; J. James 1996; H. Lasswell 1941; C. Parenti 1999). These
developments, along with the expanding roles of policy
intellectuals and the increasing politicization of expert knowledge, also
signal the managerial imperative - the coming of an increasingly
fragmented, nihilistic, and repressive society. The new politics of
policy making is witnessing an increasing nexus between
professional policy specialists and professional politicians - a
veritable convergence of knowledge and power - which appears to
dominate, monopolize, and manipulate the dynamics of public
policy discourse. This springs from the growing complexity of social problems
and the demand for expertise. The great threat of the managerial polity is to the
belief in and practice of democracy itself. If there is to be a democratic

society in America's future, the role and responsibility of policy

experts and their specialized knowledge cannot be to manage the
people but to improve the quality of public discourse by probing
assumptions, raising issues, and thereby helping the people to
consider different formulations of problems and a wider set of
possible solutions (G. Majone 1988, 1989). Policy intellectuals need to
become not servants of the powerful few, but representatives of the
silenced masses; policy intellectuals must become dissenters who
speak truth to power (E. Said 1994). In the final analysis, knowledge must
have a more public value and role so that the people can decide
their own future (J. Willinski 2000). As we stand at the dawn of the new
millennium, a burning question is whether industrial-capitalism and American
democracy can survive an increasingly technocratic, elitist policy-making process
that more and more defines the managerial age.

2. Policy research is used selectively by elites doesnt

improve policy but manipulates researchers to work on
behalf of power
Wacquant 04 (LOIC WACQUANT, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.
Critical Thought as Solvent of Doxa. Constellations 11:1, p. 99.)

In the United States, it is policy research that plays the lead role as a
cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a

buffer isolating the political field from any research that is

independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public
policy. All researchers who want to address state officials are obliged to
pass through this mongrel field, this decontamination chamber, and
agree to submit to severe censorship by reformulating their work according
to technocratic categories that ensure that this work will have neither purchase
nor any effect on reality (over the entrance gates of public policy schools is written in
invisible letters: thou shallt not ask thy own questions). In point of fact, American

politicians never invoke social research except when it supports the

direction they want to go in anyway for reasons of political expediency; in all
other cases, they trample it shamelessly, as President Clinton did when he signed
his welfare reform in 1996 (a misnomer since this legislation abolished the
right to public assistance for the most destitute to replace it with mandatory
precarious wage work via workfare) despite truckloads of studies showing
that this amounts to a social regression bound to seriously harm the most
disadvantaged when economic conditions are no longer favorable.

Externalizing ethics onto legal institutions trades off with

personal ethics--- independently turns casemagnifies the
impact to the kritik and turns case
Rozo 4 (Diego, MA in philosophy and Cultural Analysis @ U of Amsterdam,
Forgiving the Unforgivable: On Violence, Power, and the Possibility of Justice, p.
19-21, http://www.banrepcultural.org/blaavirtual/tesis/colfuturo/Forgiving%20the
%20Unforgivable.pdf) ***We dont endorse gendered language.
Within the legal order the relations between individuals will resemble this logic where

suffering is

exchanged for more, but legal suffering , because these relations are no longer
regulated by the culture of the heart [Kultur des Herzens]. (CV 245) As Benjamin describes it, the legal system
tries to erect, in all areas where individual ends could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can be

The individual is not to take law in his own

hands; no conflict should be susceptible of being solved without the direct intervention of law, lest its
authority will be undermined. Law has to present itself as indispensable for any kind of
conflict to be solved. The consequence of this infiltration of law throughout the whole of human life is
paradoxical: the more inescapable the rule of law is, the less responsible the
individual becomes. Legal and judicial institutions act as avengers in the name of the individual. Even the
possibility of forgiveness is monopolized by the state under the right of mercy. Hence the
responsibility of the person toward the other s is now delegated on the
authority and justness of the law. The legal institutions, the very agents of (legal) vengeance
exonerate me from my essential responsibility towards the others,
breaking the moral proximity that makes every ethics possible.20 Thus I am
realized only by legal power. (CV 238)

no longer obliged to an other that by his/her very presence would demand me to be worthy of the occasion (of
every occasion), because law, by seeking to regulate affairs between individuals, makes this other anonymous,
virtual: his otherness is equaled to that of every possible other. The Other becomes faceless, making it all too easy
for me to ignore his demands of justice, and even to exert on him violence just for the sake of legality. The logic of
evil, then, becomes not a means but an end in itself:21 state violence for the sake of the states survival. Hence,

my unconditional responsibility
towards the other being delegated on the ideological and totalitarian
the ever-present possibility of the worst takes the form of

institutions of a law gone astray in the (its) logic of self-

preserving vengeance. The

undecidability of the origin of law, and its consequent meddling all across human affairs makes it possible that the
worst could be exerted in the name of law. Even the very notion of crimes against humanity, which seeks to
protect the life of the population, can be overlooked by the state if it feels threatened by other states or by its own

responsibility towards the Other is taken from

me, at the price of my own existence being constantly threatened by the
population.22 From now on, my

imminent and fatal possibility of being signaled as guilty of an (for me) indeterminate offence. In this picture,

the modern state protects my existence while bringing on the terror of state violence the law
infiltrates into and seeks to rule our most private conflicts.

They perpetuate in round violence because we learn to be

mediocre scholars
Schlag 9 (Pierre, Distinguished Prof. @ U. of Colorado and Byron R. White
Professor @ Colorado Law School, Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, and the Rank
Anxiety of Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art) 97 Geo. L. J. 803,
pp. 828-830)
In terms of social organization then, there may be something to be said for
creating a professional corps (lawyers) whose modes of communication are widely
shared and relatively standardized. Notice that if this is the objective, then the only place where
that sort of standardized communication can be widely shared is
somewhere close to the middle of the bell curve. Both intellectual sloth and
intellectual excellence are, by definition, aberrant and thus detract from our efforts at standardization.
Thus, training for mediocrity does serve a social function (within limits, of course).
Mediocrity is not the only aim here. One would like this mediocrity to be the best it can be. We would like legal professionals to
share a language and a mode of thought and, at the same time, for that language and mode of thought to be as perspicuous and
intelligent as possible. Given the omnipresence of the bell curve, these desiderata are obviously in tension. The economists would
likely talk about achieving the optimal degree of intelligence and mediocrity at the margin, but my sense is this will only get us

What many law professors

would likebecause many of them are intellectually inclinedis to bring intelligence to bear
within legal discourse. This is bound to be a somewhat frustrating venture. Legal discourse is not designed to
produce intelligence and, frankly, the materials and the discourse can only bear so much. Good judgment,
groundedness, reasonablenessany of these virtues is often enough to snuff out real
thinking. Indeed, whatever appeal good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness may have for a judge or a lawyer
so far. For law professors, the tension is bound to be somewhat frustrating.

(and I am prepared to say the appeal is considerable), such virtues are not particularly helpful to intellectual achievement. On the

intellectual achievement requires the abandonment of received

understandings. In fact, I would go so far as to say that intellectual vitality (at least in the context of a discipline like
contrary,

law) requires some degree of defamiliarization, some reach for the exotic. The thing is, those sorts of efforts are not going to get
very far if they constantly have to answer to good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness, and the like. And at this point, I would

I would like us to think of appeals to good

judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness in legal thought as appeals
to mediocrity. Making people see things involves things far different from good judgment, groundedness, or
reasonableness. It involves a kind of artistrya reorientation of the gaze, a disruption of complacency, a
like to flip the argument made earlier in the paper. Here,

sabotage of habitual forms of thought, a derailing of cognitive defaults. This is part of what a really good education is about.

Constant obeisance to good judgment or groundedness or reasonableness ,

by contrast, will systematically frustrate such efforts. 57 This is all rather vexing. Legal
academicswith aspirations to intellectual excellenceare thus destined to play out the myth of
Sisyphus. The main difference, of course, is that Sisyphus had a real rock to
push up a real hill. The law professors rock and hill, by contrast are
symbolicimaginative constructions of their own making. Arguably, pushing a
symbolic rock up a symbolic hill is substantially easier than doing it for real. At the very least, it is

easier to fake it and to claim success. At the same time, though, the symbolic
nature of the exercise perhaps makes it more transparently pointless. As between these two
points, there is a certain dissonance. On the one hand, we are dealing with pushing rocks up hillsand that is surely hard work.
On the other hand, the rocks and hills are of our own imaginationso it should be easy. This is very confusing.58 My best guess
(and I offer this only as a preliminary hypothesis) is that the dissonance here might yield a certain degree of neurosis.59 Still the

So what? So whatso you have maybe seven thousandsomething law professors in the nation and you know, maybe ninety-six percent are
engaged in a kind of vaguely neurotic scholarship. So what? Maybe its
borderline tragic. Maybe, these people could have done so much better. None of this, by the way, is clearly
question pops up again:

established. But lets just assume, its true. Who cares? Seven thousand peoplethats not a lot of people. Plus, its hard to feel for

why care about

this? Heres why. The thing about legal scholarship is that it playsthrough the mediation of the professorial mind
an important role in shaping the ways, the forms, in which law students think
with and about law.60 If they are taught to think in essentially mediocre
ways, they will reproduce those ways of thinking as they practice law and
politics. If they are incurious, if they are lacking in political and legal imagination , if
they are simply repeating the standard moves (even if with impressive
virtuosity) they will, as a group, be wielding power in essentially mediocre ways.
And the thing is: when mediocrity is endowed with power, it yields violence. And when mediocrity is
endowed with great power, it yields massive violence. 61 All of which is to say that in
making the negotiation between the imprinting of standard forms of legal thought
and the imparting of an imaginative intelligence, we err too much on the side
of the former. (Purely my subjective call herebut so is everybody elses.) Another way to put it is that while there is
them. I know that nearly all of them would be us (but still). Its an extraordinarily privileged life. So

something to be said for the standardization point made earlier, generally, standardization is overdone.62

Simply talking about colonialism or adding more scholars to

the discussion isnt enough. Debating about decolonization at
the level of knowledge production is key leads to academic
spill over
Foneseca and Jerrems, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
graduate students, 12
Melody, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Ari, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid,
June 2012, Why Decolonise International Relations Theory?, Pg. 3-4,
http://academia.edu/1631024/Why_Decolonise_IR_theory, JB)
These scholars insist on the need to open a real debate about the imperial,
colonial and racist origins and legacies of the discipline. This means
decolonising any consensus regarding time, knowledge, and being via a
thorough confrontation with these issues. Shilliam in 'The perilous but
unavoidable terrain of the non-West"s affirms that modernity as a debate in IR is
"naturalized" by certain issues such as: the problem of continuity and change -that
is assigning different temporalities to non-Western societies-; the question of
secularism -starting with the idea that certain kinds of religiosities have
disappeared with modernity-; and the topic of race -that the aim to homogenize
cultures led to the creation of "meta-racialized identities". Sankaran Krishna
identifies what is the crux of the problem when she argues that IR theory is

quintessential white, "not because race disappears [but because it] serves
as the crucial epistemic silence around which the discipline is written and
coheres."5 in Decolonizing International Relations the main suggestion is that "to
decolonize IR theory is [...] to decolonize all the topics, since the discipline
itself is reproducing a "modern imperial ideology".' As Julian Saurin argues,
"the central historiographical battle is a political battle over ownership of
the means of production of memory and the definition of progress".5 it is
necessary to question not only the "neutrality" of history, but the selection
of events, characters, epochs, what is memorable and what is not . The
control over what is to be remembered is suppressed by what Krishna calls the
abstraction of the discipline "presented as the desire of the discipline to engage on
theory building rather than on descriptive or historical analysis, is a screen that
simultaneously rationalizes and elides the details of these encounters."9 To go
beyond that abstraction IR theory not only needs to deconstruct itself as a
reproducer of Western imperialism, colonialism, and racism, but also as a
discipline that continues to insist that '"the rest of the world" has benefited
[...] from the spread of the Wests civilizing values and institutions [...]""'
This natural acceptance of "Wests civilizing values and institutions" and the
"socialization of international norms" is the focus of intense criticism. Addressing
Kathryn Sikkin and Martha Finnemore's International Organization, Robert Vitalis
argues that the "acceptance" of international norms had to hide that within an IR
framework, white supremacy is constitutive of a set of racist practices
undertaken by states and individuals"."1 To counter this he proposes Du Bois'
color line as an initial approach to the study of racism as an international
institution. Vitalis understands that "his views on the 'race concepf expressed, over
time, a growing understanding of what we now mean when we say that the idea of
race itself is a social construction".1