Professional Documents
Culture Documents
burden is on user/auditor to comply with USSID-18 or other rules, apparently including the British Human Rights Act (HRA), which protects the rights of U.K. citizens. U.S.
Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) is the American directive that governs U.S. person minimization. Kurt Opsahl, the Electronic Frontier Foundations general
XKEYSCORE for all iPhone users, this query would violate USSID 18 due to the inevitable American iPhone users that would be grabbed without a warrant, as the NSAs own
auditing, not by preventing the search. Screenshots of the XKEYSCORE web-based user interface included in slides show that analysts see a prominent warning message: This
system is audited for USSID 18 and Human Rights Act compliance. When analysts log in to the system, they see a more detailed message warning that an audit trail has been
established and will be searched in response to HRA complaints, and as part of the USSID 18 and USSID 9 audit process. Because the XKEYSCORE system does not appear to
prevent analysts from making queries that would be in violation of these rules, Opsahl concludes that theres a tremendous amount of power being placed in the hands of
analysts. And while those analysts may be subject to audits, at least in the short term they can still obtain information that they shouldnt have. During a symposium in January
2015 hosted at Harvard University, Edward Snowden, who spoke via video call, said that NSA analysts are completely free from any meaningful oversight. Speaking about the
its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling
fundamental limits on the NSAs powers of mass surveillance . Even if it somehow did, this White
House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that the U.S.
intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight
means theyd easily co-opt the entire reform process. Thats what happened after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment
of congressional intelligence committees and a special FISA oversight courtthe committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the intelligence community like Senators Dianne
Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, while the court quickly became a rubber stamp with subservient judges who operate in total secrecy. Ever since the Snowden
government agencies, as well as the U.K. Government, are apoplectic over new products from Google and Apple that are embedded with strong encryption, precisely because they know that such protections, while
far from perfect, are serious impediments to their power of mass surveillance. To make this observation does not mean, as some deeply confused people try to suggest, that one believes that Silicon Valley companies
care in the slightest about peoples privacy rights and civil liberties.
Terror
CP
Radical Democracy 1NC [2:00]
Thus the counterplan: The United States federal government should hold a
binding national referendum to Drones Surveilance, The United States
federal government should enact the aforementioned legislation if and only if
the referendum receives more than 50% of the popular vote.
The net benefit is radical democracy
Representative structures destroy the power of the multitude to resist
biopolitical controlpower of decision is key
Hardt and Negri 9 [Michael-Professor Duke University, PhD, Comparative
Literature, University of Washington, 1990 and Antonio-an Italian political
philosopher, Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, 2009, pg. 304-306]
The metaphor of a great conversation, however, paints a picture of these productive relationships that is too harmonious and pacific,
indifferent to the quality of encounters that constitute them. Many people are silenced even when included in a conversation. And simply
adding more voices without adequate means of cooperation can quickly result in cacophony, making it impossible for anyone to understand
advance production and foster the expansion of productive forces is one that is characterized by participation in an open, expansive network
capitalist entrepreneur persists, although any attempt of an individual capitalist Or even the class of capitalists to innovate by intervening in
Biopower eliminates the value to life and is the root cause of genocidal
violence
for biopower
is understood as the basic needs, mans concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a
plenitude of the possible.15 Biopower makes life an impersonal, abstract plenitude that is
attached to no one in particular. Foucault writes about biopower not in terms of subjects but of
forces. Biopower works to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the
forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them (HS 136).
To disallow these forces would be to rob them of their momentum, or to contain their energy without disrupting future productivity.
Many zones of state-driven violence or deprivation are abandoned to a postcolonial outside that
enters political discourse only as an abstract figure for human suffering . What gets lost in such a
figuration is the way in which these conflicts are brought about by scarcities and divisions intrinsic to the biopolitical economy itself,
to the way it manages the movement of commodities and capital. In fact, these localized
theory of participatory
democracy is built around the central assertion that individuals and their institutions cannot be
considered in isolation from one another. The existence of representative institutions at the
national level is not sufficient for democracy; for maximum participation by all the people at that level of
socialization, or social training, for democracy must take place through the process of democracy itself .
The major functions of participation in the theory of participatory democracy is therefore an educative one, educative in the very
widest sense, including both the psychological aspect and the gaining of practice in democratic skills and procedures. The strongest
arguments in favor of citizen referendums can be made within this theoretical context of positive
liberty, participation, and democracy. Several scholars have debated the merits of referendums, and we will look briefly
at their reasons for and against. In the last analysis, however, the argument about referendums is essentially about
participation and whether or not democracy requires this type of citizen input. Political theorist Benjamin
Barber testified before a US congressional subcommittee considering a constitutional amendment allowing the use of a
national referendum. Barber held that democracy and referendums are inseparable, contending
that: in the end, the real issue at stake is whether or not America believes in democracy, and
believes it can afford the risks that go with democratic life. All of the objections to it are so many
different ways of saying the people are not to be trusted- a skepticism which, it is perfectly true,
can be traced back to the realism and cynical elitism of a significant group of constitutional fathers. But
there is really no democratic alternative to such trust: if the American people are not capable of self-government,
our democracy will perish- whether or not elites keep them from initiating legislation.
K
Data has become neoliberalisms new currency - the affs increase in privacy
fuels a transition to corporate surveillance - failure to foreground
neoliberalism promotes a fantasy that Snowdens whistle might eventually be
proven false and causes a retreat into inaccessible legal discourse
Morozov 13
(Evgeny Morozov [writer and researcher of Belarusian origin who studies political and social
implications of technology. He is currently a senior editor at The New Republic], 12/26/13, "The
Snowden saga heralds a radical shift in capitalism," www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d2af6426-696d-11e3aba3-00144feabdc0.html, MX)
Edward Snowden now faces a growing wave of surveillance
fatigue among the public - and the reason is that the National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower has revealed too many
uncomfortable truths about how today's world works. Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous
Following his revelations this year about Washington's spying excesses,
surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of "internet freedom" and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control - all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead,
transparent. Of course, all those things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to reach and harvest. At the very least,
such measures can create the impression that something is being done. But what good are these steps to counter the much more
disturbing trend whereby our personal information - rather than money - becomes the chief way in which we pay for services - and soon, perhaps, everyday objects - that we use? No laws and
tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the
lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data - be it information about their shopping or copies
of their genome. These citizens want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it. Now that every piece
of data, no matter how trivial, is also an asset in disguise, they just need to find the right buyer. Or the
buyer might find them, offering to create a convenient service paid for by their data - which seems to be Google's model with Gmail, its email service. What eludes Mr Snowden - along with most of his detractors
day rank all Yemeni kids based on their propensity to blow up aircraft does not obviate the need to address the sources of their discontent - one of which might be the excessive use of drones to target their fathers.
Unfortunately, these issues are not on today's agenda, in part because many of us have bought into the simplistic narrative - convenient to both Washington and Silicon Valley - that we just need more laws, more
Mr Snowden has revealed is the new tension at the very foundations of modern-day
capitalism and democratic life. A bit more imagination is needed to resolve it.
tools, more transparency. What
the ability to act with relative impunity is both individually as well as socially
corrosive (Durkheim, 1925, 1960, 1965). Compounding this situation, the mutual social estrangement that occurs with
increasing social polarisation diminishes the extent to which actors on both sides of the divide
identify with each other as, raising the potential for stereotyping, distrust, prejudice and stigma (Aronson, 1995; Bone, 2010;
Goffman, 1963). This process can evidently produce a situation where an exclusive elite begin to view the
masses as other which, in turn, leads to demonization and reduced empathy, legitimating a
hardening of attitudes to the plight of those negatively affected by the actions of the powerful, a situation
that has arguably been much at play during the neoliberal era. Once more, as has been identied throughout our history, psycho-social
estrangement and the concomitant negative stereotyping and prejudice that it cultivates, further enhances the
capacity for un-empathic and amoral conduct, with potentially fateful outcomes, particularly where this can
occur with few constraints. It may even be the case, as has been argued, that social arrangements and values such as those prevalent in
contemporary capitalism not only disinhibit anti-social behaviours but actually undermine an
otherwise natural predisposition towards pro-social and empathic conduct (Olson, 2005). Conclusion As above, the
First, as Durkheim observed,
much promulgated notion that deregulated economies promote freedom, wealth and the greater good can be regarded as a touchstone of late twentieth and early twenty-rst
brief intervening period of managed capitalism, or embedded liberalism, appears as a minor detour, as opposed to the sea change that it was once assumed to represent within
as well as its capacity to generate profound inequities (Krugman, 2009). This paper asserts that, in their contribution to the above,
the deregulatory features of neoliberal capitalism imply more than mere structural adjustments to economic organisation, but might also be
understood as impacting upon the aspects of individual neurological functioning that are correlated with inhibiting
anti-social self gratifying behaviour. Thus, without a deeply neurologically engrained set of formal and
informal rules, together with a concomitant commitment to their adherence, the habituated emotional stop signs that routinely
inhibit socially and economically destructive conduct dissolve, as rm injunctions become pliable
obstacles to be negotiated or simply ignored. Overall, by undermining or even eradicating the regulatory walls that guide individual
conscienceand, in turn, socially and economically rational and responsible conduct licentiousness, self interest and short term
expediency ourish, raising the potential for further irrational destabilization of society and
economy and the generation of continuing crises. In this way deregulation, of itself, compounds the
deleterious effects of the value system that drives it. From this perspective, the spirit of contemporary
neoliberal capitalism and its organisational form appears as almost the inverse of the rational,
measured and moral credo that Weber once imagined (1930).
perhaps constitute their vocabularies as referring to actual existing practices and might be alarmed by any reference to metaphor as
The concepts
that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect . They also govern
our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what
we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. . . . If we are right in suggesting that our
ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience and what we do every day is very much a matter of
more than reveal that metaphor is not a purely cognitive issue. Instead metaphor appears as an engaged sensuous process involving bodies
differ in their associations with and mobilization of the social. In this setting,
to make things happen (2006: 16, 1819). In countering neo-liberalisms politics of truth as the naturalized dominant form of
What techniques might such a political metaphor bring to bear? These are questions that we expect to consider in more detail in future
publications. Nevertheless, at this early stage we can see some methodological possibilities. In the Australian context we have suggested in
the ethico-
The second charge against my initial response was that all that criticizing is all well and good but, unless it is
combined with a solution, such criticism is not constructive. A reactionary response to criticism
that aims at foreclosing critical discourse, such a demand for constructiveness and practical
solutions, should be rejected unconditionally. First, on moral grounds, why should it be acceptable
for someone who posits as a solution a utopian fantasy (hence no solution at all) to demand from his or her
detractors a solution? Second, we should reject the notion that criticism should always be constructive
on theoretical grounds. Constructivist criticism is a kind of criticism that accepts the coordinates
of the real within which the criticized object resides. If criticism rejects the assumptions on which
the critiqued rests, or put differently, if criticism rejects as unacceptable the entire symbolic universe that
make possible the criticized object, then it cannot be called constructive . Often, then, constructive
criticism becomes meaningless criticism. For example, how would one provide constructive criticism of
Hitlers ideological and political project? Such a task would make little sense because it would
cast a priori Hitlers Third Reich as a reasonable entity (see Horkheimer, 2004). Similarly, when Arvidsson calls
for us to start behaving like reasonable and constructive people, what he means is that we should
accept the coordinates of his argument for example, that neoliberal capitalism has to be accepted as a
reality and by doing so we can move beyond it as a reasonable entity. Trying to change these
coordinates becomes unreasonable and unconstructive. Here again we should remember ieks advice
to the Wall Street occupiers not to speak to all those agents of reason, those pragmatists, from Clinton to
Obama to Goldman Sachs. At such moments of resistance and defiance, silence becomes the most
radical act against pragmatic politics, the kind of politics that wants to resolve the problem step
by step in a realistic way, rather than addressing it at its roots (see iek, 2008). Because what would Arvidssons response be to
anything outside the existing coordinates he sees structuring the domain of social and economic relations? Perhaps, then, this is not the time to articulate
solutions when we are still struggling to ask the right questions. This sentiment is expressed perfectly by a joke iek told at
Occupy Wall Street[2], In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic , a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of
how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: Lets establish a code: if a letter you
will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false .
After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: Everything is wonderful here: stores are
full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair the only
thing unavailable is red ink. The point of the joke is that without the red ink, we lack the very language to
articulate our reality. Paraphrasing iek, what this lack of red ink means is that all the main terms we use to
designate the present situation productive consumer publics, informal economy and
freedom, common resources, etc. are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation
instead of allowing us to think it. Before we offer solutions, we need the red ink.
central scenario work, Europe and the USA each have to absorb 50 million migrants between now and 2060, with the rest of the developed world absorbing another 30 million.
and Detroit look like Manila abject slums alongside guarded skyscrapers; the UK workforce is a mixture of old white
people and newly arrived young migrants; the middle-income job has all but disappeared . If born in 2014, then by 2060 you are either a 45year-old barrister or a 45-year-old barista. There will be not much in-between. Capitalism will be in its fourth decade of stagnation
and then if we've done nothing about carbon emissions the really serious impacts of climate change are starting to
kick in. The OECD has a clear message for the world: for the rich countries, the best of capitalism is over. For
the poor ones now experiencing the glitter and haze of industrialisation it will be over by 2060. If you want higher growth, says the OECD, you
must accept higher inequality. And vice versa. Even to achieve a meagre average global growth rate of 3% we have to make labour "more flexible", the
economy more globalised. Those migrants scrambling over the fences at the Spanish city of Melilla, next to Morocco, we have to welcome, en masse, to the tune of maybe two or
armed with smartphones, and an increased sense of their human rights, will not accept a future of high inequality and low growth.
between two states involving at least 1,000 battle-deaths.7 They argue that most events in our data fall short of war, could never lead to war, and in many cases are trivial: they do not amount to interstate conflict in
First, war is conflict; even if not all conflicts are wars, observations of low-intensity conflicts
are valuable and should contribute to our understanding of war . Second, low-intensity does not mean
trivial. In the MID3 data events are coded by their intensity from level 1 (no action) through 2 (threat of force), 3 (display of force), and 4 (use of force), to 5 (war). We
any meaningful sense. Here we make two points.
drew the line to include events of level 3 and above; level 3 is defined by show of force, alert, nuclear alert, mobilization, fortify border, or border violation.8 We accept that every field has its technical
on the same continuum as real war. In particular, our critics argue: the use of force category in the MID data (that is, level 4) includes events such as fishing disputes where one country's coastguard seizes a vessel
from another state. Only 313, or about 20 per cent, of the 1,553 MIDs that involved use of force entail any recorded fatalities. Therefore, MIDs considered to include use of force hardly correspond to what most
We refute this as follows. While some fishing disputes are included at level 4 (use of force), coastguard or policing actions
it is wrong to conclude that most disputes at this level are one-sided or bloodless . Of 1,553 level 4
disputes, 844 (or more than half) are recorded as involving reciprocal action ; action by one state is followed by counteraction on the part of
another. Moreover, the level 4 disputes that lack recorded casualties or reciprocal action include a number of events that most
historians would classify as acts of war without question: for example, the German occupation of
Czechoslovakia and the Soviet occupations of the Baltic states are recorded as level 4 events with no casualties (or none recorded) and no
reciprocal action. As for fatalities, in these cases (and many others), a lack of recorded casualties is just a lack of
records. Moving closer to the present, we can analyse the more detailed narratives of level 4 disputes that transpired between 1992 and 2001. Of the 164 disputes described in this category, we can find the
people have in mind when they talk about interstate wars.10
are not typical, and
word fish or boat in 49 entries (or 30 per cent) but the word border appears in 74 entries (nearly half); we can find the words troop, soldier, forces, attack, bomb, shot, or kill in 109 entries (or two-
the general tenor of these events is darker and more ominous than Gleditsch and Pickering
imply. It would also be wrong to conclude that all level 3 conflicts (display of force) are trivial. Of the 119 disputes
thirds). Thus
recorded in this category between 1992 and 2001, only nine involved fish or boat; the word border appears in 58 entries (again, nearly half); we can find the words troop, soldier, forces, attack, bomb,
shot, or kill in 67 entries (more than half). Some of these developed into very violent conflict (ID 4083, for example, at the Kenyan-Ugandan border), or had grave potential to do so (ID 4281, China versus
Conflict is negative-sum interaction, even if it is not a war . Dramatic events can be hard to explain because they are rare.
Precisely because low-intensity events occur more frequently, we can hope to find regularities
among them that are not apparent from the more salient events . Costly exercises of military force,
even those that are mainly symbolic, that are designed to inform international relations by intimidating the
adversary, and so to shift the balance of bargaining power , are relatively frequent and should be of interest . From the point of view of
trade versus war, even low-intensity disputes signal a state's willingness to risk the two-sided gains from
cooperation and impose a deadweight loss in order to extract a possible one-sided gain from
conflict. Gleditsch and Pickering are right, and we acknowledge, that most events in our data fall short of war. Compared with 107 events that reach level 5, we have 1,553 events of level 4 and 569 of
Taiwan).
level 3 (another 103 are excluded at level 2). As we have explained, the reader should be comfortable with this degree of inclusivity. At the same time it is useful to know how our findings are affected by the variation
in intensity. We show this in two ways. Figure1 reproduces our original time plot of pairwise conflicts; the area shaded grey is the contribution of level 3 disputes, so the profile of the white area below it represents
disputes at levels 4 and 5. Figure 1. Militarized disputes between pairs of countries since 1870 Notes: Disputes are coded as level 1 (no action), 2 (threat of force), 3 (display of force), 4 (use of force), and 5 (war).
Source:Militarized Inter-State Disputes dataset, version 3.1, athttp://www.correlatesofwar.org, described by Ghosn et al., MID3 data set. In figure1 the considerable annual volatility tends to obscure the
implications of changing composition by intensity. Figure2 shows decadal averages normalized for the total number of disputes in the dataset (including those of level 2 that we did not use) in each period. It shows
disputes of lower intensity were more prevalent in the late nineteenth century , the 1920s, and the last decade of the
twentieth century. This is certainly of interest. It confirms that full-scale wars declined as a proportion of all
inter-state disputes over the twentieth century. It also shows that even in the last decade of the
twentieth century the proportion of disputes of lower intensity (levels 2 and 3) remained below that of the
late nineteenth century. As we have argued, none of this detracts from our findings. Figure 2. The distribution of
that
militarized disputes by intensity in decades since 1870 Source:As for fig. 1. Gleditsch and Pickering suggest that there are three selection biases in our data. The first arises from the way the Militarized Interstates
Disputes dataset codes conflicts of different intensity; as result, they maintain, trivial events will have been overrepresented: One implication of the MID coding rules is that more severe events are likely to give rise
to fewer disputes. Hence, they will be given systematically less weight in Harrison and Wolf's count of disputes. In particular, large scale wars such as the First World War and Second World War constitute a single
event in the COW MID dataset (IDs 257 and 258 respectively). By contrast, less serious militarized disputes such as those over the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea constituting approximately
five square kilometres of land are held to constitute 12 separate events.11 We refute this as follows. If it were the case, our original time plot (figure1) would show a reduction in the number of conflict events
around the times of the two world wars. Instead, it shows what anyone would expect to see: two spikes of violence. One reason for this is the presence in the data of many level 4 and 5 events that are associated with
each world war. The Second World War, for example, is represented by both ID 258 and at least 30 related conflicts starting from the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia with the Marco Polo Bridge incident of
1937 and ending with Mongolia's entry into the war. The 30 conflicts include the Soviet annexations in Poland and the Baltic in 1939/40; the number would rise to 36 if we included the various foreign interventions
in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and the Soviet border wars with Japan (in north China) and Finland in 1939 and 1940. All of these events are rightly in our data. As previously noted, some of them are graded level 4
rather than 5 although any historian would surely count them as acts of war. The other reason why our data show a spike is because ID 258, although a single event, involved many countries and therefore rates highly
when counting pairwise conflicts. We count pairwise because we are interested in state formation; when each new state is formed, a new potential is created for conflict with the existing set of country pairs. Of course
most of those potential conflicts are never realized, but some are; of those, most remain at a low level, but some do not. That is why we count pairwise. It may be true, as Gleditsch and Pickering point out, that the
distribution of the number of wars is not particularly skewed, but the number of country pairs does have a skew and we use logs in charting them for this reason.12 The aggregate number of pairs in the Second
World War can be counted up as follows. On a first pass, seven Axis countries fought 18 countries that were either Allies or victims of Axis aggression, making 126 pairs; 17 more pairs are added when France
changed to the side of the Axis; plus 12 more pairs when Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania changed sides the other way, making a total of 155 pairwise conflicts. Of course these conflicts were not all contemporaneous
and every country did not actually fight every other country (but alliance resources were actually or potentially fungible). For these reasons we see no particular risk that our data underrepresent more serious disputes.
The Spratly Islands lie at the other extreme. As Gleditsch and Pickering point out, disputes over the Spratlys contribute 12 events to our data, five of them rated at level 4. Twelve would be too many compared with
two world wars, but, as we have shown, the world wars contribute many times that number of events. Besides, although only an archipelago in the South China Sea constituting approximately five square kilometres
of land, the Spratlys are a far from trivial issue. Long a zone of contention among a number of littoral states, The Economist wrote recently, the South China Sea is fast becoming the focus of one of the most
serious bilateral disputes between America and China.13 Gleditsch and Pickering argue that the MID3 dataset is affected by two other biases. Both, they maintain, lead to underrepresentation of disputes in the early
period, and these bias upward our estimate of the rising trend in the data. One source is the concept of a world system of states that had diplomatic relations with the European powers, on which the MID3 data are
based. This system did not become truly global until the 1920s, so that some extrasystemic conflicts before this period are omitted.14 We acknowledge this. We note that this source of underrepresentation was
diminishing by the 1870s when our story starts. We also note that we can drop data from the period 1870 to 1914 altogether and still find the upward trend in level 4 and 5 events. The last remaining bias that our
critics suggest is at work is that lower-level militarized disputes tend to be severely undercounted the further back we go in time, due to systematic differences in the availability of sources.15 This is plausibleyet
it is directly contradicted by the evidence of figure2 which shows that lower level disputes are more, rather than less, prevalent in the data as we go back into the nineteenth century. We have defended our findings;
Our critics do not seriously address our main contribution. This is that state formation is
at the heart of many conflicts yet remains neglected in many empirical studies of conflict and war .
what do they imply?
Moreover, when new states are formed they acquire sovereignty, which is the capacity to decide between peace and war with their neighbours. A historical perspective that goes beyond the temporal and conceptual
purposes. Falling trade costs have disproportionately promoted long distance trade; in turn, this has
reduced the cost of disrupting cross-border trade with close neighbours. A growing economic
literature on state capacity introduces the supply side factors in conflict that political science has
tended to ignore.16 A convergence of these literatures would seem to offer great opportunities. In our article we noted specifically a long-run decline in the relative cost of destructive power. In
response, Gleditsch and Pickering note that most researchers dispute that there is any simple direct relationship between the costs of armaments and the risk of conflict.17 So would we; it is not what we argue.
As economists, we might think of trade between two countries (a positive sum game) and conflict (a negative sum game) as
alternatives. If that is the choice, then one factor among others is the time trend in cost of the war technology relative to the trade technology. Even if war technology
costs are changing at the same rate for all countries, moreover, countries A and B could respond
differently to a common change in conflict costs if they faced different marginal trade costs. Our critics
go further when they accuse us of neglecting the full costs of war, including the destruction caused by war and the opportunity costs of violent conflict, adding Any serious analysis of conflict must consider how
the full costs of war shape the incentive of actors, and their incentives to reach alternative solutions to contentious issues without the use of violence.18 In other words, they maintain, because we left out the
dimension of increasing destructive power, we omitted an important factor biasing national choices in favour of peace. But we did not leave it out; the basis of our argument was exactly that destructive power has
risen even faster than unit costs.19 We had in mind (but did not articulate) that, as destructive power increases, it raises issues that have been well known since the time of Kahn andSchelling: the advantage of
moving first can increase, deterrence and punishment of aggression can lose credibility, and the strategic balance that frames peaceful negotiation can be destabilized.20 Concluding their comment, Gleditsch and
Pickering contend that we have fallen prey to the ecological fallacy. The ecological fallacy states that in the presence of heterogeneity it can be misleading to predict the attributes of a member of some group from the
group mean.21 But this exactly inverts our argument. We want to shift the focus to the issue of group formation: given that individual attributes affect individual behaviour, mean behaviour in the system must reflect
both the attributes of heterogeneous individuals and the process that selects individuals for system membership. We write that according to the longstanding traditions of western political and philosophical thinking
on the future of war, the spread of democracy should crowd war out of the global community. Whoever else they fight, the evidence is compelling that Liberal or democratic states do not fight each other . 22 In
other words, we understand and accept the importance of heterogeneity among the membership of the international system. We go on to emphasize the selection aspect: if new entities are created within the system,
and new entities change the likelihood of interstate conflict, then that should be of interest. A simple example shows how. In the decade from 1992 to 2001 there were on average 187 countries, of which 92just over
halfwere non-democracies. There were also 38 pairwise conflicts a year of level 3 or above, each involving at least one non-democracy. If the probability of conflict between democratic pairs is roughly zero, then
the annual probability of conflict within any given pair involving at least one non-democracy was 0.3 per cent, which is a historically low level and certainly does not sound like much. In this context, what would be
the impact of creating one more country? Assume that conflict probabilities are independent (so conflicts are not serially related, and the fact that new states are often formed through conflict does not increase their
immediate conflict probabilities). Then, if the new country was a non-democracy, it would create 187 new country pairs, each of which has an annual conflict probability at level 3 or higher of 0.3 per cent. Across
187 pairs this makes a probability of the new country being involved in one pairwise conflict of 1 (1 0.003)187 = 43 per cent in one year, or 99.6 per cent over a decade. Even if the new state is a democracy, it
joins a world in which it must interact with 92 non-democracies. Across the 92 new pairs that include one non-democracy, the probability of one pairwise conflict is still 1 (1 0.003)92 = 24 per cent in one year, or
the formation of new states has been promoted by processes that we (with most
productivity growth, democracy, globalization, and the break-up of empires .
National self-determination is a universal value, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. Yet the formation of new states is clearly a source of
increasing conflict in global society, and has been promoted by the very things that have
underpinned an increasingly democratic and liberalized global order . New evidence demands to be
either explained or explained away. We welcome our critics' efforts to explain our evidence away. As scholars should, they ask whether our
work is robust. We have shown that it is. Our evidence has not been explained away. That is why we have tried to
94 per cent over a decade. In our view of global society,
others) would generally wish to welcome:
explain it.