Contention One: The

Link
Discourse of human security lays the terrain for western military
interventions across the globe, authorizing force in the maintenance
of bare life.
de Larrinaga & Doucet 8 [Miguel, Assistant Professor of International
Relations at the University of Ottawa, & Marc G., Associate Professor at the
Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Security Dialogue
39(5), Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security, p. 530-533]
We have already explored via Agambens work how rendering

life bare can be seen as the originary activity of

sovereign power. What can be brought to light here, in relation to our discussion of human security above, is that the life lived by the
subjects of the human security discourse can be seen as life lived as bare inasmuch as this discourse is
not meant to qualify political life. As explored previously, life through the lens of human security is understood
primarily in terms of providing for the basic sustenance of day-to-day life . Brought into the post-9/11
context, what this enables is an opening towards mapping global order in a way that apportions this bare
life in relation to zones of exceptionality amenable to the logic of an exercise of sovereign power . This is
reflected in the way development objectives and humanitarian goals now tend to submit more directly to the dictates of the management of global
order. Instead of targeting populations that are most insecure as measured by the human security discourse and viewing the provision of security
to those populations as an end in itself, the targeting is now overridden by the hard security concerns of homelands and ends understood
increasingly in terms of the aims of the global war on terror.14 While the human security discourse could always be critically interpreted as
prioritizing its responses to populations that are threatened in relation to servicing the maintenance of the global liberal order (Chandler, 2004),
the shift here can be understood as one where this servicing reveals a more intimate connection between sovereign power, biopolitics and the
maintenance of post-9/11 order. This connection comes in the way in which the human security discourse prepares

conceptually a form of life that is at hand for the mounting of proactive interventions of pre-emption
and prevention . We can see elements of this shift in the most recent institutional developments of the human security discourse within
the UN. To be certain, the post-9/11 moment can be taken as a movement away from a further codification of grounds for humanitarian
intervention that would have as its objective the health and welfare of populations as an end in itself. As Alex Bellamy (2006: 165) chronicles, the
language of the World Summit Outcome Document as it relates to the model of humanitarian intervention outlined in the 2001 ICISS report was
watered down in favour of reinforcing not only the principle that the burden of protecting populations fell chiefly on individual states, but also the
idea that the threshold for interventions on humanitarian grounds should be high. Thus, there was a clear shift in the document away from what
was meant to be shared responsibility between the international community and the host state through a re-emphasis of the responsibility of the
latter. At the same time, the document also moved towards safeguarding the Security Councils political discretion to choose when and whether it
would intervene rather than endorsing binding criteria that would compel the Council to act in cases of clear humanitarian emergencies, as
prescribed in the ICISS report (Bellamy, 2006: 166167). While these changes can be seen as weakening the case for binding the Council to
intervene on humanitarian grounds, they can also be read as broadening the scope for interventions on discretionary grounds. They do this by
further codifying the range of justifications for intervention that emerged from Security Council resolutions during the 1990s while
simultaneously reaffirming the Councils ability to choose which cases merit its attention. Perhaps most importantly, the outcome document
retains the understanding of sovereignty as responsibility outlined in the ICISS report, reinforcing the notion that it is the host state that has the
primary responsibility to protect. The test of responsibility here remains couched in terms of the biopolitical functions of the state insofar as what
is measured is the latters ability or inability to provide for the health and welfare of the populations within its care. As recounted by Bellamy
(2006: 164167), the negotiations leading to the final draft of the outcome document came as a result of pressure from representatives of states
that wanted either a free hand to determine whether and when to intervene (the USA) or to retain the traditional supremacy of sovereignty in
terms of political and legal autonomy (Russia and China). Although this can be taken as a deferral to the norms of territorial inviolability, there

is a continued adherence to an understanding of sovereignty that is qualified in line with the states
biopolitical functions, in that each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic
cleansing and crimes against humanity (United Nations, 2005b: para. 138). Combined with the endorsement of the Security Councils political
discretion on intervention, these most recent institutional developments could also be read as a codification of

sovereignty in biopolitical terms, and thus as reinforcing the linkages between sovereign power and
biopower. The second area of complementarity can be seen as relating to the manner in which Agamben articulates the relationship between

human security
is instrumental in sovereign powers ability to delineate the circumstances in which such a state of
bare life and the exercise of sovereign power as one that operates through the state of exception. What we argue here is that

exception can be proclaimed. What the discourse of human security does, whether broad or narrow, is to
help define the exceptional circumstances that require the international communitys intervention ,
whether on behalf of humanitarian imperatives as initially conceived or in the service of maintaining global
order as made evident more recently. It does so by initially constructing the terms that inform the exceptional circumstances that define the
range of threats to human life. In turn, it contributes to the labour of defining and authorizing when the suspension of conventional international
law of nations can occur. The question that surfaces at this juncture is what authorizes the suspension of the law in the name of human security
when the discourse of human security has yet to find its codification as international law? In other words, what allows human security to stand
before the law? Returning to Agamben, human security can be understood here as participating in the institution of a form of sovereign power
insofar as it simultaneously operates within and outside the law. It points towards a zone of indistinction in relation to its efforts to codify the
authorization of a form of international intervention that becomes apparent in the fact that this authorization has yet to receive the status of
international law while, at the same time, it must invoke the force that law normally assumes. The human security discourse thus finds itself in an
aporia in relation to international law, which it must suspend while simultaneously invoking its force. On this point, Agambens reading of the
relationship between sovereign power and biopower clearly brings back an element of analysis that is intentionally left aside in Foucaults
biopoliticization of sovereign power highlighted through his reading of racism noted earlier. Agamben allows us to reintroduce the connection
between the institution of the juridico-political order and biopower, which much of Foucaults work on modern forms of power under the rubric
of a multiplicity of force relations sought to sever (Neal, 2004: 375). Having said that, Agambens reading is not entirely satisfactory either,
which leads us to the final element of the assemblage between sovereign power and biopower brought to light by the human security discourse.
Following Connollys critique noted earlier, Agamben appears to maintain a view of the logic and paradox of sovereign power as coherent and
ultimately centred on the sovereignty of the state. The cartography of the form of sovereign power that articulates itself through the human
security discourse would seem to complicate this view. Human security can be read as informing the institution of a form

of sovereign power that ultimately has as its plane of exercise the globe . This element of globality
emerges most clearly in the manner in which the human security discourse articulates threats . Constituting
threats specifically in terms of threats to human life means that the human security discourse, through a
categorization and accounting of such threats, must constitute them with a view of (in)security that is
global. In conceptual terms, viewing human life as a grounds upon which the (in)security dilemma is
played out makes the life of the human species the referent of security (Dillon, 2007). To be sure, the human
security discourse in practice identifies these threats as emanating from specific locales insofar as its
interventions target delimited non-Western populations, and thus the Western state clearly continues to
play a central role in mounting the recent series of international interventions . However, too much emphasis on the
state misses how such interventions have come to depend upon strategic complexes of global governance that bring together state and non-state
actors, public and private organizations, military and civilian organisations (Duffield, 2001: 45). In helping to constitute key

elements of the state of exception, the human security discourse prepares the conceptual ground upon
which such complexes are bound up with instituting a form of global sovereign power unmoored from the
formal juridico-political sovereignty of any one state or coalition of states . Within the post-9/11 moment,
then, human security can be seen as having laid the conceptual terrain for a form of human subjectivity
amenable to the exercise of global sovereign rule . Rather than seeing a disjuncture between pre- and
post-9/11, human security proposes a form of life that is intimately connected to the assemblages of
biopower and sovereign power that mark this rule.

Calls for the state to assure human security provide the rationale
for military intervention human security re-installs traditional
discourses of state security.
de Larrinaga & Doucet 8 [Miguel, Assistant Professor of International
Relations at the University of Ottawa, & Marc G., Associate Professor at the
Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Security Dialogue
39(5), Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security, p. 525-527]
The formal origins of the

concept of human security are to be found in the worldview of an international organization that was
enmeshed in the discourse of national

concerned with post Cold War humanitarian issues, and only subsequently became

foreign policy concerns and academic debates on security. Generally attributed to the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report and
some of the concurrent writings of Mahbub ul-Haq, the initial impulse was to shift the referent from the state to the
legitimate concerns of ordinary people who s[eek] security in their daily lives (UNDP, 1994: 22). In other words, the objective
was to bring security down to the level of human life by seeking to develop strategies in the provision of both safety from such chronic threats as
hunger, disease and repression and protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life whether in homes and jobs or in
communities (UNDP, 1994: 23). In so doing, security was to be decoupled from the particular national interest of

states and tied to the universal concern[s] (UNDP, 1994: 22) of all people. In articulating itself universally,
human security was therefore initially meant to be built upon the bedrock of universal human rights . This
move would be accompanied by efforts to identify a comprehensive list of threats that the all encompassing (UNDP, 1994: 24) concept of
human security would respond to that is, economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security (UNDP, 1994: 24
25). Clear connections were made between severe impediments to human development and pervasive and chronic threats to the fulfilment of
human potential. Such a broad formulation sought to transcend the state , insofar as it brought into question its

role as a provider of security relative to other actors for example, international organizations, NGOs and non-military
government agencies while simultaneously identifying the state itself as a potential source of insecurity . This
elision of the state also served to make the quotidian the object of security. Whereas security tended to be understood
in terms of defining historical moments centred around the survival and integrity of the state, we now see emerging an understanding of
(in)security that arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event (UNDP, 1994: 22). In this way,
human security certainly participated in the broader redefinition of security begun in the 1970s and 1980s; however, it also set off on new terrain,
in that shifting its referent to the individual introduces as threats a host of contingencies that emerge from daily life. This initial deployment of the
concept in the mid-1990s was subsequently accompanied by other efforts to theorize human security in ways that would be more amenable to the
multilateral and middle-power approaches found in the foreign policy concerns of certain states. Examples like the Responsibility

To Protect generally moved away from the broader development concerns of the Human Development Report
towards a more narrow focus on introducing a new set of international norms on intervention that would
guide and restrict the conduct of the state and the international community in extreme and exceptional
cases (ICISS, 2001: 31). Here, the threats are concomitantly narrowed down to violent threats to individuals
(Human Security Center, 2005: viii), such as mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and
terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease (United Nations, 2004: 65). Emphasis shifts from an
understanding of threats that stem from a broad set of quotidian political, social, economic and
environmental contingencies, to what are deemed to be avoidable catastrophe[s] (United Nations, 2004: 65).
Within this context, there is a partial but significant return to the state, in that it is through the nexus of the
state that the provision of both security and insecurity, by state and non-state actors, is predominantly
understood. The traditional apparatus of the state as concerns its monopoly over the (il)legitimate use of
violence also makes its return in the form of military intervention as a response of last resort to the
extreme violation of rights that are held as inviolable . This then enables the shift towards tying security to
the notion of the states ability or inability to fulfil its responsibility to protect the human beings within its
care.9 In this sense, the referent and threats continue to be articulated in non-territorial forms, as within the
broader notion of human security, but the responses are framed within the nexus of the state and therefore
call forth a statist conception of security . This return to the state is made all the more evident in the
manner in which the narrower concept of human security centres around (re)defining norms surrounding
the legitimacy of the international communitys right to intervention . Such an effort attempts to inaugurate
and codify a new law around a set of norms that simultaneously requires the suspension of certain
foundational elements of international law in cases of violence which so genuinely shock the
conscience of mankind, or which present such a clear and present danger to international security, that
they require coercive military intervention (ICISS, 2001: 31) on the part of the international community. It
is the concept of human security that serves to define and identify the extreme and exceptional
circumstances that it itself requires in the subsequent formulation of its responses . In so doing, the human
security discourse participates in setting the conditions for both the suspension of the law and the
authorization of its refounding in the form of new norms of intervention . As we will explore below, this marks a
key dimension of the operation of the concept of sovereign power elaborated earlier.

IMPACTS

Security politics is the root cause of war and environmental

destruction criticism is a prerequisite to reducing global violence.
Burke 7 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at
UNSW, Sydney, Theory & Event, 10:2, Ontologies of War: Violence,
Existence and Reason, Muse]
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am
arguing that war

is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of
hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions
about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an
international society of republican states will save us . The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the
conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come , against everything Kant hoped for, to
stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing
world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself
and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to
enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to
extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the

challenge is posed not

merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of
thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most
destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism , repression , coercive diplomacy,
covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely
from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative,
'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being .
Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities,
their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die . Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the
name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of
action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and
existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or
legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and
events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however
ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On
my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped
within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the
friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there
no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and
responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to
Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of
agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and
obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly 89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was
searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately
recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility
and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more. When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis
suggests that choice and agency can

be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the
overarching strategic and security paradigms . Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly
inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political . But this cannot be done without seizing

alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought , by being aware of its
presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action .90 This
would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to
create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge
human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S.
in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of
'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and
consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable
choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?

Security politics destroys value to life, reducing humans to

units of calculation.
Dillon 96 [Michael, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of
Lancaster, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought, p. 26]
Everything, for example, has now become possible. But what human being seems most impelled to do with the power of
its actions is to turn itself into a species; not merely an animal species, nor even a species of currency or consumption (which amount
to the same thing), but a mere species of calculation . For only by reducing itself to an index of calculation does
it seem capable of constructing that political arithmetic by which it can secure the security globalised
Western thought insists upon, and which a world made increasingly unpredictable by the very way human
being acts into it now seems to require. Yet, the very rage for calculability which securing security incites is
precisely also what reduces human freedom, inducing either despair or the surrender of what is human to
the de-humanising calculative logic of what seems to be necessary to secure security. I think, then, that
Hannah Arendt was right when she saw late modern humankind caught in a dangerous world-destroying cleft between a belief that everything is
possible and a willingness to surrender itself to so-called laws of necessity (calculability itself) which would make everything possible. That it
was, in short, characterised by a combination of reckless omnipotence and reckless despair. But I also think that things have gone one stage
furtherthe surrender to the necessity of realising everything that is possible and that this found its

paradigmatic expression, for example, in the deterrent security policies of the Cold War ; where everything up
to and including self-immolation not only became possible but actually necessary in the interests of
(inter)national security. This logic persists in the metaphysical core of modern politics the axioms of inter-State
security relations, popularised, for example, through strategic discourse even if the details have changed.

Crafting political strategies geared toward promoting security

makes violence inevitable criticism is a prerequisite to
sustainable peace.
Burke 7 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Theory &
Event, 10:2, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Muse]
This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a
given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex').
Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful
structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential'

and 'rationalist' discourses of

war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even
discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces
with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful
and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim
a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is . I am thinking of ontology in both its senses:
ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and
certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the
creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry
into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of
'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I

see ontology as a particularly

powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity,
existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that
is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind . In short, ontology

is the 'politics of truth' 18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see such a drive for ontological
certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the
existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for
ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries
of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as
such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual
structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an
ontology of violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone
(and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a
context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and
with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry
Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a
profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they
enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction,
and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces
neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of
pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence
collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither,
however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no
longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21 What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex
relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in

the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like
charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being
and political necessity. Positivistic

or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and

reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being
and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here
it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a
distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action. The
epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action
which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice,
technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental

violence is married to an ontology of insecure

national existence which itself admits no questioning . The nation and its identity are known and
essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its
perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing
being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of
'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology
becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose
obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake
neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are
ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the
"deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon,
like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22 The danger obviously raised here is that these

dual ontologies of war link being, means, events and

decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined . As is clear in
the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did
in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from
strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24
Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of
truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up
choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant
understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made. The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that arises out of
its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define
being and drive 'out every other possibility of revealing being', how can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is
there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up the entire space of the political -- needs to
be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The

need is to critique dominant images of

political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act and choose such that
we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political .

NO PERM

Including the Aff wards off critique.

Burke 7 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and Professor of International Relations at
University of New South Wales, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 3-4]
These frameworks are interrogated at the level both of their theoretical conceptualisation and their practice: in their influence and implementation
in specific policy contexts and conflicts in East and Central Asia, the Middle East and the 'war on terror', where their meaning and impact take on
greater clarity. This approach is based on a conviction that the meaning of powerful political concepts cannot be abstract or easily universalised:
they all have histories, often complex and conflictual; their forms and meanings change over time; and they are developed, refined and deployed
in concrete struggles over power, wealth and societal form. While this should not preclude normative debate over how political or ethical
concepts should be defined and used, and thus be beneficial or destructive to humanity, it embodies a caution that the meaning of concepts can
never be stabilised or unproblematic in practice. Their normative potential must always be considered in relation to their utilisation in systems of
political, social and economic power and their consequent worldly effects. Hence this book embodies a caution by Michel Foucault, who warned
us about the 'politics of truth ... the battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays', and it is inspired by his call to
'detach the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time'.1 It is clear

that traditionally coercive and violent approaches to security and strategy are both still culturally
dominant, and politically and ethically suspect. However, the reasons for pursuing a critical analysis relate
not only to the most destructive or controversial approaches, such as the war in Iraq, but also to their available
(and generally preferable) alternatives . There is a necessity to question not merely extremist versions such
as the Bush doctrine, Indonesian militarism or Israeli expansionism, but also their mainstream critiques whether they take the form of liberal policy approaches in international relations (IR), just war theory, US realism,
optimistic accounts of globalisation, rhetorics of sensitivity to cultural difference, or centrist Israeli security discourses
based on territorial compromise with the Palestinians. The surface appearance of lively (and often significant) debate
masks a deeper agreement about major concepts, forms of political identity and the imperative to
secure them. Debates about when and how it may be effective and legitimate to use military force in
tandem with other policy options, for example, mask a more fundamental discursive consensus about the
meaning of security, the effectiveness of strategic power, the nature of progress, the value of freedom or
the promises of national and cultural identity. As a result, political and intellectual debate about
insecurity, violent conflict and global injustice can become hostage to a claustrophobic structure of
political and ethical possibility that systematically wards off critique .

ALT

Reject the Affs security discourse abandoning the attempt to

eradicate insecurity is a prerequisite to meaningful political
engagement.
Neocleous 8 [Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, Critique of
Security, p. 185-186]
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether to reject it
as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian
and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought
and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain
this is an insecure world and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it
hard to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a
political way out of the impasse of security. This impasse exists because security has now become so allencompassing that it marginalises all else , most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and
discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end
as the political end constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term . That is, as a mode of
action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people
might come to believe that another world is possible that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security

politics simply removes this;

all issues of power and turns political questions into
debates about the most efficient way to achieve security , despite the fact that we are never quite told never could be told what
might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,141 dominating political discourse in
much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism
and the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination . We therefore need to get beyond
security politics, not add yet more sectors to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and
legitimises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives . Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with
worse, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses

Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole thats left
behind? But Im inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.142 The

mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that

this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised
or gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever . All of these ultimately remain within the statist
political imaginary, and consequently end up re-affirming the state as the terrain of modern politics, the
grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but to
fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security
and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state . Thats the point of critical
politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want . Thus while much of
what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as
significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths . For if security really is the supreme concept of
bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity
and to keep demanding more security (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesnt damage our liberty) is to blind
ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary
politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating
effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and political issues , debilitating in the sense
that security helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the

short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms . It would also allow us to forge another kind of
politics centred on a different conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about
social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true
sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising that security is
an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as
solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition , and thus giving up the
search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and
insecurities that come with being human; it requires accepting that securitizing an issue does not mean
dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave
enough to return the gift.143