***1AC***

Advantage
The threat of regime change posed by military presence creates a security
dilemma that risks miscalculation and full scale war.
Maleki and Reardon 14 (10/4, Abbas, PhD in Strategic Management, assistant
professor of political science at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, director of
the International Institute for Caspian Studies, senior associate of the Belfer
Center's International Security Program, former Wilhelm Fellow in International
Studies at MIT and deputy foreign minister of Iran from 1988-1997, and Robert, PhD
in Political Science from MIT, Research Fellow with the International Security
Program and the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvards Belfer Center,
Improving U.S.-Iranian Relations and Overcoming Perceptual Biases, in U.S.-Iran
Misperceptions: A Dialogue, pp. 158-161)

The views Americans and Iranians have of each other as innately and implacably hostile revisionist states are
mutually reinforcing. Leaders in both Tehran and Washington have frequently discounted as mere rhetoric each others efforts to describe these views. The
authors in this volume suggest however, that they are largely genuine, and strongly inform the decision-making process

in both countries. As a result, each countrys actions are interpreted in the most aggressive light
possible.
A consequence of these mutually reinforcing views is what Robert Jervis has referred to as the spiral model. According to the spiral
model, conflicts arise when both sides of a dispute believe, falsely, that the other will best

respond to coercive threats, and that positive inducements will invite greater aggression.
Both sides therefore adopt coercive postures toward the other, and eschew compromise. The result
is a spiral of mutual hostility, and a conflict that neither side intended nor desired. The
spiral model stands in contrast to the deterrence model, in which one party to a dispute falsely
believes it can satisfy its rivals claims by offering concession. Instead, the appeasement convinces the rival that it can effectively coerce the appeaser, reinforcing its aggressive
behavior.

Foreign policy hawks in both Tehran and Washington believe that the deterrence
model best describes the current relationship between the United States and Iran, and their adherence
to this view has had a significant effect on U.S. policy . Throughout Washington, Iran is
typically treated as an implacably hostile state that will only respond to coercion .
With only a few notable exceptions, U.S. efforts at engagement with Iran have been infrequent and
half-hearted . When engagement is pursued, as it has been with respect to Irans nuclear program, the American negotiating stance (in cooperation with its Western
allies) has been inflexible. At the same time, in the belief that the Iranians cannot be expected to negotiate

in good faith unless they are simultaneously threatened with coercive

measures , Washington has followed a carrot-and-stick approach . Thus, even
where negotiations might succeed, they are often undermined by threats .
In both Washington and Tehran, political conservatives tend to paint advocates of
negotiation and rapprochement as nave would-be appeasers who dangerously misunderstand the other states malign
intentions. The dynamic is illustrated by the repeated references to the Munich Pact in the public discourse in the United States about Irans nuclear program. Hawkish politicians and
pundits have often sought to use the 1938 deal with Hitler by the British and French that partitioned Czechoslovakia and fueled the Nazis aggression as an analogy for U.S. engagement
strategies with Iran. Just as Hitler was not satisfied with the Sudetenland and interpreted British and French behavior at Munich as a signal of their weakness and lack of resolve, so would

Tehran could be expected to

Iran not be satisfied with any deal regarding its nuclear program with the P5+1, or have any intention of honoring the deal.

pocket whatever concessions the United States offered and, eventually, seek greater concessions through
aggressive means. On the Iranian side, it is reflected in the Supreme Leaders oft-made statements that the U.S. offers to negotiate over the Iranian nuclear
program are not made in good faith, and mask an American effort to make Iran subordinate to American power.

Decision-makers perceptions of the nature of the U.S.-Iran relationship and whether it should be described using the deterrence
or spiral model are shaped by their beliefs about the others intentions . Specifically, they are more likely to
perceive the relationship as the deterrence model if they believe the other side is an aggressor that seeks to overturn the legitimate status quo. In the case of the United States and Iran,

as the authors of this volume show, both sides tend to see themselves as the legitimate defender of the
status quo, and view the other state as the illegitimate, revisionist challenger . Each
sides behavior is therefore interpreted as aggression designed to expand the states
power in the region. Because these mutually incompatible views dominate on both sides, the result is a spiral model : Both
American and Iranian decision makers tend to believe that coercion will be more effective than carrots when dealing with the other state, and that it is dangerously nave to make any
concessions that could signal a lack of resolve. None of this is to say that either the United States or Iran is necessarily peaceful or aggressive. The problem is that each side sees the
other as the aggressor, and itself as the aggrieved. And, critically, each side believes that this is equally apparent to the other, and that the others claims of grievances are
disingenuous.

Thirty-three years of mutual hostility between the United States and Iran have served to strongly reinforce
negative perceptions and suspicions on both sides. Misperceptions about each others attitudes are now deeply rooted and
typically go unchallenged in elite and popular discussions. Where positive attitudes do exist, or where they challenge strongly held negative assumptions, they are typically hidden to the
other side. For example, most Americans would surprised to find that among the Iranian public there are remarkably favorable attitudes toward the American people, and a strong desire
for good relations between the two nations. Notably, the Iranian publics show of sympathy toward America after the 9/11 attacks went largely unnoticed and unreported in the U.S.
media. Few Americans know that hundreds of Iranians gathered publicly to pay their respects and to show their solidarity with the American people, first on September 13, 2001, two
days after attacks on New York and Washington, DC, and did so again in two other vigils. Three days after the attacks, a moment of silence for the American tragedy was held before the
stat of the World Cup qualifying soccer game, the same day the Tehran Friday prayer leader said the terrorist attacks against America were heart-rending, everyone condemns,

Misperception and
denounces, and is saddened by it.4 These sorts of positive public attitudes are not just unfamiliar but often inconceivable to many Americans.

ignorance on both sides can affect policy making and unnecessarily close off policy
options.
The spiral model illustrates that the greatest danger brought about by U.S. and Iranian
misperceptions of one another is not just continued stalemate but escalation . When
each side believes it must stand firm to demonstrate resolve , and must likewise meet any threat
with a counterthreatand at the same time believes that any conciliatory gesture could be used by the other as a means to gain an advantage the
risk of escalation to overt conflict , even when such a conflict is not desired by
either side, is real . Repeated rounds of threats and counterthreats limit policy
choices and raise the perceived international and domestic political stakes
of backing down in order to avoid catastrophe. The severance of diplomatic contacts,
a refusal to negotiate (or to only do so on rare occasion in high-profile, one-off meetings), and the use of inflammatory

rhetoric all reduce effective means of communication and policy coordination , and only
heighten the risk of misperception and miscalculation , increasing the risk of
accidental or unintended conflict . In recent months, the United States and Iran appear to be accelerating down this path, not least by
raising tensions in the Persian Gulf , where a small-scale or accidental military encounter

could easily trigger a much wider conflagration .

Military force and soft power driven regime change are two sides of the
same coin only the threat of intervention prevents Iran from effectively
resisting neoliberal infiltration.
Hossein-Zadeh 15 (8/28, Ismael, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Drake
University, Behind the Congressional Disagreements Over the Iran Nuclear Deal,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/28/behind-the-congressional-disagreements-
over-the-iran-nuclear-deal/)

Indeed, the Obama administrations recent approach of relying primarily on business/market

forces of regime change, or modification, without ruling out the military option
is likely to be more effective in achieving its goal than the war partys reckless insistence on escalating
sanctions and military threats.
The effectiveness of this approach lies in the fact that, as pointed out earlier, the nuclear deal would
significantly limit Irans military and defense capabilities . The deal would also avail
the US extensive knowledge of Irans economic, technological, security, and military
capabilities and, therefore, vulnerabilities. This means that if at any time in the future Iran

defies or resists the heavy-handed imperialistic designs of the U nited S tates, the US
can then employ its war machine more effectively as it would have the necessary information on
strategic places or targets to be attacked or bombarded.
This is no speculation or conspiracy theory. It is, indeed, a scenario projected by the Obama
administration officials and other advocates of the nuclear deal as they promote it ahead of the next months critical vote in Congress.
In meetings on Capitol Hill and with influential policy analysts , administration officials argue that
inspections of Irans nuclear facilities under the deal will reveal important details that can be used for better targeting should the U.S. decide to attack
Iran [1].
Commenting on this ominous depraved scheme, Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told Michael
Crowley of the Politico, Its certainly an argument Ive heard made. . . . Well be better off with the agreement were we to need to use force [2].
suffice it to remember the fact that
To see how this menacing projection is not simply an abstract or partisan argument,

this is exactly what was done to Iraq and Libya . In both cases, the U nited S tates and its allies
used disingenuous negotiations with Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi as pretexts to collect
information about their military/defense capabilities and, then, used the information thus acquired for targeted
bombardment and effective invasion .

Presence threatens Iran and emboldens the GCC, causing an expansion of

the military-industrial complex throughout the region and multiple
instances of ongoing violence including in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria.
Jones 11 (12/22, Toby, PhD in Middle Eastern History from Stanford University,
assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, Don't Stop at Iraq: Why the U.S.
Should Withdraw From the Entire Persian Gulf,
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/dont-stop-at-iraq-why-the-
us-should-withdraw-from-the-entire-persian-gulf/250389/)

Led by Saudi Arabia, the Arab Gulf states claim that their fears of Iranian ambition
are existential. It is certainly true that Tehran is locked in a regional balance of power struggle with Saudi Arabia and that Iran seeks greater influence. But Iran
does not seek the destruction of Saudi Arabia or the overthrow of Arab world's
political order. In spite of claims to the contrary by the Saudi and Bahraini governments, Iran's revolutionary imperative is a
relic of the past. Israel expresses a similar anxiety about Iran as a security threat. And Iran's leaders have played their part in fostering Israeli uncertainty. Iran's
potential acquisition of nuclear weapons is a source of concern, of course, as is its support for Hezbollah and Syria. The challenge of how best to

deal with Iranian ambition, however, is mainly a political problem, one that has for too
long been treated almost entirely through the lens of security and
militarism .
The presence of the American military in the Gulf has not only done little to deter
Iran's ambitions, it has emboldened them . Surrounding Iran militarily and
putting it under the constant threat of American or Israeli military action
has failed to deter the country . Instead this approach has strengthened
hardliners within Tehran and convinced them that the best path to self-preservation is
through defiance, militarism, and the pursuit of dangerous ties across the Middle
East. The rivalry between Iran, the U.S., and its regional partners has turned into a
political and military arms race, one that could easily spin out of control .
Less obvious, the United States' military posture has also emboldened its allies, sometimes to act

in counterproductive ways. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain justify their brutal crackdown
of Bahrain's pro-democracy movement by falsely claiming Iranian meddling . While
American policymakers support democratic transitions in the Middle East rhetorically, their unwillingness to confront long-time allies
in the Gulf during the Arab Spring is partly the product of the continued belief that the
U.S. needs to keep its military in the Gulf, something that requires staying on good terms with Gulf monarchies. The result
is that Saudi Arabia and its allies have considerable political cover to behave badly,
both at home and abroad.
If the Arab Spring has demonstrated anything, it is that the old political order is vulnerable to

domestic political pressure. The Middle East is moving to an era of mass politics , in
which mobilized publics demand greater rights and greater influence. While many
 Saudi Arabia, the world's most important oil producer,
observers believe that the oil states are less susceptible to such pressures, this seems far from certain. In fact,

shares many of social and political-economic characteristics of its beleaguered

neighbors, including high unemployment, widespread poverty, popular disillusion
with corruption, and an increasingly sophisticated network of grassroots
organizations committed to political change. Even flush with considerable oil
revenue and the capacity to throw money at its many internal problems, Saudi Arabia has still been forced to unleash
its police and security forces to quell unrest. The United States, because of its relationship with Saudi Arabia
and Bahrain and its apparent preference for preserving the political status quo in the Gulf, is increasingly

seen by the region's citizens as conflated with the violent forces of

counterrevolution . Should revolutionaries and would-be revolutionaries in the Gulf force political
transitions in the future, the United States could pay a political price for its long-
standing military entanglements.
Now, even the White House no longer believes our large military presence in the Gulf is

good for combating the big threat we're supposedly there to contain: terrorism. Ben
Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, remarked last week that u," he said, to bring the U.S. security posture in the region more "in line with where
we were before 1990." Rhodes apparently did not comment on either energy security or Iran. While his comments strike the right tone, there may be less to them than meets the eye.
Last week's statement directly contradicted an October New York Times report that administration officials plan to reallocate military resources and combat troops from Iraq to elsewhere
in the Gulf, Kuwait in particular.

There are compelling reasons to believe that the Obama administration will not demilitarize the Gulf to pre-1990
levels, as Rhodes said. The majority of U.S. military facilities, including the al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and the headquarters of the Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, were built after 1990.

New military spending and new construction are planned for 2012. The State Department has requested around $26
million dollars for new construction at the Fifth Fleet's Bahrain headquarters. This is not a huge sum, but it was requested as Bahraini security forces carried out a brutal crackdown on its

own people. American priorities are, sadly, all too clear .

The status quo is never easy to change, especially when it comes to institutions as risk-averse as the Pentagon and State Department and to practices as entrenched as the 25-year U.S.-

Skeptics will warn that Iran

Gulf alliance. A new strategic approach, one that relies less on the projection of military power, will seem replete with risk.

would be emboldened, that terrorists would seek a foothold, and that the flow of oil
would be imperiled. But these fears are exaggerated . To the extent that these
dangers are plaudible at all, it's because our current policy makes them
possible . The greatest risk is proceeding ahead with the status quo . To
disengage from our fraught and increasingly counterproductive Gulf presence would
require the U.S. to begin withdrawing its military personnel from the region, reduce its spending
on existing infrastructure, put an end to the weapons pipeline, and look for places from which it can depart

immediately, such as moving the Fifth Fleet out of the Gulf and reducing the Navy's burden in patrolling the Gulf.

Blurring the binary between war and peace is crucial the Gulf is not at
peace, and believing it is obscures hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Jones 12 (2012, Toby, PhD in Middle Eastern History from Stanford University,
assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, America, Oil, and War in the
Middle East, Journal of American History (2012) 99 (1): 208-218)

It might be tempting to argue that the escalating involvement of the U nited S tates and its history of militarism and
military engagement in the Gulf region have provided a kind of security for the region. After all, oil has continued to flow, the network of oil producers has
remained the same, and thus the primary interests of the United States in the region have been served. But three decades of war belie this

argument. War is not tantamount to security, stability, or peace. Even in the periods between wars in the
region the violence carried out by regimes against their own subjects makes

clear that peace is not always peaceful . The cost has been high for the United States and
especially for people who live in the Middle East . In thirty years of war, hundreds of thousands have died

excruciating and violent deaths. Poverty, environmental disaster, torture, and

wretched living conditions haunt the lives of many in Iraq, Iran, and
elsewhere in the region. Of course, the burden of death and destruction does not fall entirely on the United States and its policy of militarization. The
politics of war have primarily served the interests of regional leaders who have, often from a position of weakness, exported
violence to deflect internal challenges to their authority . And international political
rivalry, particularly during the Cold War, drew in the other global powers, most notably the Soviet Union, which also helped facilitate
insecurity and disorder in the Middle East.

Removing presence is key the US attempt to play a balancing role in the

region causes conflict
Oktav 11 (Summer 2011, zden Zeynep, PhD, Professor of Political Science and
International Relations, Yildiz Technical University, Turkey, The Gulf States and Iran:
A Turkish Perspective, Middle East Policy Council, Volume XVIII, Number 2)

From Tehrans perspective, the military presence of the United States is the
key destabilizing factor removal of American influence is Irans sole ; therefore, the

strategic objective in the Persian Gulf. On the other hand, the Gulf states situation has been even more difficult. They have been increasingly uneasy about American intentions, especially
since Obama has come to power. The U.S. presidents engagement policy with the Islamic Republic made the Gulf countries more vulnerable, pushing them to diversify their security relations.11 Put differently, the Obama
administrations lighter footprint in the region strengthened the belief that "the United States could acquiesce to Iranian domination of the Gulf if Tehran were to put an end to its uranium enrichment program and renounce its
ambition to develop nuclear weapons."12 Moreover, President Ahmadinejads reelection in 2009 showed that the engagement policy did not quell the Islamic Republics revolutionary zeal to "change the current circumstances in the
world."13 This exacerbated the GCC countries security concerns and led to an increase in their military spending.
Although a strong military collaboration was reinstated between the GCC and the United States after 2003, the GCC states are still vulnerable due to their lack of military experience, modest populations and limited geographic size.
In addition, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, none has strategic depth. Irans army has a total manpower of more than 540,000, compared to a combined GCC total of 176,500.14 Most important, "There isnt a GCC military alliance
akin to NATO."15

The GCC countries have always been very cautious about military confrontation with
Iran The Gulf countries fear the chaos of a U.S. strike
and reluctant to counter Irans nuclear program by military means. more than the

and they want Washington to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear

effects of Irans nuclear acquisition,

weapons Military force would prompt Iran to activate its networks and
rather than confronting them militarily.

assets in Iraq, fueling an already highly volatile situation . In addition, the GCC countries would not be able to continue their tacit

Iran has the

cooperation with Iran, a crucial part of the policy of diversification, to protect their interests but not challenge the United States. The GCC countries would be "hard-pressed to choose a side."16 Third,

ability to block the Strait of Hormuz and cut the Gulfs oil traffic in half, a disaster for the region as well as the West.

Commercial interests also pressure both sides to be cautious about military

confrontation . Most of Irans foreign-currency earnings derive from the export of energy through the Persian Gulf. The region is also Irans main route of international trade and communication and the starting
point for Irans international relations.17 It is also noteworthy that the Saudi petrochemical industry has an ever-increasing need for natural gas, and Iran holds the worlds second-largest reserves.18 In addition, the

instability from any military confrontation would hinder the flow of foreign direct
investment to the Gulf primarily Saudi Arabia countries, . For example, between 2004 and 2006, Saudi inward foreign direct investments, as a percentage
of gross fixed capital, rose from 4.5 percent to 32.1 percent; in Iran, it rose from 0.7 to 1.9 percent. The average in the developing world in 2006 was 13.8 percent.19

Despite the existence of so many reasons for both sides to avoid military
confrontation and build interdependent relations, they have not been able to
reinstate mutual trust due to two factors: the U.S. policy of containing Iran
, mostly

and Irans insistence on being a nuclear power . These two factors drive the Gulf governments to continue relying on outsiders to
ensure a rough balance of power that will protect their sovereignty, domestic identity and regime security.

The GCC states increasing military dependence on the U S both exacerbates nited tates

Iranian threat perceptions and limits the Gulf states room to maneuver
vis--vis Iran U.S. military presence produces an anti-Iranian alliance
since the

that prevents normalization of relations the U.S. military presence in . Moreover,

the region including Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait

its naval facilities in , air-force installations in ,20 ground troops in , not only promotes Arab Gulf passivity
in defense and strategic thinking but also prevents the Gulf countries from "harnessing and refining their soft power tools to counter any Iranian attempt to hurt their Islamic legitimacy and shore up their counterterrorism
capabilities."21
Thus, the rough balance of power based on confrontation between Iran and the United States basically hinders the Gulf countries transition from controlled states to more open societies. Currently, there are two parallel

The U.S. plan to develop a new security architecture

developments in the region: "top-down state building" and "bottom-up globalization."22

and to continue its role as "external balancer" in the region ignores those two
parallel developments and not only fails to solve the primary interstate , therefore,

issues , but also complicates the existing ones . Abu Musa Island offers a pointed example. It emerged as a disputed area after the
withdrawal of British colonial power. For Iran, the territorial separation is an accident of a British intervention that was by nature illegitimate, as it involved an outside power. For the Arab Gulf states, external powers are default local
powers. According to Michael Kraig, "The dispute is not just a legal argument, but an existential issue involving the security of the Arab and Persian sides of the Gulf."23

since the Cold War, the

In a nutshell, national- security environment in the Gulf has become
increasingly internationalized . This has made external influence, namely that of the United States, extremely important in setting the regional-security agenda. However, it is

Washington
evident that the balance of power set by in the post-Iraq War period has failed to cope with new security threats , such as
ethnic rivalries, Sunni extremism, religious and civil war and the probability of territorial disintegration.

Neither sectarianism nor firm ideological conflicts between progressives

and reactionaries sufficiently explain current events in the Gulf
adequate analysis requires attention to the strategic and geopolitical
drivers of conflict.
Gause 14 (July 2014, F. Gregory Gause, John H. Lindsey 44 Chair, Professor of
International Affairs and Head of the International Affairs Department at Texas A&M
University, Beyond Sectarianism: e New Middle East Cold War, Brookings Doha
Center Analysis Paper, Number 11,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2014/07/22-beyond-
sectarianism-cold-war-gause/English-PDF.pdf?la=en)

The best framework for understanding the complicated and violent regional politics of the
Middle East is as a cold war among a number of regional players, both states and non-state actors, in which
Iran and Saudi Arabia play the leading roles. It is a cold war because these two main actors are not confronting and most
probably will not confront each other militarily. Rather, their contest for influence plays out in the domestic political systems of the regions weak states. It
The military and political
is a struggle over the direction of the Middle Easts domestic politics more than a purely military contest.

strength of parties to civil wars, and the contributions that outsiders can make to that strength, is
more important than the military balance between Riyadh and Tehran . This struggle predates
the Arab uprisings of 2011, but that profound regional upheaval has opened up new arenas in which the Middle East cold war is being played out. There
are also important conflict axes that fall outside the main Saudi-Iranian contest for influence. Saudi Arabia also sees itself locked in a contest with the
Muslim Brotherhood (and to some extent Qatar, as a state patron of the Brotherhood) over the direction of domestic politics in the Sunni Muslim states of
the Arab world.
This is a new Middle East cold war because it shares important structural similarities with the Middle East regional conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s,
what the late Malcolm Kerr famously dubbed the Arab cold war.1 Then, Gamal Abd al-Nasir used the new technology of the day, transistor radio, to rally
Arab nationalist support against ruling regimes in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Nasir squared off against the reactionary monarchs in
Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but also tangled with fellow Arab nationalist progressives like Abd al-Karim Qasim in Iraq and the Baath Party in Syria. It was
not the power of Egypts army that made Nasir influential. The one time he deployed it in service of spreading his influence in the Arab world, in Yemen,
the results were disastrous. His military brinksmanship with the Israelis in 1967 was even more damaging, in effect ending his regional leadership role. It
was his ability to mobilize support across borders and in the domestic politics of other Arab states that made him the leading force in Arab politics from
the mid-1950s to the late 1960s.
It is not
The new Middle East cold war goes beyond the Arab world.2 Iran is a major protagonist. Turkey has made a bid for a greater regional role.

an ideological battle of progressives versus reactionaries. The line-ups are less ideological and
more identity-based. Yet the similarities are striking. The power of the major protagonists in the Arab cold war was measured in their ability to affect
domestic political struggles in neighboring states, where weak regimes had trouble controlling their own societies and local players sought regional allies
contending camps themselves were not
against their domestic opponents. Nonstate actors played major roles. The

always united, with tactical alliances crossing what appeared to be the lines of
conflict. Israel was a focus, but not much of a player . The great powers were important participants, but not the
drivers of events. The new Middle East cold war shares every one of these characteristics.3 The current confrontation has even come to play a major role
in the struggle for power in Syria, which has drawn in all the regional players, much as was the case in the early years of the Arab cold war.4

This new Middle East cold war has an important sectarian element, but it cannot be
accurately understood simply as a Sunni versus Shia fight . It is a balance
of power game , but not one played by impermeable state entities with matching military power and occasionally clashing on the
battlefield. It can only be understood by appreciating the links between domestic

conflicts, transnational affinities, and regional state ambitions .5 Domestic conflicts for power lead
local actors to seek out regional allies who can supply them with money, guns, ideological
cover, and diplomatic support. They look for regional allies who share, in some way, their own political and ideological positions,
with whom they feel some kinship on ideological or identity grounds. The regional powers need these ideological or identity links to consolidate their
relations with their local clients. Providing clients with material support is important, but it is not enough to sustain influence. States that have the military
and material potential to reach for regional domination but lack these ideological and identity links across borders, like Israel, are severely hampered in
their ability to have an impact on the new Middle East cold war.

The empirical analysis of Saudi-Iranian cooperation during the 1990s

supports our interpretation.
Hamidaddin 13 (9/20, Abdullah, PhD candidate in Kings College London, writer
and commentator on religion, Middle Eastern societies and politics with a focus on
Saudi Arabia and Yemen, A window for Iranian-Gulf relations?
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2013/09/20/A-window-for-
Iranian-Gulf-relations-.html)

When I look at the improvement of relations between the Saudis and the Iranians,
starting from the early 1990s, I see two countries which were almost waging a war
 during the 1980s yet were able to overlook that and start a steady
against each other ,

process of trust building culminating in the domestic security agreement of the

late 1990s This proves beyond doubt the possibility and desirability of
.

positive relations despite recent animosity This also tells us that between the two countries.

sectarianism is not a factor in the relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran most . But

importantly, this tells us that radical elements in the Iranian government do not
shape its foreign policy ; rather they are brought forward or withdrawn depending on the regional situation. The radicals were present and powerful during the 1990s, but the regional politics
demanded a more conciliatory approach to foreign relations so they stepped back.

In the 1990s, the regional balance of power and network of alliances was shaken due to Iraqs
invasion of Kuwait. This allowed the Saudis and the Iranians to initiate good relations. But there was a limit to where they could reach due to two barriers: the United States and Iranian regional

The U S is pivotal
interference. nited tates to Saudi security and thus the Saudis cannot go too far with a country that is hostile to the United States. They can however create amiable relations as
long as the opposition to the United States is not polarizing. On the other side Iranian security vis--vis the United States depends on its control of pockets of influence in the weak countries of the region such as Lebanon, Somalia,
Sudan and Yemen; which in turn has been a threat to regional stability and Saudi security. In other words Irans quest for security depended on activities which threatened the security of Saudi Arabia creating a second barrier for
Saudi-Iranian normalization.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein the balance of power in 2003 of the 1990s - which allowed for relatively better Saudi-Iranian relations -

radically changed leading to worsening relations . Some analysts say that it was mainly due to the competition between the Saudis and the Iranians

I think that the American invasion of Iraq was more

in Iraq. While I agree with that;

fundamental It created an American military presence in the Gulf, leading

.

to a severe polarization of positions It was no longer possible for an ally of the .

U S to be close to its rivals

nited tates It was even expected that allies . Here we had a situation of opposition with polarization.

of the U S go against Iran and actively seek to damage its interests

nited tates regionally and globally. For

Iran subsequently increased its regional

example the U.S. had demanded that the Saudis use their leverage to disrupt relations between China and Iran.

activity creating a vicious circle

, which consequently threatened Saudi security, .
 Plan
The United States should significantly reduce its military presence in the
states of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
 Method
Scenario analysis is pedagogically valuable enhances creativity and self-
reflexivity, deconstructs cognitive biases and flawed ontological
assumptions, and enables the imagination and creation of alternative
futures.
Barma et al. 16 (May 2016, [Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15], Naazneen
Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National
Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political
Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD
from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher,
Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within
the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, Imagine a World
in Which: Using Scenarios in Political Science, International Studies Perspectives
17 (2), pp. 1-19,
http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_polit
ical_science_isp_2015.pdf)
**FYI if anyone is skeptical of Barmas affiliation with the Naval Postgraduate School, its worth looking
at her publication history, which is deeply opposed to US hegemony and the existing liberal world
order:
a) co-authored an article entitled How Globalization Went Bad that has this byline: From
terrorism to global warming, the evils of globalization are more dangerous than ever before.
What went wrong? The world became dependent on a single superpower. Only by correcting
this imbalance can the world become a safer place.
(http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/publications/how_globalization_went_bad)
b) most recent published scenario is entitled World Without the West, supports the a Non-
Western reinvention of the liberal order, and concludes that This argument made a lot of
people uncomfortable, mostly because of an endemic and gross overestimation of the reach,
depth and attractiveness of the existing liberal order
(http://nationalinterest.org/feature/welcome-the-world-without-the-west-11651)

Over the past decade, the cult of irrelevance in political science scholarship has been
lamented by a growing chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009). Prominent scholars of international affairs have
diagnosed the roots of the gap between academia and policymaking, made the case for why political science research is
valuable for policymaking, and offered a number of ideas for enhancing the policy relevance of scholarship in international relations
and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci 2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights, several

initiatives have been formed in the attempt to bridge the gap.2 Many of the specific efforts put in place by these projects focus on
providing scholars with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate the
findings and implications of their research to the policymaking community, a necessary and worthwhile objective for a
field in which theoretical debates, methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and esoteric.

Yet enhancing communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap between
international affairs theory and practice. Another crucial component of this bridge is the generation of substantive

research programs that are actually policy relevant a challenge to which less concerted attention has been
paid. The dual challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline with the explicit hope of informing policy. In

a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection , strikingly

little attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-relevant ideas
for dissertation and other research topics. Although numerous articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and problem-based
learning, especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes (Loggins 2009; Butcher 2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been
written about the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research ideas.
This article outlines an experiential and problem-based approach to developing a political
science research program using scenario analysis. It focuses especially on illuminating the research generation and pedagogical benefits
of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference (NEFPC), which brings together doctoral students of international and comparative
affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice of scenario analysis and considers the utility of the
technique in political science. We argue that scenario analysis should be viewed as a tool to stimulate problem-based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader scholarly
benefits of using scenarios to help generate research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario analysis. The third section reflects upon some of the
concrete scholarly benefits that have been realized from the scenario format. The fourth section offers insights on the pedagogical potential associated with using scenarios in the
classroom across levels of study. A brief conclusion reflects on the importance of developing specific techniques to aid those who wish to generate political science scholarship of
relevance to the policy world.
What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science?

Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision
makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current
trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to
protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks . The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique,
characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering what if questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically

seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used

in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to

these uses . This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a
case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios
deployed at NEFPC were created.
The Art of Scenario Analysis

We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in

unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible
futures , often referred to as alternative worlds. Scenarios are thus explicitly not
forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary
patterns , and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions . Nor should
they be equated with simulations , which are best characterized as functional
representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead,
they are depictions of possible future states of the world , offered together with
a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to
those futures . Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausibleyet, when combined, suggest surprising and
sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution
in the United States, Chinas slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends thatcombined with
OPECs decision not to take concerted action as prices began to declinecame together in an unexpected way.
While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies
of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques
and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line
extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning helped break the habit, ingrained in most
corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-
induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector.
Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight,
which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth
2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Councils series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in
anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of alternative worlds approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of
emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be
used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the
German Marshall Funds EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013).

Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-
term global trends across a number of different realms social, technological, environmental, economic, and political
combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges . Yet the ability
of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is
constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated
by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and
confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to
help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by
introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in
narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a
structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and
thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present .
Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry
The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research

programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us
imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy
challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be
linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of changethe rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity
prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemicscan be
useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic
significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic

Very simply,
trends and dynamics. The notion of exogeneityso prevalent in social science scholarshipapplies to models of reality, not to reality itself.

scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions
in international affairs that demand focused investigation.
Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science
research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the
approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based
research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in
contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of
the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to simplify, then
exaggerate them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible
pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be
implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is
that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8
An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around themthat of case-centered, structured, focused comparison,

The use of scenarios is similar to

intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005).

counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in

order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are
traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are
deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could
unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the funnel of choices available to political actors and thus
lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 6869), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the

We see scenarios as a complementary resource for

perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge.

exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for

counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools.
In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit
driving forces which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates
(discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative
analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for
capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario
analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas.

The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some
guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively
unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The
initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their
coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for puzzles in existing research
programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically
base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent pastleading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or
terrorism studies in the 2000sin the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance.

The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that
these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to
be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as
puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events . The

scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium
(five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and
policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can
begin thinking critically about them now . This timeframe offers a period distant
enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so
far into the future as to seem like science fiction . In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass,
participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for
overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from
anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international
affairs.

Valid, descriptive understandings of the world are an essential

prerequisite to emancipatory critique and epistemic decolonization.
Jones 04 (August 2004, Branwen Gruffydd, PhD in Development Studies from the
University of Sussex, Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at
Goldsmiths University of London, From Eurocentrism to Epistemological
Internationalism: power, knowledge and objectivity in International Relations, Paper
presented at Theorising Ontology, Annual Conference of the International
Association for Critical Realism, University of Cambridge,
http://www.csog.group.cam.ac.uk/iacr/papers/Jones.pdf)

The common-sense view pervading recent discussions of epistemology, ontology and methodology in IR asserts that
objectivity implies value-free neutrality. However, objective social inquiry has an
inherent tendency to be critical , in various senses. To the extent that objective
knowledge provides a better and more adequate account of reality than
other ideas, such knowledge is inherently critical (implicitly or explicitly)
of those ideas . 30 In other words critical social inquiry does not (or not only)
manifest its criticalness through self-claimed labels of being critical or
siding with the oppressed, but through the substantive critique of
prevailing ideas . Objective social knowledge constitutes a specific form of
criticism: explanatory critique . The critique of dominant ideas or ideologies is elaborated
through providing a more adequate explanation of aspects of the world , and in so
doing exposing what is wrong with the dominant ideology . This may also entail revealing the social
conditions which give rise to ideologies, thus exposing the necessary and causal relation between particular social relations and particular ideological conceptions.

the reproduction of those

In societies which are constituted by unequal structures of social relations giving rise to unequal power and conflicting interests,

structured relations is in the interests of the powerful, whereas transformation of existing

structured relations is in the interests of the weak . Because ideas inform social action they

are casually efficacious either in securing the reproduction of existing social relations
(usually as an unintended consequence of social practice), or in informing social action aimed at transforming social relations . This is why

ideas cannot be neutral . Ideas which provide a misrepresentation of the nature of society, the causes of unequal social conditions, and the
conflicting interests of the weak and powerful, will tend to help secure the reproduction of prevailing social relations. Ideas which provide a more adequate account of the way society is
structured and how structured social relations produce concrete conditions of inequality and exploitation can potentially inform efforts to change those social relations. In this sense,

ideas which are false are ideological and, in serving to promote the reproduction of the status
quo and avoid attempts at radical change, are in the interests of the powerful . An account which is objective
will contradict ideological ideas, implicitly or explicitly criticising them for their false or flawed accounts of reality. The criticism here arises not, or not only,

from pointing out the coincidence between ideologies and the interests of the powerful, nor from a prior normative stance of solidarity
with the oppressed, but from exposing the flaws in dominant ideologies
through a more adequate account of the nature and causes of social conditions
31 .

A normative commitment to the oppressed must entail a commitment to

truth and objectivity, because true ideas are in the interest of the
oppressed, false ideas are in the interest of the oppressors . In other words, the best
way to declare solidarity with the oppressed is to declare ones
commitment to objective inquiry 32 . As Nzongola-Ntalaja (1986: 10) has put it:
It is a question of whether one analyses society from the standpoint of the
dominant groups , who have a vested interest in mystifying the way society
works, or from the standpoint of ordinary people, who have nothing to lose from
truthful analyses of their predicament.
The philosophical realist theory of science , objectivity and explanatory critique
thus provides an alternative response to the relationship between knowledge

and power . Instead of choosing perspectives on the basis of our ethical

commitment to the cause of the oppressed and to emancipatory social
change, we should choose between contending ideas on the basis of which
provides a better account of objective social reality . This will inherently
provide a critique of the ideologies which , by virtue of their flawed account of the social world, serve the interests
of the powerful.
Exemplars of explanatory critique in International Relations are provided in the work of scholars such as Siba Grovogui, James Gathii, Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Jacques
Depelchin, Hilbourne Watson, Robert Vitalis, Sankaran Krishna, Michel-Rolph Trouillot 33 . Their work provides critiques of central categories, theories and discourses in the theory and
practice of IR and narratives of world history, including assumptions about sovereignty, international society, international law, global governance, the nature of the state. They expose
the ideological and racialised nature of central aspects of IR through a critical examination of both the long historical trajectory of imperial ideologies regarding colonized peoples, and
the actual practices of colonialism and decolonisation in the constitution of international orders and local social conditions. Their work identifies the flaws in current ideas by revealing
how they systematically misrepresent or ignore the actual history of social change in Africa, the Caribbean and other regions of the Third World, both past and present during both
colonial and neo-colonial periods of the imperial world order. Their work reveals how racism, violence, exploitation and dispossession, colonialism and neo-colonialism have been central
to the making of contemporary international order and contemporary doctrines of international law, sovereignty and rights, and how such themes are glaring in their absence from
histories and theories of international relations and international history.

Objective social knowledge which accurately depicts and explains social reality has
these qualities by virtue of its relation to its object, not its subject . As Collier argues, The
science/ideology distinction is an epistemological one, not a social one. (Collier 1979: 60). So, for example, in the work of Grovogui,

Gathii and Depelchin, the general perspective and knowledge of conditions in and the history of Africa
might be due largely to the African social origins of the authors. However the judgement
that their accounts are superior to those of mainstream IR rests not on the fact that the authors
are African, but on the greater adequacy of their accounts with respect to the actual
historical and contemporary production of conditions and change in Africa and
elsewhere in the Third World. The criteria for choosing their accounts over others derives from the relation between the ideas and their objects (what they are about), not
from the relation between the ideas and their subjects (who produced them). It is vital to retain explicitly some commitment to objectivity in social inquiry, to the notion that the proper
criterion for judging ideas about the world lies in what they say about the world, not whose ideas they are.

A fundamental problem which underlies the origin and reproduction of IRs eurocentricity is the
overwhelming dominance of ideas produced in and by the west, and the wilful and
determined silencing of the voices and histories of the colonised . But the result of

this fundamental problem is flawed knowledge about the world .

Eurocentricity is therefore a dual problem concerning both the authors
and the content of knowledge, and cannot be resolved through normative
commitments alone . It is not only the voices of the colonised, but the histories of colonialism, which have been glaring in their absence from the discipline
of International Relations.

Overcoming eurocentricity therefore requires not only concerted effort from the
centre to create space and listen to hitherto marginalised voices, but also
commitment to correcting the flaws in prevailing knowledge and it is not
only the Other who can and should elaborate this critique . A vitally important implication of
objectivity is that it is the responsibility of European and American, just as much as

non-American or non-European scholars, to decolonise IR . The importance of

objectivity in social inquiry defended here can perhaps be seen as a form of epistemological
internationalism . It is not necessary to be African to attempt to tell a more
accurate account of the history of Europes role in the making of the
contemporary Africa and the rest of the world, for example, or to write counter-histories of the expansion of
international society which detail the systematic barbarity of so-called Western civilisation. It is not necessary to have been colonised
to recognise and document the violence, racism, genocide and dispossession which have characterised European expansion over five hundred years.

Root cause explanations of international politics dont exist

methodological pluralism is necessary to reclaim IR as emancipatory
praxis and avoid endless political violence.
Bleiker 14 (6/17, Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of
Queensland, International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,
International Studies Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 325327)
This book is part of an increasing trend of scholarly works that have embraced poststructural critique but want to ground it in more positive political foundations, while retaining a
reluctance to return to the positivist tendencies that implicitly underpin much of constructivist research. The path that Daniel Levine has carved out is innovative, sophisticated, and
convincing. A superb scholarly achievement.

the key challenge in international relations ( IR ) scholarship is what he calls unchecked reification : the
For Levine,

widespread and dangerous process of forgetting the distinction between

theoretical concepts and the real-world things they mean to describe or to which they refer (p. 15).
The dangers are real, Levine stresses, because IR deals with some of the most difficult
issues, from genocides to war . Upholding one subjective position without critical
scrutiny can thus have far-reaching consequences . Following Theodor Adornowho is the key theoretical influence on this
bookLevine takes a post-positive position and assumes that the world cannot be known outside of our human perceptions and the values that are inevitably intertwined with them. His
ultimate goal is to overcome reification, or, to be more precise, to recognize it as an inevitable aspect of thought so that its dangerous consequences can be mitigated.

Levine proceeds in three stages: First he reviews several decades of IR theories to resurrect critical moments when scholars displayed an acute awareness of the dangers of
reification. He refreshingly breaks down distinctions between conventional and progressive scholarship, for he detects self-reflective and critical

moments in scholars that are usually associated with straightforward positivist positions (such as E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, or
Graham Allison). But Levine also shows how these moments of self-reflexivity never lasted long and were driven out by the compulsion to offer systematic and scientific knowledge.

The second stage of Levine's inquiry outlines why IR scholars regularly closed down critique. Here, he points to a range of factors and phenomena, from peer review
processes to the speed at which academics are meant to publish. And here too, he eschews conventional wisdom, showing that work conducted in the wake of the third debate,

while explicitly post-positivist and critiquing the reifying tendencies of existing IR scholarship, often lacked
critical self-awareness. As a result, Levine believes that many of the respective authors failed to appreciate
sufficiently that reification is a consequence of all thinking including itself (p. 68).
The third objective of Levine's book is also the most interesting one. Here, he outlines the path toward what he calls sustainable critique : a form of self-

reflection that can counter the dangers of reification. Critique, for him, is not just something that is directed outwards,

against particular theories or theorists. It is also inward-oriented, ongoing, and

sensitive to the limitations of thought itself (p. 12).
The challenges that such a sustainable critique faces are formidable. Two stand out: First, if the natural tendency to forget the origins and values of our concepts are as strong as Levine
and other Adorno-inspired theorists believe they are, then how can we actually recognize our own reifying tendencies? Are we not all inevitably and subconsciously caught in a web of
meanings from which we cannot escape? Second, if one constantly questions one's own perspective, does one not fall into a relativism that loses the ability to establish the kind of stable
foundations that are necessary for political action? Adorno has, of course, been critiqued as relentlessly negative, even by his second-generation Frankfurt School successors (from
Jrgen Habermas to his IR interpreters, such as Andrew Linklater and Ken Booth).

The response that Levine has to these two sets of legitimate criticisms are, in my view, both convincing and useful at a practical level. He starts off with
depicting reification not as a flaw that is meant to be expunged, but as an a priori
condition for scholarship. The challenge then is not to let it go unchecked.
Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique .
He borrows from what Adorno calls a constellation: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple

methods to understand the same event or phenomena . He writes of the need

to validate multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing (p. 63, see also pp. 101102). In this model,
a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms , trying
to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method
can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand .
But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the
others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of
methods even when or, rather, precisely when they are deemed incompatible.
They can range from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and
championed by positivist social sciences .
The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to
bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis
has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can
then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them . For Levine, this is how
reification may be checked at the source and this is how a critically reflexive
moment might thus be rendered sustainable (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not
really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to balance foundationalisms against
one another (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theorylinks that could have been explored in
more detail.

Studying the security dilemma is a valuable contribute to IR scholarship.

Cheraghlou 14 (June 2014, Ebrahim Mohseni, Research Associate at Center for
International and Security Studies at Maryland, Lecturer on the Faculty of World
Studies at the University of Tehran, and a Senior Analyst at the University of Tehran
Center for Public Opinion Research, MA in Public Policy and a Graduate Certificate in
Intelligence Analysis from the University of Maryland, PhD candidate (at pub time),
WHEN COERCION BACKFIRES: THE LIMITS OF COERCIVE DIPLOMACY IN IRAN,
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of a PhD in Public Policy at UMD,
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/16554)

a coercing power must ensure that his coercive measures do not

As this dissertation illustrates,
augment and/or add to the very factors that have positively contributed to the adoption
of the objectionable policy by the target. Coercion could potentially initiate a positive
feedback loop that would create many more reasons for the target to more aggressively pursue the objectionable policy.
Indeed, if a coercive measure and/or the costs that it imposes on the target positively induce s it to
continue on with or even intensify its pursuit of the objectionable policy, then it would be
unrealistic to expect that that coercive measure would eventually persuade the target to
stop the objectionable policy. What makes the situation even more tragic is that those who adopt such coercive measures are
often unaware of the positive feedback loop that they might have created and when they see their coercive measures not working,
they often conclude that their coercive measure was not tough enough, resulting in the intensification of the coercive measure,
which in turn further adds to the motives of the target to pursue the objectionable policy with much more vigor.
Existence of such a mechanism has long been known to international
relations theorists that have studied the nature of international conflicts under such labels as the spiral
model or the security dilemma. More than half a century ago, John H. Herz described this tendency in
international relation in his Political Realism and Political Idealism and asserted that the self-help attempts of
states to look after their security needs tend, regardless of intention, to lead to
rising insecurity for others as each interprets its own measures as defensive and the
measures of others as potentially threatening (1951 p.7). Indeed, policymakers often
interpret events and actions based on what they think to be true . So if they think a
state has hostile intentions , neutral or even friendly postures of that state is
more likely to be ignored, distorted, or seen as attempted duplicity if not outright as hostile
(Jarvis, 1976 p. 68). It is due time for those studying various aspects of coercive diplomacy to

start incorporating those concepts into their works and more vigorously study
their effects on successful utilization of the strategy .
***2AC***
 scholarship o/v
Understanding the intrincacies of politics, the state, and the military is a
PREREQUISITE to addressing oppression means our ACADEMIC theorizing
is methodologically valuable and a PREREQUISITE to the alternative.
Bryant 12 (9/15, Levi, professor of Philosophy at Collin College and Chair of the
Critical Philosophy program at the New Centre for Research and Practice, War
Machines and Military Logistics: Some Cards on the Table,
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-machines-and-military-
logistics-some-cards-on-the-table/)

We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of military logistics. We are,
after all, constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things

the opposing force, the opposing war machine captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to
deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks, people willing to fight, propaganda or
ideology, people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things . Second, military logistics asks
how to best deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine . In what way should we
deploy our war machine to defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism , etc? What are the

things upon which these state based war machines are based, what are the privileged nodes within these state based war

machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are
to be effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target.

What Ive heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military

logistics . Its as if people like to wave their hands and say this is horrible and
unjust! and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act . Yeah,
youre right, it is horrible but saying so doesnt go very far and changing it . Its also as if people are horrified

when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social

functions in the horrible way, the next response is to say youre justifying that
system and saying its a-okay! This misses the point that the entire point is
to map the supply lines of the opposing war machine so you can
strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of
life. You see, we already took for granted your analysis of how horrible things are . Youre
preaching to the choir . We wanted to get to work determining how to change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state
based war machine so we can decide how to intervene.

your sole strategy seems to be ideological critique or

We then look at your actual practices and see that

debunking . Your idea seems to be that if you just prove that other peoples beliefs
are incoherent, theyll change and things will be different. But weve noticed a
couple things about your strategy: 1) there have been a number of bang-on critiques of state
based war machines, without things changing too much , and 2) weve noticed that we

might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their position is incoherent, yet
they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology didnt matter much. This leads us to suspect that there are other causal factors that undergird these
social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to ourselves, there are two reasons that an ideological

critique can be successful and still fail to produce change : a) the problem can be one of distribution. The
critique is right but fails to reach the people who need to hear it and even if they did receive
the message they couldnt receive it because its expressed in the foreign language of

academese which theyve never been substantially exposed to ( academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to change the
world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social worlds take the form they do that are not of the
discursive, propositional, or semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both.
I dont deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I
merely deny that this is the only causal factor . I dont reject your political aims, but
merely wonder how to get there . Meanwhile, you guys behave like a war machine that believes its sufficient to drop
pamphlets out of an airplane debunking the ideological reasons that persuade the
opposing forces soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting supply lines, that there are
other soldiers behind them with guns to their back , that they have obligations to their fellows,
that they have families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other things its not to reject your political aims, but to say that

perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to change the world. In other words, Im objecting to your tendency to use a

hammer to solve all problems and to see all things as a nail ( discursive problems ),
ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social assemblages take.
This is the basic idea behind what Ive called terraism. Terraism has three components: 1) Cartography or the mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they
take and why they endure. This includes the mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) Deconstruction Deconstruction is a practice. It includes
both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-structuralist feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more

It is not simply beliefs, signs,

literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant.

and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but also
material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do . Part of
changing a social order thus necessarily involves intervening in those
material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or feedback mechanisms that allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for
people. Finally, 3) there is Terraformation. Terraformation is the hardest thing of all, as it requires the activist to be

something more than a critic , something more than someone who simply denounces
how bad things are , someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing instead other material and
semiotic arrangements rendering new forms of life and social relation possible .
Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life. None of this, however, is possible without good

mapping of the terrain so as to know what to deconstruct and what resources

are available for building new worlds . Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly
unjust. But rather than waving my hands and cursing because of how unjust and horrible

it is so as to feel superior to all those about me who dont agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful soul who
refuses to get his hands dirty, I think we need good maps so we can blow up
the right bridges, power lines, and communications networks , and so we can engage in
effective terraformation.
 at dillon
Fails to produce emancipatory political change and reifies the squo.
Bevernage 15 (October 2015, Berber, Assistant Professor of History at the
University of Ghent, The Past is Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics,
Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism, History and Theory Volume 54,
Issue 3, pages 333352)

Torpey is certainly not the only intellectual expressing these worries. According to historian Pieter Lagrou ,
our
contemporary societies, for lack of future projects, shrink into a passeist culture. 12
In European public discourse, he argues, the focus on crimes of the distant past has become so strong that it tends to
marginalize claims of victims of contemporary crimes and human rights violations. Therefore, Lagrou
argues, a commemorative discourse of victimhood is very much the opposite of a constructive and dynamic engagement with the
present, but rather a paralyzing regression of democratic debate.13 Lagrou's argument closely resembles many others that turn
against retrospective politics and victim culture such as Ian Buruma's warning about the peril of minorities defining themselves
exclusively as historical victims and engaging in an Olympics of suffering14 and Charles Maier's claims about a surfeit of
memory.15
These warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing or even banning politics directed at contemporary
injustices or striving for a more just future should be taken seriously. Yet the alternative of an exclusively present- or
future-oriented politics disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either. Contemporary injustice often manifests itself in the
form of structural repetition or continuity of injustices with a long history. Moreover, totalitarian versions of progressivist politics
have frequently abused the idea of a struggle for a more just future in order to justify past and present suffering. It could even be
argued that the rise of dominant restrospective politics has been initiated partly on the basis of disillusionment with the exculpatory
mechanisms of progressivist ideology.16 Some indeed claim that much of present-day retrospective politics and the setting
straight of historical injustices would be unnecessary had totalitarian progressivist politics focused less exclusively on the bright
future and shown more sensitivity to the contemporary suffering of its day. This claim certainly makes sense if one thinks of extreme
examples such as Stalin's five-year plans and Mao's Great Leap Forward. Yet, as Matthias Frisch rightly argues, the risk of the
justification of past and present suffering lurks around the corner wherever progressive logics of history or promises of bright and
just futures are not counterbalanced by reflective forms of remembrance.17
we should resist dualist thinking that forces us to choose between
Therefore,

restitution for historical injustices and struggle for justice in the present
or the future . Rather, we should look for types of retrospective politics that do not
oppose but complement or reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in
present- and future-directed politics and the other way around: present- and future-
oriented politics that do not forget about historical injustices .
In this paper I want to contribute to this goal by focusing on the issue of retrospective politics and by analyzing how one can
differentiate emancipatory or even utopian types of retrospective politics from retrospective politics that I classify here as anti-
utopian. I argue that thecurrently dominant strands of retrospective politics indeed do tend to be anti-
utopian and have a very limited emancipatory potential . Moreover, I claim that currently dominant
retrospective politics do not radically break with several of the exculpatory intellectual
mechanisms that are typically associated with progressivist politics but actually modify
and sometimes even radicalize them. In that restricted sense, and only in this sense, it can be argued that
currently dominant retrospective politics do not represent a fundamentally new way of
dealing with historical evil and the ethics of responsibility .
My perspective is not a pessimistic one, however. Besides the currently dominant retrospective politics, there exist other
strands of retrospective politics that do have emancipatory or even utopian features and that do
not force us to choose between restitution for historical injustices and struggle for justice in the present or the future. Anti-
utopianism and ethical passeism, I argue, are not inherent or necessary features of all
retrospective politics but rather result from a specific, underlying type of historical thought or philosophy of history18 that treats the
relation between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding transtemporal injustices and
responsibilities. Sometimes this type of historical thought indeed stimulates a moralistic stance in which the past is charged with the
worst of all evil, while the present becomes morally discharged by simple comparison. The latter type of temporal
Manichaeism can be highly problematic , I argue, because it not only posits that the past is evil
but also tends to turn this reasoning around and stimulates the wishful thought that evil is past.
 at anti-humanism
Anti-humanism is just as fucked as humanism and humanism isnt always
bad context is always key and narratives of humanity are contingent.
Lester 12 (January 2012, Alan, Director of Interdisciplinary Research, Professor of
Historical Geography, and Co-Director of the Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
Network, University of Sussex, Humanism, race and the colonial frontier,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 37, Issue 1, pages 132
148)

Anderson argues that

it is not an issue of extending humanity to negatively racialised people, but of putting into
question that from which such people have been excluded that which, for liberal discourse, remains unproblematised. (2007, 199)
I fear, however, that if we direct attention away from histories of humanisms failure to
deal with difference and to render that difference compatible with its fundamental universalism, and if we overlook its proponents failed
attempts to combat dispossession, murder and oppression ; if our history of race is instead
understood through a critique of humanitys conceptual separation from nature, we dilute the
political potency of universalism .
Historically, it was not humanism that gave rise to racial innatism, it was the specifically anti-
humanist politics of settlers forging new social assemblages through relations of
violence on colonial frontiers. Settler communities became established social
assemblages in their own right specifically through the rejection of humanist
interventions . Perhaps, as Edward Said suggested, we can learn from the
implementation of humanist universalism in practice , and insist on its
potential to combat racism, and perhaps we can insist on the contemporary conceptual hybridisation of humannon-human entities too, without
necessarily abandoning all the precepts of humanism (Said 2004; Todorov 2002). We do not necessarily need to accord a specific value to

the human, separate from and above nature, in order to make a moral and political case for a fundamental human universalism that can be

wielded strategically against racial violence .

Nineteenth century humanitarians universalism was fundamentally conditioned by their
belief that British culture stood at the apex of a hierarchical order of civilisations . From
the mid-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, this ethnocentrism produced what Lyotard describes as the

flattening of differences, or the demand for a norm (human nature), that carries with it its own forms of terror (cited Braun 2004, 1352). The intervention
of Aboriginal Protection demonstrates that humanist universalism has the potential to inflict such terror (it was the Protectorate of Aborigines Office reincarnated that was responsible,
later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for Aboriginal Australias Stolen Generation, and it was the assimilationist vision of the Protectors equivalents in Canada that led to the

abuses of the Residential Schools system). But we must not forget that humanisms alternatives ,
founded upon principles of difference rather than commonality , have the potential
to do the same and even worse .
In the nineteenth century, Caribbean planters and then emigrant British settlers
emphasised the multiplicity of the human species, the absence of any universal
human nature , the incorrigibility of difference , in their upholding of
biological determinism . Their assault on any notion of a fundamental
commonality among human beings has disconcerting points of intersection
with the radical critique of humanism today . The scientific argument of the nineteenth century that came closest to
post-humanisms insistence on the hybridity of humanity, promising to close the ontological gap between human and non-human animals (Day 2008, 49), was the
evolutionary theory of biological descent associated with Darwin, and yet this theory was adopted in Aotearoa New Zealand and other colonial sites
precisely to legitimate the potential extinction of other, weaker races in
the face of British colonisation on the grounds of the natural law of a struggle for survival (Stenhouse 1999).
Both the upholding and the rejection of humannature binaries can thus result in
racially oppressive actions, depending on the contingent politics of specific
social assemblages . Nineteenth century colonial humanitarians, inspired as they were by an irredeemably ethnocentric and religiously exclusive form of universalism, at least combatted
exterminatory settler discourses and practices at multiple sites of empire, and provided spaces on mission and protectorate stations in which indigenous peoples could be shielded to a very limited extent from dispossession and
murder. They also, unintentionally, reproduced discourses of a civilising mission and of a universal humanity that could be deployed by anticolonial nationalists in other sites of empire that were never invaded to the same extent by
settlers, in independence struggles from the mid-twentieth century. Finally, as Whatmores (2002) analysis of the Select Committee on Aborigines reveals, they provided juridical narratives that are part of the arsenal of weapons that
indigenous peoples can wield in attempts to claim redress and recompense in a postcolonial world.

The politics of humanism in practice, then, was riddled with contradiction, fraught
with particularity and latent with varying possibilities. It could be relatively progressive
and liberatory; it could be dispossessive and culturally genocidal . Within its repertoire lay potential to combat
environmental and biological determinism and innatism, however, and this should not be forgotten in a rush to

condemn humanisms universalism as well as its anthropocentrism. It is in the tensions within

universalism that the ongoing potential of an always provisional, self-conscious,
flexible and strategic humanism one that now recognises the continuity between the
human and the non-human as well as the power-laden particularities of the male,
middle class, Western human subject resides.
 at lib econ
Their diagnosis of racism in the libidinal economy exposes its contingent
nature.
Johnson 05 (2005, Adrian, PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook, Professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a
faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta, Time Driven:
Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, p. 340-1)

Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human

nature as being perturbed by an irreducible inner antagonism , there is, surprisingly, what might be
described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially

dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated

by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure . In fact,
subjects are forced to be free , since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever
missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden,
heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses impulses mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web of

multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's barring of the Symbolic Otherthe parltre has no choice but to
bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy . The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The
true extent of one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those
heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior.

The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy
mark the precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality
has a chance briefly to flash into effective existence; such points of breakdown
in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the sudden
emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default
physical and sociopsychical run of things. Moreover, if the drives were fully functional
and, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real

humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The pain of a

malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort
signaling a capacity to be an autonomous subject . This is a pain even more essential to human
autonomy than what Kant identifies as the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant
treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the
case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely curing individuals of this discomfort, even if it were
As Lacan
possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects.

might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a
suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of
subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far
from perfection , insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute .

Exclusive causal focus on affect is a theoretical shortcut to avoid

examining the concrete nature of politics.
Grossberg 10 (2010, Lawrence, PhD, Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of
Communication Studies and Cultural Studies; Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
Anthropology; Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies at UNC,
Affects Future, in The Affect Studies Reader, p. 315-6)
 is it possible that affect itself has been
Gs ac MG: Yes, that's something that we were going to ask about:
overinvested by theory? Is there a way that affect lets one off the hook in the way, as you've sometimes argued, that
theory does?
LG: Yes, I think that is a nice way of putting it . I do think that affect can let you off
the hook . Because it has come to serve, now, too often as a "magical" term . So, if
something has effects that are, let's say, non-representational then we can just describe
it as "affect:' So, I think there is a lot of theorizing that does not do the harder work of
specifying modalities and apparatuses of affect, or distinguishing affect from other
sorts of non-semantic effects, or, as I said, analyzing the articulations between (and hence,
the difference between, as well as how one gets from) the ontological and the "empirical."
The last is a vexing problem, and crucial I think if we are ever going to sort out a theory of affect. It's like people who
say the world is "rhizomatic:' The world isn't rhizomatic ! I mean, as virtual, the world is rhizomatic.
On the plane of consistency then, the world is rhizomatic. But there is always a plane of organization and
that's what you have to describe because that is what you have to de-territorialize and decode, and then of
course it will always be re-territorialized and you will of course never get back to the plane of consistency.' And whether or
not Deleuze and Guattari thought you could become a body without organs , I have never
had the desire .. . and I see nothing particularly political about it anyway .
Gs & MG: But is it that these planes (virtual/actual or consistency/organization) are so separable or is it that they persist alongside
one another in the manner of Spinoza's monism? That is, is there another way perhaps to think the spatiality of their relationship?
it is the ontological
LG: Yes, I do assume that these two planes are the same thing. It's like Nietzsche's will:
condition of possibility of any empirical reality. But that doesn't mean that it is
a description of any empirical reality . There is a difference between the
transcendental condition of possibility and the actualization of those conditions . So, I
think that sometimes affect lets people off the hook because it lets them appeal back to an
ontology that escapes. And, it often ends up producing a radically de-
territorializing politics that I have never been particularly enamored of anyway.
But it also lets me too much off the hook, because what we need to do is take up this work and rethink it. You know that brilliant
chapter in A Thousand Plateaus ( 1987) where Deleuze and Guattari talk about regimes of signification, or what Foucault would have
called discursive apparatuses, different forms of discursive apparatuses. Machinic assemblages produce different kinds of effects.
We know that. Foucault would say that. Deleuze would say that. And Spinoza too, you know. Some of those kinds of effects are
useful to group together and call affect. But then you have to do the work of specifying the particular regime of signification, and the
particular machinic effectivity that is being produced.
In too much work done by people who talk about affect -or at least I get the feeling when reading
some of it anyway-there is a kind of immediate effectivity of affect on the body. Despite
constant denials, I can't escape the feeling that Brian Massumi's recent work, for example,
on the color-coding of terror alerts reduplicates a kind of old-fashioned media-effects model. You
know, you flash these lights at people and there is some kind of bodily response. Well, there isn't! Affect then becomes
a magical way of bringing in the body . Certainly, there is a kind of mediation process but it is a machinic one. It
goes through regimes that organize the body and the discourses of our lives, organize everyday life, and then produce specific kinds
of effects. Organizations of affect might include will and attention, or moods, or orientation, what I have called "mattering maps:'
and the various culturally and phenomenological constituted emotional economies. I say it this way because I am not sure that
emotions can simply be described as affect, even as configurations of affect. I have always held that emotion is the articulation of
affect and ideology. Emotion is the ideological attempt to make sense of some affective productions.
So,I don't think that we've yet done the actual work of parsing out everything that
is getting collapsed into the general notion of affect . Basically, it's become
everything that is non-representational or non-semantic that's what we now
call affect. And, so, yes, I think you are right: it is letting us off the hook because then we don't end up
having to find the specificity .
 at afro-P
Ontological fatalism reifies dehumanization affirming the conditions of
possibility for anti-racism is a better starting point for political praxis
Marriott 12 (2012, David, PhD in literature from the University of Sussex,
Professor of the History of Consciousness at UC-Santa Cruz, 3. Black Cultural
Studies, Years Work Crit Cult Theory, 20 (1): 37-66)
In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so very unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-
racism of Frantz Fanon:
[Fanons] audacious commitment to an alternative conception of humanity reconstituted outside race [] is something that does not endear Fanons work to todays practitioners of
the facile antihumanism and ethnic absolutism so characteristic of life on US college campuses, where class-based homogeneity combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic
particularity and with resignation to the world as it appears. Fanon disappoints that scholastic constituency by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable obstacle between groups,
even if they have been racialized. He does not accept the strategic award of an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth. Their past and present sufferings
confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights. Suffering is just suffering, and Fanon has no patience with those who would invoke the armour of
incorrigibility around national liberation struggles or minority cultures. (pp. 1578, my emphasis)
Whatever one might think of the cogency of these remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea that the human can somehow reside outside of race,

the question of whether US culture can

a humanism that would always then be constitutively compromised by the racism at its frontier),

ever escape racial antagonism is the primary focus of Frank B. Wilderson IIIs powerful Red,
White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of US film culture. And indeed Fanons anti-
philosophical philosophical critique of racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as yet,
part of human being, a not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its separation from the state of nature from which it

forms a major part of Wildersons conception of anti-blackness as the major

has come)

structural antagonism of US history and culture . It is against the conception that racism could ever be simply contingent to black
experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no parallel to other forms of suffering, and perhaps most strikingly social death is the constitutive

In brief, slavery remains so originary , in the sense of what he calls its accumulation and fungibility
essence of black existence in the US.

(terms borrowed from Saidiya Hartman), it not only has no analogy to other forms of antagonismWildersons examples are the Holocaust and Native
American genocide there is simply no process of getting over it , of recovering from the

loss (as wound, or trauma): as such, slavery remains the ultimate structure of antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the level of historical process, if black slavery
is foundational to modern Humanism, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the start (p. 22). The problem with

Wildersons argument , however, is that it remains of a piece with the manichean

imperatives that beset it , and which by definition are structurally uppermost, which means that he can only
confirm those imperatives as absolutes rather than chart a dialectical path
beyond them , insofar as, structurally speaking, there is no outside to black social death and
alienation, or no outside to this outside, and all that thought can do is mirror its own enslavement by
race. This is not so much afro-pessimism a term coined by Wilderson as thought wedded
to its own despair . However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show.
For example, in Chapter One (The Structure of Antagonisms), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot

understand the being of the Black, Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond
analogy, it also refigures the whole of being : the essence of being for the White and non-Black position is non-niggerness,
consequently, [b]eing can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness (p. 37). It is not hard when

reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that
manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic : throughout Red, White, and
Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there is always the desire to have
black lived experience named as the worst, and the politics of such a desire
inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism : for the claim that Blackness is incapacity in
its most pure and unadulterated form means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logicand the denial of

any kind of ontological integrity to the Black/Slave due to its endless traversal
by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic , namely, a logic of non-
recuperabilitymoves through the following points : (1) Black non-being is not capable
of symbolic resistance and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which
Wilderson persists in calling death, the symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such,
Blackness is the record of an occlusion which remains ever present : White (Human) capacity, in advance
of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the institutions or

discourses involving violence, antagonisms and parasitism, Wilderson describes

White (or non-Black) film theory and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the suffering of the
Blackthe Slave (they cannot do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism
and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a corrective,

Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction , and one centrally concerned with exposing
the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans (p. 68). Reading seems to
stop here , at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacans notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the subject is still wedded to
relationality as implied by the contrast between empty and full speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of absolute Otherness that is the Blacks relation to Whites,
because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the structural, or absolute, violence of Black life (pp. 74; 75). Whereas Lacan was aware of how language precedes and exceeds us, he did not

The violence of such abjectionor incapacityis therefore that it

have Fanons awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks (p. 76).

cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence
the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving aside
the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacans notion of full speech to the
search for communication (the unconscious cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that, according to Wildersons own logic, his description of
the Black is working, via analogy, to Lacans notion of the real but, in his insistence on the Black as an absolute

outside Wilderson can only duly reify this void at the heart of universality .
The Black is beyond the limit of contingency but it is worth saying immediately that this beyond is
indeed a foreclosure that defines a violence whose traces can only be
thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose nonbeing returns as the theme for Wildersons political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The Black is
nonbeing and, as such, is more real and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability
between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be Black).
This argument could be illustrated at many points in Red, White, and Black, which all interconnect. Wilderson is concerned, for example, to argue that a Marxian ontology of labour and/or
commodity form is philosophically inadequate for reading black accumulation and fungibility: this idea, which is not altogether new, is supported by a lengthy reading of the film
Monsters Ball (Chapter Four (Monsters Ball) and is perhaps the most valuable part of his book in its illustration of the links between race, violence, contingency, and death). Other
chapters offer critiques of what Wilderson calls empathetic as against analytical cinema, with the former offering sentimental apologies for structural violence, rather than
paradigmatic analyses of black suffering (p. 341). It is not at all clear how this argument differs from film theorys opposition between a cinema of distraction and a socially engaged
cinema: it seems to me that this theory of the filmwork describes quite precisely the distinction between analysis and empathy Wilderson is trying to make (and unsettle). However,
unlike film theory, Wildersons attempt to preserve the distinction seems to work with an unquestioned notion of film spectatorshipi.e. either seduced or interrogatedwhich means

It is also a little strange

that the theory of cinema he puts forth somewhat undermines his more general claim that film theory can never understand black suffering.

that a work so concerned with the chasm between Human life and Black death
should indict cinema for its efforts to reassert relational logic, but nowhere
mentions how the very form of this reproach relies on reasserting the endless
non-relational absence of Blackness (and thereby reducing the history and politics
of race to a logic of non-relationality ) (p. 340). This transcendentalizing of black
suffering is fundamentally absolutist ( and, once again, moralistic ) in effect
if not in intention . In the final sentences of the book, Wilderson asks, How does one deconstruct life? It remains a pivotal question. But perhaps, after all, the
more urgent task is not how to deconstruct life, but to grasp the necessarily-perverse logic of racial determinations of suffering? Red, White, and Black is a thought-provoking study of
racial ontology which, whatever its limitations, is a powerful invocation of why blackness just is death, a death-in-life which has no analogy or synonym but which, for the same reason,
must be thought differently for blackness to live.

The alts understanding of blackness reproduces the worst reductive

determinism of orthodox Marxism anti-blackness is part of a complex
ecology of power relations, not a discrete causal relationship to slavery
it also proves the double turn at the heart of their wilderson and sexton
arguments.
Day 15 (Fall 2015, Iyko, Associate Professor of English and Chair of Critical Social
Thought at Mount Holyoke College, Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity,
Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique, Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2
(Fall 2015), pp. 102-121)
But perhaps my own defense of Indigenous decolonization movements for sovereignty begs a larger question about whether sovereignty in itself offers a radical politics that can
encompass or mobilize a black radical tradition rooted in the project of abolition. And it is here that I agree with Sextons intervention to problematize the idea that antiracist agendas

against the totalizing frame of

must emerge from the foundational priority of Indigenous sovereignty and restoration of land.54 But

Afro-pessimism , I want to stress instead the pitfalls of any antidialectical approach

to the political economy of the settler colonial racial state from the position of either
Indigenous or antiblack exceptionalism . Settler colonial racial capitalism is not a
thing but a social relation . As such, it is not produced out of the causal
relationships that Sexton puts forward here : Slavery, as it were, precedes and
prepares the way for colonialism, its forebear or fundament or support . Colonialism, as it were, the
issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or monument. 55 The nearly totalizing black existential frame is similarly

based on a questionable construction of epistemic privilege :

[black existence] does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and

economic system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is
most fully understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under
patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.56

According to Sexton, no other oppression is reducible to antiblackness , but the

relative totality of antiblackness is the privileged perspective from which to
understand racial formation more broadly. But unlike the way feminist and queer
critical theory interrogate heteropatriarchy from a subjectless standpoint, Sextons
entire point seems to rest on the very specificity and singularity rather than
subjectlessness of black critical theorys capacity to understand race . The privilege of this

embodied viewpoint similarly relies on rigidly binaristic conceptions of land and bodily

integrity . He writes, If the indigenous relation to land precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slaves inhabitation
of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to landlandlessness. And selflessness is the correlate. No ground for
identity, no ground to stand (on).57 In other words, the slaves nonrelation to her body precedes and exceeds any other bodys relation to land. However, the settler colonial designation
of the United States and Canada as terra nulliusas legally empty landsdenies the very corporeality of Indigenous populations to inhabit land, much less have any rights to it.
Alongside genocidal elimination, the erasure of Indigenous corporeal existence is inseparable from the ground it doesnt stand on, or is removed from.

For the same reason that the economic reductionism of orthodox Marxism has been
discredited, such an argument that frames racial slavery as a base for a
colonial superstructure similarly fails to take into account the dialectics of
settler colonial capitalism . The political economy of settler colonial capitalism is more
appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than a linear chain
of events . Relinquishing any conceptual privilege that might be attributed to Indigeneity, alternatively, Coulthard offers a
useful anti-exceptionalist stance: the colonial relation should not be understood as a
primary locus of base from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather
as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and state
relations converge.58 From this view, race and colonialism form the matrix of the settler colonial racial state.

The narrative of no progress is affectively appealing but historically

imprecise major gains have been achieved and the political implications
of their ethics risks throwing out the possibility of a less violence, less
dehumanizing future around the world.
Winant 15 (2015, Howard, Professor of Sociology at UC-Santa Barbara, The Dark
Matter: Race and Racism in the 21st Century, Critical Sociology 2015, Vol. 41(2)
313324)
The World-Historical Shitpile of Race

Structural racism an odious stinkpile of shit left over from the past and still
being

augmented in the present has been accumulated by slavery unwilling to die,4 by empire, and indeed by the entire racialized modern world
system. The immense waste (Feagin et al., 2001, drawing on Bataille) of human life and labor by these historically entrenched social structures and practices still confronts us today, in the aftermath of the post-Second World War

antiracist accomplishments have reduced the size of the pile

racial break. Our But a ; we have lessened the stink.

massive amount still remains. of waste So much racial waste is left over from the practice of racial domination in the early days of empire and conquest, to the present combination

Indeed it often seems that this enormous and odious waste pinions the
of police state and liberalism!

social system under an immovable burden despair and hopelessness . How often have

overcome those who bore this sorrow ? How often have slave and native, peon and maquiladora, servant and ghetto-dweller, felt just plain sick and tired (Nappy
Roots, 2003), encumbered by this deadening inertia composed of a racial injustice that could seemingly never be budged? How often, too, have whites felt weighed down by the waste, the guilt and self-destruction built into racism
and the psychological wage?
Yet racial politics is always unstable and contradictory Racial despotism can .

never be fully stabilized or consolidated at key historical moments rare . Thus , perhaps

but also inevitable the sheer weight of racial oppression , becomes qua social structure

insupportable . The built-up rage and inequity, the irrationality and inutility, and the explosive force of dreams denied, are mobilized politically in ways that would have seemed almost unimaginable earlier.

Racism remains formidable , entrenched as a structuring feature of both US and global society and politics. Indeed it often seems impossible to overcome.

Yet Thats Not the Whole Story

Large-scale demographic and political shifts
We are so used to losing! We cant see that the racial system is in crisis both in the US and globally.

have overtaken the modern racial system undermining and rearticulating it During world ( ) , .

and after the Second World War a tremendous racial break occurred a seismic ,

shift The US was but one national case

that swept much of the world (Winant, 2001). which was of this rupture,

experienced very profoundly : racial transformations occurred that were unparalleled since at least the changes brought about by the US Civil War. Omi and I (1994) and many,

not only the

many others have proposed that the terrain of racial politics was tremendously broadened and deepened after the War. The increased importance of race in larger political life grounded

modern civil rights movement but a whole range of new social movements that shaped

we take for granted today as central axes of political conflict. In earlier stages of US history it had not been so evident that the personal is political at least not since the end of

From the explicit racial despotism of the Jim Crow era to the racial
Reconstruction.

democracy of course still very partial and truncated of the present period :
( )

that is a big leap, people .

In the modern world there were always black movements, always movements for racial justice and racial freedom. The experience of injustice, concrete grievances, lived oppression, and resistance, both large and small, always

These movements, these demands, were excluded from

exists. It can be articulated or not, politicized or not. largely

mainstream politics before the civil rights movement in a huge rise of the after the War. Indeed, after the Second World War,

break politicization of the social swept over the world It ignited

that was racially framed in crucial ways, this . (or

major democratic upsurges This included the explicitly anti-racist movements

reignited) . : the

civil rights
modern anti-apartheid the anti-colonial movement
movement, the movement, and (India, Algeria, Vietnam,

It also included parallel

etc.). movements like secondwave feminism, and more-or-less allied, , LGBTQ (ne

gay liberation and others ) movements, .

In short, the world-historical upheaval of the Second World War and its aftermath were racial upheavals in significant ways: the periphery against the center, the colored others against The Lords of Human Kind (Kiernan, 1995).

These movements produced :

Demographic, economic, political, and cultural shifts across the planet

The destruction of the old European empires
The coming and going of the Cold War
The rise of new social movements the in the US , led by the black movement

And this is only the start of a much bigger list what could be .
A Crisis of Race and Racism?
[C]risis, Gramsci famously wrote, consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass (Gramsci, 1971: 276). Using the

On the one hand, the old verities of established racism

Gramscian formula, I suggest that there is such a crisis of race and racism.

and white supremacy have been officially discredited, not only in the US but fairly comprehensively

around the world. On the other hand, racially-informed action and social
organization continue unchecked
, racial identity and race consciousness, in nearly every aspect of social life! On the one hand, the state (many states around the world) now
claims to be colorblind, non-racialist, racially democratic; while on the other hand, in almost every case, those same states need race to rule. Consider in the US alone: race and electoral politics, race and social control, race and legal
order Why dont our heads explode under the pressures of such cognitive dissonance? Why doesnt manifest racial contradiction provoke as much uncertainty and confusion in public life and political activity as it does in everyday
experience? Are we just supposed to pretend that none of this is happening? Can anyone really sustain the view that they are operating in a nonracial, colorblind society?
The colorblind claim is that one should not notice race. For if one sees race, one wouldnt be blind to it, after all.5 But what happens to race-consciousness under the pressure (now rather intense in the US, anyway) to be
colorblind? Quite clearly, racial awareness does not dry up like a raisin in the sun. Not only does it continue as a matter of course in everyday life, but in intellectual, artistic and scientific (both social and natural) life race continues
to command attention.6
Colorblind ideologies of race today serve to impede the recognition of racial difference or racial inequality based on claims that race is an archaic concept, that racial inclusion is already an accomplished fact, and so on. Just so,
persistent race-consciousness highlights racial differences and particularities. Noticing race can be linked to despotic or democratic motives, framed either in defense of coercion, privilege, and undeserved advantage, or invoked to
support inclusion, human rights, and social justice (Carbado and Harris, 2008; see also Brown et al., 2003).
Obama
Is he a mere token, a shill for Wall Street? Or is he Neo, the one? If neither alternative is plausible, then we are in the realm of everyday 21st-century US politics. This is the territory in which, as Sam Rayburn famously said, There
comes a time in the life of every politician when he [sic] must rise above principle.
Yet Barack Obama has transformed the US presidency in ways we cannot yet fully appreciate. Obama is not simply the first nonwhite (that we know of) to occupy the office. He is the first to have lived in the global South, the first to
be a direct descendent of colonized people, the first to have a genuine movement background. Consider: How many community meetings, how many movement meetings did Obama attend before entering electoral politics? But he
is no more powerful than any of his predecessors; he is constrained as they were by the US system of rule, by the US racial regime, by structural racism.
In addition he is constrained by racism as no other US president has ever been. No other president has experienced racism directly:
Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the
average black man must endure I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car
keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what its like to have people tell me I cant do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of
swallowed back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb from TV and music and friends and the streets about who the world
thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be. (Obama, 2006: 233)
On the other hand: he has a kill list. All presidents kill people, but Obama is the first systematically and publicly to take charge of these egregious and unconstitutional uses of exceptional powers. In this he echoes Carl Schmitt, the
Nazi political theorist, whose famous dictum is Sovereign is he who decides on the exception (2004 [1922]). The drones, the surveillance, and the numerous right turns of his administration all stand in sharp contradiction not only to
his campaign rhetoric, but to the anti-racist legacy of the civil rights movement that arguably put him in office. Obama has not interceded for blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in US history, the great recession
of 2008. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers rights particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other people of color are
concentrated. Obama himself largely deploys colorblind racial ideology, although he occasionally critiques it as well. Beneath this ostensibly postracial view the palpable and quite ubiquitous system of racial distinction and inequality
remains entrenched. Though modernized and moderated, structural racism has been fortified, not undermined, by civil rights reform; Obama is not challenging it, at least not directly.
Reframing the Discussion

What should we be studying and teaching now? The list of themes I have highlighted here is partial of course, and perhaps impressionistic as well. If

the dark matter of race

the argument I have proposed has any validity, then , which is even more invisible now than it was in the past in its present post-civil rights, colorblind, and
even presidential forms continues to exercise its gravitational pull on our politics . It continues to shape what is called (and
improperly deprecated as) identity politics. The dark matter takes on new significance as a central feature of neoliberalism, which is enacted today through the deployment of accumulation by dispossession, states of exception,
state violence, and exclusionary politics all political practices that rely on racism.

Yet the legacy of centuries of resistance to these depredations the ,

undeniable achievements of anti-racist and ant-imperialist struggles the ,

extension of democracy to peoples of color also exerts a often tortuous and always incomplete ,

significant political force Race-based freedom dreams sustain the hope

. (Kelley again)

of democracy, inclusion, equality, and justice in the US and elsewhere .

 at root cause
The alt fails to account for international dynamics and essentializes
blackness.
Wright 15 (2015, Michelle, PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of
Michigan, Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literature Studies
at Northwestern University, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage
Epistemology, pp. 147-55, endnote on p. 188)
When interpellated through the Middle Passage epistemology, Blackness has a limited set of qualitative values or denotations that link it to the events in that epistemology such as the commitment to collective and individual

generally, the Middle Passage

struggle, racial uplift, and the maintenance of strong communities through traditional or heteropatriarchal family structures. More

epistemology like established Black linear progress or antiprogress narratives

( other

e.g. Afropessimism links all Black collectives across the

, Afrocentrism, PanAfricanism, Negritude, )10 also

Diaspora to the experience of racism and the need to overcome itso how can Ramses II be Black? Even further, what does it mean for us to claim him as
Black? It is hard to interpellate Ramses (or any of the other African kings, queens, leaders, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, etc., whose physiognomy we would acknowledge as stereotypically Black) within the qualitative
definition of Middle Passage Blackness as making common cause with African Americansor any other Black community fighting racism and seeking socioeconomic and political equality in the African Diaspora. In attempting to

interpellate Ramses within this definition, we must produce Blackness as a fixed identity that transcends time and
space ; through this, Ramses no longer belongs to his own spacetime but retroactively becomes a denigrated Negro who must combat his oppression. A paradox oras Massey terms it, a dichotomous resultnow
confronts us: was Ramses II a Black freedom fighter or a ruler of extraordinary and largely unquestioned power, one of the greatest and most oppressive in the history of Egyptian pharaohs?

It is the qualitative definition of Black progress that creates this dichotomy, a

paradox that then empties out all meaning in qualitative collapse . The attempt to interpellate Ramses II through
a Black progress narrative exposes the continuing attempt and subsequent failure of the progress narrative to interpellate Ramses. He is Black because he is a Black African, but he is not Black, because neither Black nor African
operated as identities in Ramsess spacetime. Ramses IIs life speaks to the greatness of African empires, but his unapologetic use of massive slave labor should expel him from Black progressive membership, the same way in
which some discourses attempt to expel Blacks whose actions deliberately harmed other Blacks.

While we should not lose sleep over the odd individual whose
perhaps behaviors bar terrible

them from
him, her, or a Black progress narrative
full or perhaps even partial mention in , there are other Black individuals who are barred from mention who have not

This dichotomy threatens to create interpellative problems

acted against the principle of striving for collective progress. also

for Blacks who move across the Atlantic at the same time as millions of
, unlike the Egyptian pharaoh,

Black Africans are being sailed to and sold into the Americas but not in the same ,

directions , veering away from our progress narrative.

Black slaves transported outside of the Americas to Europe, India, and

elsewhere do not retain a collective identity They disappear into . are sold individually and

households factories, fields roads and city streets

, perhaps From the , or country , intersecting with populations at large.

point of view of Black linear narratives progress , progress has not been achieved because the collective has evanesced (and is therefore unable to achieve its goal of

their histories have become irrelevant to the collective historical

overcoming racism), or read another way,

theme of overcoming racism Qualitatively speaking, it appears difficult if not .

impossible to interpellate Blackness using a Black Atlantic linear narrative in a progress

significant and lasting way . In The World Is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia, which is included in Ruth Simms Hamiltons book Routes of Passage,
Cassandra Pybus reprises a version of Sidney Mintzs question about the qualitative limits of Black Atlantic studies:

A transnational historical consciousness and a capacity to encompass

experience in disparate time and space are great strengths of African diaspora
studies In so far as there is a weakness, it is that the Atlantic world
.

remains the locus of discussion While some attention has begun to drift toward .

the Indian Ocean, less has been directed toward the distant Pacific
scholarship . . . . In the diaspora at the detailed
penal transportation records we can find information about the African end of the eighteenth century that is very hard to come by elsewhere and that points in directions in which historians may not otherwise look.11
Pybus understands that her topic is framed by African Diaspora studies yet constrained by its Atlantic focus; she then observes that despite this swirl of scholarly activity in the Atlantic, there is a drift and direction toward the
Indian Ocean and the distant Pacific. This passage draws a connecting line moving horizontally (well, south by southeast) from the moment of the American Revolution in the Middle Passage timeline to other moments in those
kingdoms and empires that border the Indian Ocean and, more specifically, to the moment of the British penal colony of Australia.
By moving us horizontally into the Pacific, Pybus traces the journey of those (primarily) U.S. Blacks who allied with the defeated British and accompanied them on their return to England. Once there, the promised support from the
Crown never materialized, and many of these former soldiers, spies, and support staff found themselves on the London streets. These (primarily) men would have been in competition with an already burgeoning class of the
dispossessed filling the streets of London and other industrial centers. As Robert Hughes argues in his monumental history of the settling of white Australia, The Fatal Shore, land grabs by the aristocracy and the replacement of
cottage industries with large industrialized factories deprived farmers, laborers, and urban workers of their former careers as well as prospects for new ones (many machines, such as looms, required fewer adult workers). Theft,
especially with the poor now rubbing shoulders with the wealthy in crowded urban centers, skyrocketed, and Parliament responded with deeply punitive measures; to steal a bit of ribbon or bread could send you to prison or heavy
labor or, most fearful of all, condemn you to transport (to a British penal colony). With the American colonies no longer available for convicts, Britain turned to its recently neglected discovery of Australia as a convenient
replacement, and so white and Black Britons, along with a few U.S. and Caribbean Blacks, found themselves transported as part of the First Fleet settlers.
Pybuss second horizontal reading comes, counterintuitively, mostly through records created by hierarchies such as court, maritime, colonial, and penal records, due to the paucity of horizontal archives (correspondence between
peers, diaries, etc.). Pybus, not unlike Hughes in The Fatal Shore, constructs a horizontal narrative of these Black convicts and settlers through (unavoidably) mostly vertical archival sources: state, judicial, colonial, and penal records
that read these human beings as mere numbers filling ships, accepting punishment, and perhaps enriching the Crown through forced labor. To an even greater extent than Hughes, Pybus works to retrieve the very multivalent human
experiences behind these records of discipline and punishment, to see the interactions denoted, denounced, and pronounced through their eyes, so to speak, looking out horizontally rather than down from the (at least figurative)
heights of the judges bench and foremans lash.
Yet despite two horizontal readings qualitative collapse looms because Pybus has
these , here

framed this history as a horizontal connection to what is ultimately a vertical

framework that finds meaning in the struggle against racism . Pybuss Black Founders offers us a
notable exception to our assumptions about Blackness, but in her work, as in other histories she mentions, Blackness evanesces as the convicts and settlers perhaps married, procreated, and most certainly died without moving a
coherent Black Atlantic collective forward in its quest for equality in a majority white society. Or, rather more complicatedly, in Black Founders Blackness evanesces into either the white Australian population or the Australian
Aboriginal population, in the latter case an indigenous Blackness. Most likely reflecting on this, Pybus herself does not think that this discovery of Australias Black founders radically changes the history of the African Diaspora or
Australia: My point is not that this cohort of convicts is especially significant to the history of Australiathough it certainly challenges the conventional reading of the colonial experiencebut to examine what it can tell us about the
wider world.12
If we add Epiphenomenal time to our Black Atlantic frame, however, we can avoid the qualitative collapse that (re)produces these histories as interesting in their own right but marginal to our understanding of Black Atlantic history.
Interpellated through Epiphenomenal time, the Blackness in Black Founders first changes a persons relationship to Blackness and indigeneity. Rather than simply losing indigenous status once captured and then sold, Blackness
intersects twice more with indigeneity, and on two continents: North America and Australia. In both cases, indigenous peoples sometimes helped Black slaves escape, the latter often marrying into specific American Indian nations.
Middle Passage U.S. Blackness now shares a spacetime through indigeneity and raises questions about Central and South American intersections (such as the Garifunas of Nicaragua).13 One might also see a third, more controversial
intersection, between U.S. Blacks who returned to establish the free state of Liberia and the indigenous populations who found themselves oppressed in the resulting socioeconomic and political hierarchy. The qualitative value of
Pybuss Blackness now meaningfully intersects with the Americas but is not swallowed by it, because the frame is horizontally comparative rather than vertically subordinating.
The intersection of Blackness with indigeneity in the Americas, Australia, and Africa also subverts the notion of a purely diasporic Blackness, even within the progress narrative itself, because the latter honors indigeneity as the
origin to which the collective must eventually return. In this moment of interpellation, origin/home is achieved not necessarily through return but through intersections with other first nations in the Atlantic and Pacific. Even
further, we can see how Blackness, in intersecting with indigeneity when (formally) seeking return, as in Liberia, might produce not egalitarian unity but instead oppressive hierarchy.
Black Founders also provides us with perhaps unheard of dimensions of Blackness that, once recognized, might usefully connect to other possible spacetimes that share this dimension. As noted before, the Atlantic Blacks who
arrived with the First Fleet and on subsequent convict ships experienced a range of lives or careers that cannot be summed up through one collective trajectory, especially that of the progress narrative. Pybus shows that in our
present moment of reading, Blackness becomes ambiguous in its meaning in these early colonies. On the one hand, racial designations are clearly marked in the official records, but unlike in the Americas, socioeconomic and political
castes are not created to wholly segregate them. There are many marriages one would designate as interracial, but even if one could access some understanding of how interracial marriage would translate in this spacetime,
marriage is rarely an ideal that denotes the cessation of difficulties over differences. As more than one wag has pointed out, the dominance of heterosexual marriage certainly does not reflect an egalitarian harmony of relations
between the sexes. The marriages in question are thus racialized outside of social racializations, meaning that to be Black in these colonies does not automatically designate a subaltern status below that of whites. In cases where
Black convicts were executed or subjected to physical punishment (whipping was the most common), we might see racially motivated causes, but in the brutal tide of regular executions and torturous punishment, it is difficult to
extrapolate consistently a narrative in which this Blackness can be separated from the brutal imperial and capitalist caste system that ruled all British subjects, including the white working poor.
Blacks intermixing with the white working poor populations in England and Australia intersect with similar interactions during the earlier spacetime of indentured servitude in the United States and the later one of late nineteenth-
century Irish immigration to northeastern urban centers of the United States. If we step back from Pybuss initial frame, which connects the history of the Black Atlantic in Australia horizontally, and instead honor the horizontality of
her interpellations of Black individuals and their intersections (through marriage, penal life, executions, manumission, etc.), one can read this history as a series of moments that intersect not only with Black Atlantic histories in the
Americas but also with histories in Europe, Africa, and perhaps India. It should be noted that, while we are discovering intersections of collectives, we do so wholly within idealist frameworks that can be further interpellated only
through individuals who make up those collectives; beneficially, however, the collective identities that intersect with these individuals produce yet more collectives in more spacetimesmore dimensions of Blackness across the
Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.
While the era of the Middle Passage produces many and varied kinds of Blackness through the intersection of linear and Epiphenomenal time, the conflated eras of World War II and the postwar era offer yet more. I understand World
War II and the postwar period as a conflation of eras because it is impossible to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins; however, when we are operating with Epiphenomenal time, this ambiguity is productive rather than
restrictive. Indeed, breadth, depth, ambiguity, ambivalence, and dominance are the strengths contributed by these overlapping eras: breadth because World War II involved almost the majority of Black Africans and Black Diasporans
across the globe, whereas slaverywhich forms the cornerstone of the Middle Passage epistemologydid not; depth because the various narratives, such as that of Black African men attempting to resist forcible conscription by
French and British colonial forces, or that of African American men and women who fought for the right to be drafted, require explanation and further research; ambiguity because we find Blackness where we do not expect it and
struggle to interpret it, such as Black German individuals who served in Hitlers army and Black Brazilian troops tasked with defending Italy; ambivalence because it is a war and its equally destructive aftermath ironically connects
the African Diaspora many times over with ease and diversity; and finally, dominance because World War II and the postwar era constructed an interpellative frame that has been used by so many across the globe, a frame that
highlights the contemporary and global importance of Blackness far more frequently than themes of the Middle Passage ever do. While the rise of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the Arab Spring, and other
sociopolitical and economic events seem to signal the framing of a new era, journalists, pundits, and politicians alike still interpret many of these events as effects of the World War II/postwar era.
Even the most rigid histories cannot sustain a completely linear Second World War narrative. For example, the invasion of Poland in 1939 must be explained by the rise of Nazism, which perhaps requires a notation about the
Versailles Treaty. Likewise, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is necessary to explain the entrance of the United States into the war as a direct combatant. The Second World War, therefore, has at least two beginnings and, even by
conservative estimates, at least two endings: the surrender of the Nazis in Berlin and the signed surrender by the Japanese on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
This gives us a war with at least two timelines to which there correspond two themes, two notions of progress, and many ways in which occupied nations must be understood: as collaborators, as wholly oppressed, as underground
resisters, and so on. This nonlinear set of peoples, places, and events forces anyone seeking interpellations through World War II to accept all the exceptions to its linear progress narrativethat is, it forces researchers to incorporate
great nuance into their interpellations (in asking when the Second World War ended, for example, we have to amend the question to reflect all the surrenders and dates that dominant discourses on World War II cite in response
because, whether there were multiple wars or one great war may be a matter of definition, but there is no question that there were multiple narratives that intersected). This means that qualitative collapse will occur less frequently
in interpellations made through a wholly linear progress narrative on the war (because dominant discourses do not offer, really, any wholly linear narratives of it), but when it does, the effect is almost always deafening, as if it were
drowning out alternative interpellations.14
Blackness can manifest through this multidimensionality, in most cases quite easily. In contrast to the difficulty involved in explaining how Blacks from the Atlantic found themselves in Australia, the global reach of the Second World
War makes it easy to explain how Blackness has spread almost everywhere. When using both Epiphenomenal and linear spacetimes to interpellate Blackness in these eras, no long, creative narratives are needed to explain the
presence of West Africans under British rule, East Africans under Italian Fascist rule, or the fight for equality both at home and abroad that was the self-appointed task of many an African American man or woman in uniform;
moreover, using both spacetimes enables Black European studies to explain without much difficulty how Blacks of African descent came to fight under Hitler. We can arrive at these explanations by starting with the individual, rather
than the collective, as a point of interpellation. We can then link such an individual to his, her, or their variously realized collective identities (understanding that we should never claim that an individual is fully realized, as we can
work within distinct spacetimes only as they are imagined in the now, not in both the present and the past).
Unfortunately, many of these dimensions as interpellated through the postwar epistemology are easily achieved through vertical structures: we need only locate (in ascending order) a military battalion, a regiment, or a division that
would contain Black soldiers and its encampments and headquarters. Vertical readings alone can often interpellate an agential and diverse Blackness: Black soldiers and field nurses with agency, Black civilians with choices, and a
whole roster of intersections with a broad variety of peers (soldiers and civilians) across vast geographies. At first glance, performing vertical interpellations through linear narratives appears to bear the same fruit as a horizontal
reading: Blackness with agency and diversity.
This might explain why so many Black collective progress narratives of World War II use this multidimensionality to produce hierarchical, or vertical, interpellations for the collective. The Windrush narrative of Black Britain, for
example, readily narrates the contributions of Black British Caribbeans in the Second World War, yet uses a progress narrative to interpellate this Blackness. Like the histories of African American men who fought for the United States
during World War I, the Windrush narrative underscores the painful hypocrisy of serving the British Crown only to be treated as an undesirable emigrant in the postwar era.15 Drawing on oral histories of service in the war and
archival records from the British War Office, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1999) interpellates Black Britishness as agential and diverse, a proud component of the history of World War II but of official British
histories of the war more particularly.16
To be sure, even when operating within World War II/postwar frameworks, we encounter obstacles. Hierarchies of power are not (unfortunately) wholly erased, and they can be complicated by the complexities of global alliances and
rivalries (no matter how easily they are manifested in the postwar epistemology). The postwar epistemologys emphasis on the now, in the absence of a geographical center (a component of even the most traditional narratives of
the Second World War/postwar era),17 allows, say, Samoan warriors aiding the Allies to be interpellated through collective identities that certainly include hierarchal structures (e.g., the military command structure) but also
relationships whereby power must constantly be negotiated (e.g., in relationships between soldiers or between soldiers and civilians). The now complicates power, meaning that while an Epiphenomenal interpellation enables
agency, it will also reflect those vertical hierarchies that inevitably accompany so many moments of interpellation in every individual life across the globe.18

***BEGIN ENDNOTE***
One could read
18. Blackness through U.S. versions of Afropessimism but
Smiths first novel as interpellating ,

this is a distinction lacking meaningful difference While it eschews the Middle .

Passage Epistemologys progress narrative Blacks are destined to always be (

oppressed it needs this linear progress narrative to argue against progress

), .

While claiming to be static, U.S. versions of Afropessimism nonetheless

doggedly track each moment of the Middle Passage Epistemology to state
yet again that no progress has been made .

***END ENDNOTE***
***1AR***
 middle east key
The alt fails without proximate demands US occupation of the Middle
East produces repressive policing at home and connecting those struggles
through the permutation is key to long term change
Taylor 16 (assistant professor in the department of African American Studies at
Princeton University)
(Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Haymarket
Books, Kindle Edition)

In the contest to demonstrate how oppressions differ from one group to the next, we
miss how we are connected through oppression and how those connections should form the
basis of solidarity, not a celebration of our lives on the margins. The American government demonizes its enemies
to justify mistreating them, whether it is endless war, internment, and torture or mass incarceration and police
abuse. There is a racist feedback loop, in which domestic and foreign policies feed
and reinforce each other. This is why US foreign policy in the Middle East has
reverberated at home. The cynical use of Islamophobia to whip up support for
continued American interventions in Arab and Muslim countries inevitably has
consequences for Muslim Americans. And the ever- expanding security state, justified by the War on
Terror, becomes the pretext for greater police repression at home which, of course,
disproportionately affects African Americans and Latino/as in border regions.
In the late 1990s, a movement began to stop racial profiling against Black drivers in police
stops. Major class-action lawsuits in Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida highlighted the extent to
which African Americans were subjected to unwarranted suspicion and harassment on the nations interstates. New
Jersey became a center of anti- profiling activism when, in the spring of 1998 during a routine police stop, an officer
fired into a van filled with young African American men. Al Sharpton led a protest of several hundred people,
including a five-hundred-car motorcade, onto Interstate 95. That same year, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit on
behalf of several Black motorists who complained of racially motivated traffic stops on Interstate 95. The
widespread suspicion of Blacks and Latino/as contributed to an atmosphere of intimidation and an implicit threat of
violence. (This certainly seemed to be the case with the 1999 murder of Amadou Diallo, which touched off a wave
of protests and civil disobedience demanding the prosecution of the cops involved.) Then, in March 1999,
Republican New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman fired the state police superintendent when he said profiling
was justified because mostly minorities trafficked in marijuana and cocaine}?
The movements momentum however, was dramatically cut short in the aftermath
of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The US government rushed to turn tragedy into a call for national unity in
preparation for a new war with Afghanistan in 2001 and later in Iraq. Moreover, federal agents justified
racial profiling to hunt down Muslims and Arabs in the aftermath. No longer was this
tactic subject to federal investigation and lawsuits. It became a legitimate and
widely supported tool in the War on Terror. For example, in 1999, 59 percent of Americans said they believed
that the police engaged in racial profiling; of those, 81 percent thought the practice was wrong. Even George W.
Bush, several months before 9/11, addressed a joint congressional session on the practice to declare, Racial
profiling is wrong and we will end it in America.9 However, by September 30, 2001, Black support for racial
Not only
profiling of Arabs had jumped to 60 percent, compared to 45 percent among the general population.
was the developing struggle against racism buried under a wave of jingoism and
Islamophobic racism, but the focal point of the antiracist struggl e, racial profiling,
was now being championed as a necessary tool to protect the United States.