Borders Kritik - Harvard 2013

8/13/2019 Borders Kritik - Harvard 2013

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BORDERS K

Borders K .................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... .. 11NC ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 2Links....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Link Thesis .................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ............. 2Link Border Crossing/Terrorism.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3Link Cuba ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ............. 5Link Development Rhetoric.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 6Link Democracy ...................... ....................... ..................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... .. 7Link Democracy (Latin American) ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7Link Drug Cartels ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 8Link Globalization ...................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ..................... 9Link Globalization/Terrorism............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 10Link Interventionism ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 11Link Liberal Imperialism ...................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...... 12Link Maps ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... .......... 13Link Oil Scarcity ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14Link Oil Supplies ..................... ....................... ..................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ..................... 15Link War Impacts .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 16Link Threat Scenarios .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 17Link Threats (Nuke War/Terrorism) ....................... ..................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...... 18Link Nation State/Hegemony........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 18Link Territory/Nation-State ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 19Link Transboundary Water Agreements ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 21Link Water Basins ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... .................. 22Link Water Cooperation .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 22Link Water Cooperation .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 23Link Water Security .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 24Turns Case Conflict .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 24

Impacts .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 25Root Cause .................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... .............. 25War ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 26War/Terror ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 27Impact Framing ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 29Cognitive Bias ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ..................... ....................... ....................... ...... 30Capitalism Mod ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 30

Alternative ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 32Discursive Analysis ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 32No Borders Utopianism ...................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...... 34Zizek Ideology Critique ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 35Dike Ideological Critique ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 36Film ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 38New Imaginaries ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 39Challenge Geopolitics ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 41Floating PIK ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... .......... 42

Framework ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 43Framework Geopolitical Framing .................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 43Framework Metaphors Key ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 44


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Framework Metaphors Key ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 45Discourse 1st ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 46Local Politics Key ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 47Maps Determine Politics ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 48Policymaking Bad ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 49A2 Policymaking = Education ...................... ..................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ..................... 51

AT Aff Answers ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 51AT: Borders = Social Cohesion .................... ..................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ..................... 51

Aff Answers .................... ....................... ..................... ....................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ....................... ..................... .................. 54Borders Key to Peace .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 54Borders Prevent Ethnic Cleansing ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 54Borders Key to Freedom .................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... .......... 54Pragmatism Key......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 55Perm Critical Geopolitics .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 56Perm Global/Local ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 57Securitization Good ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 59Framework Turn ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 61AT Geopolitics Alternative ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 61Aff Transboundary Conflicts Differ .................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... ....................... .......... 62Aff Hydro-Hegemony Perm .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 62Neoliberalism Good ...................... ...................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ...................... ...................... .................. 63

Extras .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 63Extra Uzbek/Kyrgz................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 63

1NC

YOUR 1NCIS UP TO YOU.

LINKS

LINK THESIS

SPACE IS NOT STATIC BUT POLITICAL.THE AFFIRMATIVES INVOCATION OF THE NATION-STATE IS PART OF A

BROADER PRACTICE OF LEGITIMIZING THE WORLD MAP AND ITS EFFACEMENT OF ALTERITY IT RELIES ON A

SERIES OF SILENT ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS THAT MASK VIOLENCE AND MUST BE CRITICIZED

SHAPIRO 97(Michael J., Department of Political Science, University of HawaiI, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, pp. 15-16)

Michel Foucaultput the matter of geographic partisanship succinctly when he noted that "territory is no doubt a geographical

notion, but it is first of all a juridico-political one : the area controlled by a certain kind of power."41 Now that

global geographies are in flux, as political boundaries become increasingly ambiguous and contested, the

questions of power and right are more in evidence with respect to the formerly pacified spaces of nation-states.

The "pacification" was violent, but the violent aspects have been suppressedbecause the narratives and


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conceptualizations of familiar political science discourses of comparative politics and international relations , which

have been aphasic with respect to indigenous peoples, have been complicit with the destruction of indigenous peoples and

their practices. While these discourses now appear increasingly inadequate, it is less the case that they have been

made invalid by changes in the terrains to which they were thought to refer than it is that the extended period of

relative geopolitical stability during the cold war discouraged reflection on the spatial predicates of their

intelligibility. Statecentric academic, official, and media political discourses approached adequacy only in their

role of legitimating the authority of nation-states.Helping to contain ethical and political conversations within

the problematics that served the centralizing authorities of states and the state system, they were complicit in

reproducing modernity's dominant, territorial imaginary. To recognize that the dominant geopolitical map has

been imposed on the world by powerrather than simply emerging as an evolutionary historical inevitablity, as the dominant

consensual narratives would have it, one needs to achieve an effective conceptual distance, to think outside of the state

system's mode of global comprehension, outside of the spatial predicates of its structures of power, authority, and

recognition.42 As Henri Lefebvre has noted, space, especially for those occupying it, tends to have an air of neutrality, to appear empty of

normative imposition, as "the epitome of rational abstraction . . . because it has already been occupied and used, and has already been the

focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident in the landscape."43 To the extent that the nation-state geography

remains descriptive(what some call "realistic") and ahistorical, the ethics and politics of space remain unavailable to

political contention.More specifically, this resistance to the geographic imaginary's contribution to ethical

assumptions makes it difficult to challenge the prevailing political and ethical discourses of rights, obligations, and

proprieties that constitute the normativity of the state.Nevertheless, the spatial practices of the stateits divisions into

official versus unofficial space, local versus national space, industrial versus leisure spaceare commitments that are as normative as

the spatiality of the Christian imaginary, which divided the world into sacred and profane spaces. Although they

do not appear on the map, cultural and political struggles accompany and continue to challenge the political

consolidations of space that comprise modernity's geopolitical map. The alternative worlds destroyed and

suppressed within modern cartography become available only when the global map is given historical depth and

alternative practices are countenanced.In sum, although the dominant geopolitical map appears uncontentious and

nonnormative, it constitutes what I am calling a moral geography, a set of silent ethical assertionsthat

preorganize explicit ethicopolitical discourses.Although there is increasing pressure on the statecentric frame of understanding, as

the state system's ability to code and contain actions associated with "large-scale ethnic mobilizations"44 has been attentuated, the

geopolitical map of states remains the primary model of space. Despite its increasingly active competitors for

identity and affiliation, it continues to dominate the determination of how things are valued, actions are

interpreted, and persons are assigned identities. Representing the structure of approved sovereignties, it is the

primary force determining recognized political subjectivity.

LINK BORDER CROSSING/TERRORISM

THE THREATS OF TERROR ON THE BORDER ARE MERELY THE FLIP SIDE OF THE GLOBAL IMPERIAL MISSION TO

ELIMINATE ALL NON-AMERICAN EVIL FROM THE GLOBE IT INEVITABLY CREATES VIOLENT BACKLASH AND

FAILS.DISCUSSIONS LIKE THIS ONE IN UNIVERSITY SPACES ARE CRITICAL TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST IMPERIAL

EXPANSION


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SHAPIRO 7(Michael J., Department of Political Science, University of HawaiI, The New Violent Cartography Security Dialogue 38, p. 305-306)

As Virilio(2002: 8) points out in an analysis he undertook during the first Gulf War, the militarized state looks

inward as well as outward, manifesting a panicked anticipation of internal war. In the case of the post-9/11 war

on terror, the same preemption involved in assaults on states has been turned inward. A state of siege mentality

is effacing the inside/outside boundary of the war.Achille Mbembe (2003: 30) puts it succinctly: The state of siege is itself a

military institution. In contrast with the firefights deployed on distanced terrains, the weapons used internally are surveillance technologies andextra- juridical modes of detention. For example, as an instance of hysterical perception, an FBI fingerprinting laboratory identified a lawyer in

Oregon as one whose fingerprints were found among the detritus of the train bombings in Madrid in 2004. Furthermore, FBI agents pressed

their perceptions for some time, despite a rejection of their fingerprint data by their counterparts in Madrid.

The technologies deployed in the war on terror have operated on two fronts, the distant and the home.For

example, the drone, which was weaponized for use on a distant battlefield, is being employed in its spare,

observational version in USMexico border areas to help prevent illegal entry of immigrants.According to a report in

the New York Times, on 25 June 2004, unmanned planes known as drones, which use thermal and night-vision equipment, were used in the

US southwest to catch illegal immigrants attempting to cross into the USA from Mexico. The drones form part of the domestic front

in the USAs war on terror; specifically, they are part of the Department of Homeland Securitys operational

control of the border in Arizona(Myers, 2004).

However, while one agency involved in the war on terror is diverting its technology to help exclude Hispanic

bodies, another is actively recruiting them for duty on the external war fronts.As shown in Michael Moores documentary

Fahrenheit 9/11, military recruiters are most in evidence in poorer and disproportionately ethnic neighborhoods and venues for example,

the parking lots of discount department stores. Ironically, given the participation of southwestern border patrol agencies within the Homeland

Security network, much of the recruiting is aimed at those Hispanics that live on the margins of the national economy. An item about

recruitment in the Denver area tells much of the story:

In Denver and other cities where the Hispanic population is growing, recruiting Latinos has become one of the Armys top priorities. From

2001 to 2005, the number of Latino enlistments in the Army rose 26 percent, and in the military as a whole, the increase was 18 percent. The

increase comes at a time when the Army is struggling to recruit new soldiers and when the enlistment of African-Americans, a group

particularly disillusioned with the war in Iraq, has dropped off sharply, to 14.5 percent from 22.3 percent over the past four years (Alvarez,2006).

Where are the recruiters searching? The story continues:

Sgt. First Class Gavino Barron, dressed in a crisp Army uniform, trawls the Wal-Mart here for recruits, past stacks of pillows and towers of

detergent, he is zeroing-in on one of the Armys special missions: to increase the number of Hispanic enlisted soldiers.

But the militarys domestic initiatives go beyond collecting bodies. It is also militarizing other agencies, assembling

them within what I have called the tertiary spatialization of terrorism.As the author of The Pentagons New Map points out,

a whole lot more than just the Defense Department is actively pursuing the war on terror (Barnett, 2004: 95). One aspect of that

broadened participation is evident in a recent collaboration between three kinds of institutions: Hollywood film-

making, the military, and the university , all of whom share participation in the University of Southern Californias Institute for Creative

Technologies. The collaboration exemplifies the tertiary spatialization of terrorism inasmuch as it is located in the

sector of the institutional ecologies of militarization that involve relations among military, entertainment, and

university agencies. Leaving aside the historical development of the film industry (which, like the Internet, has

borrowed much of its technology from innovations in the militarys information technologies), USCs involvement

can be located in a long history of the universitys role in national policy.

The modern university began, at least in part, as an ideological agency of the state. It was intellectually shaped as a

cultural institution whose task was to aid and abet the production of the nation-state, a coherent, homogenous

cultural nation contained by the state.Bill Readings describes a paradigmatic example, the University of Berlin, for which Alexander


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von Humboldt was primarily responsible: Humboldts project for the foundation of the University of Berlin is decisive for the centering of the

University around the idea of culture, which ties the University to the nation-state. And, he adds, the project is developed at the

moment of the emergence of the German nation-state. In addition to being assigned the dual ask of research

and teaching, the university is also involved in the production and inculcation of national knowledge(Readings,

1995: 12).

LINK CUBALONG BEFORE THE EMBARGO,AMERICA TREATED CUBA LIKE A PLAYTHING IN ITS GEOPOLITICAL TOYBOX

THE PLAN IS MERELY A REINTEGRATION OF CUBA BACK INTO THE AMERICAN SPHERE OF INFLUENCE TO WAGE

IMPERIALISM UNDER NEW,COVERT MEANS

SLATER 94(David, Emeritus Professor of Pol itical Geography @ Loughborough University, Reimagining the Geopolitics of Development:Continuing the Dialogue Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 233-234)

When, for example, the Cuban Revolution erupted on to the international scene, the sharp reaction of the US

administration could not be simply explained in terms of the Cuban move towards what was perceived to be

Communism.There was a duality in the response which is crucial to our analysis. First, and foremost in historicalterms, Cuba was seen as naturally being within the orbit of US power; essentially a country which had no right

to abandon the discourse of the Master and develop its own independent signifiers of national destiny .

Secondly, not only to reject the master signifiers of American civilization and Cubas place therein, but to chose an

antagonistic political discourse that was represented as constituting the greatest possible menace to the security

of the Free World, was seen as a pernicious double betrayal.As Benjamin (1990) has aptly demonstrated, the historical

restrictions imposed by the United States on Cuba were much older and tighter than the anti-communist ones,

and hence the Castro regime, in seeking its own destiny, broke these bonds before it chose(under limiting geostrategic

conditions) to inscribe its own place in a bipolar Cold War.As Benjamin (1990, 216) suggests

in the long run, the double betrayal of ideological loyalty and presumed historic destiny reinforced each other and led to an intense and

enduring ideological antagonism.

Retaining our example of the Cuban case but going somewhat further back into history, it is instructive to take

into account that some decades before the codification of modernization theory, the United States formulated its

perceived right to intervene in Cuba in order to preserve Cuban independence.At the turn of the century, immediately

following the end of the Spanish-American War(rightly referred to in Cuba as the Spanish-Cuban-American War), the United

States acquired Cuba as a virtual protectorate. The United States had occupied and ruled the island from 1898 to

1902, departing only after the Cubans agreed to include in their constitution the Platt Amendment which, under Article III, sanct ioned US

intervention for the preservation of Cuban independence. Apart from institutionalization of Cubas compromised sovereignty,

the beginning of the century also saw the initiation of an imperial project for modernizing and developing Cubansociety under US tutelage.Public school reformers built a new instructional system on the island with organization and texts imported

from Ohio; in 1900 Harvard brought 1300 Cuban teachers to Cambridge for instruction in US teaching methods, and protestant evangelists

established around ninety schools (colegios) in Catholic Cuba between 1898 and 1901. Subsequently, serious efforts were made to

Americanize the systems of justice, sanitation, transportation and trade. Furthermore, the US military government acted to disband the

institutions of the Cuban independence movement - the Liberation Army, the Provisional Government and the Cuban Revolutionary Party. A

US-created and directed rural guard took the place of the Liberation Army and leaders of the Cuban army and government who accepted the

occupation regime were given subordinate posts in the US military government. United States investments were encouraged and

teams of North American experts, an earlier wave of the missionaries of development, placed the mineral


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agricultural and human resources of the island under their scientific gaze so as to determine the proper means for

harnessing the countrys wealth.

In this particular case we have a clear example, in the period prior to 1917, of a modernizing, developmental,

civilizing project that was justified as part of a wider mission of imperial destiny.Under the same banner, the United

States came to occupy and administer the governments of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), Haiti (1915-1934) and Nicaragua (1912-1925

and 1926-1933). In the case of the Dominican Republic, the attempted installation of development through occupation went together with a

five-year guerrilla war against the forces of the US military government (Calder 1988) and, in other instances too, especially in the Nicaraguan

case, there was no absence of resistance. In general, the project for modernization, development and progress was rooted

in a series of related programmes; for example, US officials introduced initiatives to expand education, improve

health and sanitation, create constabularies, build public works and communications, establish judicial and penal

reforms, take censuses and improve agriculture.

Overall, the point I want to convey here is that the desire to develop, the will to modernize another society, went

together with a belief in the need for order, but also with a grand sense of civilizing zeal; as President Roosevelt

expressed in 1904 (quoted in Niess 1990, 76), when referring to the weak and chaotic people south of us,

it is our duty, when it becomes absolutely inevitable, to police these countries in the interest of order and

civilization.

LINK DEVELOPMENT RHETORIC

GEOGRAPHICAL RHETORIC IS OFFENSIVE AND WITHOUT CHANGE THERE WILL BE VIOLENCE

DALBY 3(Simon Dalby, leading figure in the disciplines of critical geopolitics at Bastille school of International Affairs, 2003, Calling 911:geopolitics, security and America's new war, Geopolitics,https://mail-

attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid

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Geopolitics is about how the world is actively spatialized, divided up,labeled, sorted out into a hierarchy ofplaces of greater or lesserimportance by political geographers, other academics and political leaders. This process

provides the geographical framing within whichpolitical elites and mass publics act in the world in pursuit of their ownidentities and

interests.2It is both knowledge and power, a mode of makingsense of the world that facilitates action, asserts identity and justifies both.

The dominant themes in modern geopolitics are the view of the world as asingle entity, but a politically divided

whole, its presentation in terms ofplaces ranked in terms of their similarities to Euro-American notions of

development and democratic accomplishment, and a focus on the nationstate as the primary political entity that

matters in struggles for primacy. But geopolitics is also about the performance of political acts, the specifications of friends and

enemies, the designations of spaces as theirsand ours, the distinctions between hostile and friendly places and peoples.These are

practices of political reasoning that can be challenged andcritiqued by an investigation of their implicit

geographical formulations andhow these structure the arguments.3Geopolitics is also about theconstruction of

popular identities, of masculinities, citizenships andquotidian cultural practices which both specify cultural norms

and providethe political terms that can be interpellated in political discourse in a crisis .4Challenging the

geographical specifications of power is part of what criticalgeopolitics writers have been doing for some time.5In

line with this concernin recent scholarship this essay starts with a series of comments andreflections on the dominant themes in the

saturation coverage of the eventsof 911 in the American mass media in September 2001. It does so becauseprecisely which geopolitical

tropes are invoked in political performance ina crisis matter; these are part of the arguments for specific forms of action.6The title of this

essay, calling 911, points to the importance of these political debates; how an event is called, to use the sporting phrase, is animportant

part of geopolitical practice.
https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid=f_hj7ca03i2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374073763994&sads=LrkN0zMampkXH8suPShGzhtR76Mhttps://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid=f_hj7ca03i2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374073763994&sads=LrkN0zMampkXH8suPShGzhtR76Mhttps://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid=f_hj7ca03i2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374073763994&sads=LrkN0zMampkXH8suPShGzhtR76Mhttps://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid=f_hj7ca03i2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374073763994&sads=LrkN0zMampkXH8suPShGzhtR76Mhttps://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid=f_hj7ca03i2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374073763994&sads=LrkN0zMampkXH8suPShGzhtR76Mhttps://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid=f_hj7ca03i2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374073763994&sads=LrkN0zMampkXH8suPShGzhtR76M


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LINK DEMOCRACY

WE NEED TO EVALUATE OUR RHETORIC WHEN WE TALK ABOUT GEOPOLITICAL BORDERS

SLATER 1(final version completed May 31st, 2001, David Slater, Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Otherdomains of democratic theory: space, power, and the politics of democratization,https://mail-

attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.4&disp=inline&realattid

=f_hj7ca0533&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374075638586&sads=q_8sr26Nys984ehpUXm9rrgLr3I)

Moving now to our third question, we need to ask how thinking about space makes adifference to our

perspective on democracy and democratization.In a view thatencapsulates the posited predominance of the

global, it is not infrequently suggestedthat the scale upon which so much contemporary socioeconomic, cultural,

and politicalactivity unfolds is so formidable as to make territorial democracy appear increasinglyimpotent

(McGrew, 1997). Given the existence of a growth in the importance of transversal social movements and networks

(Keck and Sikkink, 1998) and the overall trendtowards a deterritorialization of national spaces, how do we draw

the connectionsbetween territoriality and democracy?How do we approach and contextualize thepolitics of territorial

democracy, and to what extent is it justifiable to follow McGrew'ssuggestion, in particular when the context is provided by non-Western

spaces, as is thecase in this discussion?For Connolly (1993), in his discussion of democracy and territoriality, the

sovereign, territorial state is an insufficient generator of democratic life, and the attempt totreat it as if it were

sufficient exerts a disciplinary pressure on the citizenry, limitingdemocratic possibility. Similarly, it is argued that a

democratic ethos is about balancingthe desirability of governance through democratic means, with a corollary

politics ofdemocratic disruption by which any specific pattern of previous accommodationsmight be opened up

for renegotiation. There is then in this view a sharply drawntension between two senses of democracy. The

construction of rule inevitably involvesthe fixing of identities, and the practice of questioning those fixities is

basically unrulyor destabilizing.Neither the one nor the other can triumph and the tension betweenthem cannot be permanently

resolved. In an important sense this tension mirrorsthe previously mentioned interrelation between democracy and

democratization,and further connects to recent debates concerning consensus, exclusion, anddemocratic

politics.On one side, we can locate a conformist vision which argues for limits on the spiritof democracy. For example, earlier on in the

20th century, the Spanish philosopherOrtega y Gasset (1957), in his text on the rebellion of the masses talked about thedangers of what he

called `hyperdemocracy', in which the mass acts directly andoutside of the law, imposing on society its own desires and aspirations by

materialpressure and violence. More recently, Crozier et al (1975, page 162), in their report onthe governability of democracies, argued that

a ``pervasive spirit of democracy maypose an intrinsic threat and undermine all forms of association, weakening thesocial bonds which hold

together family, enterprise and community.'' For these authors, the governability of a society at the national level depended upon the extent to

which itwas effectively governed at the subnational, regional, local, functional, and industriallevels. Too much democracy would

erode the effectiveness of governability, andseriously undermine the foundation of authority

LINK DEMOCRACY (LATIN AMERICAN)OUR USE OF THIS RHETORIC IS BRINGING BACK USIMPERIALISM AND DISCRIMINATION

SLATER 7(David Slater, Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Imperial Geopolitics and the promise ofdemocracy, Development and Change 38.6)

In the wake of 9/11, with military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 andmore centrally with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the resurgence

of US imperialpower has been placed firmly back on to the agenda.1Not only has this raisedolder questions

concerning theories of imperialism (see for example Harvey,2003), but also related issues connected to the
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specificity of US imperialismhave begun to re-emerge. Some authors have emphasized the centralizingpower of

the United States (for one discussion, see Callinicos, 2003), whilstHardt and Negri (2004: 323) have argued that in

todays world, imperialgeopolitics has no center and no outside.In setting out the nature of US power, I intend

to highlight the importanceof the dissonant relations between imperial geopolitics and democracy. This

discussion will be preceded by a consideration of specific elements of USimperial power and the nature of its

geopolitical interventionism in LatinAmerica. The focus on the relations between imperialism and democracy is

intended to uncover some of the contradictions of US power and some of the shifting complexities of democratic

politics.2The style of argument issuggestive rather than exhaustive and is intended to provoke new questionsand new lines of debate. I

begin by outlining certain aspects of the specificityof the lone super-power in the context of USLatin American relations,which have been

crucial in the evolution and dynamic of US power (Grandin,2006). Whilst in the history of Western development,

commonalities across the Atlantic have been emphasized, it is necessary to take into account the discursive

separation of the United States from Europe. An early example of such a separation is found in the Monroe

Doctrine of 1823 in which a new Americanworld is distinguished from an old European world and in which the

USssouthern brethren (the emerging states of Latin America) are called uponto distance themselves from the

political system of the European powers. Asimilar sentiment was expressed by President Polk in 1845when he notedon

the eve of the USMexican war and the surfacing of notions of ManifestDestiny, that the American system ofgovernment is entirely different fromthat of Europe, and that the people of this continent alone have the right

todecide their own destiny (quoted in Holden and Zolov, 2000: 23) . WoodrowWilson, writing at the onset of the twentieth

century, was equally emphaticin his separation of the US from Europe, asserting that no doubt class privilege has been forever discredited

because of our example, and he went on,we have taught the world the principle of the general welfare as the objectand end of

government, rather than the prosperity of any class or section ofthe nation (Wilson, 1901: 28990). This intra-West demarcation has

sometimes been accompanied by an underscoring of the posited affinities between the two Americas, so that, for

example, President Kennedy, when launchingthe Alliance for Progress in 1961, called for a common effort to transform the

American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts, where the American revolution will

guide the struggle of people everywhere(McPherson, 2006: 152).

LINK DRUG CARTELS

THEIR SCARE-MONGERING ABOUT DRUG CARTELS OBSCURES RACIST,GENDERED,AND NEOLIBERAL VIOLENCE

ONLY THE ALTERNATIVE ALLOWS A PRODUCTIVE REFORMULATION OF THE DANGER OF DRUG CARTELS IN

LINE WITH OUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY.JUST LIKE THE WAR ON TERROR,THE WAR ON DRUGS IS FUEL FOR

THE FIRE OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

CORVA 8(Dominic, Department of Geography, University of Washington, Neoliberal globalization and the war on drugs: Transnationalizingilliberal governance in the Americas Political Geography 27, pp. 190-191)

The discourse of crime collapses all sorts of choices made in the context of limited possibilities into one global

category: a behavior whose practices present a danger to the social body. The normative social body is

constructed at multiple sites and scales, from the individual to the global, as a rational-choice making, law-abiding

liberal subject of democracy and neoliberal capitalism. A central problem with this construction is that the

production of global narco-delinquency depoliticizes class, gender, racial, and neo-colonial modes of


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dominationby fetishizing illicit narcotics as, essentially, weapons of mass destruction endowed with the power to

turn human beings into security threats.

Illicit drug trafficking and chemical dependency do produce extensive violencein societies especially within vulnerable

spaces and against marginalized subjects, by states and narco-entrepreneurs (Bourgois, 1997 and Waldorf, Reinarman, & Murphy, 1991). The

war on drugs elides the extent to which such violence is produced by the deployment of repressive power to

regulate sets of practices that are more closely linked to survival strategies than to dangerous properties inherent

in drugs themselves(Laniel, 1999). Illiberal governance produced by such representationshas arguably turned out

to be more harmful than many of the drugs themselves, but not so much for elite consumers, bankers, and

corrupt police forces without which illicit economies could not operate.In societies characterized by increasing economic

inequality, justice is a commodity like any other e available to those who can afford to purchase their freedom or hide from the state.

The penalization of poverty(Wacquant, 2003) is significantly the effect of the multiscalar construction of narco-

delinquency.From the vantage point of the liberal state, people are not incarcerated because they are poor or black or an ethnic minority .

They are incarcerated because they participate in an industry whose viability is guaranteed by its production as a delinquency. Poverty is

criminalized, de facto, but it would be more accurate to say that narco-delinquency23 tends to produce excluded populations,

and the spaces they inhabit, as criminal. This is how Captain Steven Brown of the Seattle Police department, responding to charges of racial

disparity in narcotics policing, can say: Thats nonsense .. Were going where the crime is (Francis, 2006). The Majors Certification process is

an example of this discourse on a global scale. On the ground, the war on drugs can be interpreted critically as a U.S.- sponsored, neo-

colonially mediated war against populations whose socioeconomic vulnerabil- ity is connected to the U.S.-sponsored, neo-colonial project of

uneven economic globalization.

The war on drugs and the war on terror are connected by a shared discourse that partitions identifies specific

global spaces that need to be governed in other ways. Both underwrite an imperialist geopolitics of coercive

enforcement rooted in liberal notions of spreading freedom and democracy(Slater, 2006: 1376). The war on drugs

replaced the containment of communism as the primary mission of hemispheric security at the end of the Cold

War(Isaacson, 2005), but since 9/11 the two have been increasingly used to reinforce each other.The terrain of these link-

ages has been discursively geopolitical: for instance, the post-9/11 anti-drug ads linking teen pot-smoking to terrorist funding networks. But

also it has been politically empirical: the Colombian military is now being used to train U.S.-sponsored Afghan anti-narcotics police units, as rural farmers in dire economic straits have replicated Andean campesino strategies in the

early 1980s by turning to poppy production.

LINK GLOBALIZATION

BECAUSE OF POOR USE OF GEOPOLITICAL RHETORIC,OLD TENSIONS SURFACE

SLATER 4(David Slater, 2004, Geopolitics and the post-colonial- rethinking North-South Relations, Department of Geography,Loughborough University, Loughborough,http://translate-english-

indonesia.com/download/International%20Relations/Geopolitics%20and%20Poscolonial.pdf)

Together with the post-1989 dissolution of the Second World, the accelerating tendencies of globalization and the

explosive surfacing of avariety of acute social tensions and conflicts, there has also been a resurgence of interest

in the state of NorthSouth relations. Already in theearly 1990s, it was suggested that the growing gap between

First andThird Worlds was raising some of the most acute moral questions of themodern world and becoming a

central issue of our times(see Arrighi1991 and Hosle 1992). This re-assertion of the significance of NorthSouth

relations captures one of the worlds geopolitical continuities.Thus, in a world frequently portrayed in terms of

flows, speed, turbulence and unpredictability, there is another narrative rooted in historicalcontinuity the
http://translate-english-indonesia.com/download/International%20Relations/Geopolitics%20and%20Poscolonial.pdfhttp://translate-english-indonesia.com/download/International%20Relations/Geopolitics%20and%20Poscolonial.pdfhttp://translate-english-indonesia.com/download/International%20Relations/Geopolitics%20and%20Poscolonial.pdfhttp://translate-english-indonesia.com/download/International%20Relations/Geopolitics%20and%20Poscolonial.pdf


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recurring stories of poverty, inequality and exclusion ashock of the old.For example, global inequalities in

income in the twentieth centuryhave increased by more than anything previously experienced, illustratedby the

fact that the distance between the incomes of the richest andpoorest country was about 3 to 1 in 1820, 35 to 1

in 1950, 44 to 1 in1973, and 72 to 1 in 1992 (UNDP 2000: 6). Inequalities are also to besymptomatically

encountered in the world of cyberspace, where access to the internet displays a familiar geographical distribution,

with over 90 percent of all internet hosts being located in developed countries whichaccount for only 16 per cent of the worlds population

(see Main 2001:867 and also World Bank 1999: 63).

LINK GLOBALIZATION/TERRORISM

WE CANT UNDERSTAND TERRORISM DISTINCT FROM BROADER PROCESSES OF GLOBALIZATION RETALIATION

TO A TERRORIST ATTACK ISNT INEVITABLE,MERELY AN EXAMPLE OF OUR GROWING FEELINGS OF INSECURITY

TOWARD GLOBAL THREATS

DALBY 3(Simon, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Calling 911: geopolitics, securityand

America's new war Geopolitics, 8:3, pp. 67-69)Insecurity in the face of threat/disaster there was in abundance on 11 September, and it is here that the link

between invocations of war and practical policing meet; calling for help requires security personnel but 911

reaches emergency services rather than the military.In the short term dealing with the disaster required fire services and police,

hospitals and ambulances, searcher dogs and construction crews. Insecurity connects to risks and to disasters, threats are not here a matter of

traditional military action, the boundaries between civil defence, emergency preparedness and military action were blurred in a manner that

suggests that things have changed, at least in so far as the conventional distinctions between civil and military, war and disaster, risk and

security no longer operate in the circumstances of 11 September.

The geography had apparently changed too; the assumption that America itself was relatively immune to

terrorism, despite the earlier 1993 bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, and the Oklahoma bombing

of 1995, was no longer valid.What could reach New York was apparently obviously now a global threat. Ballistic missile defences

seemed absurdly inappropriate when boxcutters and martyrdom would do to inflict huge damage on Americas infrastructure and symbols;

and yet building such a system was subsequently accelerated by the war psychosis that gripped Washington. Insecurity is now indelibly

tied to the horrifying images of burning and collapsing towers.As chaos in airports in many places, not least Canada where

numerous flights were diverted, subsided, security for travelers became once again a matter of pressing importance. The survivalist stores and

gunshops in the United States sold gas masks, guns and all sorts of supplies to an anxious public unsure as to where the danger lay or who

the enemy was; insecurity was both a matter of state and a matter that was very personal as anthrax contaminated the American postal system

and killed apparently at random.

Florida once again featured in American politics, this time as a pilot training ground for the would-be hijackers. External dangers are in here

too; geography is no comfort from dangers from outside. But that has not stopped the impulse to reinscribe security in spatial tropes, to

assume that homeland defence, in the new language of American thinking, is a matter primarily of border controls.13 Clearly tropes of insideand outside are in play here as foreign dangers are invoked to try to keep illegal acts at bay. But the point that some of the hijackers were

legally resident in the United States and that the weapons, training and skills needed to carry out the attacks were gained within the

boundaries of the United States stretched arguments about keeping the bad guys out as the most appropriate mode of dealing with the

possibilities of further attacks.

Global threats have long been a concern in American security thinking.14 Although quite what makes them global

as opposed to threats to specific facets of American life is frequently less than clear. Worries about rogue states

equipped with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction were high on the second Bush administrations

concerns; other threats had nonetheless been part of the policy landscape too. From concerns with the


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proliferation of nuclear weapons through worries about chemical and biological weapons, not to mention drugs,

environmental degradation, demographic change and all manner of international crimes, the post-Cold War

security discussion had extended the discussion of American national security far beyond the traditional themes of

war and peace.15

All this can in part perhaps be explained by looking to the discussions of the geopolitics of risk society with its

complex borderless technological dangers and mobile protagonists.16 Such formulations seemed an eerily apt and

unsettling summation of matters as the rescue workers struggled with the rubble in New York. The sheer

inventiveness of the planning of the September hijackings suggests that technological risks are now merging into

themes of political violence. The potential for sabotage and criminal acts to unleash technological disasters has

been demonstrated clearly; abstract discussions of terrorist acts on nuclear power stations or water supply systems

has been eclipsed by the use of mundane everyday technologies as brutally effective weapons. The tropes of

global terrorism link to the discussion of risk society in a number of ways, not least the way in which distant

developments have local consequences.

Viewed in terms of the geopolitics of risk society the consequences of political actions in distant places can be

presented as having come back to haunt America. Afghanistan and the support by the CIA and related agencies

for those fighting the Soviet Union are part of the story of the birth of global terrorism. The presence of

American troops in the Gulf is part of the rationale given by bin Laden for attacks such as those of 11 September.

Blowback in the classic espionage sense of the term this probably wasnt, but the interconnections between earlier

conflicts and current ones are inescapable. These violate the basic geopolitical cartography that these were the

kind of events that happened somewhere else, not on inviolate American soil.17

But the geography of these attacks was not so new as widespread assumptions that something fundamentally new had happened suggested.

In so far as risk society calls into question the geopolitical cartography of borders prior episodes have also

violated American borders in analogous ways.In 1993 the World Trade Center had been attacked by the use of a truck bomb in

the basement. While there were casualties, the damage to the complex was relatively minor. The Oklahoma city bombing some years later had

suggested that large buildings in the United States were targets of terrorist attacks, although once it became clear that Timothy McVeigh was

an American, rather than a foreigner, the geographical script of America invulnerable once again became prominent. The crucial

connection of McVeighs disillusionment with American power in the aftermath of his involvement in the Gulf War

suggests a connection here again with the geopolitics of the Middle East, but that theme has not been much

commented upon.18 McVeigh has been executed; that episode is closed.

LINK INTERVENTIONISM

THE HIDDEN CARTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES OF THE STATE ARE USED AS THE JUSTIFICATION FOR OUR ROLE AS

INTERNATIONAL POLICE OFFICER,WHERE ISOLATED AND MAPPED ZONES OF CONFLICT BECOME POLITICAL

SPACE FOR INVASION

DALBY 5(Simon, Prof. of Geography @ Carleton U. in Ottawa , Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire, Alternatives, Vol. 30, pgs.433-435)

Starting from the assumptions of stability and the fixity of political spaces in a world where they are so novel

suggests great conceptual confusion, or at least considerable ethnocentrism and "presentism," in the so-called

social sciences.It forces reflection on the social role of such discourses as statements of political aspiration quite as much as analysis of

how things actually are. Legitimation practices premised on an unreflective cartography of at least relatively


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autonomous spaces offer an extension of the geopolitics of liberalism, of local autonomy as the mode of administration of a

political economy that exceeds those spaces repeatedly. Then again, might we social scientists not simply understand ourselves as Wilsonian

liberals dedicated to the triumph of modern affluence administered within autonomous territorial, albeit it not obviously "national" spaces?

Ironically the events of the last few years, and in particular the actions of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001, make all this

much easier to see. In a world of supposedly sovereign states with formal political equality, the conditions of the global

covenant, at least the US stateunder the Bush administration has no problem arrogating to itself the right to intervene

when and where it sees fit to preempt any threats to its preeminence. The nonintervention clauses of the UN Charter are

notably fraying, but still the return of the Bush administration to the United Nations, in the months after its invasion in March 2003, to ask for

help in pacifying Iraq suggests that even the prerogatives of empire do not allow that state to evade its political obligations to claim

legitimacy on the basis of more than brute force. In this sense, there remains a global "political space," albeit one that seems

to have an impossible Newtonian cartography. The converse of this argument is that political struggles that oppose the

cavalier use of military force to ensure the flows of resources from the periphery to fuel, literally in this case, the

economies of the metropole, are also implicated in a politics that transcends claims to sovereignty.Precisely the

invocation of the rights to nonintervention on the part of activists in many places rely on a nonterritorial strategies of publicity, internet "sites,"

and coordinated protests in many places, to invoke the "rights" to territorial nonintervention. This is not to disparage the undoubted uses of

territorial strategies in defence of many things; but it is to make clear that this is what is going on. It is also to insist on the utility of

raising explicitly the questions of who precisely writes cosmopolitan texts with many of the assumptions of the"right" of mobility, travel, and transit anywhere on the planet.66 In addition, the argument that the current occupation of Iraq

is about a war for the US way of life, and gas-guzzling SUVs in particular, makes it clear that this violence is a form of "shadow

globalization" cast over the peripheries of the world economy.^^ Progressive politics cannot now be about the

extension of these fossil-fueled urban liberties.It can be about solidarities, which do not have an implicit spatiality to them,

although these sometimes also use spatial metaphors to express "horizontal" linkages. Above all else, this engagement with the

political-space debate reinforces the argument that the cartographies of modern administrative spaces are no

longer an adequate basis on which to build either social sciences or some form of progressive politics. To think

differently is to try to think about politics as connection, as link, as network. As Walker has repeatedly pointed out, this is

immensely difficult to do given the constraints of the spatial languages that we have inherited from modern

thinkers.^^

LINK LIBERAL IMPERIALISM

LIBERAL IMPERIALISM ATTEMPTS TO EXTEND THE HALF-LIFE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE THROUGH AGGRESSIVE

INTERVENTIONS THAT ONLY RECREATE INSTABILITY AND CAUSE ANTI-AMERICAN BACKLASH

CAIRO 4(Heriberto, Facultad de Ciencias Pol ticas y Sociolog a, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, The Field of Mars: heterotopias of

territory and war Political Geography 23, pp. 1027-1028)

This idea is more fully developed by both Ignatieff(2001, 2003) and Cooper(2002). Ignatieffs humanitarian

imperialism orCoopers liberal imperialism points to the same problem; the chronic instability of post-colonial

states.However, rather than pointing to the disruption and social fracture inherited from colonialism, the authors make a diagnosis: The age

of empire ought to have been succeeded by an age of independent, equal and self-governing nation states. In reality it has been succeeded

by an age of ethnic cleansing and state failure (Ignatieff, 2003: 123). Theyalso provide a solution, a new kind of imperialism,

one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values (Cooper, 2002: 17), which would be able to create order

through nation-building.According to Ignatieff, [l]ocal elites must be empowered to take over as soon as the American imperial


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forces have restored order and the European humanitarians have rebuilt the roads, schools and houses (Ignatieff, 2003: 22).However, they

provide no explanation as to how a permanent and stable order might be achieved. The current impasse in

Bosnia or Kosovo, the growing difficulties in Afghanistanor the popular uprising and overthrow of Haitian president Jean

Bertrand Aristide at the beginning of the year 2004 allow some skepticism.Furthermore, nation-building in such states is perceived as

the mission and responsibility of Western powers.

Here again, the concept of heterotopia both illustrates and problematises this point. According to Foucaults sixth principle of heterotopia, one

can distinguish between heterotopias of illusion and heterotopias of compensation; in fact heterotopias function between these two extreme

poles. Heterotopias of illusion create spaces of illusion andon the contrary, [the] role [of heterotopias of

compensation] is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is

messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.It is exemplified by the case of colonies, like those that the Puritan English founded in North

America or the Jesuits in Latin America, which structured the general organization of terrestrial space (Foucault, 1986: 27). The new

protectorates or occupied territories of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq work in similar ways to these

heterotopias.On the one hand, intervening powers attempt to avoid replicating the ills that riddle European and

North American countries in these new colonies(racist murders in the streets, ethnic cleansing in upper class neighborhoods,

corruption in the administration .), whilst on the other hand, they must also constitute a sort of mirror into which the

neighbor states can look.As the British Prime Minister puts it:The terrorists know that if Iraq and Afghanistan survive their assault, come through their travails, seize the opportunity the future offers, then

those countries will stand not just as nations liberated from oppression, but as a lesson to humankind everywhere and a profound antidote to

the poison of religious extremism.16

LINK MAPS

THE GEOPOLITICAL MAPPING OF THE AFFIRMATIVE RELIES ON A FORM OF ENFRAMING THAT REDUCES THE

ONTOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY OF THE WORLD TO A COMPREHENSIBLE WORLD-PICTURE

PICKLES 4(A History of Spaces, Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geocoded World, 2004, pgs. 6-8. John Pickles is an economicgeographer trained in political economy and development studies, cultural and social theory, and continental philosophy. He holds BA and

MA degrees from Oxford University and Ph.D. degrees form the University of Natal and the Pennsylvania State University)

As Olsson indicated by adding 'the eye' to his story, modern science rests onwhat Derek Gregory(1994: 15) has called the

'problematic of visualization'.From Descartes to Goethe, the experience of the healthy corporal eye was a direct and true reflection of

reality (Crary 1995: 97-8). But, as Jonathon Crary (1995: 9) has suggested, such truth effects 'were, in fact, based on a radical

abstraction', an epistemology of 'plain vision'(and the practices, instruments, and institutions that were associated with it) that

naturalized sight as a source of clear unmediated knowledge(Krygier 1997: 30; see also Edney 1997). For geographers, the

ways in which the map became 'a theory which geographers ... accepted' (Ullman 1953: 57) is the story of the radical

abstraction of the practices of the finger and the eye, the history of the technologies and institutions of map-making and map use, and ways of seeing and thinking; a story we need to revisit (Figure 1.2).

In a broader sense, this is whatthe philosopher Martin Heidegger(1982) meant when he described the emergence of

the 'age of the world-as-picture'.In using this phrase, Heidegger pointed to both the representational and objectifying

nature of modern sciences and the global scope of the modern project; a rendering of all aspects of the world as

picture, as 'standing reserve' or as resource for appropriation and use. Rendering the diversity of global alterities

as objects, even commodities, for display and exhibition the global (European) project of modernity 'orders' and

domesticates the unknown and the invisible, making them known and visible, making them available for use


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(Mitchell 1991). And in this sense Derek Gregory(1994) asks us to think about geographical practices such as mapping in

terms of a broader epistemology and a politics that treat the 'world-as-exhibition'. The world-as-picture and as-

exhibition was, in part, produced by technologies and practices of representation, including cycles of mapping, each

of which left their residual impress on contemporary ways of seeing: the geometrical experiments of perspective;

the exploratory portolan charts and the deep cultural fascination with boundaries (coastlines) that gave rise to

them; the parcelling of land in the regional and national cadastres; the national topographic mapping

programmes; the emergence of the globe as a cultural icon; and the more recent remote remapping of all aspects

of social life(Figure 1.3).

Such a geopolitics of representation has very much been about property and the ownership and trading of

commodities. As Walter Benjamin (1999) has shown in his writings on social and urban life in nineteenth-century Paris, representation

entered fully into the commodity relation by its production of an economy of display in which the spaces of the

city were restructured as spaces of visual display and mass consumption.The visual, informational and the exotic were

commodified for bourgeois consumption through the ur-forms of a new visual and global imaginary: the national exhibition (Crystal Palace),

the panorama, the plate-glass window, and the shopping arcade in which the world of people, places and goods were gathered for display

and consumption (see Buck-Morss 1989).2

LINK OIL SCARCITY

THE 1ACS NOTION THAT OIL SCARCITY IS DIVORCED FROM IMPERIALIST ECONOMICS IS WRONG SUPPLIERS

AND ECONOMIC AGENTS CREATE OIL SCARCITY IN ORDER TO DRIVE UP PRICES AND ENSURE CONTINUED

DEPENDENCE ON OIL.THEIR OIL =WAR ARGUMENTS GET IT BACKWARDS:MORE OIL MAKES WAR MORE

LIKELY

HUBER 11(Matthew T., Department of Geography, The Maxwell School of Syracuse University, Enforcing Scarcity: Oil, Violence, and the

Making of the Market Annals of the Association of American Geographers)

Since at least the 1920s petroleum geologists have warned of the looming exhaustion of U.S. petroleum supplies

(Yergin 1991; Olien and Olien 2000). The most recent manifestation of this narrative is those pro- claiming the imminence

of peak oilwhen global production reaches its peak and goes into decline. Given the fixed nature of petroleum deposits, it is

clear that petroleum production will indeed peak at some point, but predicting the peak is much more difficult

than peak oil proponents claim(Smil 2008). As some critics point out,1 peak oilers tend to downplay capitals dynamic capacities for

innovation. From a Marxist perspective (e.g., Labban 2010), peak oil theorists fail to theorize the wider social relations through which both the

supply and demand of oil are structured. Supply is certainly not the result of petroleum producers producing at the

maximum capacity that geology allows,2 and demand is not always increasing and actually declines in moments of

crisis.3 Moreover, they approach oil as simply a geological thing and not a commodity produced for exchange andprofit(Caffentzis 2005, 17076). Quite apart from geological supply, if producers do not ex- pect the money (M) invested in producing oil (C)

will produce a profit (M) then they will not supply the market.4 Indeed, private and national oil capitals are still investing substantial money in

oil exploration and development with the expectation that the oil age will continue for years to come (Bridge and Wood 2005).5

Although petroleum is indeed a finite resource, and its limitation certainly should not be ignored, Labban(2008, 2)

commented that history reveals the problem of oil is not its scarcity but its abundance.Retort (2005, 59) argued that

the constant menace threatening the oil industry is not scarcity but falling prices . . . surplus and glut. If oil

scarcity is not actively managed, prices will not be high enough for profitable accumulation. The oil market is


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beset by a struggle to find a balance between abundance and scarcity that both allows high enough prices for

profitable accumulation and low enough prices to maintain levels of demand.

What is striking is how difficult it is to achieve the scarcity necessary for market stability and a profitable oil market. From the Texas Railroad

Commission to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), elaborate institutional mechanisms have been

constructed with the purpose of limiting oil production. After high prices during the 1970s, non-OPEC pro-

duction combined with OPECs own failure to control each others production levels to cause price collapses

throughout the 1980s and 1990s.In 1986, Vice President George H. W. Bush was forced to visit Saudi Arabia to plead with them to

limit production on be- half of U.S. independent oil producers (Yergin 1991). A glutted market during the financial crisis of 2008

forced petroleum sellers to store 80 million barrels of oil in thirty-five idling supertankers (Krauss 2009).

When scarcity is presumed as a fact of nature and not a remarkable social achievement, it is posited as the

natural cause of violence and war.Over the last decade, many have argued that oil scarcity is ushering in a new era of

resource wars and geopolitical conflict(Heinberg 2003; Kunstler 2005; Klare 2008). Yet, given that the world was

drowning in oil as recently as a decade ago(Drowning in oil 1999), it is questionable whether or not oil scarcity

should be so quickly assumed as the cause of recent war and conflict.Nitzan and Bichler (2002) provocatively argued that

the abundance of oil (low prices) is the best predictor of violence in the Middle East.Le Billon and Cervantes (2009, 842)

examine how violence triggers a scarcity . . . narrative . . . constructed for and through prices. The appearance ofscarcity and violence yields high prices and , thus, high returns for particular interests.Thus, although common sense

expects violence to emerge out of oil scarcity, few have explored the possibility that violence could be a

response to oil abundance and falling prices.In what follows, I examineperhaps the most spectacular caseof the use of

violence to produce scarcitythe declaration of martial law in the oil fields of east Texas and Oklahoma.6 First, I provide some background on

the legal geography of U.S. petroleum production and its endemic problems of overproduction.

LINK OIL SUPPLIES

OIL IS NOT A SIMPLE COMMODITY:SCARCITY,CONFLICT,AND COOPERATION OVER OIL ARE ALL STRUCTURED

BY DISCURSIVE AND PERFORMATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF AVAILABILITY,VIOLENCE,AND BY HIERARCHICAL

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COUNTRIES DONT TRUST THEIR OVERLY SIMPLISTIC SCENARIO-BUILDING

ZIMMERER 11(Karl S., Department of Geography and Environmental and Earth Systems Institute (EESI), The Pennsylvania State University,New Geographies of Energy: Introduction to the Special Issue Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101:4, pp. 706- 707)

Critical geopolitics is increasingly central to understanding the changing landscapes of hydrocarbons in particular.

In the first article of this section, Bouzarovski and Bassin elucidate how nationalist discourses of Russia as a global energy

superpower are politically important and implicated in identity formation in that country. Substantial geographic

work discusses the role of modern-day imperialism, particularly that of the United States, which is aimed at oil

extraction across extensive regionsranging from the Caspian Basin and the Middle East to the Western Amazon and northern South

America (Venezuela) and to West Africa (Nigeria; Watts 2001, 2008a, 2008b; Harvey 2003). Clashes and conflicts are commonplace in

the mounting convergence of energy investment, markets, governance, and infrastructure. Much workalso

highlights the many examples of capital accumulation through dispossession; resource curse impacts and the

failure of oil-based development; and oil-fueled conflicts, referred to as petro-violence, that include the

emergence of new forms of armed insurgencies in such countries as Nigeria(Watts 2001, 2008a, 2008b; Harvey 2003;

Bradshaw 2010; Orta-Martnez and Finer 2010). Energy security and energy scarcity are shown to be contested concepts

that are consequences of both geophysical factors and broadly social ones defined within national contexts and


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international relations(Goldthau and Witte 2010; Sovacool and Brown 2010). Huber probes the concept of energy scarcity,

showing the roles of many nonmarket influences, ranging from the broad political economy to violence in and

near regions of hydrocarbon deposits. This volatile mix of factors is energizing geographic analysis and

contributes to the actual pricing and availability of oil, including the construct of peak oil(Huber 2009, this issue; see

also Kaufmann and Cleveland 2001; Cleveland and Kaufmann 2003; Bridge 2010; Bridge and Wood 2010; Harvey 2010; Labban 2010; Kaufmann

2011). At the same time, the changing landscapes of gas extraction have gained heightened interest and , in some circles,

are now being seen as integral energy sources in the context of scenarios leading to potential low-carbon energy

transitions(e.g., the Natural Gas and Sustainable Energy Initiative of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC; see Flavin and Kitasei

2010). This interest is intensifying despite concerns over growing shale gas extraction, liquefied natural gas facilities (B. Harrison 2008), and

social conflict and environmental degradation issues in extractive sites (e.g., Bolivia and Ecuador; Bridge 2004; Perreault and Valdivia 2010).

LINK WAR IMPACTS

WAR IS NOT DEFINED BY RATIONAL ACTORS BUT INSTEAD BY A CONSTELLATION OF RHETORICAL AND

ONTOLOGICAL DECISIONS ABOUT THE WORLDS STRUCTURE THE AFFIRMATIVES INVOCATION OF GLOBAL

VIOLENCE IS NOT BENIGN AND LOCKS US INTO FURTHER CONFLICTCAIRO 4(Heriberto, Facultad de Ciencias Pol ticas y Sociolog a, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, The Field of Mars: heterotopias ofterritory and war Political Geography 23, pp. 1011-1012)

Our way of visualizing global space(Agnew, 2003: 15) is central to the understanding of war. The way we order

things in planetary space is constitutive of what we see and what we conceal: proletarian internationalism, national

liberation, territorial integrity areall dimensions of geopolitical discourses that inform the actions of combatants who try to make them

intelligible to a wider audience. War, in this sense, is not a matter of rational interest, [p]eople go to war because of how

they see, perceive, picture, imagine, and speak of others:that is, how they construct the difference of others as well

as the sameness of themselves through representations (Der Derian, 2002a).

Understanding war is fundamental to appreciate the relevance of geo-political considerations in its analysis. And in order to define the current

social understanding of war, we should take into account the regularity of its enunciation, which nowadays leads to us to

regard war as a kind of violent group behavior organized on a large scale.Strictly speaking, war is considered a

conflict, but more specifically it is usually defined as: (1) a conflict developed using weapons which surpass a determined threshold of

violence; (2) a violence of a political kind, because politics is a fundamental part of the action; (3) a violence related to a state, because one of

the opponents in wars in the modern world system is usually a state, or at least desires to become a state;3 (4) a territorial behavior, not only

because it is conducted in a particular space, but because the contenders also aim to control the opponents territory in full or in part. This

definition applies to the so-called civil war as well as to the inter-state war, but, obviously, excludes some

different kinds of violent behavior: robberies or passionate murders clearly do not fit, just as what are referred to as terrorism and

insurgency do not qualify as war (although the aftermath of September 11 and the American War on terrorism launched b y the Bush

administration suggests an important shift). In fact, the dominant discourse of war is basically geopolitical and state-

centered, and, as Shapiro states, the map of global warfare changes dramatically when one departs from the

language of sovereignty(Shapiro, 1999: 61). For instance, struggles involving indigenous peoples constitute more than

half of the wars that Bernard Nietschmann includes in the Third World War, which is hidden from view because

the fighting is against peoples and countries that are often not even on the map(quoted in Shapiro, 1999: 61).

It isalso important to stress the historical, constructional and constellational character of war and its legitimation.

Firstly, war is a human behavior, which has obviously occurred since early times; that is why we cannot consider it exclusive to our age.4 As

Harvey points out, capitalism did not invent war any more than it invented writing, knowledge, science or art. Not all wars, even in the

contemporary era, can be truly regarded as capitalist wars, and war will not necessarily disappear with the demise of capitalism (Harvey, 1985:


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162163). In other words, war has happened in other economic and political contexts. Different kinds of power relations also variously lead to

war, and usually it is not the outcome of a single process. War is not caused by any one thing. Its origins are in what we could call a bellical

constellation5 of factors and processes, which make each war a unique, but not a singular, event. Notwithstanding, we are able to find

constants in the issues of peace and war, and social scientists should consider that we can hardly discu

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Borders Kritik - Harvard 2013