COINTELPRO NEG 2.

Fugitivity Neg 2.0

Fugitivity Fails
Blackness is always already hyper visible the affirmative
misses the point some bodies will never have the
access to anonymity because of the black aesthetic
the affirmative allows for whiteness to remain
invisible and renders blackness as an attractor to
violence
Yancy 13, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College
who focuses primarily on issues of social justice, Walking While Black in
the White Gaze http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/walking-whileblack-in-the-white-gaze/?_r=0, NN

My point here is to say that the white gaze is global and historically
mobile. And its origins, while from Europe, are deeply seated in the making
of America. Black bodies in America continue to be reduced to their
surfaces and to stereotypes that are constricting and false, that
often force those black bodies to move through social spaces in
ways that put white people at ease. We fear that our black bodies incite
an accusation. We move in ways that help us to survive the
procrustean gazes of white people. We dread that those who see us
might feel the irrational fear to stand their ground rather than
finding common ground, a reference that was made by Bernice King as
she spoke about the legacy of her father at the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial. The white gaze is also hegemonic, historically grounded in material
relations of white power: it was deemed disrespectful for a black person to
violate the white gaze by looking directly into the eyes of someone white. The
white gaze is also ethically solipsistic: within it only whites have the
capacity of making valid moral judgments. Even with the
unprecedented White House briefing, our national discourse regarding
Trayvon Martin and questions of race have failed to produce a
critical and historically conscious discourse that sheds light on what
it means to be black in an anti-black America. If historical precedent
says anything, this failure will only continue. Trayvon Martin, like so many
black boys and men, was under surveillance (etymologically, to keep
watch). Little did he know that on Feb. 26, 2012, that he would enter
a space of social control and bodily policing, a kind of Benthamian
panoptic nightmare that would truncate his being as suspicious; a space
where he was, paradoxically, both invisible and yet hypervisible. I
am invisible, understand, simply because people [in this case white
people] refuse to see me. Trayvon was invisible to Zimmerman, he
was not seen as the black child that he was, trying to make it back
home with Skittles and an iced tea. He was not seen as having done
nothing wrong, as one who dreams and hopes. As black, Trayvon
was already known and rendered invisible. His childhood and humanity
were already criminalized as part of a white racist narrative about black male
bodies. Trayvon needed no introduction: Look, the black; the
criminal!

Anonymity allows whiteness to remain unchallenged while

people of color are continuously exploitegd
Rodriguez 15, Princess Harmony Rodriguez, 3/27/15, Princess is an afrolatin trans woman, survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence, creator,
otaku, and anti-violence activist. Her writing has been published on The
Feminist Wire, Feministing, Black Girl Dangerous, Know Your IX, and
FeministaJones.com. Who Are the Real Victims?: SAE Racist Chant, Yik Yak,
and the Weapon of Anonymity
Recently, a video depicting members of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon
(SAE) singing a racial slur-laden song making reference to lynching shocked
and appalled the nation. The outcry resulted in a near-instantaneous
dissolution of the chapter and expulsion of its ringleaders. However, the
attitudes expressed by SAE arent exactly isolated. In fact, the
outcry spawned the #NotJustSAE hashtag in which students of color
shared our experiences with racism on our college campuses. An
ongoing source of controversy, Twitter and Facebook university
confessions pages and anonymous posting apps are making waves
for the exact same reasons. In particular, the app Yik Yak has been
highlighted as a source of trouble because of the chaos it enables. While
some posts are innocent, such as those asking about parties or asking who
got the hookup to a good weed man, there are too many that are dedicated
to violent and white supremacist acts. On campuses across America, the app
is either creating or worsening gender, racial, and class divisions. Schools,
including schools already under a microscope for their (mis)handling of
sexual violence, are allowing individual students who come forward about
sexual violence to get targeted by those who were reported. A dear friend of
mine, who had already survived violence, was targeted on her colleges Yik
Yak. They threatened her with violence for daring to speak what happened to
her. I saw the screenshots and so did the administration. Similarly, schools
already the target of criticism for their racial divisions are rife with yaks that
are filled with violent threats and racial epithets. For example, a school in
North Philadelphia thats already the target of criticism for gentrifying the
area and for having a disturbingly high number of overt racists has racist
yaks posted almost every day. Words that ordinarily have no negative
connotation to them, such as local, are racialized and turned into an
acceptable form of the N-word. When posts get reported to college
administrators, its almost a given that the administration will wash its hands
of the responsibility to handle it. Civil rights laws such as Title VI and Title IX
(among others) and the Department of Educations subsequent Dear
Colleague Letters say that universities have a responsibility to handle
violence and harassment from students on campus, even if the violence
occurs online. By ignoring and failing to acknowledge incidents of harassment
and violence, theyre breaking the law. Even if theyre unable to track down
who is responsible for particular threats, they can at least make an attempt to
acknowledge the problem. This highlights the problem of anonymity. When
people use anonymity, it can either be used for innocuous or outright
negative purposes. In Yik Yaks case, as has been noted across the country,
its used mostly for negative purposes. In its short history, Yik Yak has been
used to make bomb threats, target specific students who were already
survivors of sexual violence, target entire races of people, and threaten said

people with violence. In each of those examples, with the exception of only a
few, not only did those posts remain, they got upvoted. And they didnt get
just one or two upvotes, they got dozens of upvotes. Most yaks dont even
get 5 upvotes. But they got dozens. Juxtapose that with statements made by
one of its creators. Brooks Buffington claimed the app was made for the
disenfranchised. With violent yaks not being removed and a constant
stream of racist yaks, who really is disenfranchised to them? Who really is
marginalized to them? Who are the real victims? The answer is simple. The
victims are the white bros who use that app, in their own minds. Then, what
purpose does anonymity especially in terms of this particular app serve?
Anonymity serves as a weapon for the patriarchy. Why? Because theyre not
held accountable for their words. When someone posts an anti-black, racist,
and/or misogynistic yak, the people who view it including the people in
charge of moderating those posts support it. They upvote it. Even if people
report the post, its probably not gonna go down. In other words, it serves as
a weapon for the patriarchy because the audience of that post, from top to
bottom, supports that viewpoint. And thats more than just within the app,
since this app was targeted at college students, so the audience then
includes administration because its inevitable that theyll get involved.
Usually, involved only means that they acknowledge that its happening
and then nothing happens from there. Despite their responsibility to protect
their students from violence, particularly violence based on race, gender,
etc., they refuse to act. They protect and enable the status quo: violence
towards gender/sexual minorities, people with disabilities, and oppressed
racial groups. With the exclusion of incidents that go viral, such as the SAE
chant, this status quo is never challenged by administration, There is an
unspoken agreement between the powers that be and the students that
violence against oppressed people is okay. In an ideal world, anonymity
would protect the oppressed and serve as a means for us to subvert
the negative things forced on us. However, that is not the world we
live in and while there are those who have used anonymity for that
purpose, its more common to run into racists and misogynists using
anonymity as a shield to keep themselves from being accountable
for their words and actions. In this world, anonymity and the existing
power structure make it so that oppressors dont have to be
accountable for their actions or words unless they become too much
of a burden for the patriarchy to protect. For us to further the
conversation started by #NotJustSAE, we have to acknowledge the
challenges that anonymity creates for oppressed people. Some
college students started campaigns to take back Yik Yak from students who
use it to harm others. While anonymity serves as a weapon for the
oppressors, it can be made to serve us as a means to fight back and change
the environment on the internet, on campus, and in society overall.

AT: Social Death

Social death theory is wrong it ignores black insurrection
and cultural heritage proves violence is contingent
and reform is possible
Ba 11, Saer Maty Ba is a professor at Portsmouth university, The US
Decentred From Black Social Death to Cultural Transformation
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/2304/2474, NN

Red, White and Black is particularly undermined by Wildersons

propensity for exaggeration and blinkeredness. In chapter nine,
Savage Negrophobia, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all
too aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became Black
style ... Blackness can be placed and displaced with limitless
frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses.
Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do to either
check or direct this process ... Anyone can say nigger because anyone
can be a nigger. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, A Crisis in the Commons,
Wilderson addresses the issue of Black time. Black is irredeemable, he
argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or deemed
through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black
moment and place are not right because they are the ship hold of the
Middle Passage: the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time
but also the moment of no time at all on the map of no place at all. (279)
Not only does Pinhos more mature analysis expose this point as preposterous
(see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless
historians and sociologists works on slave ships, shipboard
insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of
groundbreaking jazzstudies books on crosscultural dialogue like
The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once
Wilderson theorises blacks as socially and ontologically dead while
dismissing jazz as belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there
for the taking, (225) there seems to be no way back. It is therefore hardly
surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative
to both his sustained bashing of blacks and anti Blackness.9 Last but not
least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a
bad Hollywood films badly planned sequel: How does one deconstruct life?
Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle approaches with its
answers in tow. (340)

Academic Colonialism
Decolonization ignores the black body and cannot be
integrated into a framework because it justifies
white supremacy
Tuck and Yang, State University of New York, 2012,

(Decolonization is not a metaphor file:///Users/kalyani/Downloads/1863043263-1-PB.pdf-KA)

Alongside this work, we have been thinking about what decolonization
means, what it wants and requires. One trend we have noticed, with growing
apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization
has been superficially adopted into education and other social
sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice,
critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler
perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project
from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far
too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no
regard for how decolonization wants something different than those
forms of justice. Settler scholars swap out prior civil and human rights
based terms, seemingly to signal both an awareness of the significance of
Indigenous and decolonizing theorizations of schooling and educational
research, and to include Indigenous peoples on the list of considerations - as
an additional special (ethnic) group or class. At a conference on educational
research, it is not uncommon to hear speakers refer, almost casually,
to the need to decolonize our schools, or use decolonizing
methods, or decolonize student thinking. Yet, we have observed
a startling number of these discussions make no mention of
Indigenous Decolonization is not a metaphor 3 peoples, our/their1
struggles for the recognition of our/their sovereignty, or the
contributions of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to theories
and frameworks of decolonization. Further, there is often little
recognition given to the immediate context of settler colonialism on the North
American lands where many of these conferences take place. Of course,
dressing up in the language of decolonization is not as offensive as Navajo
print underwear sold at a clothing chain store (Gaynor, 2012) and other
appropriations of Indigenous cultures and materials that occur so frequently.
Yet, this kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it
domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it
recapitulates dominant theories of social change. On the occasion of the
inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, we want
to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor
invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization;
it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to
the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and
decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing
discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are antiracist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption,
adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler

appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a

metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of
oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we
want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesnt have
a synonym.

Their reading of the aff and asking for the ballot

reproduces the commodification of the lives of the
oppressed by exploiting them and colonizing the
work of subjugated communities

Thompson in 3 <Audrey. Tiffany, friend of people of color: White

investments in antiracism QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION, 2003, VOL.
16, NO. 1, 729>
Indeed, Collins finds it suspicious that black feminism is so well received by White women.20 Such
suspicions are prompted by the history of whites appropriation of black and brown bodies, words, songs,

white women have long taken up black

womens texts and voices for our own activist purposes profiting
much more from the commodification of black voices than have the
black women invoked in the white texts. Whereas Sojourner Truth had to sell
and symbols. As Nell Irvin Painter observes,

photographic cartes de visite for 33 cents apiece to support her abolitionist work, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Tapping a marketable
subject in an era when material on the Negro was very much in
demand, Stowe who had already made a fortune from Uncle Toms Cabin but found herself in
need of further funds min[ed] the vein that had produced her black
characters in Uncle Toms Cabin. Writing for the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, Stowe
earned money by writing about Truth and other African Americans.21

made Truth into a quaint and innocent exotic who disdained feminism.22 Later, in a reversal of her
symbolic fortunes, Truth was appropriated for white feminist purposes. In the white feminist reform
literature, Sojourner Truth became a suffragist more than an abolitionist symbol, famous mostly for having
said and arnt I a woman? a line that Frances Dana Gage, a white woman, composed and attributed to

white academics who take up the texts (and

lives and projects) of people of color for progressive purposes risk
exploiting them for our own insufficiently examined ends. Writing an open
Truth.23 Like Stowe and Gage,

letter to Mary Daly in 1979, Audre Lorde told her, The history of white women who are unable to hear
Black womens words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging.24 Rather than ever
really read the work of Black women and other women of color, white feminists tend to finger through
[such work] for quotations that they think will support an already-conceived idea concerning some old
and distorted connection between us.25 The question Lorde asked Daly might be asked of white feminists
and white progressives in general: Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for what
it could give you? Or did you hunt through only to find words that would legitimize your own claims about

When white scholars strategically quote material by

scholars of color to support an already-conceived idea, we
colonize the work of the Other to enrich our writing and enhance our
authority. Like Stowe, we mine the lives and writings of people of color to
produce a more marketable commodity.27 Indeed, even when we are true to the
work we study, whites may profit in ways wholly out of proportion to our
historical contribution to the field. Long before the academy began to accept whiteness
race and racism?26

as a distinctive area of research, it had been the subject of countless works of theory, fiction, art, and
journalism by people of color. Although some of the contemporary scholarship on whiteness by white
authors recognizes our indebtedness to classic and pathbreaking work by James Baldwin, Vine Deloria, Toni

The very
acknowledgement of our racism and privilege can be turned to our
advantage.
Morrison, and others, whiteness theory nevertheless seems to be ours.

The focus on racialized surveillance becomes an alibi for

acquiescence of class struggles they obscure the logic of capital
and ensure repetition of oppression
Zavarzadeh 94 (Mas'Ud, The Stupidity That Consumption Is Just as
Productive as Production": In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left," College
Literature, Vol. 21, No. 3, The Politics of Teaching Literature 2 (Oct., 1994),pp.
92-114)
Post-al logic is marked above all by its erasure of "production" as the determining
force in organizing human societies and their institutions, and its insistence on
"consumption" and "distribution" as the driving force of the social .5 The
argument of the post-al left (briefly) is that "labor," in advanced industrial "democracies," is
superseded by "information," and consequently "knowledge" (not class struggle over the
rate of surplus labor) has become the driving force of history . The task of the post-al left is
to deconstruct the "metaphysics of labor" and consequently to announce the end of socialism and with it
the "outdatedness" of the praxis of abolishing private property (that is, congealed alienated labor) in the
post-al moment. Instead of abolishing private property, an enlightened radical democracy which is to
supplant socialism (as Laclau, Mouffe, Aronowitz, Butler, and others have advised) should make property
holders of each citizen. The post-al left rejects the global objective conditions of production for the local
subjective circumstances of consumption, and its master trope is what R-4 [France] so clearly foregrounds:
the (shopping) "mall"?the ultimate site of consumption "with all latest high-tech textwares" deployed to
pleasure the "body." In fact, the post-al left has "invented" a whole new interdiscipline called "cultural
studies" that provides the new alibi for the regime of profit by shifting social analytics from "production" to
"consumption." (On the political economy of "invention" in ludic theory, see Transformation 2 on "The
Invention of the Queer.") To prove its "progressiveness," the post-al left devotes most of its energies (see
the writings of John Fiske, Constance Penley, Michael Berube, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Andrew Ross, Susan
Willis, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson), to demonstrate how "consumption" is in fact an act of production and
resistance to capitalism and a practice in which a Utopian vision for a society of equality is performed!

The shift from "production" to "consumption" manifests itself in post-al left theories
through the focus on "superstructural" cultural analysis and the preoccupation not with the "political
economy" ("base") but with "representation"? for instance, of race, sexuality,
environment, ethnicity, nationality, and identity. This is, for example, one reason for [Hill's] ridiculing
the "base" and "superstructure" analytical model of classical Marxism (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy) with an anecdote (the privileged mode of "argument" for the post-al left) that the
base is really not all that "basic." To adhere to the base/superstructure model for [him] is to be thrown into

For the post-al left a good society is, therefore, one in which,
as [France] puts it, class antagonism is bracketed and the "surplus value" is
distributed more evenly among men and women, whites and persons of color,
the lesbian and the straight. It is not a society in which "surplus value"?the exploitative
an "epistemological gulag."

appropriation of the other's labor-is itself eliminated by revolutionary praxis. The post-al left's good society
is not one in which private ownership is obsolete and the social division of labor (class) is abolished. Rather

it is a society in which the fruit of exploitation of the proletariat (surplus labor) is

more evenly distributed and a near-equality of consumption is established. This

distributionist/consumptionist theory that underwrites the economic interests of the (upper)middle classes
is the foundation for all the texts in this exchange and their pedagogies. A good pedagogy in these texts
therefore is one in which power is distributed evenly in the classroom: a pedagogy that constructs a
classroom of consensus not antagonism (thus opposition to "politicizing the classroom" in OR-1 [Hogan])
and in which knowledge (concept) is turned through the process that OR-3 [McCormick] calls "translation"?
into "consumable" EXPERIENCES. The more "intense" the experience, as the anecdotes of [McCormick]

it is a pedagogy that removes the

student from his/her position in the social relations of production
and places her/him in the personal relation of consumption: specifically,
EXPERIENCE of/as the consumption of pleasure. The post-al logic obscures the laws of motion of
capital by very specific assumptions and moves-many of which are rehearsed in the texts here. I will
show, the more successful the pedagogy. In short,

discuss some of these, mention others in passing, and hint at several more. (I have provided a full account
of all these moves in my "Post-ality" in Transformation 1.) I begin by outlining the post-al assumptions that
"democracy" is a never-ending, open "dialogue" and "conversation" among multicultural citizens; that the
source of social inequities is "power"; that a post-class hegemonic "coalition," as OR-5 [Williams] calls it-

and not class struggle-is the dynamics of social change; that truth (as R-l [Hill] writes) is an
"epistemological gulag"? a construct of power and thus any form of "ideology critique" that raises
questions of "falsehood" and "truth" ("false consciousness") does so through a violent exclusion of the
"other" truths by, in [Williams'] words, "staking sole legitimate claim" to the truth in question. Given the
injunction of the post-al logic against binaries (truth/falsehood), the project of "epistemology" is displaced
in the ludic academy by "rhetoric." The question, consequently, becomes not so much what is the "truth"
of a practice but whether it "works." (Rhetoric has always served as an alibi for pragmatism.) Therefore,
[France] is not interested in whether my practices are truthful but in what effects they might have: if
College Literature publishes my texts would such an act (regardless of the "truth" of my texts) end up
"cutting our funding?" [he] asks. A post-al leftist like [France], in short, "resists" the state only in so far as
the state does not cut [his] "funding." Similarly, it is enough for a cynical pragmatist like [Williams] to
conclude that my argument "has little prospect of effectual force" in order to disregard its truthfulness.

The post-al dismantling of "epistemology" and the erasure of the question of

"truth," it must be pointed out, is undertaken to protect the economic interests of
the ruling class. If the "truth question" is made to seem outdated and an
example of an orthodox binarism ([Hill]), any conclusions about the truth of
ruling class practices are excluded from the scene of social contestation as a
violent logocentric (positivistic) totalization that disregards the "difference" of the
ruling class. This is why a defender of the ruling class such as [Hill] sees an ideology critique aimed at
unveiling false consciousness and the production of class consciousness as a form of "epistemological
spanking." It is this structure of assumptions that enables [France] to answer my question, "What is wrong
with being dogmatic?" not in terms of its truth but by reference to its pragmatics (rhetoric): what is
"wrong" with dogmatism, [he] says, is that it is violent rhetoric ("textual Chernobyl") and thus Stalinist. If I
ask what is wrong with Stalinism, again (in terms of the logic of [his] text) I will not get a political or

The post-al left is a New Age Left: the "new

dialogic left of
coalitions, voluntary work, and neighborhood activism (more on these later). It is, as I will show,
philosophical argument but a tropological description.6

new left" privileged by [Hill] and [Williams]- the laid-back, "sensitive," listening, and

anti-intellectual and populist; its theory is "bite size" (mystifying, of course, who determines the "size" of
the "bite"), and its model of social change is anti-conceptual "spontaneity": May 68, the fall of the Berlin
Wall, and, in [Hill's] text, Chiapas. In the classroom, the New Age post-al pedagogy inhibits any critique of
the truth of students' statements and instead offers, as [McCormick] makes clear, a "counseling," through

The rejection of "truth" (as "epistemological gulag"?[Hill]), is

accompanied by the rejection of what the post-al left calls "economism." Furthermore, the
post-al logic relativizes subjectivities , critiques functionalist explanation, opposes
"determinism," and instead of closural readings, offers supplementary ones. It also celebrates
eclecticism; puts great emphasis on the social as discourse and on discourse as always
anecdotes, concerning feelings.

inexhaustible by any single interpretation? discourse (the social) always "outruns" and "exceeds" its
explanation. Post-al logic is, in fact, opposed to any form of "explanation" and in favor of mimetic
description: it regards "explanation" to be the intrusion of a violent outside and "description" to be a
respectful, caring attention to the immanent laws of signification (inside). This notion of description which
has by now become a new dogma in ludic feminist theory under the concept of "mimesis" (D. Cornell,
Beyond Accommodation)?regards politics to be always immanent to practices: thus the banalities about
not politicizing the classroom in [Hogan's] "anarchist" response to my text7 and the repeated opposition to

The opposition to binaries is, in fact, an ideological alibi

for erasing class struggle, as is quite clear in [France's] rejection of the model of a
binaries in all nine texts.

society "divided by two antagonistic classes" (see my Theory and its Other).

The affs solvency relies on empathetic identification with the

suffering and injustice outlined in the aff it seeks to make
suffering visible and intelligible which denies and erases
the experience of the other
Hartman, 97 <Saidya Hartman, Saidiya Hartman is a professor at
Columbia University specializing in African American literature and history.
She grew up in Brooklyn and received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and
Ph.D. from Yale University, Scenes of Subjection, Accessed: 4/25/14>

By making the suffering of others his own, has Rankin ameliorated indifference or only confirmed the

Can the white witness of the

spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of black sentience only
by feeling for himself? Does this not only exacerbate the idea that
black sentience is inconceivable and unimaginable but, in the very
ease of possessing the abased and enslaved body, ultimately elide
an understanding and acknowledgment of the slave's pain? Beyond
evidence of slavery's crime, what does this exposure of the suffering body of the bondsman yield? Does
this not reinforce the "thingly" quality of the captive by reducing the
body to evidence in the very effort to establish the humanity of the
enslaved? Does it not reproduce the hyperembodiness of the
powerless? The purpose of these inquiries is not to cast doubt on
Rankin's motives for recounting these events but to consider the
precariousness of empathy and the thin line between witness and
spectator. In the fantasy of being beaten, Rankin must substitute
himself and his wife and children for the black captive in order that
this pain be perceived and experienced. So, in fact, Rankin becomes a proxy and the
other's pain is acknowledged to the degree that it can be imagined, yet by virtue of this
substitution the object of identification threatens to disappear. In order
difficulty of understanding the suffering of the enslaved?

to convince the reader of the horrors of slavery, Rankin must volunteer himself and his family for

the effort to counteract the commonplace

callousness to black suffering requires that the white body be
positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this
suffering visible and intelligible.Yet if this violence can become
palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only through the
masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is doubleedged, for in making the other's suffering one's own, this suffering is
occluded by the others obliteration. Given the litany of horrors that fill Rankin's pages,
this recourse to fantasy reveals an anxiety about making the slave's
suffering legible. This anxiety is historically determined by the
denial of black sentience, the slave's status as object of property,
the predicament of witnessing given the legal status of blacks, and
the repression of counterdiscourses on the "peculiar institution. "
Therefore, Rankin must supplant the black captive in order to give
expression to black suffering, and as a consequence, the dilemmathe denial of black sentience and the obscurity of suffering-is not
attenuated but instantiated. The ambivalent character of empathy-more exactly, the
repressive effects of empathy-as Jonathan Boyarin notes, can be located in the
"obliteration of otherness" or the facile intimacy that enables
identification with the other only as we "feel ourselves into those
we imagine as ourselves." And as a consequence, empathy fails to
expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead .
abasement. Put differently,

5 This is not to suggest that empathy can be discarded or that Rankin's desire to exist in the place of the
other can be dismissed as a narcissistic exercise but rather to highlight the dangers of a too-easy intimacy,
the consideration of the self that occurs at the expense of the slave's suffering, and the violence of
identification.6

Their call for counternarratives rely on empathetic identification

by conjuring the judge/debaters liberal self-worth to get a
ballot. This reinscribes suffering by making fungible the
experience of the other and simultaneously destroying
their experience turns the case by recreating colonialism
Hartman, 97 <Saidya Hartman, Saidiya Hartman is a professor at
Columbia University specializing in African American literature and history.
She grew up in Brooklyn and received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and
Ph.D. from Yale University, Scenes of Subjection>

In an epistle to his brother, John Rankin illumined the "very dangerous evil" of slavery in a description of
the coffle, detailing the obscene theatricality of the slave trade: "Unfeeling wretches purchased a
considerable drove of slaves how many of them were separated from husbands and wives, I will not
pretend to say-and having chained a number of them together, hoisted over the flag of American liberty,
and with the music of two violins marched the woe-worn, heart-broken, and sobbing creatures through the
town." 1 Rankin, aghast at the spectacle and shocked by "seeing the most oppressive sorrows of suffering
innocence mocked with all the lightness of sportive music,'' decried: ''My soul abhors the crime.'' The
violation of domesticity, the parody of liberty, and the callous defiance of sorrow define the scene in which
crime becomes spectacle. The "very dangerous evil" of slavery and the "agonizing groans of suffering
humanity" had been made music.2 Although Rankin conceded that the cruelty of slavery "far exceed[ed]
the power of description," he nonetheless strove to render the horrors of slavery, And in so doing, Rankin

the crimes of slavery are not only witnessed but

staged. This is a result of the recourse to terms like "stage," "spectacle, and "scene in conveying
makes apparent that

these horrors, and, more important, because the abominations of slavery" are disclosed through the
reiteration of secondhand accounts and circulating stories from "unquestionable authorities" to which
Rankin must act as surrogate witness. In the effort to "bring slavery close," these circulating reports of

The grotesqueries enumerated in

documenting the injustice of slavery are intended to shock and to
disrupt the comfortable remove of the reader/spectator. By providing
the minutest detail of macabre acts of violence , embellished by his own fantasy
of slavery's bloodstained gate, Rankin hoped to rouse the sensibility of those
indifferent to slavery by exhibit ing the suffering of the enslaved and
facilitating an identification between those free and those enslaved:
atrocity, in essence, are reenacted in Rankin epistles.

"We are naturally too callous to the sufferings of others, and consequently prone to look upon them with

in imagination we identify ourselves with the

sufferers, and make their sufferings our own .... When I bring it near, inspect it
cold indifference, until,

closely, and find that it is inflicted on men and women, who possess the same nature and feelings with
myself, my sensibility is roused" (56-57).

By bringing suffering near, the ties of

sentiment are forged.

In letter after letter, Rankin strove to create this shared experience of

horror in order to transform his slaveholding brother, to whom the letters were addressed, as well as the

In this case, pain provides the common language of

humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and, in turn,
remedies the indifference of the callous. The shocking accounts of whipping, rape,
mutilation, and suicide assault the barrier of indifference, for the abhorrence and
indignity roused by these scenes of terror, which range from the
mockery of the coffle to the dismemberment and incineration of a
slave boy, give rise to a shared sentience between those formerly
indifferent and those suffering. So intent and determined is Rankin to establish that
audience of readers.

slaves possess the same nature and feelings as himself, and thereby establish the common humanity of all

he literally narrates an imagined

scenario in which he, along with his wife and child, is enslaved. The
men on the basis of this extended suffering, that

"horrible scenes of cruelty that were presented to [his] mind as a consequence of this imagining aroused

this scenario enables Rankin to

speak not only for but literally in the place of the enslaved. By believing
the ''highest pitch of indignant feeling.'' In addition

himself to be and by phantasmically becoming the enslaved, he creates the scenario for shared feelings:
My flighty imagination added much to the tumult of passion by persuading me, for he moment, that 1

myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in reality to feel
for myself, my wife, and my children-the thoughts of being whipped at the pleasure of a morose and
capricious master, aroused the strongest feelings of resentment; but when I fancied the cruel lash was.
Approaching my wife and children, and my imagination depicted in lively colors, their tears, their shrieks,
and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of my bloody nature was exerted to the highest degree. (56)
The nature of the feelings aroused here is rather complicated. While this flight of imagination enables a
vicarious firsthand experience of the lash, excoriates the pleasure experienced by the master in this brutal

the phantasmic
vehicle of this identification is complicated, unsettling, and
disturbing. Although Rankin's fantasy culminates in indignant
outcries against the institution of slavery and, clearly, the purpose
of this identification is to highlight the crimes of slavery, this flight
of imagination and slipping into the captive's body unlatches a
Pandora's box and, surprisingly, what comes to the fore is the difficulty and
slipperiness of empathy. Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself
into another in order to better under stand the other or "the projection of
one's own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one's own emotions."4 Yet
empathy in important respects confounds Rankin's efforts to identify with
the enslaved because in making the slave's suffering his own, Rankin
begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in
imagination presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting
the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses,
thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave
inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the
relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin's empathic
identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt
opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body.
exercise of power, and unleashes Rankin's fiery indignation and resentment,

Their method relies on the external validation of suffering in order

to attain empowerment and resistance this recreates
academic colonialism the right to conquer is intimately
connected to the right to know
Tuck and Yang 2014 [Eve, & K.W., R-Words: Refusing Research. In n D.
Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative
inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223-248). Thousand Oakes, CA:
Sage Publications. Pp. 223-6]

Research is a dirty word among many Native communities (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), and arguably, also
among ghettoized (Kelley, 1997), Orientalized (Said, 1978), and other communities of overstudied Others.
The ethical standards of the academic industrial complex are a recent development, and like so many
postcivil rights reforms, do not always do enough to ensure that social science research is deeply ethical,

Social science often

works to collect stories of pain and humiliation in the lives of those
being researched for commodification. However, these same stories of
pain and humiliation are part of the collective wisdom that often
informs the writings of researchers who attempt to position their
intellectual work as decolonization. Indeed, to refute the crime, we
may need to name it. How do we learn from and respect the wisdom
and desires in the stories that we (over) hear, while refusing to
portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze?
How do we develop an ethics for research that differentiates
meaningful, or useful for the individual or community being researched.

between powerwhich deserves a denuding, indeed petrifying

scrutinyand people? At the same time, as fraught as research is in its complicity with power,
it is one of the last places for legitimated inquiry. It is at least still a space that proclaims to care about

we theorize refusal not just as a no, but as a type

of investigation into what you need to know and what I refuse to
write in (Simpson, 2007, p. 72). Therefore, we present a refusal to do research,
or a refusal within research, as a way of thinking about humanizing
researchers. We have organized this chapter into four portions. In the first three sections, we lay
curiosity. In this essay,

out three axioms of social science research. Following the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990), we use
the exposition of these axioms to articulate otherwise implicit, methodological, definitional, self-evident

refusal. The axioms are: (I) The

subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain; (II)
there are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesnt
deserve; and (III) research may not be the intervention that is
needed. We realize that these axioms may not appear self evident to everyone, yet asserting them as
groundings (p. 12) of our arguments and observations of

apparent allows us to proceed toward the often unquestioned limits of research. Indeed, in dealing with
an open secret structure, its only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the
vicinity of the transformative (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 22). In the fourth section of the chapter, we theorize
refusal in earnest, exploring ideas that are still forming. Our thinking and writing in this essay is informed
by our readings of postcolonial literatures and critical literatures on settler colonialism. We locate much
of our analysis inside/in relation to the discourse of settler colonialism, the particular shape of colonial
domination in the United States and elsewhere, including Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Settler
colonialism can be differentiated from what one might call exogenous colonialism in that the colonizers

The
permanence of settler colonialism makes it a structure, not just an
event (Wolfe, 1999). The settler colonial nation-state is dependent on
destroying and erasing Indigenous inhabitants in order to clear
them from valuable land. The settler colonial structure also requires
the enslavement and labor of bodies that have been stolen from
their homelands and transported in order to labor the land stolen
from Indigenous people. Settler colonialism refers to a triad
relationship, between the White settler (who is valued for his leadership and
innovative mind), the disappeared Indigenous peoples (whose land is valued, so they
and their claims to it must be extinguished), and the chattel slaves (whose bodies are
valuable but ownable, abusable, and murderable). We believe that this triad is the basis of
the formation of Whiteness in settler colonial nation-states, and
that the interplay of erasure, bodies, land, and violence is
characteristic of the permanence of settler colonial structures.
Under coloniality, Descartes formulation, cognito ergo sum (I think,
therefore I am) transforms into ego conquiro (I conquer, therefore I
am; Dussel, 1985; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlvou-Gatsheni, 2011). Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2009)
arrive at a place (discovering it) and make it a permanent home (claiming it).

expounds on this relationship of the conquerors sense-of-self to his knowledge-of-others (I know her,

Knowledge of self/Others became the philosophical

justification for the acquisition of bodies and territories, and the
rule over them. Thus the right to conquer is intimately connected to
the right to know (I know, therefore I conquer, therefore I am). Maldonado- Torres (2009)
therefore I am me).

explains that for Levi Strauss, the self/Other knowledge paradigm is the methodological rule for the birth

Settler colonial knowledge is premised on

frontiers; conquest, then, is an exercise of the felt entitlement to
transgress these limits. Refusal, and stances of refusal in research, are
attempts to place limits on conquest and the colonization of
knowledge by marking what is off limits, what is not up for grabs or
discussion, what is sacred, and what cant be known. To speak of limits in
of ethnology as a science (pp. 34).

such a way makes some liberal thinkers uncomfortable, and may, to them, seem dangerous. When access

to information, to knowledge, to the intellectual commons is controlled by the people who generate that
information [participants in a research study], it can be seen as a violation of shared standards of justice

By forwarding a framework of refusal within (and

We are
making visible invisibilized limits, containments, and seizures that
research already stakes out.
and truth. (Simpson, 2007, p. 74)

to) research in this chapter, we are not simply prescribing limits to social science research.

It is necessary to recognize the inherent lack of safety

when working within academic spaces as well as its
inherent colonial foundation that must be abolished
instead of survived in

Rodriguez in 12 chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the

University of California <Dylan. Racial/Colonial Genocide and the "Neoliberal
Academy": In Excess of a Problematic", American Quarterly. Volume 64.
Number 4. December 2012>
My place of employment reflects how the U.S. academy remains constituted by its
gendered racist, apartheid, colonial foundations. As several students and
colleagues remind me, the desecration of Indian burial grounds has guided the construction and expansion
of the land grant institution at which I work, the University of California, Riversidethat is, desecration is
not an incidental and fleeting moment in the campuss creation, it is the continual condition of UCRs
existence as such.1 Second, recent UCR police practices are saturated with antiblack racism and racial
profiling, landmarked by a set of early-2000s exchanges between renowned African American historian
Sterling Stuckey and then Chancellor Raymond Orbach. Stuckey detailed the UCRPDs yearlong
harassment of one black graduate student in particular (detained multiple times by campus police while
walking to the library), remarking that circumstances at UCR [have] made it impossible for me to go on

the academys
paradigmatic ordering of bodies, vulnerabilities, and intellectual
hierarchies. That is, such everyday dehumanization illustrates the
systemic logics, institutional techniques, rhetorics, and
epistemologies of violence and power that undergird the academys
racial and colonial foundations evenespeciallyas they resurface
in our current working and thinking conditions. These dehumanizing violences
recruiting black graduate students.2 These local examples express

exceed the effects of the academys neoliberalization; they require an urgent, strategic, mutual centering
of the analytics of racial/colonial genocide. Framed in the long historical scope of modernity, racial/colonial
genocide is a logic of human extermination that encompasses extended temporal, cultural, biological, and
territorial dimensions:3 the mind-boggling body counts associated with commonly recognized genocides
are but one fragment of a larger historical regime that requires the perpetual social neutralization (if not
actual elimination) of targeted populations as (white, patriarchal) modernitys premise of [End Page 809]
historical-material continuity. This is why Indian reservations, the U.S. prison and criminalization regime,
and even Arizonas ban on ethnic studies need to be critically addressed through a genocide analytic as
well as through focused critiques of neoliberalisms cultural and economic structures:

the logics of

social neutralization (civil death, land expropriation, white supremacist curricular enforcement)
always demonstrate the capacity (if not the actually existing political will and
institutional inclination) to effectively exterminate people from social spaces
and wipe them out of the social text. To appropriate a well-known phrase, Im
advancing an abolitionist praxis without guaranteesof either victory or survival. Here

abolitionist invokes and identifies the genealogies of freedom

struggle that emerge in direct, radical confrontation with genocidal
and protogenocidal regimes: lineages of political-intellectual
creativity and organized, collective (and at times revolutionary) insurgency
that have established the foundations on which people have relied
to build life-sustaining movements to liberate themselves from racial
chattel enslavement and its extended aftermath, colonialist
conquest and contemporary settler states, apartheid (Jim Crow), the

prison industrial complex, militarized border policing, and so forth. If the

ethical imperative is to abolish (rather than merely render
temporarily survivable) the social logics and institutionalized
systems of violence that are mutually structured by the genealogies
of neoliberalism and racial/colonial genocide, then there are places
of collective power that can be cherished at the same time that they
are critiqued and transformed. For better or worse, the U.S. academy (both the specific
institutional site of the college/university and the broader, shifting political-intellectual terrains of the

Activisms that form in

confrontation with the academys long historical complicities in
racial/colonial genocide might be understood within an urgency
imperative that seeks to denaturalize and ultimately dismantle the
conditions in which these systems of massive violence are
reproduced.4 There are thriving circuits of radical thought that aim to do just that: for example, the
academy) may be one fruitful place from which to catalyze this work.

very presence of anticolonialism, black radicalism, Native American feminism, and prison abolitionism as
recognizable streams of scholarly and pedagogical labor within institutional spacesand more importantly,
the vibrant and urgent ways in which many (though still far too few) people inhabit these spaceshas

The capacities to produce such

scholarship (including the creation of counterarchives, vital
epistemological and theoretical tools, course syllabi, and
mentorship) have been hard-won by multiple histories of liberation
struggle and intense intellectual innovation, and cohere in the
academy through affinities of ideas, analytics, and scholars whose
[End Page 810] work is mutually nourishing and critically enabling . The
activist importance of these circuits cannot be overstated; at their best, their politicalintellectual work is engaged in something resembling a collective
standoff with the most mundanely violent forms of dehumanization,
humiliation, displacement, and immobilization. The interrogations are grave:
What are the ethical and political implications of chronicling the
racial-sexual violence of U.S. lynching in continuity with less
spectacular (and differently gendered) forms of antiblack state and statecondoned violence such as police abuse, welfare policy, and school
segregation? To what degree have the critical renarrations of the
U.S. racial colonialist project from the Americas to the Philippinesenabled a
productive denaturing of the violent, teleological mythologies of
liberal white humanism, multiculturalist democracy, and national
progress (all of which require a code of silence on the actual existence of colonized peoples on U.S.
become a matter of life and death in more ways than one.

sovereign and occupied soil)?5 These are just two examples in which dedicated activist scholarly labor has
uncovered the unexceptional normal of genocidal and protogenocidal social logics. Such intellectual
practices can renarrate racial terror and miserythe forms of suffering endemic to multicultural civil
society. Within this collective work, there is possibility for effective (though never permanent)
denaturalizationsand politicizationsof the forms of human suffering, entrapment, and vulnerability that
are otherwise routinely embedded in the current worlds institutional protocols, and death-inducing
organization of resources. In such instances, radical intellectuals inhabitation of existing institutional sites
can enable both ethical opposition to structures of domination and creative knowledge production that
strives to glimpse the historical possibilities that are always just on the other side of terror and
degradation. Intellectuals engaged in such projects are always more than academics, in the sense that
their scholarly engagement is not secured by the academy proper. This expansive grounding is an
antidisciplinarity of a certain kind: if what animates their intellectual work is what I have tentatively

such radical intellectuals always understand

themselves to be working in alien (if not hostile) territory. The
academy is never home: some of us are subject to eviction and
evisceration, alongside the surveillance, discipline, and low-intensity
punishment that accrues to those of us who try to build modalities of
named an abolitionist desire,

sustenance and reproduction within liberationist genealogies,

particularly when we are working and studying in colleges and
universities.6 I am undecided as to whether the university is capable or worthy of being
transformed from its dominant historical purposes, or if it ought to be completely abolished. For now, I
am interested in the radical creativity that can [End Page 811] come from the standoff position in-and-of-

Such a position reveals that the fundamental problem is not that

some are excluded from the hegemonic centers of the academy but
that the university (as a specific institutional site) and academy (as a shifting material
network) themselves cannot be disentangled from the long historical
apparatuses of genocidal and protogenocidal social organization .
itself.

Placed in the context of the United States, we can see that (1) genocidal methodologies and logics have
always constituted the academically facilitated inception of a hemispheric America, and (2) genocidal
technologies are the lifeblood of national reproduction across its distended temporalities and geographies.

The recent flourishing of scholarship that rehistoricizes regimes of

incarceration, war, sexuality, settler-colonialist power, and gendered
racist state violenceincluding much of the work that has recently
appeared in this very journalconstitutes a radical reproach of
institutional multiculturalism and liberal pluralism. The point to be
amplified is that multiculturalism and pluralism are essential to both
the contemporary formation of neoliberalism and the historical
distensions of racial/colonial genocide.7 It is for this reason that I do not find the
analytics of neoliberalism to be sufficient for describing the conditions of political work within the U.S.
academy today. It is not just different structures of oppressive violence that radical scholars are trying to
make legible, it is violence of a certain depth, with specific and morbid implications for some peoples

If we can begin to acknowledge this fundamental

truththat genocide is this place (the American academy and, in
fact, America itself)then our operating assumptions, askable
questions, and scholarly methods will need to transform. At a
moment of historical emergency, we might find principled
desperation within intellectual courage.
future existence as such.

We should embrace an unflinching paradigmatic analysis

that calls for the end of the world, and poses the
question of a new existence.
Wilderson (an associate professor of African American studies and drama at the University of

California, Irvine. He is the author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (2008), winner of the
American Book Award. killed apartheid officials in South Africa, nuff said)
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,)

2010 (Red, White & Black:

During the last years of

apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground
and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general
and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how
essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement
dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The
neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist
Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large
part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to
the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching
paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points
of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations.
Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the questionand the
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa.

power to pose the question is the greatest power of all.

Elsewhere, I have
written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not
rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic
discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place
where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing
ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco
Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz,
Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani
Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.

We must call for an end to the world, its necessary for any
revolutionary epistemic foundation.
Farley, 2004

(Anthony Paul, Associate Professor at Boston College Law School, Perfecting

Slavery, Online, pdf )
Education is where we begin. We begin after we are called.28 We are called and that is when and how we all begin. There
is a calling. We are called upon to be. We can only be by becoming. What we become depends upon the calling that we
choose to follow. We become the calling that we make our own. Jonathan Kozol writes of education in the neosegregated,
post-Brown v. Board of Education era as death at an early age.29 White-over-black is death at an early age. Slaves are

Abolition. The word calls to

the slave but slaves are not called. Slaves cannot be called. Freedom is the only calling.
not called. Slavery is death. Education is where this death begins. V. ABOLITION

Everything not called is a thing, an object, and if the object takes the form of the
human then it is abject. Frederick Douglass wrote: If a slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or if a
slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or did any thing very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of as the
fruit of abolition. Hearing the word in this connection very often, I set about learning what it meant.30 There, in the above
passage from Douglasss narrative of his life, we read of the call that became his calling, abolition, but slaves cannot be
called. Education is the call and abolition is the same call (I set about learning what [abolition] meant31). Education
requires abolition. Abolition requires education. Freedom is the only education. One can only be called to freedom.
Abolition called Douglass. Abolition became Douglasss calling.32 The tree of knowledge produces the forbidden fruit of
abolition.33 What happens to the slave who responds to the call, who enables herself to call and to be called? What, in
other words, happens to the slave who learns to read and to write? [T]he most common widely known penalty for
learning to read and write was amputation.34 It is difficult to remember these dismemberments and so we screen them
with juridical memories of progress up from a slavery that never ended. Education and freedom are the same call, the
same calling. VI. EDUCATION

We who have slavery with us still are made up of memory

and forgetting. Freedom is our calling. Slaves are not called. Education is required to
pursue our calling. Education is dangerous to slavery, to the system of
white-over-black. James Baldwin, speaking to Harlem teachers, noted: The paradox of
education is precisely thisthat as one begins to
become conscious one begins to examine the society
in which he is being educated. The purpose of
education, finally, is to create in a person the ability
to look at the world for [oneself] himself, to make
[ones] his own decisions, to say to [oneself] himself
this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or
not.35 Baldwin continued: [I]f

I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school . . .

dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of
every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets,
children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try
to teach themI would try to make them knowthat those streets,
those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are
surrounded are criminal. I would try to make each child know that
these things are a result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I

would teach him that if he intends to be [an adult], he must at once

decide that he is stronger than this conspiracy and that he must
never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for
refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on
what he decides he is worth.36 C.L.R. James, writing on the revolution in Haiti, observed of the
small, privileged class of slaves that while most slavishly imitated their masters, albeit in a lesser key, a few used their
positions to become dangerous, to become the revolutionaries who would later burn down every plantation: Permeated
with the vices of their masters and mistresses, these upper servants gave themselves airs and despised the slaves in the
fields. . . . But a few of these used their position to cultivate themselves, to gain a little education, to learn all they could.
The leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by the cultural advantages of the system they
are attacking, and the San Domingo revolution was no exception to this rule.37 The leaders of the revolution in Haiti were
slaves who, like Douglass, took and ate of the forbidden fruit of abolition.38 The leaders of that revolution, in other
words, were slaves who had educated themselves.39 James Baldwin understood this and warned the post-Brown school
children of Harlem and their teachers that the institutions within which revolutionaries must never make . . . peace.40 It
is with education, then, that the study of memory and forgetting begins. C.L.R. Jamess description of the Haitian
beginning is useful in understanding the beginning of white-over-black in the United States: From the underworld of two
continents they came, Frenchmen and Spaniards, Maltese, Italians, Portuguese and Americans. For whatever a mans
origin, record or character, here his white skin made him a person of quality and rejected or failures in their own country
flocked to San Domingo, where consideration was achieved at so cheap a price, money flowed and opportunities of
debauchery abounded.41 White-over-black is a calling (From the underworld of two continents they came. . . .).
Education is a calling. Education in whiteoverblack is necessary to live within the world and time belted by the colorline for
in that world and time white-over-black is everyones calling. White-over-black is a business and a pleasure, it is the
business of pleasure, and it is the pleasure of business. White-over-black is sublime and earthly and divine and other
many-splendored things besides these.42 White-over-black is the orientation needed to use the maps of all our territories:
Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence as a foundation, there is built a
superstructure of diversified and characteristic sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general. The
class as a whole creates and shapes them out of its material foundation, and out of the corresponding social relationships.
The individual in whom they arise, through tradition and education, may fancy them to be the true determinates, the real
origin of his activities.43 Everyone, then, in a white-over-black order of things, is called to that order. The order to which
we are called (our social conditions of existence) is the structure of thought itself (of our diversified and characteristic
sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general). In a white-over-black order of things the order to
which we are all called is white-over-black. That calling to order is itself the material foundation of white-over-black. Whiteover-black occurs when those marked as white are made mind and those marked as black are made matter and it is also
what we call thinking.44 To come to order requires training, an education in that order. Whiteoverblack is the order of
things at present. Our training begins early:45 Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for
education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the
performance of our most basic public responsibilities, . . . even service in the armed forces. Today it is a principal
instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to
adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in
life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.46 And it never ends.47 VII. BURN

What is to be done?

when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity,

burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the
war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn
everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn
what we cultivate because a man [or woman] has a
right to dispose of his [ones] own labour, was the reply of this
unknown anarchist.48 The slaves burned everything because everything was
against them. Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it
was their lot to follow, the entire order in which they were positioned as
worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything.49 Leave
nothing white behind you, said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-overblack. 50 God
Two hundred years ago,

gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately,
they only burned everything in Haiti.52 Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world
but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the Nineteenth century.53 At the dawn of the
Twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, The colorline belts the world.54 Du Bois said that the problem of the Twentieth
century was the problem of the colorline.55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the Twenty-first century is the problem of

the slave power that is

the United States now threatens an entire world with
the death that it has become and so the slaves of
yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing
the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed,

but their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if

they would escape slavery, win the entire world . VIII.
TRAINING We begin as children. We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not
called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are
brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are called upon to
become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is
schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree and thus
the living can never be and so the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children, and death is not
a beginning but an end. There is no progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the slave, or so it seems.

We

are trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the

grandest narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from
slavery. The progress from slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-overblack to white-over-black to white-over black. The progress of slavery runs in the
opposite direction of the past-present-future timeline. The slave only becomes
the perfect slave at the end of the timeline, only under conditions of total juridical freedom.
It is only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself
as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by
offering a prayer for equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The system
of property is a plantation. The system of law is a plantation. These
plantations, all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce whiteover black, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself
as a slave through its prayers for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit
suicide and the slave, as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds

its way back from the undiscovered country only by

burning down every plantation. When the slave prays for
equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the
free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and

then we become something. We become that which we make of

ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only
callingit alone contains all possible directions, all of the choices that
may later blossom into the fullness of our lives. We can only be free.
Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must
be trained to be that which the living cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to
be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be
trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood.
The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death .

White-over-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue

its calling that is not a calling. ******Modified for Gendered Language.*****

Institutionalism
The state is not a monolithic apparatus. Engaging with it
critical to challenge hegemonies and produce
change any alternative cedes the political and fails
Mouffe, Professor of Politics and International Relations
at Westminster, 09 (Chantal, 2009, What is Radical Politics Today?,
The Importance of Engaging the State, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/ef12653960910c6594243a9a98293bfa1e1702ff#page=247,
7/9/15, SV)
The way we envisage social criticism has very important consequences for
radical politics. Radical politics today is often characterised in terms of
desertion, exodus and refusal to engage with existing institutions.
Whereas I believe that radical politics should instead be concerned
with building political engagement, through developing competing,
antagonistic political claims. My aim here is to highlight the main
differences between these two characterisations. The first could roughly
be described as critique as withdrawal; the second as critique as
engagement. I will argue that, ultimately, the problem with the form of
radical politics advocated by critique as withdrawal is that it has a
flawed understanding of the very nature of the political itself.
Critique as withdrawal The model of social criticism and radical politics put
forward by Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri in their books Empire (2000) and
Multitude (2004) is a good illustration of critique as withdrawal. Empire is
often referred to as the Communist manifesto for the twenty-first century in
academic and activist conferences. In this book, the authors call for a total
break with modernity and the elaboration of a postmodern approach. In their
view such a break is required because of the crucial transformations of
globalisation and the subsequent workers struggle experienced by our
society during the last decades of the twentieth century. According to Hardt
and Negri, these transformations can be broadly summarised in the following
way: 1. Sovereignty has taken a new form: there is a new global sovereignty,
which Hardt and Negri call Empire. They argue that this Empire is a new
imperialism that replaces the attempt by nation states to extend their own
sovereignty beyond their borders. In contrast to old-style imperialism, the
current Empire has no territorial centre of power and no fixed boundaries; it is
decentred and deterritorialised, progressively incorporating the entire global
realm with open, expanding frontiers. 2. This transformation corresponds,
they say, to the transformation of the capitalist mode of production. The role
of industrial factory labour has been reduced. Priority is instead given to
communicative, cooperative and affective labour. In the postmodernisation of
the global economy, the creation of wealth tends towards regulating and
mediating life itself. It permeates every aspect of our life. The scope of the
rule of Empire is social life in its entirety. All aspects of our life are controlled
from the way we work and exchange ideas across international borders,
through to how we think about our body image. 3. We are witnessing the
passage from a disciplinary society to a society of control characterised by
a new paradigm of power. In the disciplinary society, which corresponds to

the first phase of capitalist accumulation, command is constructed through

diffuse networks of apparatus. These produce and regulate customs, habits
and productive practices with the help of disciplinary institutions like prisons,
factories, asylums, hospitals, schools and others. The society of control, in
contrast, is a society in which mechanisms of command are less obvious. The
society of control is dominated by the many mechanisms of the globalised,
postmodern capitalist society, which seek to directly organise the brain and
body (from the internet, through to complex global systems of trade). What is
directly at stake is the regulation of life itself. This is what they call
biopower. 4. Hardt and Negri produce new terms to help explain this
situation. These are mass intellectuality, immaterial labor and general
intellect. The central role previously occupied by the labour-power of mass
factory workers in the production of surplus-value is today said to be
increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial and communicative labourpower. For Hardt and Negri, the figure of immaterial labour involved in
communication, cooperation and the reproduction of affects occupies an
increasingly central position in the schema of capitalist production. 5. A new
term is needed to refer to this collective worker that Hardt and Negri call the
Multitude. They believe that the transition to Empire where territorial state
sovereignty is less important has opened up new possibilities for the
liberation of this Multitude. The Multitude have shaped a new form of
globalisation, which means that previous systems and structures of
exploitation and control, such as the state, are no longer needed. This is why
their book Empire is so often referred to as the Communist manifesto of the
twenty-first century. According to this manifesto, the creative forces of the
Multitude are capable of constructing a counter-empire, of overthrowing the
state apparatus of control. The present systems of control are no longer
necessary. An alternative political organisation of the global flows of
exchange now dominates in this era of globalisation. We can, therefore, get
rid of territorial sovereignty because it only serves to oppress our creativity.
Hardt and Negri therefore clearly illustrate what I previously called,
in my introduction to this chapter, critique as withdrawal: a refusal
to engage with existing institutions. At this point it is worth introducing
the work of Paolo Virno to complement the picture. Virnos analyses in his
book Grammar of the Multitude (2004) dovetail in many respects with those
of Hardt and Negri. But there are also some significant differences. For
instance, he is much less sanguine about the future. While Hardt and Negri
have a messianic vision of the role of the Multitude, which will
necessarily bring down Empire and establish an Absolute
Democracy, Virno does not. For Virno, the present conditions are
not right for a communist future. It is unlikely that the sort of
Absolute Democracy that Hardt and Negri envisage will actually
take place. Instead of seeing the generalisation of immaterial labour
as a type of spontaneous communism like Hardt and Negri, Virno
tends to see post-Fordism as a manifestation of the communism of
capital. Under post-Fordism, consumers pursue different goals, with
services responding accordingly. This means that today, for Virno, capitalistic
initiatives orchestrate material and cultural conditions for their own benefit.
And the role of political action should be to create a sphere of common affairs
which he calls the Republic of the Multitude to challenge this situation.

Virno proposes two key terms to describe the type of political action which he
thinks is necessary. These are exodus and civil disobedience. And for me,
they again illustrate what I call critique as withdrawal: something which is
an important and influential trend in radical politics today because exodus
advocates mass defection from the state. This requires the
development of a non-state public sphere and a radically new type
of democracy. It involves experimenting in new forms of nonrepresentative
and extra-parliamentary democracy, organised around leagues, councils and
soviets. The Multitude never aspire to transform themselves into a
majority. They develop a power that refuses to become government.
This is why, according to Virno, civil disobedience needs to be
emancipated from the liberal tradition. He does not just want to ignore
specific laws if they do not conform to the principles of a given territorial
constitution or state. For Virno, like Hardt and Negri, radical disobedience
goes much further it puts the existence of the state itself in question. In
both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon
critique as withdrawal. They all call for the development of a nonstate public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, nonrepresentative and extra-parliamentary politics. They see forms of traditional
representative politics as inherently oppressive. So they do not seek to
engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid
of them altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential
personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political
position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty
itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power.
Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the
fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it
should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the
evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles
against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these
important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial
postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the
past was dominated by the notion of the people. This was, according to
them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of
the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not
representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can never
achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a
general will, because the present globalisation of capital and
workers struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and antipopular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived
any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of
the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are nonrepresentative, are needed. They advocate a withdrawal from existing
institutions. This is something which characterises much of radical
politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical
politics today is often characterised by a mood, a sense and a
feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem. Critique as
engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of
social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and
Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-

Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better

apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
(Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have
contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is
necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and
Negris view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers
struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one
single logic: the workers resistance to the forces of capitalism in the
post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In
their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the
creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way,
they deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we use the word
hegemony to describe the way in which meaning is given to
institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given
institution or practice is defined as oppressive to women, racist or
environmentally destructive. We also point out that every hegemonic
order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counterhegemonic practices feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for
example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements
which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counterglobalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers
struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to
influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that
when we talk about the political, we do not lose sight of the ever
present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society.
There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a
heterogeneous society it need not only refer to the workers struggles. I
submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension
when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism.
This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers struggles) is at
work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the proactive role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting
insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The
New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists
manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements
that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of
the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into
new forms of control. They use the term artistic critique to refer to how
the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of
selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to promote
the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing
the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point
of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an
important dimension of the transition from Fordism to postFordism
involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new
ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to
postFordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure,
Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear

example of what Gramsci called hegemony through neutralisation or

passive revolution. This refers to a situation where demands which
challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which
is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive
potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to postFordism
within such a framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move by
capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy.
We did not witness a revolution, in Marxs sense of the term. Rather, there
have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic
practices. It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of
hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices, radical politics is
not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather,
we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in
order to challenge them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced
with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and
challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the
state completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of
systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical
(and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little
interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to
take over the state. The strategy of exodus could be seen as the
reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are
many points in common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt
and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the
privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is seen as a
monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It
has to wither away in order to leave room for a reconciled society
beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as Ive already noted,
others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my approach
supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices has
been called post-Marxist by many, it is precisely because I have challenged
the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever
present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising
that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is concerned, this
means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between
conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to
define the symbolic parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes
the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the
common sense through which a given conception of reality is
established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious
and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic
interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by
antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that
engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never
be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to
challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more
comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic
politics lies in establishing linkages between various demands (such
as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to
transform them into claims that will challenge the existing structure

of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves

engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different
demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This
is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the
creation of a collective will, a we. This, in turn, requires the determination of
a them. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of
the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude possesses a
natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see
the People as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather
than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic practices,
by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what
could be called an ensemble of differences, all coming together,
only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when
different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest
against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists,
feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge
dominant models of development and progress. In these cases, the
adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like Empire, or for that
matter Capitalism. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances
in question the specific states, international institutions or governmental
practices that are to be challenged. Put another way, the construction of
political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power
that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the
conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from
politics. It is not critique as withdrawal, but critique as
engagement. It is a war of position that needs to be launched, often
across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests.
This can only be done by establishing links between social movements,
political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create a
common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and
often institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how
we should conceive the nature of radical politics.

Institutional reform breaks down structural racism and

creates a new social order, and legalism is key to
implement these solutions
Wiley and Powell 6 (Maya, legal counsel to the NYC mayor, and John A.,
internationally recognized expert in civil rights, Berkeley Law Review,
Tearing Down Structural Racism and Rebuilding Communities,
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=2987&context=facpubs)
The good news is that globalization and the erosion of the middle class
present an opportunity for a new social order.6 2 Also, a paradigm
shift is beginning in the courts as courts demonstrate a willingness
to look at multiple institutions and a complex set of factors to reach
liability decisions and consider remedies. 6 3 As demonstrated in the
education adequacy cases, courts are willing to look at outcomes to
determine the need for institutional reform. 64 Even when courts fail to
produce sought-after remedies, the structural approach lays a

foundation for transforming institutions that have proven resistant

to change through the political process. This foundation can be laid and
the paradigm shift sup - ported only if lawyers make
multiinstitutional arguments and demonstrate the complex layers of
institutional behavior creating social and racial inequity. Adequacy
education cases such as Sheff v. O'Neil, Leandro v. State of North Carolina,
and Abbott v. Burke demonstrate this approach, and Walker and Thompson in
the context of housing, as discussed below.6 5 Over the years advocates
and researchers have been developing many strategies to create
more choice and greater opportunity for low-income people of color
and to attack structural underpinnings of inequity and improve the
structural soundness of the nation. This requires, in one way or
another, legal expertise. In almost all these instances, legal services
and legal aid lawyers have been influential partners in identifying
and implementing these strategies. The strategies themselves are not
new. In fact, they can be seen as a continuation of the struggle-beginning
in the 195os-for racial justice. 6

The consequences of Hurricane Katrina prove the realities

of structural racism. However, policymaking can be
a viable solution to these inequalities if racial biases
are eliminated
Dovidio et al 6 (John, professor of psychology at Yale University,
Institutional Discrimination, Individual Racism, and Hurricane Katrina, pg.
115-116,
http://www.yale.edu/intergroup/Henkel_Dovidio_Gaertner_ASAP_2006.pdf)
Although much of the public debate about the devastating consequences
of Hurricane Katrina, particularly for Blacks in New Orleans, has
focused on whether racism was involved, we have attempted to show
that a focus on old-fashioned, overt racism likely misrepresents the dynamics
in the situation. Overt racism might have played a role, but subtle and
unintentional biases seemed to be a much more significant influence.
Moreover, the actions of Whites and Blacks both contributed to
varying degrees and in various ways to the lack of responsiveness
that characterized the preparation for the hurricane and the
response in its aftermath. Specifically, three key processes that we
identified are institutional racism, subtle contemporary prejudice,
and racial distrust. We further propose that understanding how these
forces shaped the way both Whites and Blacks responded to the threat and
damage of Hurricane Katrina can help to guide policies that can
facilitate effective recovery and enhance emergency efforts in the
future. One of the most basic implications of our analysis is that the
circumstances of Blacks in New Orleans at the time Hurricane
Katrina made landfall, which made them especially vulnerable to
flooding and which contributed to racial distrust, were the result of
historical discrimination and institutional racism. Because race was
central to these circumstances, interventions to address the consequences of
Hurricane Katrina and policies for future emergency situations cannot be

colorblind. Effective interventions and policies should consider the

importance of historical and contemporary racial disparities to the
susceptibility of different communities to harm, how racial biases
may unintentionally influence the actions of decision makers, and
how race relations might influence the responses of vulnerable
groups to efforts to help. That is, the processes related to how New
Orleans got to this point need to be considered in a plan to reverse
the devastating consequences of these processes. We illustrate the
application of these principles with a recovery strategy that could meet these
requirements.

Policy COINTELPRO

Democratic Peace = Wrong

The idea that democracy causes peace is false and
predicated off of western supremacy, it forces war
to become inevitable It justifies domination of the
periphery and treats anything outside of the
western states as savages that need to be
subjugated
Grayson 03 (Kyle, Doctoral Candidate Department of Political
Science York University, Democratic Peace Theory as Practice:
(Re)Reading the Significance of Liberal Representations of War
and Peace (p. 7-9) 2003, accessed 7/9/15, FZ)
According to Doty, all of the above representational practices help to position states relative to one
another; for the democratic peace theory discourse, it is concepts like liberal democracy,
nonliberal/democratic, dove-like, and war-mongering, that are used to position states vis--vis each

The democratic peace discourse and its rhetorical strategies

which engage in the processes of positioning are built upon the
foundations of a logic of difference which attempts to fix the
positions of social agents as stable, positive differences based upon
foundational essences.37 As a result, the subjective and ontological
nature of positioning to the casual observer remains obscured
because the logic of difference in democratic peace theory asserts
that states objectively define themselves through their essences
that can only be known to the expert. From a Foucaultian perspective, the invisibility
other.36

of this exercise of power is not surprising for: power is implicated in the very possibility of meaning. The
naturalness of the world and the categories through which we know it and its subjects are manifestations
of power. Neither subjects, nor subjectivity, nor structural social relations exist before the workings of

In this respect, the democratic peace theory discourse differs

very little from other historical discourses (especially those centred
around civilization) that have sought to separate an us from a
them. Given the representation practices embodied within the democratic peace theory discourse, it
power.38

is best to view the interactions that it fosters as imperial encounters. According to Doty, the term
imperial encounters is meant to convey the idea of asymmetrical encounters in which one entity has been
able to construct realities that were taken seriously and acted upon and the other entity has been denied
equal degrees of kinds of agency.39 The reality of democratic peace theory has been defined by Western
representational practices outlined above. These representations have shaped the production of
knowledge and identities as well as making particular courses of action appear
possible/impossible/inevitable.40 Furthermore, to borrow a term from David Campbell ,

democratic
peace theory has constructed a new geography of evil that
(re)produces national identity while dictating what courses of action
are apt (i.e., conversion/force) when confronting the supposedly non-liberal/democratic other.41 To
reiterate this point in a slightly different fashion, the context of the democratic
peace, then, includes not only the advent of a zone of peace among
core states, but also international relations of domination and
subordination in the periphery.42 As a result of this analysis, the answers to the
questions of for whom and for what purpose is democratic peace theory designed are now evident but
not surprising.

Democratic peace theory and its associated discourse is

for the people of the US/West. Its purpose is to fix the
American/Western national identity as civilized, peacefully inclined,
and democratic with the non-West by definition being considered

uncivilized, war-mongering, and authoritarian.

Democratic peace theory also

aids in the justification of the American/Western world-view which perceives both democracy and war in a
particular fashion. In turn, these conceptions of democracy and war help to hide much of the sordid past
and present of the international relations of western liberal democratic states. They help to justify the
Grayson g Democratic Peace Theory as Practice / 8 unjustifiable and to legitimate the illegitimate. Of
utmost importance is the ontological basis of these international relations practices sanctioned by
democratic peace theory and its associated discourse within the popular political realm. This is the focus of
the following section which examines the existence of one of the empirical silences within democratic
peace theory research and the consequences of ignoring these important events. Democratic Peace
Theory and the Ontology of War and Peace In Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, Michael
Shapiro tries to examine the ways that enmity-related global geographies and ethnoscapes emerge as
collectivities, and how they try to achieve, stabilize, and reproduce their unity and coherence.43
Historically, the practice of war has emerged as one the most enduring methods to attempt to fix national
identities and ontological foundations. Victory in war confirms all the positive subjective views of the self
while at the same time providing proof of the subjectively perceived inferior nature of the other.
Conversely, defeat not only leads to (geo)strategic losses, but also to a reappraisal of the national identity
and deep questioning of the foundations that helped define national identity. The American defeat in the
Vietnam War provides an excellent example of these identity/foundation casualties. Therefore, Shapiro
argues that war is not just (geo)strategic, but is also about the confrontation between competing
ontologies. As mentioned earlier, democratic peace theory and its surrounding discourse views war as an
activity waged by state actors in pursuit of (geo)strategic spoils (e.g., territory, resources, wealth), as well
as an activity arising over disputes of ownership of spoils and/or perceived violations of sovereignty. As
John Vasquez has argued, the situation that states in the modern global system are most likely to deal
with by the use of force and violence is one in which their territory is threatened....territorial disputes
provide the willingness to go to war.44 Democratic peace theorists believe that liberal democracies can
peacefully manage these kinds of disputes amongst themselves; however, in circumstances of dispute
between a liberal democracy and a non-liberal/democracy, war is seen as almost inevitable.
Conventionally, this has been attributed to the inherently aggressive nature of the authoritarian state,
which prevents liberal democracies from trusting these states to adhere to peacefully negotiated
settlements. Yet,

when democratic peace theory is viewed as a

representational practice, war becomes inevitable between
disputing liberal democratic states and non-liberal/democratic states
not because of the aggressive nature of authoritarian regimes but
because these situations are viewed as an opportunity for liberal
democratic states to engage in a civilizing mission and reaffirm
their national identity and ontology by demonstrating their
superiority in battle. This imperative becomes especially clear if we abandon the traditional
view of war contained within democratic peace theory and look at democratic non-state/liberal democratic
state disputes and the underlying ontological contestations that fuelled them.45 Barkawi and Laffey have

force is used in the service of defending and

expanding economic and to a lesser extent political liberalism (in the
guise of democracy) beyond the Grayson g Democratic Peace Theory as Practice / 9 liberal
argued that currently

capitalist core.46 From a historical perspective, the dispute between the Iroquois Six Nations and the
Canadian government over the Grand River territory during the first decades of the twentieth century,
provides an excellent example of the ontological impetus behind international relations practices and how
warfare

can also be directed towards the annihilation of culture.

The democratic peace theory is flawed 3 reasons

1. A faulty definition of democracy is used
2. A culture of peace is used in democracies
3. Its a myth, democracies have gone to war with each other

Gautreaux 12 (Sergio, M.A. in International Relations from

Webster University in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a B.A. in
History from Louisiana State University, Examining the
Democratic Peace Hypothesis: A Neorealist Critique 2012,
accessed 7/9/15, FZ)
The first flaw in the theory is one of conceptualization. The Polity
Index, used by Russet in his examination of the democratic peace, is

based on a faulty definition of democracy.

In 1971, Yale University Professor, Robert

Dahl, posited two very basic attributes of the system: competition and participation. The first state that
granted full participation by way of universal suffrage and, as a consequence, met Dahls requirements for
a democratic society, was Finland in 1906. While the Polity Index measures the spread of democracy from

the data omits participation as a key attribute in its

determination of democratic states. By omitting such a basic, yet
vital, component of democracy and failing to properly conceptualize
democracy, the very question of what it means to be a democratic
state, bent on avoiding dyadic conflict, is called into question. Despite
the year 1800 onwards,

this conceptual flaw, most states listed as democratic by Russett and the Polity I-IV data do, in fact,
promote universal suffrage (at least in theory) in the twenty-first century and would meet Dahls 1971
requirements (though Russetts blanket assertion and inclusion of states without universal suffrage

With this in mind, the

second error in the logic of the democratic peace theory is with
Russetts cultural/normative model. The model assumes that a
culture of peace is the standard across all democratic societies. While
remains a point of contention for the emerging democracies).

few would disagree that a Western liberal state such as the Netherlands is more peaceful than the various
war-torn countries that comprise the very undemocratic societies of sub-Saharan Africa, the same
comparison cannot be made between all democratic and autocratic societies. Studying the post-World War
II era, in which numerous former colonies gained their independence and empires were systematically

one will find that the emerging democracies during this era,
struggling with the formation of civil society structures and the
demands posed by the market economy, had substantially higher
crime rates than the ardently non-democratic societies. In addition,
disbanded,

homicide rates for so-called full democracies that is, states with a long-established history of
democracy (e.g. Western Europe and the United States) increased at an alarmingly higher rate than their
non-democratic counterparts during this same time period. To use a specific example, the worlds current
hegemon and most powerful democracy, the United States, regularly experiences violent civil unrest, has
the tenth highest homicide rate per 100,000 people (just behind the Republic of Moldova and ahead of
Uruguay), and experienced a violent civil war that claimed the lives of 650,000 Americans just a century
and a half ago.

Moreover, if democratic decision-makers did actually

employ their societys supposed culture of peace into their policy
formation when faced with international conflict escalation, they
would do so at all stages and in all instances, including when faced
with a hostile challenge from a non-democratic state. History,
however, shows that is not the case. During the years 1899-1999, five of
the worlds current most powerful (expressed in terms of military potential; determined
using quantitative troop, aircraft, and nuclear arms levels) democracies the United States, India, the

engaged in interstate conflict on no less

than twenty-five occasions. Furthermore, in twenty-nine of the recent intrastate conflicts,
United Kingdom, France, and Israel

twenty-three of the prevailing regimes were either democratic throughout the dispute or at certain times
during the dispute.

Such realities call into question the assertion that

democratic societies have a culture of peace that pervades decisionmaking. The third and final logical flaw of the democratic peace is
that the theory itself is a myth, as democracies have gone to war
with each other numerous times throughout history when it was in
their interest to do so or when their sovereignty was threatened by
another. From the time of the Greek wars of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, there have been at least
14 conflicts involving states that would be listed in the democratic category of the Polity I-IV indexes.
When one alters the already contentious definition of war, the number of conflicts increases to at least
twenty-three and includes such international disputes as the long-running American-Indian War of the 19th
century (the Iroquois tribe had a complex but recognizable system of democracy), the 1923 occupation of

By
using the very same conceptualizations that Bruce Russett and other
liberal theorists use to categorize democracies, one is able to
determine that their very argument that democratic states never
the Ruhr by the French, and the Allied (British) bombings of Finland during the Second World War.

go to war with one another is simply wrong.

The Continuance of Raison dtat

Since it is possible to prove by careful examination that democratic states lack the so-called culture of
peace emanating from the transformative process of the system, and that the democratic peace
hypothesis is not valid beyond that which is examined on the surface, the only possible logical conclusion
is that democratic states have engaged in conflict with each other less frequently than they have with nondemocracies simply because doing so usually runs counter to the ultimate national interest of survival.
From 1945-1990, approximately thirty-two countries were democratic (amounting to roughly thirty-one
percent of the worlds population). With the notable exception of the non-aligned countries, most were
allied with the United States and its policy of containment with regards to the Soviet Union and the spread
of communism. Therefore, the national interests of these democratic states were aligned and they avoided
war because of this fact; having similar political processes was inconsequential. In the post-Cold War era,
although there have arguably been three democratic wars (the Croatian War of Independence, the Fourth
India-Pakistan War, and the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War), most liberal democratic states have benefited from
the status quo and free trade, not expansionist war, dictates the national interest. As the Arab Spring
continues to rage in Syria, and as the new self-proclaimed democratic states of Egypt and Libya continue
to shape their futures, the number of conflicts between democratic societies will undoubtedly increase
from its current number. For decision-makers and leaders of prior-established liberal democracies, it is
imperative to recognize the faults and failings of the democratic peace hypothesis and to act only in
accordance with what is in the interest of the states survival and its relative/absolute gains .

Employing a doctrine of democracy promotion without acting as a

rational actor who engages in a thorough cost-benefit analysis is
both irresponsible and dangerous.

Democratic peace theory is rubbish it doesnt account

for nationalism, imperialism, pre 20th century
empirics, professional armies, or fear of foreign
threats
Larison 12

(Daniel, PhD in history, 4.17.12, The American Conservative, Democratic

Peace Theory Is False,
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/democratic-peace-theory-isfalse/, Accessed: 7.9.15, VW)
Rojas claim depends entirely on the meaning of genuine democracy. Even
though there are numerous examples of wars between states with universal
male suffrage and elected governments (including that little dust-up known
as WWI), the states in question probably dont qualify as genuine
democracies and so cant be used as counter-examples. Regardless,
democratic peace theory draws broad conclusions from a short
period in modern history with very few cases before the 20th
century. The core of democratic peace theory as I understand it is that
democratic governments are more accountable to their populations, and
because the people will bear the costs of the war they are going to be less
willing to support a war policy. This supposedly keeps democratic states from
waging wars against one another because of the built-in electoral and
institutional checks on government power. One small problem with this is that
it is rubbish. Democracies in antiquity fought against one another.
Political equality and voting do not abolish conflicts of interest
between competing states. Democratic peace theory doesnt
account for the effects of nationalist and imperialist ideologies on
the way democratic nations think about war. Democratic nations that
have professional armies to do the fighting for them are often
enthusiastic about overseas wars. The Conservative-Unionist
government that waged the South African War (against two states

with elected governments, I might add) enjoyed great popular

support and won a huge majority in the Khaki election that
followed. As long as it goes well and doesnt have too many costs,
war can be quite popular, and even if the war is costly it may still be
popular if it is fought for nationalist reasons that appeal to a
majority of the public. If the public is whipped into thinking that
there is an intolerable foreign threat or if they believe that their
country can gain something at relatively low cost by going to war,
the type of government they have really is irrelevant. Unless a
democratic public believes that a military conflict will go badly for
their military, they may be ready to welcome the outbreak of a war
that they expect to win. Setting aside the flaws and failures of U.S.led democracy promotion for a moment, the idea that reducing the
number of non-democracies makes war less likely is just fantasy.
Clashing interests between states arent going away, and the more
democratic states there are in the world the more likely it is that two
or more of them will eventually fight one another.

Examples of democratic peace theory were coincidences their empirics are flawed, their authors are biased,
and they shift the definitions of democracy and
wars to fit democratic peace theory, multiple alt
causes to peace
Soesilowati 10

(Sartika, 11.19.15, Masyarakat Kebudayaan Dan Politik, A CRITIQUE OF

DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY, http://mkp.fisip.unair.ac.id/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=148:a-critique-of-democratic-peacetheory-&catid=34:mkp&Itemid=62, Accessed: 7.9.15, VW)
Some scholars, however, disagree on the existence of democratic
peace theory. Neorealists argue that all war and peace decision making
is a rational response to the constraints and opportunities generated
by the anarchic international environment (Layne, 1994; Spiro, 1994;
Oren, 1995; Farber and Gowa, 1995; Brown et al., 1996). Others, like
Kacowicz (1995), argue that democratic peace theory has inherent limitations. Also, the opponents of democratic peace theory are curious and
concerned about the normative and policy implication of the theory.
According to Hass (Chan, 1997), it can appear as a smug dogma that
dismisses many past instances of aggression committed by
democracies. This paper argues that certain democratic values will
prevent countries from going to war, but this is only relative to particular
regime types and under certain conditions. Democratic politics in general,
and the domestic context of the democratic process in particular, crucially
affects war and peace decision making and is not always consistent with
democratic political theory. Also, the empirical data for demonstrating
relations between democracy and peace does not fully support the
thesis. Indeed, democratic peace theory appears to have little
explanatory power in the cases studied. This argument will be explained
through following the debate. First, whether democracies can or can not fight
each other. This will examine the empirical data as a foundation of the

quantitative explanation and contest the definition of democracy that has

been used in the thesis. Second, this paper will question why democracies
can lead peace. This part will criticize some causal explanations given for the
thesis. The Inadequacy of the Empirical Data The difference between
democratic peace theory and other theories in international politics
lies in the attention it paying to link wide ranging empirical data
about war and to explain this by simple reasons. Thousand of wars
which occurred from the 15th century (Athens versus Syracuse) to the 20th
century (including various conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Armenia versus
Azer-baijan) are listed by Ray (1995). Wars that occurred between the 18th
century (Britain versus Maharattan) to the 20th century (Iran versus Iraq) are
listed in Doyle (1996). Rummel (1994, cited in Peterson 1998) shows that
there have been 198 wars between non democracies, and 155 between
democracies versus non democracies but there were no wars among
democracies. Babst (Peterson, 1998:103), found that of 116 majors wars
from 1789 to 1941, with 438 participating countries ...no wars have been
fought between independent nations with elective government. All of these
instances of wars show that wars happen only in non democratic countries or
between democracies and non democracies, but rarely or never occur among
democratic countries. Thus, proponents of democratic peace are not
only trying to generalize that wars occur because some countries are
not democracies but also to impress the accuracy of the democratic
peace thesis, that this thesis has been derived from the universal
cases. However, those data purposed to support democratic peace
thesis have been shown to be inadequate. Layne (1994:6) says The
statistical evidence that democracies do not fight each other seems
impressive but in fact, it is inconclusive ... A number of critics suggest
that the aggregate data is insufficient for the theory, since
democracy is a relatively new phe-nomenon and interstate wars are
generally rare occurrences. Layne (1994:39) explains the appearance
of a large number of interactions with little or no conflict between
democracies because first, between 1815 and 1945 there were very
few democracies; second, wars are a relatively rare occurrence;
third, dyads are not created equal to represent a case where there is
a real possibility of two states going to war. Similarly, other critics of
the democracy peace thesis address whether the statistics that show that
democracies never (or rarely) fight wars with each other are significant. Spiro
(1994:52) argues that the absence of wars between liberal democracies is not a significant pattern for most of the past two centuries
because the chance to go war among democracies is predicted by
random. He claims that the chance that any given pair of states will be
at war at a given time is very low, and that there were few
democracies anyway, particularly before 1945. Consequently, it is
not sur-prising that dyads of democratic states have not gone to
war. Also, Farber and Gowa (1995:124) assert that there is not a
statistically signi-ficant difference in the probability of war between
pairs of democracies and between pairs of other types of polities,
except in the years since 1945. They suggest that the empirical findings
are suspect because much of the aggregate data is from the postWorld War II period, when most scholars agree that factors other

than domestic regime type worked to produce peace between democracies. For example, Mershmeir (1990:51) agues that bipolarity, an
equal military balance, and nuclear weapons have fostered peace in
Europe over the past 45 years. Thus, the rarity democracies before
1945, rarity of war and the fact that international system had been
guaranteed with inter-national system raises difficult question of
appropriate statistical techniques. Furthermore, most of the
proponents of the democratic peace theory are bias to the
anomalous data which shows wars between democracies. They will
discard this anomalous case by shifting the definitions of war and
democracy. Spiro (1994) claims that the proponents of democratic
peace quickly dismiss this anomalous evidence by showing that one
of the states in question was not independent state or democracy, or
the conflict in question was not a war. The proponents of democratic
peace theory have cited many anomalous data as candidate
(Russett 1993) or exception (Ray 1995) to show that some wars occur
between demo-cracies in order to counter the arguments against the
democratic peace theory. For example, Russett (1993:17) lists 12 wars
among democracies from 1812 to 1967 and Ray (1995:86) lists more than 19
wars among democracies countries, from the 17th century to the 20th
century. However, Russett (1993) and Ray (1995) claim the exception of wars
among democracies by arguing that those countries failed to be categorized
as democratic countries or inter-national war. Russett (1993:14) is defining
democracy as a regime in an independent state that ensure full civil and
economic liberties: voting rights for a substantial fraction of citizens, peaceful
transfer of powers and fair competition between political groups. In the case
of Lebanon versus Israel in 1967, Russett (1993:18) argues that Israel failed
to be categorized as a democracy because it was not previously independent
and had not yet held a national election. However, Lebanese decision makers
had over twenty-five years to see Israel democracy at work. According to
Elman (1977:22): National elections, peaceful transfers of power between
opposing political groups, and civil rights were all well entrenched long before
IsraelIsrael can be considered a democracy prior to its independence there
was little reason for Lebanese leaders to think that Israel would cease to
practice the democratic processes that it had instituted since 1920.
independence. Researchers of the period agree that In sum, by shifting
the definition of democracy and the assumption of statehood,
democratic peace proponents are able to exclude the anomalies and
controversy of the data. Other democratic wars are omitted by
stressing one feature of states which looks contradictory to the
restrictive value of democratic countries. Elman (1997:22) mentions
that there is a tendency to overemphasize states autocratic features
while ignoring their democratic ones. For example, Russett (1993) and
Ray (1995) argue that the Spanish-American War of 1898 was not
democracies war, because Spanish was not implementing democracy policy
making. By contrast, critics argue that Spain had already constituted some
democratic procedures, the case counts as disconfirming evidence (Layne,
1994). Similarly, critics maintain that German demonstrated democratic
feature and conclude that the case of World War I, Germany versus Western
Democracies, as a democracies war. However, the proponents of democratic

peace believe that it is failed to be categorized as a democracies war by

pointing autocratic aspect of Imperial German. On the other hand, the
possibility always exists that a democracy will revert to an authoritarian
state, because there is relative power among liberal democracies (Mershmeir,
1990:50). Therefore, it is a problem in the argument of the proponent
of democratic peace theory to treat the continuity of democratic
features. Moreover, the restriction of the definition of war allows the
possibility to exclude the argument of wars among democracies.
Russett (1993:12) refers to Small and Singer to interpret the wars as a
conflict with 1000 battle deaths. He argues that war between Finland and the
Western allies is no record of combat and causalities between them, and in
the Six Day War of 1967, Lebanon participated in combat only by sending a
few aircraft into Israel airspace. Thus, these cases are excluded from the
criteria of 1000 battle of fatalities. However, according to Spiro (1994:59)
defining war in this way allows democratic peace proponents to omit the
case. This is because highly subjective judgments by which variables are
coded in data sets have significant and important effects on the results
yielded by analysis of those data. In sum, democratic peace proponents
are arbitrary in their dismissal of cases that theory fails to account
for. Unclear Definitions of Democracy Definition of concepts in theory should
give secure criteria for what is admissible or relevant. Democracy is a key
concept of the democratic peace literature, but has not always been
defined clearly. Analysts have not generally differentiated between the
ideas of republicanism, liberalism, and populism (Chan, 1997:64). Should the
definitions of democracy emphasize or include mass welfare, distributive
justice, popular sovereignty, personal liberty, or political participation? The
interpretation of the democracy as given in the thesis seems too broad or
limited and elements of the definition are not related with each other. Kant
views republicanism --defined as a rule of law that is respectful of peoples
basic freedoms-- as the basis for interstate peace. Doyle (1996) regards
democracy as liberalism which is based on freedom of the individual
(freedom of speech, social and economic rights, democratic participation and
representation) and four institution (juridical equality of citizen and freedom
of religion and the press; rule by representative legislature; private property;
and market economy driven by supply and demand). Weart (Waltz, 1998)
refers only to the democratic republic which he defines as a state where at
least two-thirds of the citizens enjoy full political rights. Fareed Zakaria
(1997:25), however, interprets democracy as constitutional liberalism which
concerns not only the procedures for selecting government, but rather
governments goals. Given the differences between the related concept, it is
not surprising that the data sets are not always able to provide convergent
validation for particular results. Moreover, problems of definition of
democracy tend to be controversial with the pattern recognition of
democracy. Immanuel Kants idea in Perpetual Peace has been frequently
cited as a first voice offering a philosophical justification for democratic peace
(Doyle, 1996). However, Spiro (1994:54) points out that many scholars use
definitions of democracy that have little in common with Kants vision of a
peaceful republican government. While the proponents of democratic peace
theory insist on majority rule, Kant was rather skeptical, and indeed would
not have considered himself a democrat if democracy were defined as the

rule of popular will (Chan, 1997:64). Moreover, the proponents tend to

overlook the probability of republicanism overcoming anarchy (Huntley,
1996:40). Indeed, the subjectivity of the definitions allows authors to adopt
definition of key variables so that data analysis yields the results they seek.
Similarly, the concept of democracy that has been used by
proponents of democratic peace is normative and does not relate to
its history. Oren (1995:147) argues that democratic peace theory
overlooks the fact that these values have changed over time. He also
claims that the thesis should understand the meaning of democracy not as
democracy per se, but should be understood as a special case of an
argument about peace among polities that are similar relative to some
normative benchmark. Oren (1995) argues that American leaders have
tended to interpret democracy to mean countries like the United States.
Current measures of democracy tend to use objective measures that are
actually indicators of whether a country resembles the United States or not.
In other words, democracy can be merely a tool for the US to identify
foes and friends on the basis of regime type. The Flawed Nature of the
Causal Relationship This part examines several weakness and limitations of
the democratic peace theory which are related with liberalism values,
normative values and structural concern. Most proponents of the thesis
of Democratic Peace generally argue that the value of democracies
lies in preventing states from going to war. The reason for the
possibility that democratic states are much less likely to engage each other in
war is because the idea of liberalism which include freedom of the individual
has caused these states to respect each others political independence
(Doyle, 1996:10). Doyle (1996) explains that mutual respect accounts for the
fact that constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with
one another. Other proponents of democracy, like Owen (1994), argue how
liberalism causes democratic peace: liberals will trust states they consider
liberal and mistrust those they consider illiberal. Others like Russett (1993)
argues that there are two ways in which democracy might account for the
existence of democratic peace. The first is what he calls the
cultural/normative model. He argues that decision makers in democracies
follow a norm of peaceful conflict resolution that reflects domestic
experiences and values. The second explanation for how democracy leads to
a democratic peace is the structural/institution model. Russett (1993) argues
that those domestic institutional constraints include checks and balances in
separation of powers, and the need for public debate. Also, leaders in
democracies will recognize that other democratic leaders are similarly
constrained. As a result, democracies will tend to resolve disputes peacefully
and have less fear of surprise attack. However, any causal explanation of
democratic peace thesis that shows a positive relationship between
democracy and peace that has been given by proponents of
democratic peace theory is spurious and coincidental. Layne (1994)
maintains that the historical record concludes that in these cases
democracies have avoided war, but there is no evidence that they
did so because they shared democratic norms. Instead, the
democracies behaved in a manner predicted by realism: they acted
on the basis of their calculation of national interest; they paid
attention to strategic concerns, particularly the distribution of

military capabilities; and used threats when their vital interest were
jeopardized. Furthermore, Farber and Gowa (1995) argue that neither the
normative nor the structural explanation of the democratic peace is
persuasive. They argue that the absence of war between democracies
during this period reflects their common interest in allying against
the Soviet Union, not any peculiar features of their regime type.
Similarly, Oren (1995) contends that pairs of countries do remain at peace
because they regard one another as democracies. He mentions that the
reason why the United States appears not to fight our kind is not that
objective likeness substantially affects war propensity, but rather that we
subtly redefine our kind. Thus, countries that have an interest remaining at
peace and to define one another as democracies. Furthermore, Menshemeir
(1990:49) claims that the argument of democratic peace theory that
authoritarian leaders are more prone to go to war than leaders of
democracies, because authoritarian leaders are not accountable to
their publics is flawed. Conversely, it is not possible to sustain the
claim that the people in a democracy are especially sensitive to the
costs of war and therefore less willing than authoritarian leaders to
fight wars. Another argument, which emphasizes the transnational respect
for democratic rights among democracies, rests on weaker factors or reasons
for not going or going to war. These reasons are usually overridden by
other factors such as nationalism and religious fundamentalism
(Marsheimer, 1990:50). Likewise, Kacowitz (1995:266) asserts that the
causal explanation of democratic peace theory is contained
limitation. He suggests that well-established democracies do not
fight each other since they are conservative powers, usually
satisfied with the territorial status quo within and across their
borders. Moreover, Gowa (1995) who observed that it is difficult to
distinguish between norm based and interest base attribution of foreign
policy conduct. There are, however, other explanations of why certain
countries do not to go war. Alliances and distance are included
among the contested reasons against the democratic peace thesis
(Peterson 1997). Alliances bipolarity, multilarity, with their
regulations, will hamper countries from going war. Furthermore, if
they are geographically so far apart and lack power projection
capabilities, they are physically incapable of fighting each other.
Conclusion Debating democratic peace theory only demonstrates that this
theory is still vague. The empirical data that have been derived to
prove that democracies virtually never go to war with each other
and are more peace-prone in general remain controversial. Wars are
historically rare, but democracies are as well. Moreover the definitions
used as operational tools to support the choice of empirical data are
too subjective to be able to support the argument of democratic
peace. It can not be valid for all periods and it can only be used to explain
the exceptions to the anomalies of the evidence. Furthermore, the causal
linkage of normative and structural aspects of democratic systems is
limited to explaining the decision of countries or nations to go to
war or not to go to war or to decide to live peacefully with other
parties. The judgment of normative value is not clear that this
explanation is more conventional than national interest. The

structural reasons have limited explanation because structural

constraints will not always bind leaders or people of democratic
countries from considering the option of war. Therefore, there is still
a need to redefine the causal logic that explains the apparent
absence of war between democracies. There is still no consensus,
among theorists, however, on whether liberal principles or
democratic institutions and processes cause democratic peace. This
analysis also suggests that the Clinton administrations foreign policy
strategy of enlargement may be misguided. On the basis of the historical
record, it is not clear that the spread of democracy in and of itself will
exert much influence on the incidence of serious interstate conflict.
Therefore it is not necessary to force other countries to adopt an
American demo-cracy model.

Democratic peace theory fails because of fuzzy definitions

and normativity
Strugliski 12
(Damian, BA in War Studies, Kings College London, Strengths and
weaknesses of the democratic peace theory: A critical evaluation, pgs. 3-5,
VW)
The first two points for the democratic peace theory rely on its parsimony
and empirical basis. Upon closer inspection however, the apparent simplicity
becomes more and more deceptive. The major issue of these aspects is
the question of defining democracy and liberalism. Without a
universally agreed definition of these core terms the theory
weakens significantly. On the one hand it becomes tangible and loses
the clarity and straightforwardness which are so appealing. On the
other hand it loses merit in terms of credibility, as it is impossible to
decisively prove or falsify the hypothesis without precisely defined
set of data. Christopher Layne goes so far as to arguing that lack of clearcut definitions is the saving grace of democratic peace theorists.6 4
John M. Owen, How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace, in International
Security, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn, 1994, p. 89 5 Bill Clinton, 1994 State Of
The Union Address, The Washington Post via
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/politics/special/states/docs/sou94.htm, accessed on 26th November
2011 6 Christopher Layne, Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic
Peace, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn, 1994, p. 40; he uses
James L. Ray, "Wars Between Democracies: Rare, or Nonexistent?" in
International Interactions, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1993, p. 251-276 as an example of
this. BA in War Studies, Kings College London, Damian Struglioski Strengths
and weaknesses of the democratic peace theory 4 Another major
weakness of this notion also stems directly from the lack of unified
understanding of liberalism and democracy. What democratic peace
theory fails to take into account is human perception. The idea that
democracies do not go to war with each other is based around two
core explanations. The first one is that going to war is difficult in
democracies because of institutional constraints, as it requires approval of
the whole society. The second one is normative, stating that democracies see

fighting other democracies as unjust in view of liberal ideals. Both of them

however revolve around the recognition of one state as democratic
by the other one, and vice versa. Yet without a universally, or at
least mutually agreed definition of a democracy it becomes difficult
to establish a benchmark for such a state. Furthermore, even if such
an agreement is somehow achieved, there is no guarantee that said
states will necessarily subjectively see the other as adhering to
objective standards. As a result, a clear theory becomes weakened
and prone to interpretation. This problem deepens when analysing other
circumstances as well. Following the assumption that it is liberal values that
provide a common ground between democratic states, it is highly probable
that if a non-liberal government was to be elected via democratic
means, other democracies would not feel unjust in waging war
against it. John Owen saw a similar issue with the ancient Greek
democracies and hence modified the conditions for democratic
peace so that two liberal democracies were required for the
hypothesis to be true. 7 However, this elevates the previous issue to
another level by introducing a second subjective term of liberalism
in conjunction with the already vague democracy. This distinction
further limits the scope of the democratic peace theory by
introducing another parameter which needs to be evaluated as well
as decreasing its empirical characteristic by subjecting it further to
interpretation. The argument of the scope of the descriptive value is also
debated in critiques of the hypothesis. Democratic peace supporters
often see an advantage over realism in the fact that the theory
incorporates various levels of state relations, but this view is also
not free from debate. Realists argue that encapsulating intra-state
and supra-state affairs in the analysis is a fallacy. Firstly, by
interpreting the normative part of the democratic peace theory as
nonempirical it can be claimed that only the structural elements are
relevant to the hypothesis. Hence, the actual internal dynamics of a
state are extraneous as long as the mechanisms preventing the
country from going to war are in place. Furthermore, a problem of
externalizing internal norms arises. It can be argued that in the past
liberal democracies have 7 John M. Owen, op. cit., p. 98 BA in War
Studies, Kings College London, Damian Struglioski Strengths and
weaknesses of the democratic peace theory 5 not been able to adopt
their own ideals of conflict resolutions internationally.8 As a result,
arguing that intra-state dynamics are a part of the theory becomes more
difficult. Similarly, it can be argued that supra-national part of the theory is
also irrelevant, since in theory international law does not distinguish
between democracies and non-democracies. Finally, the normative
side of the theory, while powerful, may be seen as a double-edged
sword. While it indeed provides the subjectively right direction for
foreign and international policy, the theory can be dangerous in its
interpretation. As the idea of global security in a community of
democracies is normatively strong it can be easily used as a
justification of war. This has already been the case in the past. Woodrow
Wilson, a firm believer in Kants ideas, told the Congress that the world must
be made safe for democracy when asking it to declare war on Germany.9

Similarly, the justification for the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in
2003 provided by George W. Bush and Tony Blair during the later stages of
the conflicts included arguments of bringing democracy to Afghanistan and
stating that G. W. Bush has got great faith in democracies to promote
peace. 10 This, in combination with the subjective interpretation of
what is a democracy, can be used to validate aggression.

Democratic Peace Theory is wrong Laundry list of

reasons and empirics
Rosato, Ph. D. in Political Science, 03 (Sebastian, November
2003, The American Political Science Review, The Flawed Logic of
Democratic Peace Theory, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593025?
seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, 7/9/15, SV)

The causal mechanisms that comprise the normative logic do not appear to operate as stipulated. The

democracies
do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict
resolution, nor do they generally treat each other with trust and
respect when their interests clash. Moreover, existing attempts to repair the logic are
unconvincing. Norm Externalization The historical record indicates that democracies have
often failed to adopt their internal norms of conflict resolution in an
international context. This claim rests, first, on determining what democratic norms say about
available evidence suggests that, contrary to the claims of democratic peace theorists,

the international use of force and, second, on establishing whether democracies have generally adhered to

Liberal democratic norms narrowly circumscribe the

range of situations in which democracies can justify the use of force .
As Doyle (1997, 25) notes, "Liberal wars are only fought for popular, liberal
purposes." This does not mean that they will go to war less often
than other kinds of states; it only means that there are fewer
reasons available to them for waging war. Democracies are certainly justified in
fighting wars of self-defense. Locke ([1690] 1988), for example, argues that states, like men in
the state of nature, have a right to destroy those who violate their
rights to life, liberty, and property (269-72). There is considerable disagreement among
liberal theorists regarding precisely what kinds of action constitute self-defense, but repulsing an
invasion, preempting an impending military attack, and fighting in
the face of unreasonable demands all plausibly fall under this
heading. Waging war when the other party has not engaged in threatening behavior does not. In short,
these prescriptions.

democracies should only go to war when "their safety and security are seriously endangered by the

Another justification for the

use of force is intervention in the affairs of other states or peoples,
either to prevent blatant human rights violations or to bring about
conditions in which liberal values can take root. For Rawls (1999, 81), as for
many liberals, human rights violators are "to be condemned and in grave
cases may be subjected to forceful sanctions and even to
intervention" (see also Doyle 1997, 31-32, and Owen 1997, 34-35). Mill ([1859] (1984)) extends the
scope of intervention, arguing that "barbarous" nations can be conquered to
civilize them for their own benefit (see also Mehta 1990). However, if external rule does
not ensure freedom and equality, it will be as illiberal as the system it seeks to
replace. Consequently, intervention can only be justified if it is likely to
"promote the development of conditions in which appropriate
principles of justice can be satisfied" (Beitz 1979, 90). The imperialism of
Europe's great powers between 1815 and 1975 provides good
expansionist policies of outlaw states" (Rawls 1999, 90-91).

evidence that liberal democracies have often waged war for reasons
other than self-defense and the inculcation of liberal values. Although
there were only a handful of liberal democracies in the international system during this period, they
were involved in 66 of the 108 wars listed in the Correlates of War
(COW) dataset of extrasystemic wars (Singer and Small 1994). Of these 66 wars, 33 were "imperial,"
fought against previously independent peoples, and 33 were "colonial," waged against existing colonies. It

The
democracy faced no immediate threat and conquered simply for
profit or to expand its sphere of influence . A second set of cases includes wars
waged as a result of imperial competition: Liberal democracies conquered nonEuropean peoples in order to create buffer states against other
empires or to establish control over them before another imperial
power could move in. Thus Britain tried to conquer Afghanistan
(1838) in order to create a buffer state against Russia, and France
invaded Tunisia (1881) for fear of an eventual Italian occupation . Some
is hard to justify the "imperial" wars in terms of self-defense. Several cases are clear-cut:

commentators describe these wars as defensive because they aimed to secure sources of overseas wealth,
thereby enhancing national power at the expense of other European powers. There are three reasons to
dispute this assessment. First, these wars were often preventive rather than defensive: Russia had made
no move to occupy Afghanistan and Italy had taken no action in Tunisia. A war designed to avert possible
action in the future, but for which there is no current evidence, is not defensive. Second, there was

liberal great
powers could have offered non-European peoples military assistance
in case of attack or simply deterred other imperial power s. Finally, a
substantial number of the preventive occupations were a product of
competition between Britain and France, two liberal democracies
that should have trusted one another and negotiated in good faith
without compromising the rights of non-Europeans if democratic
peace theory is correct. A third set of cases includes wars waged directly
against non-Europeans whose territory bordered the European
empires. Because non-Europeans sometimes initiated these wars contemporaries tended to justify
them as defensive wars of "pacification" to protect existing imperial possessions. Again, there are
good reasons to doubt the claim that such wars were defensive . In the
first place, non-Europeans often attacked to prevent further
encroachment on their lands; it was they and not the Europeans that
were fighting in self-defense. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that the
imperial powers often provoked the attacks or acted preventively and exploited
frequently a liberal alternative to war. Rather than impose authoritarian rule,

local instabilities as a pretext for imposing control on the periphery of their empires (Table 1). Nor were any
of the extrasystemic wars fought to prevent egregious abuses of human rights or with the express purpose
of replacing autocratic rule with a more liberal alternative. The "colonial" wars, by definition, were conflicts
in which imperial powers sought to perpetuate or reimpose autocratic rule. The "imperial" wars simply
replaced illiberal indigenous government with authoritarian rule. When imperial rule was not imposed
directly, the European powers supported local elites but retained strict control over their actions, thereby
underwriting unjust political systems and effectively implementing external rule. In short, d espite

protestations that they were bearing the "white man's burden,"

there is little evidence that liberal states' use of force was motivated
by respect for human rights or that imperial conquest enhanced the
rights of nonEuropeans.s There are, then, several examples of liberal
states violating liberal norms in their conduct of foreign policy and
therefore the claim that liberal states generally externalize their
internal norms of conflict resolution is open to question. Proponents of the
democratic peace have downplayed the importance of these findings in three ways. First, they have
restated their argument and claimed that democracies remain at peace because they trust and respect
one other and fight nondemocracies because they neither trust nor respect them. As Doyle (1997, 32)
notes, "Extreme lack of public respect or trust is one of the major features that distinguishes relations
between liberal and nonliberal societies from relations among liberal societies." According to this

restatement, we should not be surprised to observe European democracies fighting non-Europeans and the
normative logic can therefore accommodate the imperial evidence. This alternative presentation of the
logic is, however, ad hoc. A more satisfying logic, and the one put forward by most democratic peace

Democracies rarely fight each other because they

trust and respect one another, and they are able to do so because
they know that their democratic counterparts will act on the basis of
democratic norms, that is, they will only fight in self-defense or to
democratize others. The key to this logic is that democracies must
reliably externalize democratic norms. If they do, then trust and
respect will prevail; if they do not, then we cannot be confident that
peace will obtain between them. The history of imperialism suggests
that they do not and therefore casts doubt on the normative logic's explanatory power. Second,
democratic peace theorists have claimed that Britain, France, and
the United States were not sufficiently liberal in the period under
review and thus cannot be expected to reliably externalize their
internal norms (e.g., Rawls 1999, 53-54). If this claim is true, the normative
logic cannot tell us a great deal about international politics. Britain,
France, and the United States are generally considered to be classic
liberal democracies; if they cannot be expected to behave in a liberal
fashion, then few, if any, states can. Finally, democratic peace theorists
assert that they do not claim that liberal norms are the sole
determinant of decisions for war; factors such as power and
contiguity matter as well (e.g., Russett 1995). This defense would be convincing if I were
theorists, is more complex:

claiming that liberal norms were not the only factors that went into decision making or that they were not

the claim made here is

quite different: Liberal states have consistently violated liberal
norms when deciding to go to war. It is not that liberal norms only
matter a little; they have often made no difference at all . In sum, there are
as important in the decision making process as other factors. However,

good reasons to believe that one of the normative logic's key causal mechanisms does not operate as
advertised. Liberal democratic great powers have frequently violated liberal norms in their decisions for
war, thereby casting doubt on the claim that democracies generally externalize their internal norms of

democracies do not
have a powerful inclination to treat each other with trust and
respect when their interests clash. Instead, they tend to act like any
other pair of states, bargaining hard, issuing threats, and, if they
believe it is warranted, using military force. Cold War Interventions. American
conflict resolution. Trust and Respect The available evidence suggests that

interventions to destabilize fellow democracies in the developing world provide good evidence that
democracies do not always treat each other with trust and respect when they have a conflict of interest. In

Washington's commitment to containing the spread of

communism overwhelmed any respect for fellow democracies.
Although none of the target states had turned to communism or joined
each case,

the communist bloc, and were led by what were at most left-leaning democratically elected governments,

American officials chose neither to trust nor to respect them,

preferring to destabilize them by force and replace them with
autocratic (but anticommunist) regimes rather than negotiate with them in
good faith or secure their support by diplomatic means (Table 2). Three
features of these cases deserve emphasis. First, all the regimes that the United States
sought to undermine were democratic. In the cases of Guatemala, British
Guyana, Brazil, and Chile democratic processes were fairly well established. Iran,
Indonesia, and Nicaragua were fledgling democracies but Mossadeq,
Sukarno, and the Sandinistas could legitimately claim to be the first
proponents of democracy in their respective countries . Every
government with the exception of the Sandinistas was replaced by a succession of

American-backed dictatorial regimes. Second, in each case the clash of

interests between Washington and the target governments was not particularly
severe. These should, then, be easy cases for democratic peace
theory since trust and respect are most likely to be determinative
when the dispute is minor. None of the target governments were communist, and although
some of them pursued leftist policies there was no indication that they intended to impose a communist
model or that they were actively courting the Soviet Union. In spite of the limited scope of disagreement,
respect for democratic forms of government was consistently subordinated to an expanded conception of

there is good evidence that support for democracy

was often sacrificed in the name of American economic interests. At
least some of the impetus for intervention in Iran came in response to the nationalization of the oil
industry, the United Fruit Company pressed for action in Guatemala,
International Telephone and Telegraph urged successive administrations to intervene in
Brazil and Chile, and Allende's efforts to nationalize the copper industry fueled
national security. Third,

demands that the Nixon administration destabilize his government. In sum, the record of American
interventions in the developing world suggests that democratic trust and respect has often been

subordinated to security and economic interests. Democratic peace theorists generally

agree that these interventions are examples of a democracy using force against other democracies, but

offer two reasons why covert interventions should not count against the normative logic.
The first reason is that the target states were not democratic enough to be trusted
and respected (Forsythe 1992; Russett 1993, 120-24). This claim is not entirely convincing. Although
the target states may not have been fully democratic, they were
more democratic than the regimes that preceded and succeeded them and
they

were democratizing further. Indeed, in every case American action brought more autocratic regimes to
power. The second reason is that these interventions were covert, a fact believed by
democratic peace theorists to reveal the strength of their normative argument. It was precisely

because these states were democratic that successive

administrations had to act covertly rather than openly initiate military
operations. Knowing that their actions were illegitimate, and fearing a public backlash, American officials
decided on covert action (Forsythe 1992; Russett 1993, 120-24). This defense fails to address some

it ignores the fact that American public officials ,

that is, the individuals that democratic peace theory claims are most likely to abide by
liberal norms, showed no respect for fellow democracies . Democratic peace
important issues. To begin with,

theorists will respond that the logic holds, however, because these officials were restrained from using
open and massive force by the liberal attitudes of the mass public. This is a debatable assertion; after all,
officials may have opted for covert and limited force for a variety of reasons other than public opinion,

Simply because the use of

force was covert and limited, this does not mean that its nature was
determined by public opinion. But even if it is true that officials
adopted a covert policy to shield themselves from a potential public
backlash, the logic still has a crucial weakness: The fact remains
that the United States did not treat fellow democracies with trust or
respect. Ultimately, the logic stands or falls by its predictive power, that is, whether democracies treat
such as operational costs and the expected international reaction.

each other with respect. If they do, it is powerful; if they do not, it is weakened. It does not matter why
they do not treat each other with respect, nor does it matter if some or all of the population wants to treat
the other state with respect; all that matters is whether respect is extended. To put it another way, we can
come up with several reasons to explain why respect is not extended, and we can always find social groups
that oppose the use of military force against another democracy, but whenever we find several examples
of a democracy using military force against other democracies, the trust and respect mechanism, and
therefore the normative logic, fails an important test.6 Great Powers. Layne (1994) and Rock (1997) have
found further evidence that democracies do not treat each other with trust and respect in their analyses of
diplomatic crises involving Britain, France, Germany, and the United States .

Layne examines
four prominent cases in which rival democracies almost went to war
with one another and asks whether the crises were resolved because
of mutual trust and respect. His conclusion offers scant support for
the normative logic: "In each of these crises, at least one of the

democratic states involved was prepared to go to war..... In each of

the four crises, war was avoided not because of the 'live and let live'
spirit of peaceful dispute resolution at democratic peace theory's
core, but because of realist factors" (Layne 1994, 38).7 Similarly, Rock finds
little evidence that shared liberal values helped resolve any of the
crises between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth
century. In addition, his analyses of the turn-of-the-century "great rapprochement" and naval arms
control during the 1920s show that even in cases where liberal states resolved potentially divisive issues in
a spirit of accommodation, shared liberal values had only a limited effect. In both cases peace was
overdetermined and "liberal values and democratic institutions were not the only factors inclining Britain
and the United States toward peace, and perhaps not even the dominant ones" (Rock 1997, 146).8 In sum,

Shared democratic
values provide no guarantee that states will both trust and respect
one another. Instead, and contrary to the normative logic's claims, when serious conflicts of interest
the trust and respect mechanism does not appear to work as specified.

arise between democracies there is little evidence that they will be inclined to accommodate each other's
demands or refrain from engaging in hard line policies. Repaired Normative Logic Given that democracies

democratic peace theorists

have tried to repair the logic by introducing a new causal factor:
perceptions. In the revised version of the logic, democracies will only trust and respect one another
have not treated each other as the normative logic predicts,

if they consider each other to be democratic. This adjustment can only improve the logic's explanatory
power if we can predict how democracies will categorize other states with a high level of confidence and if
this categorization is relatively stable. The available evidence suggests, however, that policymakers'
personal beliefs and party affiliations, or strategic interest, often preclude coherent, accurate, and stable
assessments of regime type, thereby lessening our confidence that joint democracy enables democracies

There is rarely agreement, even among

well-informed policymakers, about the democratic status of a foreign
power and we are, therefore, unlikely to be able to predict how democracies will classify other states'
regime type with a high level of confidence.9 Owen (1997) has examined the views
of liberal elites in 10 war-threatening crises involving the United
States and another state between 1794 and 1898. In six of the
cases, the major political parties in the United States disagreed
about the liberal status of France, Britain, Chile, and Spain. In three
other cases, these disagreements extended both across and within
parties. In only one case, the Spanish American Crisis, was there a consensus within the American elite
to remain at peace. Elusive Consensus.

regarding the liberal status of the foreign power (Table 3). In sum, the evidence from Owen's cases
suggests that we are unlikely to be able to predict how states will perceive one another's regime type:
Opinion is almost always divided, even for cases that look easy to outside observers. This being the case,
the repaired normative logic can only tell us if liberal states will view each other as such after the fact: If
they treat each other with trust and respect, then they must have viewed each other as liberal; if they do
not, then they must have viewed each other as illiberal. In these circumstances, the only way to create a
more determinate logic is to predict whose opinions will win out in the domestic political game. If, for
example, we can predict that doves, republicans, or business interests will generally get their way, then we
may be able to predict policy outcomes. Such predictions have, however, eluded democratic peace

Democracies will also

often simply get another state's regime type wrong, thereby
lessening our confidence that objectively democratic states will not
fight one another. In five of the nine cases where Owen evaluates how other states perceived
America, foreign liberal elites either classified the United States as
illiberal or were unsure as to its status. In 1873, Spanish liberals, most of whom
theorists (see Autocratic Restraint, below). Inaccurate Assessment.

identified with the Spanish Republican party, disagreed over the status of the United States. All Chilean
elites and all Spanish elites, regardless of their party affiliation, regarded the United States as illiberal in
the 1890s. Finally, British opinion leaders, who had agreed that the United States was liberal for over a
century, were divided over its liberal status in 1895-96. The paradigmatic liberal state was, then, often
perceived as anything but. Even more surprising is the fact that as the nineteenth century wore on, and
the United States became more liberal by most objective standards, other states increasingly viewed it as
illiberal. Regime Type Redefined Not only are perceptions of other regimes often contested or inaccurate,
but

they are also subject to redefinition, and this redefinition does not

always reflect the actual democratic attributes of those states . Oren

(1995) conducts an in depth study of the United States' changing
relationship with Imperial Germany prior to World War I and finds
that American opinion leaders stopped defining Germany as a
democracy as the two countries' strategic relationship began to
deteriorate. This observation leads him to conclude that democracy
is not a determinant as much as it is a product of America's foreign
relations: "The reason we do not to fight 'our kind' is not that
'likeness' has a great effect on war propensity, but rather that we
from time to time subtly redefine our kind to keep our self image
consistent with our friends' attributes and inconsistent with those of
our adversaries" (Oren 1995, 147). In other words, contrary to the expectations of the normative
logic, perception of regime type is an outcome rather than a causal factor. Liberal states appear especially
prone to this practice of reinterpreting who should be trusted and respected. In the nineteenth century,
non-European peoples could be put under autocratic imperial rule for their own good. In the early
twentieth century, as Oren has noted, the bar was raised higher and Imperial Germany was judged worthy
of neither trust nor respect. By the end of the century, even liberal democratic Japan could not count on
unquestioning American friendship. In each case, prestige, security concerns, or economic interests
shaped perceptions of regime type.10 These examples raise serious problems for any causal logic based
on perceptions. Discerning whether perceptions matter inevitably becomes a question of sifting through
the statements of policymakers and opinion leaders during a crisis or war. At the same time, public figures
will try to distinguish their own state from the enemy in these situations, both for their own cognitive
consistency and to rally the public. Since people in the modern world generally identify themselves as
members of a nation state, these distinctions will tend to focus on political structures. Scholars will
therefore always be able to find "evidence" that the other state was not perceived to be sufficiently
"democratic" as leaders go about demonizing the enemy. I am not arguing that this represents a
misreading of the evidenceperceptions of another state are bound to change in crisis situations-I am only
suggesting that these perceptions are caused by factors other than the objective nature of foreign
regimes. In sum, proponents of the normative logic have done little to strengthen their case by introducing
perceptions as an independent variable. Often states do not have a unified perception of the liberal
attributes of a foreign power and it is therefore difficult to argue that perceptions of regime type affect
policy.

Moreover, these perceptions may change independently of the

objective nature of the other regime, suggesting that it is entirely
possible for liberal states to fight one another. FLAWS IN THE INSTITUTIONAL

LOGIC The causal mechanisms that make up the institutional logic do not appear to operate as stipulated.
There are good reasons to believe that accountability, a mechanism common to all five variants of the
institutional logic, does not affect democratic leaders any more than it affects their autocratic
counterparts. Nor does the available evidence support the claims of the institutional logic's other causal
mechanisms. Pacific publics and antiwar groups rarely constrain policymakers' decisions for war,
democracies are neither slow to mobilize nor incapable of launching surprise attacks, and open political
competition provides no guarantee that a state will be able to reveal its level of resolve in a crisis.

Accountability Each variant of the institutional logic rests on the

claim that democratic institutions make leaders accountable to
various groups that may, for one reason or another, oppose the use
of force. I do not dispute this claim but, instead, question whether
democratic leaders are more accountable than their autocratic
counterparts. Since we know that democracies do not fight one another and autocracies do fight
one another, democrats must be more accountable than autocrats if
accountability is a key mechanism in explaining the separate peace
between democracies. On the other hand, if autocrats and democrats are
equally accountable or autocrats are more accountable than
democrats, then there are good reasons to believe that
accountability does not exert the effect that democratic peace
theorists have suggested.11 Following Goemans (2000a) I assume that a leader's
accountability is determined by the consequences as well as the probability of losing office for adopting an
unpopular policy. This being the case, there is no a priori reason to believe that a leader who is likely to
lose office for fighting a losing or costly war, but unlikely to be exiled, imprisoned, or killed in the process,
should feel more accountable for his policy choices than a leader who is unlikely to lose office but can

expect to be punished severely in the unlikely event that he is in fact removed. Therefore,

determining whether autocrats or democrats are more accountable

and, consequently, more cautious about going to war rests on
answering three questions: Are losing democrats or losing autocrats
more likely to be removed from power? Are losing democrats or
losing autocrats more likely to be punished severely? and Are
democrats or autocrats more likely to be removed and/or punished
for involvement in costly wars, regardless of the outcome ? To answer these
questions I have used a modified version of Goemans's (2000b) dataset. Our analyses differ in one
fundamental respect: While he counts the removal of leaders by foreign powers as examples of
punishment, I do not. This decision is theoretically informed. The purpose of the analysis is to determine
whether leaders' decisions for war are affected by their domestic accountability, that is, if there is
something about the domestic structure of states that affects their chances of being punished. Punishment
by foreign powers offers no evidence for or against the claim that democrats or dictators have a higher or
lower expectation of being punished by their citizens for unpopular policies, and these cases are therefore
excluded. I have also made two minor changes to the data that do not affect the results: I have added 19
wars that appear in the COW dataset but not in Goemans's dataset and coded 11 regimes that Goemans
excludes.12 The results appear in Table 4. Although democratic losers are two times more likely to be
removed from power than autocratic losers, this evidence is not strong. This is because there are only four
cases of democratic losers in the entire dataset, making it impossible to draw any firm conclusions about
the likelihood that losing democrats will be removed. Prime Minister Menzies of Australia, for example,
resigned early in the Vietnam War, but his resignation may have had more to do with the fact that he was
in his seventies than the expectation of defeat in South East Asia a decade later. If this case is recoded, as
it probably should be, democratic losers have only been removed from power 50% of the time and the
distinction between democrats and autocrats is small. Losing autocrats are more likely to suffer severe
punishment than their democratic counterparts. None of the four losing democrats was punished, whereas
29% of autocratic losers were imprisoned, exiled, or killed. Thus ,

while democratic and

autocratic losers have similar chances of being removed from office,
autocrats seem to be more likely to suffer severe punishment in
addition to removal. The evidence from costly wars, regardless of
whether the leader was on the winning or losing side, confirms these
findings. Costly wars are defined as wars in which a state suffered one battle fatality per 2,000
population, as the United States did in World War I.13 Historically, autocrats have been
more likely both to lose office and to be punished severely if they
become involved in a costly war. Autocrats have been removed 35%
of the time and punished 27% of the time, while democrats have
only been removed 27% of the time and punished 7% of the time.14
In short, there is little evidence that democratic leaders face greater
expected costs from fighting losing or costly wars and are therefore
more accountable than their autocratic counterparts. This being the
case, there is good reason to doubt each variant of the institutional
logic. Public Constraint Pacific public opinion does not appear to place a
fundamental constraint on the willingness of democracies to go to
war. If it did, then democracies would be more peaceful in their
relations with all types of states, not just other democracies . However,
instead of being more peaceful, on average democracies are just as likely to go to
war as nondemocracies (Farber and Gowa 1995). There are three reasons why
publics are unlikely to constrain democratic war proneness. First, the
costs of war typically fall on a small subset of the population that
will likely be unwilling to protest government policy . Excluding the two World
Wars, democratic fatalities in war have exceeded 0.1% of the
population in only 6% of cases. In 60% of cases, losses represented less than 0.01% of the
population or one in 10,000 people. Most democratic citizens, then, will never be
personally affected by war or know anyone affected by military conflict. Adding the many
militarized disputes involving democracies strengthens this finding. Both the United States and Britain
have suffered fewer than 100 battle casualties in approximately 97% of the militarized disputes in which

they have been involved (Singer and Small 1994). Moreover, modern democracies have tended to have

the military, then, join the armed forces voluntarily,

accepting that they may die in the service of their countries. This in turn means that
their families and friends, that is, those who are most likely to suffer the costs of war, are
unlikely to speak out against a government that chooses to go to war or are at least less likely
professional standing armies. Members of

to do so than are the families and friends of conscripts. In short, the general public has little at stake in
most wars and those most likely to suffer the costs of war have few incentives to organize dissent. Second,

any public aversion to incurring the costs of war may be

overwhelmed by the effects of nationalism. In addition to the growth of democracy,
one of the most striking features of the modern period is that people have come to identify
themselves, above all, with the nation state. This identification has been so powerful that
ordinary citizens have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to fight
and die for the continued existence of their state and the security of their co-nationals. There are,
then, good reasons to believe that if the national interest is thought to be at stake, as it is in most
interstate conflicts, calculations of costs will not figure prominently in the public's decision process. Third,

democratic leaders are as likely to lead as to follow public opinion .

Since nationalism imbues people with a powerful spirit of self-sacrifice ,
it is actively cultivated by political elites in the knowledge that only highly
motivated armies and productive societies will prevail in modern
warfare (e.g., Posen 1993). Democratically elected leaders are likely to be well placed to cultivate

nationalism, especially because their governments are often perceived as more representative and
legitimate than authoritarian regimes. Any call to defend or spread "our way of life," for example, is likely
to have a strong resonance in democratic polities, and indeed the historical record suggests that wars have
often given democratic leaders considerable freedom of action, allowing them to drum up nationalistic
fervor, shape public opinion, and suppress dissent despite the obligation to allow free and open discussion.

Democracy Fails
Even perfect democracies always fail multiple warrants
they dont solve for, including human stupidity,
human nature, and irrationalism he cites multiple
qualified authors and empirics, Greece and Italy
prove
Cohen 12

(Dave, M.A. in theoretical linguistics and was working on a Ph.D. before

leaving The University of Texas at Austin in 1985, 3.8.12, Decline of the
Empire, Democracies Always Fail,
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/03/democracies-always-fail.html,
Accessed: 7.9.15, VW)
But suppose we did live in a democracy in which all votes were equal.
It would fail anyway scientists say, for People Aren't Smart Enough for
Democracy to Flourish. The democratic process relies on the
assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize
the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it.
But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect
of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and
imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership
and policies. The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at
Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently
unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of
those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it
is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts.
They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments. As
a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates
can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately
evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be
hard for people to adopt, because most people dont have the
sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's
Little Mysteries. He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell
and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again
that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own
intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people's ability to
rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own
performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always
assess their own performance as "above average" even people who, when
tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People
Too Ignorant to Know It] There is a lot more to say about people's
competence to evaluate their own competence or the ideas of others, but
let's stick with how their "lack of mental tools" affects democracy. In an ideal
democracy where "one person, one vote" actually holds, people's inability to
judge ideas and issues would be a big problem. But we live in the Real World,
not an ideal world. And the further away you move from an ideal democracy,
the less rational the voting process becomes. Here in the United States,

party allegiance and voting have become primarily emotional

processes. And of course for candidates or those working directly for the
political parties or those buying their allegiance, there's a pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow. The issues are unimportant, being merely
emotional touchstones for uninformed voters. There's hardly
anything rational about it for most of these dupes. The advent of
Mass Media in the 20th century changed the game in a profound
way. Emotional messages can now be disseminated far and wide in
30-second or 60-second spots on TV or radio. Certainly it is not
possible to intelligently address a real issue (e.g. tax policy or
government deficits) in such a short period of time. Soundbites, not
rational thinking, govern the election process from beginning to
end. Thus the scientists quoted above have committed the fallacy I called
the Imputation of Rationality in my post Humans Are Not Rational Problem
Solvers. If "lack of expertise" (incompetence) was the real problem, we might
conclude that democracies always fail because voters can not
distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas. The most
incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying
a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people
may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but
we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own
personal lack of expertise. Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany,
recently implemented Dunning and Kruger's theories by computersimulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the
election, he assumed that voters' own leadership skills were
distributed on a bell curve some were really good leaders, some,
really bad, but most were mediocre and that each voter was
incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate
as being better than his or her own. When such an election was
simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly
better than average always won. Nagel concluded that democracies
rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over
dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they
"effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming
leaders." As I pointed out above, the real problem is that ideal democracies
(one person, one equally-weighted vote) do not exist. Clueless voters are a
secondary issue. And I would go much further. I would say that ideal or
close-to-ideal democracies are inherently unstable and therefore
must fail. They are unsustainable. The reason for this is simple: ideal
democracies are incompatible with Human Nature, i.e. power
corrupts, governing inherently requires humans to wield power, and
thus the democratic process must become subverted at some point
or other. American democracy failed decades agowe could argue
about exactly when that occurredbut we are seeing that process at
work in Europe today. Greece and Italy are now run by unelected
bureaucrats in Brussels who, along with the ECB and big private
banks, will increasingly call the shots in other countries on Europe's
southern rim. Great power is being wielded and corruption is part &
parcel of that. The governing process in EU member states is
becoming more and more undemocratic every day. If you doubt this,

just ask a Greek or an Italian. Next year you can ask the Portuguese
or the Spanish. So my view is that democracies always fail sooner or
later. Although the United States never had a pure democracy, it is
remarkable how long the old Republic was sustained. But when America
became a great global power after World War II, the jig was up. It was only a
matter of time until the U.S. became as undemocratic as it is today. What's
ironic about this is that the less we live in a democracy, the more
those looking to maintain the status quo trumpet the idea of
America-as-a-democracy and the importance of voting. Frankly,
that's ridiculous, and provides us with yet another example of how
crazy life in the United States has become. In psychological terms, this
looks like the biggest case of overcompensation in human history. In the
media it is totally unacceptable to call a spade a spade and admit we don't
live in a democracy. It is taboo, verboten. When a subject is taboo, that's
always a strong indicator that deep psychological forces (i.e. basic instincts or
defense mechanisms) are in play.

Democracy is failing globally because countries no longer

want it Russia and China undermine it, citizens
themselves no longer promote it, and even stable
democracies are shifting from overconfidence
action on an international scale is necessary to
solve, empirics and multiple examples (perception
turn)
Kurlantzick 11

(Joshua, BA in political science, Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on

Foreign Relations, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public
Diplomacy and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy, 5.19.11,
New Republic, The Great Democracy Meltdown,
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/world/magazine/88632/failing-democracyvenezuela-arab-spring, Accessed: 7.9.15, VW)
As the revolt that started this past winter in Tunisia spread to Egypt, Libya,
and beyond, dissidents the world over were looking to the Middle East for
inspiration. In China, online activists inspired by the Arab Spring called for a
jasmine revolution. In Singapore, one of the quietest countries in the world,
opposition members called for an orchid evolution in the run-up to this
months national elections. Perhaps as a result, those watching from the West
have been positively triumphalist in their predictions. The Middle East
uprisings could herald the greatest advance for human rights and freedom
since the end of the cold war, argued British Foreign Secretary William
Hague. Indeed, at no point since the end of the cold warwhen Francis
Fukuyama penned his famous essay The End of History, positing that liberal
democracy was the ultimate destination for every countryhas there been so
much optimism about the march of global freedom. If only things were so
simple. The truth is that the Arab Spring is something of a smokescreen
for what is taking place in the world as a whole. Around the globe, it
is democratic meltdowns, not democratic revolutions, that are now
the norm. (And even countries like Egypt and Tunisia, while certainly freer

today than they were a year ago, are hardly guaranteed to replace their
autocrats with real democracies.) In its most recent annual survey, the
monitoring group Freedom House found that global freedom plummeted
for the fifth year in a row, the longest continuous decline in nearly
40 years. It pointed out that most authoritarian nations had become
even more repressive, that the decline in freedom was most
pronounced among the middle ground of nationscountries that
have begun democratizing but are not solid and stable democracies
and that the number of electoral democracies currently stands at
its lowest point since 1995. Meanwhile, another recent survey,
compiled by Germanys Bertelsmann Foundation, spoke of a gradual
qualitative erosion of democracy and concluded that the number of
highly defective democraciesdemocracies so flawed that they
are close to being failed states, autocracies, or bothhad doubled
between 2006 and 2010. The number of anecdotal examples is
overwhelming. From Russia to Venezuela to Thailand to the
Philippines, countries that once appeared to be developing into
democracies today seem headed in the other direction. So many
countries now remain stuck somewhere between authoritarianism
and democracy, report Marc Plattner and Larry Diamond, co-editors of the
Journal of Democracy, that it no longer seems plausible to regard [this
condition] simply as a temporary stage in the process of democratic
transition. Or as an activist from Burmalong one of the worlds most
repressive countriestold me after moving to Thailand and watching that
countrys democratic system disintegrate, The other countries were
supposed to change Burma. ... Now it seems like they are becoming like
Burma. Twenty or even ten years ago, the possibility of a global
democratic recession seemed impossible. It was widely assumed
that, as states grew wealthier, they would develop larger middle
classes. And these middle classes, according to democracy theorists
like Samuel Huntington, would push for ever-greater social, political,
and economic freedoms. Human progress, which constantly marched
forward, would spread democracy everywhere. For a time, this rosy
line of thinking seemed warranted. In 1990, dictators still ruled most of
Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia; by 2005, democracies had emerged across
these continents, and some of the most powerful developing nations,
including South Africa and Brazil, had become solid democracies. In 2005,
for the first time in history, more than half the worlds people lived
under democratic systems. Then, something odd and unexpected
began to happen. It started when some of the leaders who had
emerged in these countries seemed to morph into elected autocrats
once they got into office. In Venezuela, Hugo Chvez is now
essentially an elected dictator. In Ecuador, elected President Rafael
Correa, who has displayed a strong authoritarian streak, recently
won legislation that would grant him expansive new powers. In
Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who led the 2005 Tulip Revolution,
soon proved himself nearly as authoritarian as his predecessor. And,
in Russia, Vladimir Putin used the power he won in elections to
essentially dismantle the countrys democracy. But it wasnt just
leaders who were driving these changes. In some cases, the people

themselves seemed to acquiesce in their countries slide away from

free and open government. In one study by the Program on International
Policy Attitudes, only 16 percent of Russians said it was very
important that their nation be governed democratically. The regular
Afrobarometer survey of the African continent has found declining
levels of support for democracy in many key countries. And in
Guatemala, Paraguay, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, and Nicaragua,
either a minority or only a small majority of people think democracy
is preferable to any other type of government. Even in East Asia, one
of the most democratic regions of the world, polls show rising
dissatisfaction with democracy. In fact, several countries in the region
have developed what Yu-tzung Chang, Yunhan Zhu, and Chong-min Park, who
studied data from the regular Asian Barometer surveys, have termed
authoritarian nostalgia. Few of the regions former authoritarian
regimes have been thoroughly discredited, they write, noting that the
regions average score for commitment to democracy, judged by a
range of responses to surveys, has recently fallen. But what about the
middle class? Even if large segments of the population were uninterested in
liberal democracy, werent members of the middle class supposed to act as
agents of democratization, as Huntington had envisioned? Actually, the story
has turned out to be quite a bit more complicated. In country after country, a
familiar pattern has repeated itself: The middle class has indeed reacted
negatively to populist leaders who appeared to be sliding into
authoritarianism; but rather than work to defeat these leaders at the ballot
box or strengthen the institutions that could hold them in check, they have
ended up supporting military coups or other undemocratic measures.
Thailand offers a clear example of this phenomenon. In 2001, Thaksin
Shinawatra, a former telecommunications tycoon turned populist, was
elected with the largest mandate in Thai history, mostly from the poor, who,
as in many developing nations, still constitute a majority of the population.
Over the next five years, Thaksin enacted several policies that clearly
benefited the poor, including national health insurance, but he also began to
strangle Thailands institutions, threatening reporters, unleashing a war on
drugs that led to unexplained shootings of political opponents, and silencing
the bureaucracy. In 2005, when the charismatic prime minister won another
free election with an even larger mandate, the middle class revolted,
demonstrating in the streets until they paralyzed Bangkok. Finally, in
September 2006, the Thai military stepped in, ousting Thaksin. When I
traveled around Bangkok following the coup, young, middle-class Thais,
who a generation ago had fought against military rulers, were
engaged in a love-in with the troops, snapping photos of soldiers posted
throughout Bangkok like they were celebrities. The middle class in Thailand
had plenty of company. In 2001, urban Filipinos poured into the streets to
topple President Joseph Estrada, a former actor who rose to power on his
appeal to the poor, and then allegedly used his office to rake in vast sums of
money from underworld gambling tycoons. In Honduras in 2009, middle-class
opponents of populist President Manuel Zelaya began to protest his plans to
extend his power by altering the constitution. When the military removed him
in June of that year, the intervention was welcomed by many members of the
urban middle class. An analysis of military coups in developing nations over

the past two decades, conducted by my colleague David Silverman, found

that, in nearly half of the casesdrawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and
the Middle Eastmiddle-class men and women either agitated in advance for
the coup, or, after the takeover, expressed their support in polls or prominent
press coverage. Even as domestic politics in many developing nations
has become less friendly to democratization, the international
system too has changed, further weakening democratic hopes. The
rising strength of authoritarian powers, principally China but also
Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other states, has helped forestall
democratization. Moscow and Beijing were clearly rattled by the color
revolutions of the early and mid-2000s, and they developed a number of
responses. First, they tried to delegitimize the revolts by arguing that
they were not genuine popular movements but actually Western
attempts at regime change. Then, in nations like Cambodia, Ukraine,
Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova, Moscow and Beijing intervened
directly in attempts to reverse democratic gains. The Kremlins youth
group, Nashi, known for its aggressive tactics against democracy activists,
launched branches in other Central Asian nations. In Kyrgyzstan, Russian
advisers helped a series of leaders emulate the Kremlins model of political
control. In part because of this Russian influence, [p]arliamentary
democracy in Kyrgyzstan has been hobbled, according to the International
Crisis Group. China and Russia even created new NGOs that were
supposedly focused on democracy promotion. But these organizations
actually offered expertise and funding to foreign leaders to help them
forestall new color revolutions. In Ukraine, an organization called the Russian
Press Club, run by an adviser to Putin, posed as an NGO and helped facilitate
Russias involvement in Ukrainian elections. But China and Russia are
only part of the story. In many ways, the biggest culprits have
actually been stable democracies. Consider the case of Myo, a Burmese
publisher and activist who I met four years ago in a dingy noodle shop in
Rangoon. The educated son of a relatively well-off Burmese family, he told
me he had been working for a publishing company in Rangoon, but had to
smuggle political messages into pieces he published in magazines that
focused on safe topics like soccer or Burmese rap. Its kind of a game
everyone here plays, he explained, but after a while it gets so tiring.
When I next met Myo, it was in Thailand two years later. Hed finally grown
weary of trying to get his writing past the censors and left for India, then for
Thailand. Id heard that, before, India had been very welcoming to Burmese
activists, particularly after 1988, Myo said, referring to a period of antigovernment rioting in Burma. At one time, Indian officials had assisted
Burmese democracy activists, and Indias defense minister from 1998 to
2004 was George Fernandes, a prominent human rights advocate who even
gave some Burmese exiles shelter in his family compound. By the time Myo
came to India, however, Delhi had stopped criticizing the Burmese
junta. Instead, it had reversed itself and was engaging the generals
under a policy called Look East. When Than Shwe, the Burmese juntas
leader, paid a state visit to India, he was taken to the burial site of Mahatma
Gandhi, a cruelly ironic juxtaposition that Amnesty Internationals Burma
specialist called entirely unpalatable. For Myo, Indias chilly new
pragmatism was a shock. I expected China to work with Burma, he said.

But to see it from India, it was so much more disappointing. Like Myo,
many Western officials had expected that stable developing-world
democracies like India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey
would emerge as powerful advocates for democracy and human
rights abroad. But as theyve gained power, these emerging
democratic giants have acted more like cold-blooded realists. South
Africa has for years tolerated Robert Mugabes brutal regime next door in
Zimbabwe, and, in 2007, it even helped to block a U.N. resolution
condemning the Burmese junta for human rights abuses. Brazil has cozied up
to Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and to local autocrats like Cubas
Castros. When a prominent Cuban political prisoner named Orlando Zapata
Tamayo held a hunger strike and eventually died, former Brazilian President
Luiz Incio Lula da Silva seemed to ridicule Tamayos struggle, likening the
activist to a criminal who was trying to gain publicity. There are exceptions to
this trend. Poland, for one, has used its influence to support reformers in
other post-Soviet states like Belarus. But Poland is unusual, and by playing a
limitedor hostilerole in international democracy promotion efforts,
countries like South Africa or Brazil or Turkey have made it easier for
autocratic leaders to paint democracy promotion as a Western phenomenon,
and even to portray it as an illegal intervention. Why have regional
democratic powers opted for this course? It seems hard to believe that a
country with, say, Brazil or South Africas experience of brutal tyranny could
actively abet dictators in other nations. But it now appears that the notion
of absolute sovereignty, promoted by authoritarian states like China,
has resonated with these democratic governments. Many of these
emerging democratic powers were leading members of the non-aligned
movement during the cold war and weathered Western efforts to foment
coups in their countries. Today, they feel extremely uncomfortable joining any
international coalition that could undermine other nations sovereignty, even
if potentially for good reason. And many of these countries, such as Turkey
and Indonesia and India, may simply be eager to avoid criticism of their own
internal human rights abuses. Then there is the United States, still the
most influential nation on earth. Its missteps, recently, have been
serious. Barack Obamas efforts to distance himself from the Bush
administrationwhich greatly undermined Americas moral
authority-have combined with the countrys weakened economic
position to downgrade the importance of democracy promotion in
U.S. foreign policy. While Obama has delivered several speeches
mentioning democracy, he has little obvious passion for the issue.
When several prominent Iranian dissidents came to Washington in the
summer of 2009, following the uprising in their country, they could not obtain
meetings with any senior Obama administration officials. Rabeeya Kadeer,
the Uighur version of the Dalai Lama, met with Bush in 2008 but found
herself shunted off to low-level State Department officials by the Obama
administration. More substantively, the administration has shifted the
focus of the federal bureaucracy. Though it has maintained significant
budget levels for democracy promotion, it eliminated high-level positions
on the National Security Council that, under Bush, had been devoted
to democracy. The administration also appointed an assistant secretary for
democracy, human rights, and labor who in his previous work had been

mostly focused on cleaning up Americas own abuses. This was not a bad
thingthe Bush administration indeed left major issues to resolvebut it
meant that he had far less experience than many of his predecessors with
democracy promotion abroad. To be fair, the White House has to grapple
with an increasingly isolationist American public. In one poll taken in
2005, a majority of Americans said that the United States should
play a role in promoting democracy elsewhere. By 2007, only 37
percent thought the United States should play this role. In a
subsequent study, released in late 2009, nearly half of Americans
told the Pew Research polling organization that the United States
should mind its own business internationally and should let other
nations work out their challenges or problems themselves. This was
the highest percentage of isolationist sentiment recorded in a poll of
the American public in four decades. There is an obvious appeal to
the constantly touted notion that the march of human freedom is
inevitable. But not only is it simple-minded to treat history as a story with a
preordained happy ending; it is also, for those who truly want to see
democracy spread, extraordinarily dangerous. After all, if democracy
is bound to triumph, then theres no reason to work too hard at
promoting it. This overconfidence can spread to developing nations
themselves, lulling democrats into a false sense of security once an
election has finally been held, and dissuading them from building
the institutions that are necessary to keep a country free over the
long-term. Democracy is not a simple thing: Its a complex system of strong
institutions and legal checks. Very few nations have mastered it fully. And
sustaining it is a never-ending effort.

Democracies fail income inequality, corrupt executive,

ethnic fragmentation, and lack of public goods,
multiple examples
Kapstein 12

(Ethan, John M. Olin Pre- and Post-doctoral fellow, Harvard University, Ph.D. in
International Economics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a
member of the Council on Foreign Relations, awarded the Navy Achievement
Medal, 3.29.12, Center for Global Development, Why Democracies Fail:
Lessons from Mali?, http://www.cgdev.org/blog/why-democracies-fail-lessonsmali, Accessed: 6.9.15, VW)
Why, then, do democracies fail? Our study identified several common
factors. First, young democracies are often weakened by extreme
levels of income inequality. Rising income inequality indicates a
dysfunctional democratic state in which economic power is
concentrated in the hands of the few, rather than one in which
economic opportunities are widely shared and diffused. Second,
young democracies that are unable to constrain the executive
branch of powerwhether presidential or parliamentarywill find it
difficult to sustain participatory forms of government. The usual red
flags here are changesor attempts to changethe constitution, particularly
with respect to term limits and electoral cycles. Among the leaders who
have threatened their democracies in this way are Hugo Chavez in

Venezuela and Eduardo Correa in Ecuador. Third, democratic states

that are ethnically fragmented face severe challenges of institution
building they may be unable to overcome. Such societies are often
characterized by insider-outsider tensions that are not easily
resolved. As the insidersthe ethnically dominant group
centralize political power, the outsiders may find they have no
alternative but to try and overthrow the regime. Fourth, newly
democratic states that do not provide adequate supplies of public
goods like health care and education are unlikely to succeed. In
crucial respects, democracy as a regime type is justified by its ability to
deliver public goods to a broad spectrum of citizens, and not just to an elite.
If democracies are unable or unwilling to meet these demands, their very
raison detre may be called into question. The democratic reversals that
have occurred since the publication of our book in 2008 broadly confirm
our findings. For example, in Mali, ethnic tensions are a major source
of political instability, and these have not been adequately
addressed or peacefully resolved by democratic institutions. In the
Maldives, the overthrow of the president was sparked by his efforts
to dismiss judges appointed by the previous regime in a manner
inconsistent with constitutional processes.

Protests Dont Matter

Protests arent as effective today as they were years ago.
Pazienza, Author, 2013 (Chez, February 3, 2015, The 60s Brand of

Protesting Doesnt Work Anymore, http://thedailybanter.com/2013/02/the60s-brand-of-protesting-doesnt-work-anymore/, July 9, 2015, RW)

Ive said this sort of thing before many times. Matt Taibbis said it. David
Cross does an entire bit about it. But no matter how often its repeated, there
are still those out there on the left who live in their own little epistemic
bubble and dont seem to get something: the 60s are over and continuing
to protest like its 1967 will get you absolutely nowhere in the year
2013. Yes, itll grab you a little attention, but ultimately not the kind
you want. Its an ineffective model of activism in the new millennium
and the predisposition to fall back on it needs to be shelved once and for all.
Yesterday, in a scene as predictable as it was pointless, members of Code
Pink crashed the confirmation hearing of CIA chief nominee John Brennan.
They stood up with their posters emblazoned with pithy cracks like Dont
Drone Me, Bro! waved hands that theyd painted pink, and shouted at the
top of their lungs about how Brennan was a murderer and how they stood for
mothers whod lost loved ones overseas in Americas drone campaign against
Al Qaeda. One of them even brandished some kind of puppet or doll that I
guess was supposed to be a baby. They did this over and over again until
Diane Feinstein had to finally clear the room, eventually allowing many back
in but exiling the Code Pink people to the arms of waiting reporters outside,
where at least this time, as far as I know, they did their histrionic interviews
without the assistance of the giant papier-mch effigy of Brennan they
brought to the White House last month. I made it clear yesterday that while I
acknowledge the dangers of a continued drone war overseas and certainly
see how the issue of collateral damage on the ground and secret kill lists here
at home could prompt some serious discussion, I personally dont have it in
me to get so worked up over any of it that I feel the need to take to the
streets. That said, this is America and there isnt a thing wrong with voicing
your opinion on the subject of how the U.S. has been prosecuting the socalled war on terror. The thing is, if it infuriates you and you feel the need
to work toward changing it or stopping it altogether, youre going to want
a plan for making your views heard in a way thats potent and that
has some hope of accomplishing what you set out to. In the late
1960s, the way to do that was by making a lot of very loud noise and
turning almost every protest into a Kabuki theater-style spectacle.
This worked because we were living in a time when the masses were
actually terrified of individuality; it was considered a serious threat
to the established order, one that had already begun to upend that
order, and so any expression of it not only got attention, it got
results. But the rules have changed over the years. Now not only is
individualism and public outrage not shocking or dangerous, its an
almost comical anachronism. As Ive said before, there is no individualism
these days. Nothing truly audacious can stand in our culture, not when our
culture has become so monstrously adept at assimilating all forms of

rebellion until they become completely meaningless and utterly impotent.

Prepackaged, homogenized non-conformity is as close as your local Hot Topic.
Agitation is fashion. Defiance is a slogan. Insurrection is product placement.
The revolution is not only televised, it can be DVRed and enjoyed at your
convenience. When the Code Pink troops stand up and shout down a
confirmation hearing before the guy at the center of it really even has a
chance to start speaking Brennan was just thanking his wife when the hell
started being raised and produce puppets and pink hands in the process
theyre not only creating a cacophonous mess, theyre providing endless
fodder for the idiots at Fox News, who get to smirk patronizingly and present
it as red meat to their audience of bitter old people. Its left-wing agitators
just being left-wing agitators and whats more, it barely even gets the point
at hand across. Yeah, you made a statement, but who cares if no one
can figure out the details of what that statement is besides your not
wanting to be droned, bro? You made news, but to what end?

Protests are no longer effective.

Duke Chronicle, 2002 (The Chronicle, September 30, 2002, Editorial:

D.C. Protests Ineffective,

http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2002/10/01/editorial-dc-protestsineffective#.VZ7qneuJnww, July 9, 2015, RW)
Over the past several days, Washington, D.C., has hosted the annual meeting
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As usual, antiglobalization protesters mobilized opposition to these organizations. In stark
contrast to protests in April 2000 and in Seattle, these protesters were largely
ineffectual and were shut down by a strong security contingent of Washington
police. Thankfully, this round of protests did not evolve into a violent raucous
like past protests have. Although the validity of the protester complaints is
suspect, the main problem with these types of protests in general is the
violence they result in. The First Amendment clearly protects the rights
of individuals to free speech and to freedom of assembly. However,
these freedoms are predicated on the notions that any protests will
be carried out in a non-violent way. In order for freedoms to remain,
dissenters must conduct their protests in an appropriate way.
Protesters can make their voice heard without using force and causing
damage. Ultimately, by resorting to violent tactics, protesters are crippling
their own cause. However, the protesters' cause is less than clear: They
give a laundry-list of problems with the world, but do not offer any
solutions. Moreover, protesters villanize corporations, supranational
organizations and globalization without engaging in constructive
debate about these issues, providing intellectual justifications for
their beliefs or giving any reasonable alternatives to what they
protest. Standing out in the street with a sign, harassing member of
the IMF or the WTO, or burning representations of corporate America
in effigy may serve to bring protesters media attention, but they do
nothing to contribute to discussion of the very real problems facing
the world today. Conversely, the very organizations the protesters are
opposed to, the WTO and the IMF, are at least trying to provide solutions to
the problems of the developing world. First off, for the developing world,
globalization and increased free trade, including the flow of technology and

ideas from developed to less developed countries, provides the greatest

mechanism for economic betterment in the third-world. While there are
undeniably losers from free trade, these are primarily in the less developed
world and waning industries. Overall, free trade makes all countries better off
and specifically improves the lives of workers in the less-developed world.
Second, by providing loans to the less-developed world, the IMF is at least
trying to give them a leg-up and a chance to better themselves. Protesters
might have a valid argument that these non-governmental organizations and
the Western world should forgive part or all of the third-world debts, it is also
an imperative that the Western world excersice control over future loans and
grants to ensure that these monies do not go solely for the purpose of lining
the pockets of dictators.

Surveillance doesnt hurt public trust- only 17 percent of

Americans say theyre very concerned about
government surveillance.
Rainie, Harvard Graduate and has a masters degree in political science from
Long Island University, 2015 (Lee, March 16, 2015, Americans Views on
Government Surveillance programs,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/03/16/americans-views-on-governmentsurveillance-programs/, July 9, 2015, RW)
In this survey, 17% of Americans said they are very concerned about
government surveillance of Americans data and electronic
communication; 35% say they are somewhat concerned; 33% say they
are not very concerned and 13% say they are not at all concerned about
the surveillance. Those who are more likely than others to say they are very
concerned include those who say they have heard a lot about the surveillance
efforts (34% express strong concern) and men (21% are very concerned).
When asked about more specific points of concern over their own
communications and online activities, respondents expressed
somewhat lower levels of concern about electronic surveillance in
various parts of their digital lives: 39% say they are very concerned or
somewhat concerned about government monitoring of their activity on
search engines. 38% say they are very concerned or somewhat
concerned about government monitoring of their activity on their email
messages. 37% express concern about government monitoring of their
activity on their cell phone. 31% are concerned about government monitoring
of their activity on social media sites, such as Facebook or Twitter. 29% say
they are concerned about government monitoring of their activity on their
mobile apps. In addition, notable numbers of respondents said that
some of these questions were not applicable to them. In general, men
are more likely than women to say that they are very concerned about
government surveillance of Americans data and electronic communications
(21% vs. 12%). Men are also more likely than women to be very concerned
about surveillance over their own activities on mobile apps and search
engines. When asked to elaborate on their concerns, many survey
respondents were critical of the programs, frequently referring to privacy
concerns and their personal rights.

AT: CONSTITUTIONALISM
Counterintelligence operations are constitutional.
Brenner, Former Head of U.S. CI, 07 (Joel F., 3-29-07, National

Counterintelligence Executive, Strategic Counterintelligence,

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a563730.pdf, accessed 7-10-15, MAM)
I want to leave time for questions, so let me close now with a comment that
goes to the heart of this committee's mission, namely, the pursuit of national
security missions under law. U.S. counterintelligence organizations may
be imperfect but they are very good. We have highly skilled, dedicated
professionals all over the world who accomplish difficult tasks every day in
often hostile environments. We did not get good by breaking American
law. We did it within our laws and Constitution, and we cannot lose
sight of the fact that what we are trying to protect is, above all, the
rule of democratically made law. Americas position in the world is
best secured by sustaining her our values. We who labor in intelligence
work in powerful, secret agencies on behalf of a 15 society that profoundly
distrusts both power and secrecy, and in the long run, we cannot function
effectively unless the country we serve believes that we do our work within
the law. If the Congress believes it is faced with systematic violations of the
law, the tools available to it are limited. It uses a meat ax, not a scalpel. We
went through such a period after the investigations of intelligence
abuses in the mid-1970s, and those of us in the business dont want
it to happen again. Those of us who remember that era and we are
retiring at a rapid rate therefore have a duty to teach our juniors that
intelligence must be conducted in compliance with US law and the
United States Constitution, or we are asking for trouble. Ladies and
gentlemen, it's time we recognized that intelligence is a regulated industry,
and in any regulated industry, compliance is good business.

Aff Update

AT: Framework

Martinot and Sexton 3, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American
Studies School of Humanities UCI, The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 6-20-15, NN
The foundations of US white supremacy are far from stable. Owing to the instability of white supremacy, the social structures of whiteness

The process of re-inventing whiteness and

white supremacy has always involved the state, and the state has
always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political cataclysms such as the civil rights movements that
sought to shatter this invention have confronted the state as harbingers of sanity. Yet the states absorption
and co-optation of that opposition for the reconstruction of the
white social order has been reoccurring before our very eyes. White
supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake, but for the
sake of the social paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent
spectacles of racialisation that it calls the maintenance of order , all of
must ever be re-secured in an obsessive fashion.

which constitute its essential dimensions. The cold, gray institutions of this society courts, schools, prisons, police, army, law, religion, the

. It
is not simply by understanding the forms of state violence that the
structures of hyper-injustice and their excess of hegemony will be
addressed. If they foster policing as their paradigm including imprisonment, police occupations, commodified governmental
two-party system become the arenas of this brutality, its excess and spectacle, which they then normalise throughout the social field

operations, a renewed Jim Crow, and a re-criminalisation of race as their version of social order then to merely catalogue these institutional
forms marks the moment at which understanding stops. To pretend to understand at that point would be to affirm what denies understanding.

, we have to understand the state and its order as a mode of

anti-production that seeks precisely to cancel understanding
through its own common sense. For common sense, the opposite of injustice is justice;however, the
opposite of hyper-injustice is not justice. The existence of
hyperinjustice implies that neither a consciousness of injustice nor
the possibility of justice any longer applies. Justice as such is incommensurable with and wholly
exterior to the relation between ordinary social existence and the ethic of impunity including the
modes of gratuitous violence that it fosters. The pervasiveness of state-sanctioned terror,
Instead

police brutality, mass incarceration, and the endless ambushes of white populism is where we must begin our theorising. Though state
practices create and reproduce the subjects,discourses, and places that are inseparable from them, we can no longer presuppose the subjects
and subject positions nor the ideologies and empiricisms of political and class forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive
state terror becomes primary. This is not to debate the traditional concerns of radical leftist politics that presuppose (and close off) the

The problem here is how to

dwell on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness
themselves rather than simply the state as an apparatus. It is to ask
how the state exists as a formation or confluence of processes with
de-centred agency, how the subjects of state authority its agents,
citizens, and captives are produced in the crucible of its ritualistic
violence
question of structure, its tenacity, its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness.