Framework

A. Interpretation: The affirmative must present and defend the hypothetical

implementation of a topical plan action.
“Resolved” proves the framework for the resolution is to enact a policy.
Words and Phrases 64 (Permanent Edition)

Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or

determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar
force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.

The USFG is the government in Washington D.C.

Encarta 2k (http://encarta.msn.com)

“The federal government of the United States is centered in Washington DC”

B. Violation – the affirmative team doesn’t present topical plan enacted by the
USFG to be debated during the hypothetical policy discussion of the round.

C. Vote neg
1. Topicality – they don’t defend the resolution, which is a voting issue to
preserve competitive equity and jurisdictional integrity and outweighs all other
issues because without it, debate is impossible
Shively 00 (Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science – Texas A&M U., Partisan Politics and
Political Theory, p. 181-182)
The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to-they must reject and limit-
some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say
"yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the
basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in
thinking that agreement marks the end of contest-that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is
perfect-if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect.
We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their
applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray
writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the
corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is
true. Therecan be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement.
(Murray 1960, 10) In
other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating:
if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas
about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about
what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an
argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot
successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints.
In other words, contest is
Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy.
meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested.
Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the
terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at
hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of
an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about
intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.

2. Fairness – their framework allows infinite non-falsifiable, unpredictable,

totalizing, and personal claims – impossible to be neg in a world where affs
don’t have to follow the resolution

3. Switch-side debate – spending every round theorizing about your argument

is unproductive – you cannot know your argument is true unless you consider
both sides of it
4. Topicality before advocacy – vote negative to say that you think they are not
topical, not that you don’t believe in their advocacy
5. Education – we enter the round with the goal of increasing our education in
economic and/or diplomatic engagement with China, with a plan like this we
destroy any chance of this education occurring. This may be a good topic to
learn about, but the debate space is not the place to do it because it eliminates
any fairness that could be had and decreases the amount of actual education
we could garner.
6. Research – we do different research every year based on the topic given,
which increases our education base and gives us an indpeth look at the topic,
affs like this destroy any purpose of doing research which eliminates the
indepth education we get from it. There is no point of doing the research when
none of it is going to apply to the round.
 K
War is not an event, it’s a continuum threaded at every point by gender—the
aff misdiagnoses the problem by adopting a disembodied lens of analysis
Cockburn 15 – feminist researcher and writer, honorary professor in Sociology at City University
London and at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick (Cynthia
Cockburn, “World disarmament? Stop by disarming masculinity,” 4/20/2015,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/world-disarmament-start-by-disarming-masculinity/)//cpark
On the face of it, the two preoccupations, one with gender relations and the other with global military spending, may seem to have
little connection. The first speaks of the human, intimate, individual and personal; the other of the machinery of war, missiles and
military commands. And indeed the mainstream peace movements, comprising both men and women, tend not make the mental
leap that is needed to bring them into a common analytic frame. On the other hand, it’s characteristic of the women’s peace
movements, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the international network of Women in Black
against War, and hundreds of smaller, more local women’s peace initiatives, that they do so. And the particular feature of gender
relations they point to is the persistence of male dominance, accompanied (and indeed
achieved) by the insistent shaping of masculinity, the ideal, preferred, form of manhood, as
mentally competitive and combative; psychologically ready to use coercion; and physically
equipped to prevail through force. Over a span of twenty years I’ve had the privilege to meet and work with such
groups of feminist activists, in a dozen countries, many of them in the Global South. They are generating a more and
more coherent narrative about the causes of war. One of the things I’ve learned from them is
that war doesn’t stand alone. It's helpful to see it as part of a continuum of violence. That continuum
persists along a scale of force (fist to bomb), a scale of time (peacetime, prewar, wartime, postwar), a scale of place (bedroom, city,
continent) and so on. As peace activists, they say, we have to look for the organizational, economic, social and psychological
connections along the continuum and address it as a whole. One of the things they notice is that gender
is a thread
running through the continua in every direction. Men and women, masculinity and femininity, in
relation to each other, feature throughout the spectrum of violence. A good example of women
activists who clarify and alert us to a precise link in the gendered continuum of violence is the
remarkable project in Israel called Gun-Free Kitchen Tables. They protest against the death and
wounding of women, wives and partners in everyday life by soldiers and police with weapons
they take home with them. These activists point out, loud and clear, that militarism doesn't stay in the barracks. It comes
in the front door, it hangs in the closet. On a more global level, the women’s mobilization within IANSA, the
International Action Network on Small Arms and Light Weapons, successfully pressed the United
Nations, during negotiation of the Arms Trade Treaty, to acknowledge precisely what women such as those of
Gun Free Kitchen Tables have been telling us - the significance of guns in women’s lives and deaths. Another
example of continuum-thinking is Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence (OWAAMV), who insist
on the connection between the violence inherent in the massive weaponry of the US military
whose bases weigh upon their islands and the frequent rape and abuse of individual women by
individual soldiers. Suzuyo Takazato, one of its founders, spoke graphically to me of the connection between patriarchy and
militarization, both experienced every day on her Okinawan islands as violent systems, inextricably linked. Of course, the word
patriarchy does have an old-fashioned ring to it. Many
‘Westerners’ like to suppose that, in ‘the West’, in the
post-Enlightenment era, actual rule by the patriarchal head of family faded away. But Carole Pateman in her
memorable book, The Sexual Contract, has left no room for doubt that a different version of male dominance
has been substituted for rule by the fathers in modern times: it is the rule of the brothers. And we
are still searching for a word to designate this updated male supremacism. Fratriarchy, perhaps, or andrarchy, androcracy? Take
your pick. Personally, I like ‘phallocracy’. But ‘patriarchy’ seems to be hanging in there. Seeing
war from their close-in
vantage point leads Suzuyo Takato and other feminist antimilitarists to identify three main causes. They don’t
necessarily put patriarchy first. They may rather stress, in the first place, economic factors such as control of exploitable resources,
and of markets. These are often the immediate cause of war. A second causal
factor they often cite is political: lines drawn
between self-defining groups, 'us' and 'others'. The nation state system involves multiple struggles over borders.
Borders divide one rival state from another, but usually fail to align with the borders of ethnic, cultural and religious groups that
sometimes fight each other – maybe for domination of the state, or simply for recognition and rights. Racism features in this cause
of war, especially white supremacism. So, the economic order, the nation state system - what then of the sex-gender order? The
feminist analysis tends to represent patriarchy, not necessarily as an immediate, precipitating
factor in war, but as a ‘root’ cause, something that predisposes societies to militarism and war
fighting, that makes war always already likely. In this sense, the feminist analysis of war is
‘wholistic’, it sees multiple causes of war working together. After all, they emerged together, historically.
Gerder Lerner’s book, The Creation of Patriarchy, usefully takes us back to the Upper Neolithic. Gradually, from tribal and village
society there emerged a property-owning class, a system of city states - eventually empires –
and the patriarchal, patrilineal family. Only then were the first standing armies created, for the
protection and extension of privilege. War is the child not of barbarism but of ‘civilization’. Of
course these systems, dimensions, processes of power are inter-related – ‘intersected’ if you like. You see them working together in
all the institutions around us: class, ‘race’ and gender power are present in a bank, in a government, in a religious structure, in a
family even. Watching the evening news, as we relaxed from the Conference during the week of debate and discussion, we saw
reports of rioting in Baltimore. How could we escape making the link between economic inequality, racial oppression and masculine
violence, watching these events on American streets and in the prisons? Those news reports were a reminder, besides, that
patriarchy is not only a hierarchy situating men above women. It’s a hierarchical ranking among
and between men too. Sometimes feminists are made to feel that in challenging patriarchy we
are ‘blaming men’. Our analysis doesn’t blame men. It blames a system that deforms men. Several
men were present among us at the WILPF events. Especially welcome were those who shared their experience as activists in
organizations of men coming together to address male violence, such as Sonke Gender Justice, of South Africa, and the gender
justice information network Engaging Men. Together we applied ourselves to devising strategies for disarming masculinity. We are
convinced, after all, as feminists, that gender identities and behaviours are socially shaped, that we don't
have to shrug and say 'nothing can be done - it's all given in the genes'. But where, concretely,
are the social programmes that set about transforming gender relations and rewriting the script
of masculinity? They are few and far between. In the UK, for instance, where there is increasing concern over men’s abuse
of women and girls, the policy response is ‘protection’ of the victims. ‘We must take more care of women and girls.’ Policy
makers don’t look for the man behind the neutral word ‘abuser’, ‘predator’, ‘offender’.They
don’t ask ‘What is it with men?’ They don’t have a plan of action. Meantime, a tsunami of cultural products,
video games such as Advanced Warfare and films like American Sniper, bombard men and boys with the idea that militarized men
are desirable men.

Specifically, their method of pursuing peace excludes women. Affirming the

idea that everyone experiences war and climate change means that there is
never going to be true peace.
Aoláin 17 – Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy and Society at the University of Minnesota Law School
and a Chair in Law, University of Ulster’s Transitional Justice Institute, Consultant to and expert for a
number of institutions including UN Women & OHCHR, Member of the Joint Committee of Northern
Ireland Human Rights Commission and Irish Commission for Human Rights created by the Good
Friday/Belfast Agreement, LLB from Queens University, LLM from Colombia Law School; PhD in Law from
Queens University (Fionnauala Ní Aoláin, “The Aftermath of War,” March 2017,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318586041_Women_gender_equality_and_post-
conflict_transformation_Lessons_learned_implications_for_the_future)//cpark

**Note: DDR stands for Disarmament, Demilitarization, and Reintegration

For a time, a revitalized post–Cold War milieu allowed for greater bilateral state and international institutional attention to the vagrancies of conflict
sequenc- ing and endings, and created openings to engage women and other marginalized groups in peace settlements. Now, a détente and
accompanying crisis in the wake of the faltering Arab Spring transitions and renewed East-West fractures over the use of force outside the collective
security system in Ukraine and Crimea brings uncertainty and fragmentation to conflict ending processes around the world. This is most
obviously evidenced by the struggle to fashion any binding agreement on ending the Syrian
conflict despite the avalanche of refugees pouring across local and regional borders. Throughout the 1990s and early twenty-first cen- tury
attention to conflict regulation fashioned an expanded role for overarching international legal structures – namely peacemaking

agreements and transitional structures including international administration and international

criminal courts. Both become particularly relevant as opportunistic sites to advance advocacy
for women’s experiences in war. Such advocacy was critical as it was abundantly clear that
women were highly marginalized in international instutional settings, their issues rarely
addressed, and the “deals” were largely being done without them. While women are missing
from key roles in peace negotiations and gov- ernment, they often dominate in civil society
movements that create “safe” and neutral spaces in conflicted societies. In this latter role, women
frequently provide the grassroots networking and social support structures relied upon local and
international elites to embed peace processes. In many jurisdictions, they are the public face of a
transition to peace via highly essentialized public roles and politi- cal reliance on narratives of
harms particular to women, children, suffering and vulnerably undergirding appeals to
recalibrate the political order. For example, in Northern Ireland women took a lead role through the
creation of a women’s political party, the Women’s Coalition, in advocacy for a peace
agreement and “sold” the value of the peace agreement when a national referen- dum was held to approve it. This reliance is
generally under-acknowledged and rarely funded by the post-conflict reconstruction funds that
follow from international engagement with conflicted states. The under-acknowledgment goes
to a broader pattern of exclusion that remains a consistently gendered aspect of politi- cal
settlement. Conflict sites such as Northern Ireland (see chapter 4 this volume) illustrate the extent to which a highly organized women’s
civil society sector, historically associated with the global peace movement, and well organized
to advance legal and political space around such “neutral” issues such as domestic violence was
able to leverage its cross-community capacity and political organ- izing to advance the local
peace process. Despite this reliance, arguably little has been done to advance the security
concerns of women in post-conflict settings. Negotiation seldom addresses the need to reorder
post-conflict security sector reform processes to better engage women’s needs. Gender
inclusion gaps have led to impassioned advocacy for women’s insertion in peace processes and sup-
port for mainstreaming issues of particular concern to women into the fulcrum of the “deals” being made. The success of these advocacy efforts
remains difficult to measure. While there is evidence of increased female presence at the peacemaking
table, influence upon core elements including the security dimensions of peace deals remains
marginal. Empirical analysis shows inconsistent results for greater female presence, and little
more than an ad hoc patchwork of gender-specific provisions in a broad swathe of peace
agreements. A broader debate has emerged within feminist circles concerning the value of representation and the challenge
of delivering better outcomes for women from an “add women and stir” approach. Increasingly scholars
and practitioners recognize that they must pay greater attention to negotiation “tipping points” so as to progress influence on security

outcomes as well as paying attention to which women are in the room and being clearer about
the multiple and intersectional interests served by women who are present in negotiations.
Attention is also being paid to the importance of aligning elite interests with women’s interest
through the process of political set- tlement and addressing the ways in which a variety of structural and pre-existing social and economic determinants
have a decisive effect on peacemaking efforts for women. Over time, a more nuanced understanding has also emerged of masculinity in the
peacemaking environment, and the ways in which some men derive benefits from the status quo and others do not. A substantial amount of literature
has been generated over the years regarding the forms of masculinity that emerge in times of armed conflict and
war. While war literature across many disciplines has made significant conceptual and practical use of the term “masculinity,” the concept has been
less applied and understood to be relevant in the post-conflict context. In the context of DDR, asking the “man” question is

critical, thereby interrogating where and how men are situated in relation to the creation, per-
petration, institutionalization and ending of violence. Applying a core analytical insight from
masculinity theory—namely the emergence of “hyper” masculinity, and its enlarged and
elevated role in conflict requires thinking through what are the implications for DDR when
hyper masculine practices pervade “war-time” and seep beyond it. By the time conflict ends,
men who have acted militarily and their (generally) male political elites are deeply enmeshed in
a cultural vision of manhood. As former combatants in Colombia explained to anthropologist Kim- berly Theidon, for example,
joining a paramilitary group allowed the men “to ‘feel like a big man in the streets of their
barrios,’ to ‘go out with the prettiest young women,’ and to ‘dress well,’ privileges they insist
would not have been possible if they weren’t carrying a gun. The prevalence of this kind of
masculinity poses complex issues for undoing violence, for mainstreaming gender equality and
for remaking societies that have been fractured and deeply divided. It seems particularly pertinent to ask how
DDR may contribute to the unloosening or remaking of masculinity patterns and hierarchies. Thinking critically about DDR means addressing parallel
discourses maintain- ing the view that “civilians are . . . ill-equipped to address substantive issues related to the security sector.” If this is well-received
wisdom in ordinary times, we should assume that it has a heightened sensitivity in situations of great political and military flux. The “exclude civilians”
view is compounded by the vision that formulating and executing security policy (in the narrowest sense) is a legitimate responsibility (almost a
“spheres of competence” approach) given to the security forces themselves, and where applicable to international military elites. Addition- ally civil
society organizations (the majority of which do not typically embrace the women’s sector) shy away from substantive engagement with such bodies or
are simply not represented in the spaces where the conversations about policy formation take place. Thus, women
face additional
layers of exclusion because they are unrelentingly absent from the military decision-making
processes and the small number of women who “get to the negotiation tables” will be unlikely
candidates as civilian additions to security sector reform conversations.

Liberal assumptions are problematic in their propensity to consider human

rights and ethics monolithically
Kimberly Hutchings 2013 (Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International
Relations at Queen Mary University of London. She is a leading scholar in international relations
theory. “Ethics, Feminism and International Affairs," Ethics and International Affairs Journal,
https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/8120/HUTCHINGS%20Ethics%20a
nd%20International%20Affairs%202013.pdf?sequence=2 //EH)

This is not simply a theoretical dispute. For difference feminists the

prescriptive implications of care in relation to
peace and of justice in relation to human rights and development have been shown to be
ethically problematic for women who don’t fit with standard western liberal assumptions about
either women or humans. Many feminists from the developing world have supported wars in
the pursuit of struggles for decolonisation and national liberation and deny that there is a
necessary connection between feminist ethics and peace politics. Similarly, many feminists in the
global south are wary of the liberal language of global human rights and economic development and argue
that it reflects the moral priorities of an earlier western history and has been used to justify first
imperialism and subsequently other forms of interventionism in the Global South. For difference
feminists, ‘context’ is not equivalent to a monolithic account of ‘culture’. From the difference point of view,
culture and identity, like all other facets of social and political life, are sites of power relations and struggles, there is therefore
always a political dimension to ethics, and 23 this, according to difference feminists, is the dimension that care and justice feminists,
in different ways, neglect. For difference ethics it is ethical principles of respect for plurality and democracy that are fundamental to
feminism. Although they share with care and justice feminisms a commitment to challenging gendered relations of power, for
difference feminists specific questions about what moral values should guide human conduct at a global level are incapable of being
satisfactorily answered unless and until the world has changed in such a way that the voices of those currently most excluded from
moral debate can be heard (Spivak 1999; Mohanty 2003; Hutchings 2004). In the meantime, moral priority must be given to those
ethical values that do most to support struggles to change the world to include the excluded, and that do least to further repress the
voices of the least powerful actors in current world politics. The problem with this ethical project is that, as difference feminists
themselves point out, any explicitly articulated universal ethical claim in international ethics always carries its own exclusions with it,
intended or unintended. This
is typified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, for
example, in speaking of all human beings’ fundamental right to marriage and family life,
necessarily excludes those human beings who do not fit with heterosexual norms, or with the
assumption of a humanity split into two genders (Butler 2004: 102-130). One of the feminist ethical theorists who
has addressed what difference ethics implies in an international context is Judith Butler. Focusing on the concept of universal human
rights, Butler
has shown how the concept of the human in human 24 rights, by setting up a norm
of what it means to be human, consistently operates so as to situate certain categories of
people as ‘less than’ human, rendering their lives in crucial respects ‘unliveable’ and
‘ungrievable’ (Butler 2004: 225-227). Thus she directly challenges Nussbaum’s claim that it is through an inclusive account of
what it means to be human that a genuinely universal international ethics can be articulated as a yardstick for the judgement of
practice. At the same time, Butler does not advocate the abandonment of the idea of universal rights, but rather argues that the
meaning of ‘universal’ should always be open to challenge and re-negotiation, and that we should never assume that our claims to
universality actually live up to their promise (Butler 2004: 33). Somewhat paradoxically,
difference ethics is universalist
in its orientation towards giving moral priority to the excluded in general, but sees this
universalism as always failing. For difference ethics, ethical priorities will differ depending on
context, so that there is (and ought to be) no feminist consensus on either the ethics of war or
the nature of fundamental human being. It is therefore inappropriate to condemn practices
such as female circumcision in the abstract, without a full understanding of the context of the
practice and the ethical investments of the different parties to it. Moreover, the exponent of an
ethics of difference needs to take responsibility for his or her own judgment and actions and
recognise that well-intended arguments and policies may have unforeseen effects when implemented
in a top down way. In this respect, difference ethics is linked to feminist criticisms of the ‘War on Terror’
and humanitarian interventions from the 1990s onwards, which perpetuated a politics of 25
rescue in which white western men ‘save’, in Spivak’s words, brown women from brown men
(Hutchings 2011).

This gender order is far from benevolent. For the hierarchy to sustain itself,
violence against the other is used to further subordinate and maintain rule
Connell 05 [Raewyn, sociologist and professor at the University of Sidney, Masculinities
(second edition) pp. 82-86]

The structures of gender relations are formed and transformed over time. It has been common in historical
writing to see this change as coming from outside gender - from technology or class dynamics, most often. But change is also generated from within
gender relations. The dynamic is as old as gender relations. It has, however, become more clearly defined in the last two centuries with the emergence
of a public politics of gender and sexuality. With the women's suffrage movement and the early homophile movement, the conflict of interests
embedded in gender relations became visible. Interests are formed in any structure of inequality, which
necessarily defines groups that will gain and lose differently by sustaining or by changing the
structure. A gender order where men dominate women cannot avoid constituting men as an
interest group concerned with defence, and women as an interest group concerned with
change. This is a structural fact, independent of whether men as individuals love or hate women, or believe in equality or abjection, and
independent of whether women are currently pursuing change. To speak of a patriarchal dividend is to raise exactly this question of interest. Men

gain a dividend from patriarchy in terms of honour, prestige and the right to command. They
also gain a material dividend. In the rich capitalist countries, men's average incomes are
approximately double women's average incomes. (The more familiar comparisons, of wage rates for full-time employment,
greatly understate gender differences in actual incomes.) Men are vastly more likely to control a major block of

capital as chief executive of a major corporation, or as direct owner. For instance, of 55 US fortunes above $1
billion in 1992, only five were mainly in the hands of women - and all but one of those as a result of inheritance from men. Men are much

more likely to hold state power: for instance, men are ten times more likely than women to hold office as a member of parliament (an
average across all countries of the world) . Perhaps men do most of the work? No: in the rich countries, time-budget studies show women and men
work on average about the same number of hours in the year. (The major difference is in how much of this work gets paid.)21 Given these facts, the
'battle of the sexes' is no joke. Social struggle must result from inequalities on such a scale. It follows that the politics of masculinity cannot concern
only questions of personal life and identity. It must also concern questions of social justice. A
structure of inequality on this scale,
involving a massive dis- possession of social resources, is hard to imagine without violence. It is,
overwhelmingly, the dominant gender who hold and use the means of violence. Men are armed
far more often than women. Indeed under many gender regimes women have been forbidden
to bear or use arms (a rule applied, astonishingly, even within armies) . Patriarchal definition of femininity (dependence fear- fulness)
amount to a cultural disarmament that may be quite as effective as the physical kind. Domestic violence cases often find abused women, physically
able to look after themselves, who have accepted the abusers' definitions of themselves as incompetent and helpless.22 Two
patterns of
violence follow from this situation. First, many members of the privileged group use violence to
sustain their dominance. Intimidation of women ranges across the spectrum from wolf-whistling
in the street, to office harassment, to rape and domestic assault, to murder by a woman's
patriarchal 'owner', such as a separated husband. Physical attacks are commonly accompanied by verbal abuse of women
(whores and bitches, in recent popular music that recommends beating women). Most men do not attack or harass women;

but those who do are unlikely to think themselves deviant. On the contrary they usually feel
they are entirely justified, that they are exercising a right. They are authorized by an ideology of
supremacy. Second, violence becomes important in gender politics among men. Most episodes
of major violence (counting military combat, homicide and armed assault) are transactions
among men. Terror is used as a means ofdrawing boundaries and making exclusions, for example, in
heterosexual violence against gay men. Violence can become a way of claiming or asserting masculinity in group struggles. This is an explosive process
when an oppressed group gains the means of violence - as witness the levels of violence among black men in contemporary South Mrica and the United
States. The youth gang violence of inner-city streets is a striking other men, continuous with the assertion of masculinity in sexual violence against
women.23
 Violence can be used to enforce a reactionary gender politics, as in the recent firebombings and murders of abortion service providers in
the United States. It must also be said that collective violence among men can open possibilities for progress in gender relations. The two global wars
this century produced important transitions in women's employment, shook up gender ideology, and accelerated the making of homosexual
communities.
Violence is part of a system of domination, but is at the same time a measure of its
imperfection. A thoroughly legitimate hierarchy would have less need to intimidate. The scale of
contemporary violence points to crisis tendencies ( to borrow a term from Jiirgen Habermas) in the modern gender order.
 The concept of crisis
tendencies needs to be distinguished from the colloquial sense in which people speak of a 'crisis of mas- culinity'. As a theoretical term 'crisis'
presupposes a coherent system of some kind, which is destroyed or restored by the outcome of the crisis. Masculinity,
as the
argument so far has shown, is not a system in that sense. It is, rather, a configuration of practice
within a system of gender relations. We cannot logi- cally speak of the crisis of a configuration; rather we might speak of its
disruption or its transformation. We can, however, logically speak of the crisis of a gender order as a whole, and of its ten- dencies towards crisis.24
Such crisis tendencies 'will always implicate masculinities, though not necessarily by disrupting them. Crisis tendencies may, for instance, provoke
attempts to restore a dominant masculinity. Michael Kimmel has pointed to this dynamic in turn-of-the- century United States society, where fear of
the women's suffrage movement played into the cult of the outdoorsman. Klaus Theweleit in Male Fantasies traced the more savage process that
produced the sexual politics of fascism in the aftermath of the suffrage movement and German defeat in the Great War. More recently, Women's
Liberation and defeat in Vietnam have stirred new cults of true masculinity in the United States, from violent 'adventure' movies such as the Rambo
series, to the expansion of the gun cult and what William Gibson in a frightening recent study has called 'paramilitary culture'.25 To understand the
making of contemporar}" masculinities, then, we need to map the crisis tendencies of the gender order. This is no light task! But it is possible to make a
start, using as a framework the three structures ofgender relations defined earlier in this chapter. Power relations show the most visible evidence of
crisis tenden- cies: a historic collapse of the legitimacy of patriarchal power, and a global movement for the emancipation of women. This is fuelled by
an underlying contradiction between the inequality of women and men, on the one hand, and the universalizing logics of modern state structures and
market relations, on the other. The incapacity of the institutions of civil society, notably the family, to resolve this tension provokes broad but
incoherent state action (from family law to population policy) which itselfbecomes the focus of political turbulence. Masculinities are reconfigured
around this crisis tendency both through conflict over strategies of legitimation, and through men's divergent responses to femi- nism (see Chapter 5).
While the tension leads some men to the cults of masculinity just mentioned, it leads others to support feminist reforms.26 Production relations have
also been the site of massive institu- tional changes. Most notable are the vast postwar growth in married women's employment in rich countries, and
the even vaster incorporation ofwomen's labour into the money economy in poor countries. There is a basic contradiction between men's and women's
equal contribution to production, and the gendered appropria- tion of the products of social labour. Patriarchal control of wealth is sustained by
inheritance mechanisms, which, however, insert some women into the property system as owners. The turbulence of the gendered accumulation
process creates a series of tensions and inequalities in men's chances of benefiting from it. Some men, for instance, are excluded from its benefits by
unemploy- ment (see Chapter 4) ; others are advantaged by their connection with new physical or social technologies (see Chapter 7). Relations
ofcathexis have visibly changed with the stabilization of lesbian and gay sexuality as a public alternative within the het- . erosexual order (see Chapter
6) . This change was supported by the broad claim by women for sexual pleasure and control of their own bodies, which has affected heterosexual
The patriarchal order prohibits forms of emotion, attachment and pleasure
practice as well as homosexual.


that patriarchal society itself produces. Tension5 develop around sexual inequality and men's rights in marriage, around the
prohibition on homosexual affection (given that patriarchy constantly produces homo-social institutions) and around the threat to social order
symbolized by sexual freedoms. This sketch of crisis tendencies is a very brief account of a vast subject, but it is perhaps enough to show changes in
masculini- ties in something like their true perspective. The canvas is much broader than images of a modern male sex role, or renewal of the deep
masculine, imply. Economy, state and global relationships are involved as well as households and personal relationships. The vast changes in gender
relations around the globe produce ferociously complex changes in the conditions of practice with which men as well as women have to grapple. No
one is an inno- cent bystander in this arena of change. We are all engaged in con- structing a world of gender relations. How it is made, what strategies
different groups pursue, and with what effects, are political questions. Men no more than women are chained to the gender patterns they have
inherited. Men too can make political choices for a new world of gender relations. Yet those choices are always made in concrete social circumstances,
which limit what can be attempted; and the outcomes are not easily controlled.

Thus, the alternative is to commit to a feminist project of IR and to challenge

the limits of traditional security theory
Wibben ‘11
(Annick T.R. Wibben, professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Fransisco,
"Feminist Politics in Feminist Security Studies," Politics & Gender, 7(04), (2011).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/EC4B0933D14C37437BF2516BB6987CAF/S1743923X11000407a.pdf/feminist_politics_
in_feminist_security_studies.pdf 590–595)

Certainly, not all feminists need to, or could, agree on everything such that there would be a
single feminist position. There are, however, some basic commitments that are not negotiable,
chief among them that feminism is a political project committed to emancipation/
empowerment and broader social justice. FSS, like feminist IR more generally, needs to dig
deeper than a simple addition of women or gender would allow for. It needs to ask feminist
questions and develop a feminist curiosity (cf. Enloe 2004). The first task of a feminist security
scholar should be to develop a willingness to listen, to consider another view of the world. An empathetic
listener must be willing to accept vulnerability, “to suffer alienation and self-disruption” (Lugones and Spelman 1983,
576). She must be willing to suspend her own framework of meaning to “accept that some events ‘resist simple,
straightforward comprehension’; they ‘demand witness but defy narrative expression’” (Apfelbaum, quoted in
Andrews 2007, 40). Embracing empathetic listening techniques (cf. Sylvester 1994), and the slippage in positionality
that accompanies them, are of fundamental importance to the feminist project. This necessitates a certain
fragmentation of subjectivity within feminist IR in order “not to replicate the oppressive
categorizations and exclusions of the metanarrative” (Jabri and O’Gorman 1999, 7). It is, above
all, feminists’ methodological commitments (cf. Tickner 2006, 22–29) that distinguish feminist
security studies from other approaches. The difference in scope and contents of critical security
studies, which tackle many of the same issues and, for the most part, embrace an emancipatory
agenda, illustrates this.3 First, critical security scholars tend not to ask feminist research
questions, and “the definition of problematics [is] a chief culprit in creating the racism, classism,
and androcentrism of science to which feminists and others object” (Harding 1986, 239).
Second, while they deepen their levels of analysis to include humanity or the individual, they do
not base their research on women’s experiences, nor do they interrogate gender as part of a
matrix of power where it intersects with other markers such as class, race, nation, religion,
sexuality, and more. As a result, non-feminist critical security scholars find themselves with
strikingly different research agendas, findings, and policy recommendations. Feminist security
scholars, with their unique methodological choices (including the recognition of the
performative nature of gender/sex), can counter the prevalence of bodiless data in security
studies by highlighting personal stories. Basing their research on women’s experience, feminists
challenge security studies (and IR) at their base by bringing identity into the political arena.4
Doing so, they violate one of the most fundamental tenets of liberalism: “Liberalism’s universal
citizen has no identity: he is abstract, eschewing the particularity of identity. Identity politics challenges this by
bringing the particular into politics” (Hekman 2004, 197). The insistence on the particular, anchored in the
commitment to theorizing on the basis of everyday experience of gendered (and classed, raced,
sexualized, etc.) subjects, inevitably provides for different kinds of security narratives than those
traditionally told in the discipline of IR. “Violence that is poorly understood through the lenses of
the dominant logic of security,” writes Maria Stern, “could be better understood if we began
asking questions about the damage that can occur at the confluence of competing identity
claims and the efforts at securing subject positions” (2005, 11). Studying the everyday experiences of
violence by variously located subjects, feminists find that questions of identity and security are
fundamentally interwoven; any security narrative is also a narrative of political identity
(Peterson 1992; Stern 2005, 2006; Sylvester 1989, 1993). FSS, then, needs to investigate identity
and security as mutually constitutive and shifting, even as some aspects are more enduring than
others — and seemingly incommensurable (Wibben 2011). An FSS that adheres to these
principles would ask security scholars to abandon the search for security as traditionally
conceived and acknowledge: that we are always already insecure, that there is no escape from
our fundamental condition of vulnerability — and ultimately, from death.5 This poses a major
challenge to security scholars, traditional and critical, as well as to many feminists who have a
tendency to exhibit an awkward do-goodism in the imperialist tradition of “saving natives.” In
the 1970s and 1980s, Black, Chicana, lesbian, and Third World feminists (cf. Combahee River Collective
[1983] 2000; Lorde 1984; Mohanty 1988; Moraga and Anzaldu´ a [1979] 1983) challenged liberal feminists to
reconsider their facile assumptions about all women and their tendency to homogenize the Third World — yet, IR
(including some IR feminists) still engages in the same practices? A decade into the twenty-first century, it is
time to recognize that no culture is as homogenous as we assume it to be and that we do not
have all the answers. “I do not think that you have any obligation to understand us,” Marı´a C. Lugones noted
almost 30 years ago. “You do have an obligation to abandon your imperialism, your universal claims, your reduction
of us to yourselves simply because they seriously harm us” (Lugones and Spelman 1983, 576). Since there is an
emerging subfield of FSS, I would propose it should be resolutely feminist — and anti-
imperialist. It is my contention that feminist aims and the scope of their concerns explode the confines of security
studies at every possible turn (cf. Wibben 2011). The push to establish FSS as a subfield of security studies as is, which
risks the securitization of ever more issues while relinquishing input into addressing them, is a dangerous one.
Alternatively, we might locate FSS in the borderlands of security studies, so that our discussions can remain
embedded in feminist debates within and outside of feminist IR. Feminist security scholars need to take
traditional conceptions of security seriously because they have serious implications, but they
also need to challenge their relevance and reveal their limit(s).
Violence should be understood as a continuum that functions against all
women. Having permeated even the international sphere such as countries
dominating women as a way of demonstrating their power. This sexual
terrorism has become the norm where women’s bodies are the battlefield.
Prioritize these forms of violence because social biases underrepresent them
and their effects are exponential. Their focus on large scale impacts ignore
these types of low level violence that will continue to happen. Perfer the K for
this reason
Ray 97
A.E., 1997. “The Shame of It: gender-based terrorism in the former Yugoslavia and the failure of international human rights law to
comprehend the injuries.” The American University Law Review, Vol. 46. // KD

In order to reach all of the violence perpetrated against the women of the former Yugoslavia that is not committed by soldiers or
other officials of the state, human lights law must move beyond its artificially constructed barriers
between "public" and "private" actions: A feminist perspective on human rights would require a
rethinking of the notions of imputability and state responsibility and in this sense would challenge
the most basic assumptions of international law. If violence against women were considered by
the international legal system to be as shocking as violence against people for their political
ideas, women would have considerable support in their struggle.... The assumption that
underlies all law, including international human rights law, is that the public/private distinction
is real: human society, human lives can be separated into two distinct spheres. This division, however, is an ideological
construct rationalizing the exclusion of women from the sources of power. 2 6 The international
community must recognize that violence against women is always political, regardless of where it
occurs, because it affects the way women view themselves and their role in the world, as well as the
lives they lead in the so-called public sphere. 2 6 ' When women are silenced within the family, their silence is
not restricted to the private realm, but rather affects their voice in the public realm as well,
often assuring their silence in any environment. 262 For women in the former Yugoslavia, as well as for all women,
extension beyond the various public/private barriers is imperative if human rights law "is to have meaning for women brutalized in
less-known theaters of war or in the by-ways of daily life." 63 Because, as currently constructed, human
rights laws can
reach only individual perpetrators during times of war, one alternative is to reconsider our
understanding of what constitutes "war" and what constitutes "peace. " " When it is universally
true that no matter where in the world a woman lives or with what culture she identifies, she is
at grave risk of being beaten, imprisoned, enslaved, raped, prostituted, physically tortured, and
murdered simply because she is a woman, the term "peace" does not describe her existence. 2 5
In addition to being persecuted for being a woman, many women also are persecuted on ethnic, racial, religious, sexual orientation,
or other grounds. Therefore, it is crucial that our re-conceptualization of human rights is not limited to violations based on gender."
Rather, our definitions of "war" and "peace" in the context of all of the world's persecuted groups should be questioned.
Nevertheless, in every culture a common risk factor is being a woman, and to describe the
conditions of our lives as "peace" is to deny the effect of sexual terrorism on all women. 6 7
Because we are socialized to think of times of "war" as limited to groups of men fighting over
physical territory or land, we do not immediately consider the possibility of "war" outside this narrow definition except in a
metaphorical sense, such as in the expression "the war against poverty." However, the physical violence and sex
discrimination perpetrated against women because we are women is hardly metaphorical. Despite
the fact that its prevalence makes the violence seem natural or inevitable, it is profoundly political in both its
purpose and its effect. Further, its exclusion from international human rights law is no accident,
but rather part of a system politically constructed to exclude and silence women. 2 6 The
appropriation of women's sexuality and women's bodies as representative of men's ownership
over women has been central to this "politically constructed reality. 2 6 9 Women's bodies have
become the objects through which dominance and even ownership are communicated, as well
as the objects through which men's honor is attained or taken away in many cultures.Y Thus,
when a man wants to communicate that he is more powerful than a woman, he may beat her. When a man wants to communicate
that a woman is his to use as he pleases, he may rape her or prostitute her. The objectification of women is so universal that when
one country ruled by men (Serbia) wants to communicate to another country ruled by men (Bosnia-
Herzegovina or Croatia) that it is superior and more powerful, it rapes, tortures, and prostitutes the
"inferior" country's women. 2 71 The use of the possessive is intentional, for communication among men through the
abuse of women is effective only to the extent that the group of men to whom the message is sent believes they have some right of
possession over the bodies of the women used. Unless they have some claim of right to what is taken, no injury is experienced. Of
course, regardless of whether a group of men sexually terrorizing a group of women is trying to communicate a message to another
group of men,
the universal sexual victimization of women clearly communicates to all women a
message of dominance and ownership over women. As Charlotte Bunch explains, "The physical territory
of [the] political struggle [over female subordination] is women's bodies." 7 2
Case
 Solvency
Apolitical alternatives fail, the aff needs to engage with the USFG
Rorty 98 (prof of philosophy at Stanford, Richard, 1998, “achieving our country”, Pg. 7-9)JFS

Such people find pride in American citizenship impossible, and vigorous participation in electoral
politics pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the
importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them
think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America can still orchestrate
something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When
young
intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often
become convinced that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of
themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight to see through nationalist
rhetoric to the ghastly reality of contemporary America. But this insight does not move them
to formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between
national hope and national self-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of
the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath.
The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have
to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes. Transformation would be needed because the rise of industrial
capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this
rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless
society. This America would be one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures
equality of opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive
Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt
Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric. The
difference between early
twentieth-century leftist intellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the
difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades of this century, when an
intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical
eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams
was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from ·politics. But William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First
Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in
part a reaction against the sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and
self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The
kind
of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent
and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the
noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture.
"2

We control external impacts – abandoning politics causes war, slavery, and

authoritarianism
Boggs 2k (CAROL BOGGS, PF POLITICAL SCIENCE – SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 00, THE END OF
POLITICS, 250-1)

But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms and
rational planning, as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure-replete with its own
centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact,
insulated from the minimalist critique. In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who
preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo. Such one-
sided minimalism gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as
possible. The flight from “abstract principles” rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status quo (slavery
or
imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen as too deeply embedded in the
social and institutional matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action. If politics is
reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling-through, then people are
condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with no
choice but to yield to the dictates of “conventional wisdom”. Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive
conditions would, in Oakeshott’s view, turn into a political nightmare. A belief that totalitarianism might results
from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing; to argue that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessary
doomed either to impotence or totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises. Oakeshott’s
minimalism poses yet another, but still related, range of problems: the
shrinkage of politics hardly suggests that
corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will
magically disappear from people’s lives. Far from it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well
informed and ready to fight for their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own
power and privilege. Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too far
removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism and urban violence of the American landscape could open the
door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and unity in the face of social disintegration. Viewed in this light,
the contemporary drift towards antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more
authoritarian and reactionary guise-or it could simply end up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate system. In
either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that
had vanished from civil society.16 And either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean
muddling-through theories.