1NC

A Interpretation:
Topical affirmatives must affirm the resolution through
instrumental defense of action by the United States
government.
B Definitions
Should denotes an expectation of enacting a plan
American Heritage Dictionary 2000 (Dictionary.com)
should. The will to do something or have something take place: I shall go out if I feel like it.

Federal government is the central government in Washington

DC
Encarta Online 2005,
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_1741500781_6/United_States_(
Government).html#howtocite
United States (Government), the combination of federal, state, and local laws, bodies, and
agencies that is responsible for carrying out the operations of the United
States. The federal government of the United States is centered in
Washington, D.C.

Resolved implies a policy

Louisiana House 3-8-2005, http://house.louisiana.gov/house-glossary.htm
Resolution A legislative instrument that generally is used for making declarations,
stating policies, and making decisions where some other form is not required. A bill includes the
constitutionally required enacting clause; a resolution uses the term "resolved". Not
subject to a time limit for introduction nor to governor's veto. ( Const. Art. III, 17(B) and House Rules
8.11 , 13.1 , 6.8 , and 7.4)

C Vote neg
First is Predictable Limits - The resolution proposes the
question the negative is prepared to answer and creates a
bounded list of potential affs for us to think about. Debate has
unique potential to change attitudes and grow critical thinking
skills because it forces pre-round internal deliberation on a of
a focused, common ground of debate
Robert E.

Goodin and Simon J. Niemeyer- Australian National University- 2003,

When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in Deliberative Democracy,
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2003 VOL 51, 627649, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.00323217.2003.00450.x/pdf
What happened in this particular case, as in any particular case, was in some respects peculiar unto
itself. The problem of the Bloomfield Track had been well known and much discussed in the local
community for a long time. Exaggerated claims and counter-claims had become

entrenched, and unreflective public opinion polarized around them. In this

circumstance, the effect of the information phase of deliberative processes was
to brush away those highly polarized attitudes, dispel the myths and
symbolic posturing on both sides that had come to dominate the debate, and
liberate people to act upon their attitudes toward the protection of rainforest itself. The
key point, from the perspective of democratic deliberation within, is that that happened in
the earlier stages of deliberation before the formal discussions (deliberations, in
the discursive sense) of the jury process ever began. The simple process of jurors seeing the site for themselves, focusing their
minds on the issues and listening to what experts had to say did virtually all the work in changing jurors attitudes. Talking among
themselves, as a jury, did very little of it. However, the same might happen in cases very different from this one. Suppose that
instead of highly polarized symbolic attitudes, what we have at the outset is mass ignorance or mass apathy or non-attitudes. There
again, peoples engaging with the issue focusing on it, acquiring information about it, thinking hard about it would be something
that is likely to occur earlier rather than later in the deliberative process. And more to our point, it is something that is most likely to
occur within individuals themselves or in informal interactions, well in advance of any formal, organized group discussion. There is
much in the large literature on attitudes and the mechanisms by which they change to support that speculation.31 Consider, for
example, the literature on central versus peripheral routes to the formation of attitudes. Before deliberation, individuals may not
have given the issue much thought or bothered to engage in an extensive process of reflection.32 In such cases, positions may be
arrived at via peripheral routes, taking cognitive shortcuts or arriving at top of the head conclusions or even simply following the
lead of others believed to hold similar attitudes or values (Lupia, 1994). These shorthand approaches involve the use of available
cues such as expertness or attractiveness (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986) not deliberation in the internal-reflective sense we have
described. Where peripheral shortcuts are employed, there may be inconsistencies in logic and the formation of positions, based on
partial information or incomplete information processing. In contrast, central routes to the development of attitudes involve the
application of more deliberate effort to the matter at hand, in a way that is more akin to the internal-reflective deliberative ideal.
Importantly for our thesis, there is nothing intrinsic to the central route that requires group deliberation. Research in this area
stresses instead the importance simply of sufficient impetus for engaging in deliberation, such as when an individual is stimulated
by personal involvement in the issue.33 The same is true of on-line versus memory-based processes of attitude change.34 The

we lead our ordinary lives largely on autopilot, doing

routine things in routine ways without much thought or reflection. When we
come across something new, we update our routines our running beliefs
and pro cedures, attitudes and evaluations accordingly. But having
updated, we then drop the impetus for the update into deep-stored
memory. A consequence of this procedure is that, when asked in the ordinary course
of events what we believe or what attitude we take toward something, we easily
retrieve what we think but we cannot so easily retrieve the reasons why . That
more fully reasoned assessment the sort of thing we have been calling
internal-reflective deliberation requires us to call up reasons from stored
memory rather than just consulting our running on-line summary
judgments. Crucially for our present discussion, once again, what prompts that shift from online to more deeply reflective
suggestion here is that

deliberation is not necessarily interpersonal discussion. The impetus for fixing ones attention on a topic, and retrieving reasons from
stored memory, might come from any of a number sources: group discussion is only one. And again, even in the context of a group
discussion, this shift from online to memory-based processing is likely to occur earlier rather than later in the process, often
before the formal discussion ever begins. All this is simply to say that, on a great many models and in a great many different sorts of

elements of the pre-discursive process are likely to prove

crucial to the shaping and reshaping of peoples attitudes in a citizens jury-style
process. The initial processes of focusing attention on a topic, providing
information about it and inviting people to think hard about it is likely to
settings, it seems likely that

provide a strong impetus to internal-reflective deliberation , altering not

just the information people have about the issue but also the way people
process that information and hence (perhaps) what they think about the

issue. What happens once people have shifted into this more internal-reflective mode is, obviously,
an open question. Maybe people would then come to an easy consensus, as they did in their attitudes

toward the Daintree rainforest.35 Or maybe people would come to divergent conclusions; and they
then may (or may not) be open to argument and counter-argument, with talk actually changing minds.
Our claim is not that group discussion will always matter as little as it did in our citizens jury.36 Our
claim is instead merely that the earliest steps in the jury process the sheer focusing of attention on
the issue at hand and acquiring more information about it, and the internal-reflective deliberation that
that prompts will invariably matter more than deliberative democrats of a more discursive stripe
would have us believe. However much or little difference formal group discussions might make, on any
given occasion, the pre-discursive phases of the jury process will invariably have a considerable impact
on changing the way jurors approach an issue. From Citizens Juries to Ordinary Mass Politics? In a
citizens jury sort of setting, then, it seems that informal, pre-group deliberation deliberation within
will inevitably do much of the work that deliberative democrats ordinarily want to attribute to the
more formal discursive processes. What are the preconditions for that happening? To what extent, in
that sense, can findings about citizens juries be extended to other larger or less well-ordered
deliberative settings? Even in citizens juries, deliberation will work only if people are attentive, open
and willing to change their minds as appropriate. So, too, in mass politics. In citizens juries the need to
participate (or the anticipation of participating) in formally organized

group discussions might be the prompt that evokes those

attributes. But there might be many other possible prompts that can be found in less formally
structured mass-political settings. Here are a few ways citizens juries (and all cognate
micro-deliberative processes)37 might be different from mass politics, and in
which lessons drawn from that experience might not therefore carry over to
ordinary politics: A citizens jury concentrates peoples minds on a single
issue. Ordinary politics involve many issues at once. A citizens jury is often
supplied a background briefing that has been agreed by all stakeholders (Smith
and Wales, 2000, p. 58). In ordinary mass politics, there is rarely any equivalent
common ground on which debates are conducted. A citizens jury separates the process of
acquiring information from that of discussing the issues. In ordinary mass politics, those processes are invariably intertwined. A
citizens jury is provided with a set of experts. They can be questioned, debated or discounted. But there is a strictly limited set of
competing experts on the same subject. In ordinary mass politics, claims and sources of expertise often seem virtually limitless,
allowing for much greater selective perception. Participating in something called a citizens jury evokes certain very particular
norms: norms concerning the impartiality appropriate to jurors; norms concerning the common good orientation appropriate to
people in their capacity as citizens.38 There is a very different ethos at work in ordinary mass politics, which are typically driven by

a citizens jury, we
think and listen in anticipation of the discussion phase, knowing
that we soon will have to defend our views in a discursive setting
where they will be probed intensively.39 In ordinary mass-political settings, there is
flagrantly partisan appeals to sectional interest (or utter disinterest and voter apathy).

In

no such incentive for paying attention. It is perfectly true that citizens juries are special in all those
ways. But if being special in all those ways makes for a better more

reflective, more deliberative political process, then those are design

features that we ought try to mimic as best we can in ordinary mass politics
as well. There are various ways that that might be done. Briefing books might be prepared by sponsors of American

presidential debates (the League of Women Voters, and such like) in consultation with the stakeholders involved. Agreed panels of
experts might be questioned on prime-time television. Issues might be sequenced for debate and resolution, to avoid too much
competition for peoples time and attention. Variations on the Ackerman and Fishkin (2002) proposal for a deliberation day before
every election might be generalized, with a day every few months being given over to small meetings in local schools to discuss
public issues. All that is pretty visionary, perhaps. And (although it is clearly beyond the scope of the present paper to explore them
in depth) there are doubtless many other more-or-less visionary ways of introducing into real-world politics analogues of the
elements that induce citizens jurors to practice democratic deliberation within, even before the jury discussion gets underway.
Here, we have to content ourselves with identifying those features that need to be replicated in real-world politics in order to
achieve that goal and with the possibility theorem that is established by the fact that (as sketched immediately above) there is at
least one possible way of doing that for each of those key features.

Most problems are not clear cut but have complex, uncertain
interactions. The aff is characterized by shoddy
generalizations [like ____] that prevent us from understanding
the nuances of an incredibly important and complex issue.
This is the epitome of dogmatism
Keller, et. al, Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago - 2001
(Thomas E., James K., and Tracly K., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of
Chicago, professor of Social Work, and doctoral student School of Social Work, Student debates in
policy courses: promoting policy practice skills and knowledge through active learning, Journal of
Social Work Education, Spr/Summer 2001, EBSCOhost)

John Dewey, the philosopher and educational reformer, suggested that the
initial advance in the development of reflective thought occurs in the
transition from holding fixed, static ideas to an attitude of doubt and
questioning engendered by exposure to alternative views in social discourse
(Baker, 1955, pp. 36-40). Doubt, confusion, and conflict resulting from discussion of
diverse perspectives "force comparison, selection, and reformulation of ideas
and meanings" (Baker, 1955, p. 45). Subsequent educational theorists have contended that
learning requires openness to divergent ideas in combination with the ability
to synthesize disparate views into a purposeful resolution (Kolb, 1984; Perry, 1970).
On the one hand, clinging to the certainty of one's beliefs risks dogmatism,
rigidity, and the inability to learn from new experiences. On the other hand, if one's
opinion is altered by every new experience, the result is insecurity, paralysis, and the inability to take
effective action. The educator's role is to help students develop the capacity to incorporate new and
sometimes conflicting ideas and experiences into a coherent cognitive framework. Kolb suggests that,
"if the education process begins by bringing out the learner's beliefs and theories, examining and
testing them, and then integrating the new, more refined ideas in the person's belief systems, the
learning process will be facilitated" (p. 28). The authors believe that involving students in

substantive debates challenges them to learn and grow in the fashion described by
Dewey and Kolb. Participation in a debate stimulates clarification and critical
evaluation of the evidence, logic, and values underlying one's own policy
position. In addition, to debate effectively students must understand and
accurately evaluate the opposing perspective. The ensuing tension between
two distinct but legitimate views is designed to yield a reevaluation and
reconstruction of knowledge and beliefs pertaining to the issue.

The aff alone is meaningless focus on creating spaces is

communicative capitalism, thriving on individualized communication
focused debate provides the opportunity to challenge power
Chandler reviewing Dean 10, Professor of IR at the University of Westminster and Poli Sci
Prof at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (David, No Communicating Left, www.davidchandler.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/10/Radical-Philosophy-Dean-review.pdf)

Dean pulls few punches in her devastating critique of the American left for its complacency,
its limited capacity, and even its lack of awareness of the need to offer a stand of political
resistance to power. This is how she concludes her book: The eight years of the Bush administration
were a diversion. Intoxicated with a sense of purpose, we could oppose war, torture, indefinite
detention, warrantless wiretapping, a seemingly endless series of real crimes such opposition keeps
us feeling like we matter We have an ethical sense. But we lack a coherent politics. (p.175) Dean

highlights clearly the disintegration of the collective left and its simulacra in the individuated

life-style politics of todays depoliticized radicalism, where it appears that particular

individual demands and identities are to be respected but there is no possibility of
universalising them into a collective challenge to the system: no possibility of a left which
stands for something beyond itself. She argues that, rather than confront this problem, the left
take refuge in the fantasy that technology will overcome their inability to engage and that the
circulation of ideas and information on the internet will construct the collectivities and
communities of interest, which are lacking in reality. For Dean, this technology fetishism marks
the lefts failure: its abandonment of workers and the poor; its retreat from the state and
repudiation of collective action; and its acceptance of the neoliberal economy as the only game in
town (p.33). In fact, she uncovers the gaping hole at the heart of the left, highlighting that
radicalism appears to be based less on changing the world than on the articulation of an
alternative oppositionalist identity: a non-strategic, non-instrumental, articulation of a
protest against power. In a nutshell, the left are too busy providing alternative voices, spaces
and forums to think about engaging with mass society in an organised , collective, attempt to
achieve societal transformation. For Dean, this is fake or hollow political activity, pursued more for

its own sake than for future political ends. This is a politics of ethical distancing, of selfflattery and
narcissism, which excuses or even celebrates the self-marginalization of the left: as either the result of
the overwhelming capacity of neoliberal power to act, to control, and to regulate; or as the result of the
apathy, stupidity, or laziness of the masses - or the sheeple (p.171) - for their failure to join the
radical cause. Dean suggests that the left needs to rethink its values and approaches and her book is
intended to be a wake-up call to abandon narcissistic complacency. In doing this, she highlights a
range of problems connected around the thematic of the lefts defence of democracy in an age of
communicative capitalism. She argues that the lefts focus on extending or defending democracy
by asserting their role in giving voice and creating spaces merely reproduces the

domination of communicative capitalism, where there is no shared space of

debate and disagreement but the proliferation of mediums and messages
without the responsibility to develop and defend positions or to engage and no
external measure of accountability . Communicative capitalism is held to thrive
on this fragmented, atomizing, and individuated, framework of communication,
which gives the impression of a shared discourse, community, or movement but
leaves reality just as it is, with neoliberal frameworks of domination, inequality,
and destruction continuing unopposed (pp.162-75). This is not merely a critique of the US
left; it is also a powerful deconstruction of its claims for a collective existence. She suggests this most
strongly in her chapters on technology fetishism and on the 9/11 truth movement, in which she
analyzes how individuals come together not on the basis of a collective political project,

challenging power, but on the basis of an invitation for individuals to affirm their alienation
from power and to produce, or to find out for themselves, their own personal truths. These
are not projects to change or to transform the external world but mechanisms whereby
individuals can find meaning through their ethical individual actions and beliefs . She
powerfully describes how 9/11 truth movements are about individual affirmation rather than
collective engagement. In this they can easily be equated with the mass anti-war

demonstrations where individuals marched under the banner of Not in My Name, seeking
personal affirmation in distancing themselves from politics rather than taking responsibility
to engage in political struggle by the building of any collective movement (p.47). The same
atomization of left politics is analyzed in Deans critique of the radical individualism at the heart of

the displacement of politics with ethics. Here Judith Butler stands in as the exemplar for a left, which is
alleged to have given up on conviction and political struggle and instead retreated into

emphasising generosity to difference and awareness of mutual vulnerability and to focus

upon micropolitical and ethical practices that work on the self in its immediate reactions
and relations (p.123). Dean argues that the ethical turn appears to be a reflection of political
despair and celebrates a denial of political struggle and strong subjectivity . Dean also,

correctly, links this presentation of defeatism to a misconstruction of Foucaults work that understands
power as operating free from politics. Using Butler as an example, she argues that Butler reads

governmentality as replacing sovereignty, rather than as a discursive framing for the operation of
political power (p.125). The intimation is that in seeing power as having shifted to the global

level, free from states, political opposition is merely expressed in the ethical terms of
engagement in discourses that shape and deform what we mean by the human (p.135).
This strongly resonates with the technological fetishism of the global politics of networked
communication which encourages the transformation of politics into the ethics of virtual
participation.

Neg FWK 1NC

1NC Shell

FWK
1. Interpretation: the aff must advocate topical action of the
USFG
2. Violation: the aff does not use the USFG to enact their
advocacy
3. Standards
a. Decision Making (DCM):
b. Switch Side Debate (SSD):
c. Cede the Political (CTP):
d. Predictability/Limits:

On Case (Solvency)

2NC Overview of Fwk

Generic Always Read Overview

Our interpretation is that the aff must advocate topical action
by the USFG any other model of debate is bad for clash and
ruins fairness and education for both sides.
1. Framework is an additive requirement dont buy their
attempts to frame this as a tradeoff. They can use [X] to
defend a plantext, defending instrumental action doesnt
require them to remove any style or content from the 1AC
2. Weigh framework before the substance of the affOnly
until the discussion of how the best model of debate is
settled can the evaluation of impacts extrinsic to this be
deliberated.
3. Plan texts prevent the aff from pivoting to things like noncontroversial statements like racism is bad in the 2AR
and shifting out of a supposed advocacy in the 1AR.
4. Any affirmative interpretation is unreasonable- not having
to defend government action justifies omission of any
other part of the resolution. The aff justifies a plan that
increases economic engagement with Tanzania, because
economic engagement is in the direction of the topic.
5. Filter the debate through the lens of whichever
interpretation can access the best advocacy skills, which
is the primary portable skill garnered by debate rounds.

Cede the Political (CTP)

Cede The Political Overview

Full rejection of policy creates political antipathy - a few
arguments:
1. State engagement is the only way to solve the aff
external political movements get pepper sprayed into
submission until they begin to engage in politics. Occupy
Wall Street was utterly ineffective in accomplishing
anything until politicians decided to attempt to enact
modest reforms this puts the aff in a double bind:
a. Either the aff eventually collapses to policy action,
which means that they have to justify why defending
instrumental government action is problematic now but
not later OR
b. The aff never engages the state, which means that best
case scenario, privileged members of society can move
to Mendocino to live on the magical postmodernist
commune the aff wants while minority communities in
places like Texas and South Carolina are ravaged by
discriminatory legislation enacted by the hard right left
behind to govern.
2. Ceding the political gives power to right wing extremism.
Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are
characterized by resentment of governmental elites, but
while Occupy floundered in Zuccotti Park the Tea Party
organized politically and became a major voting bloc,
allowing a bigoted pumpkin to become the GOP nominee.
Extremists hijack existing political structures and use
police force to suppress any movement this turns the
aff.

Decision Making (DCM)

DCM Overview
Decision making is something that all of us do on a daily basis.
From small decisions like what should I eat for breakfast to
bigger ones like how can I improve the world? decisions are
what we do. Debates greatest value lies not in teaching us
facts about [the aff] but in teaching us how to make these
decisions, as it is a major portable skill that is facilitated by
constructive debates.
1. Decision Making is k2 critical thinkingDecision making
teaches cost-benefit analysis and weighing the methods
and outcomes of a decision. Only through a specific
affirmative that resolution based can we truly facilitate
strong decision making. There are two reasons why
decision making is best when the aff is under the
resolution.
a. Mutually accessible literature base: Literature on the
government is massive and allows an in-depth debate.
b. Predictable Limits: Resolution Based discussion allows
a predictable stasis point that facilitates a wellinformed discussion on both sides. This allows
debaters to make strategic decisions like kicking
arguments, and cross applying arguments easier as
their resolution based research can be applied to the
round unlike a K aff round.
2. Link Turn Change outside the debate space goodDCM is
cumulative and portable. By being able to make effective
decisions especially under the pressure of a controversial
subject or action is key to being able to navigate effective
methods and cost benefit analysis. The method of debate
they promote centered around the thesis of an
uncontroversial point, like racism bad, leads to neg
making worse argumentation and forces decisions of the
lesser of two evils.

DCM Political Advocacy Mod

1. Policy Advocacy advocating action by the USFG doesnt
increase the power the government has. It does force us
to consider external impacts and navigate complex
bureaucratic and political structures as well as legal
jargon. These are the most difficult decisions to make,
and the training that debate gives us is like training at
high altitude so we run faster at sea level. Comparatively,
class sign-ups are easier decisions than USFG action, but
training in USFG action-based scenarios makes us more
effective in our daily lives.

A2 Our K Aff doesnt preclude buying a

Prius/picking a college major/etc. (Steinberg and
Freely)
1. Thats not the point of our standard, rather you can cross
apply the overview of standard showing how only through a
mutually accessible lit base, limits, and a controversial
stasis point will there be a test of critical decision making.
The specific cost-benefit analysis that comes with these
conditions allow for a strong accumulation of decrision
making skills from the round to then glean the benefits of a
Prius, college major, etc.

Predictability/Limits

Predictability/Limits Overview
Predictable Limits are an important part of the continuance of
the activityWithout limits put in place, activities like debate
peter out, because people lose interest in an activity in which
there are no forces to check back against abuse. The Neg
isolates two main reasons why predictability is key
1. Predictable clash is key to specificityIf the neg has to
debate something unpredictable then we have to resort to
generics and cannot have specific arguments. There are two
implications to this
a. Lack of specificity means we will never be able to access
the affirmative on a substantive level and therefore the
discussion of the aff will allows be shallow implicating
their solvency. This acts as a solvency takeout to any of
their in-round solvency claims.
b. Lack of specificity means we will have to resort to generic
arguments which means we lose topic-specific education
because we only get a shallow discussion of the
resolution itself.
2. Limitations helps preserve the activityOnly through
restrictions imposed in debate will we be able to produce
debates that all individuals feel the ability to participate in.
Without these limitations individuals from smaller schools
cant prepare for affs outside the resolution and lack strong
accessibility making debate homogenized by larger
institutions which the aff probably indicts.

A2 Counter-Interp: this aff is the ONLY aff that is

topical/resolutional/Other BS
1. There is a logical bankruptcy behind this statement: if
every aff says this, it means their counter-interp does not
actually apply any limits on the discussion base. You
need to evaluate framework not just on a round-by-round
basis, but rather how their aff justifies explosion of limits
in other rounds and to the activity itself.

A2 Unpredictability inevitable
1. Although some form of unpredictability is inevitable,
having a generic thesis such as engagement with China
via the USFG allows to check back on the most extreme
instances of abuse, allows core neg strategies, and allows
aff flexibility, which means the resolution garners
bidirectional benefits.

Switch Side Debate (SSD)

SSD Overview
Reading their affirmative on the negative solves the framework
argument and resolves the solvency of the aff.
Even if you lose to something like a link turn or perm, isnt it
the speech act or the specific introduction of epistemology
that matters?
1. Debate isnt a lecture, we are here to engage you and
there has to be some form of quid pro quo. If the debate
is just a one sided lecture, no one benefits from the
activity because there is no clash, and the aff loses their
in-round epistemology because there is no deliberation
beyond the 1AC substance.
2. When the aff reads their criticism on the neg it allows
them to test their method under different circumstances,
aka the different affs, allowing intellectual flexibility and
the ability to further contextualize the argument to
certain scenarios, overall boosting the effectiveness of
solvency. This can be taken in juxtaposition to when they
go aff and the neg runs the same cap, framework
scenario.
3. Switch Side Debate preserves competitive equity by
ensuring the debate is not based of sincerity but rather a
win-loss framework accounting for procedurals.
4. Switch-side debate reigns in extremism and challenges
violent Us-Them dichotomies
Mitchell 2007 (Gordon, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh,

Debate as a Weapon of Mass Destruction, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2,
June) CTD
Within this context, the Speech Association of America (precursor to todays National
Communication Association) invited thousands of college students to debate the relative

merits of an American diplomatic recognition of the Peoples Republic of China in

1954. Anxiety spread about the ability of students to engage the topic safely; every
team would be asked to defend both sides of this resolution, a common tournament
procedure known as switch-sides debate . Some argued that the practice would

indoctrinate Americas youth, while giving aid and comfort to the enemy. For even a small segment of
American college students to rise at this time to the defense of this Communist Government would be
sweet music to the ears of Moscow and Peiping, wrote debate instructor Charles R. Koch, as he pulled
his own team from competition in protest.1 Given the switch-side norm of academic debate

and the highly controversial nature of the resolution, the US Military Academy, the
US Naval Academy and, subsequently, all of the teacher colleges in the state of
Nebraska refused to affirm the resolution.2 A predominant military concern was that, a
pro-recognition stand by men wearing the countrys uniforms would lead to misunderstanding on the
part of our friends abroad and to distortion by our enemies.3 Karl Wallace, then president of the
scholarly organization that now sponsors this journal, was pressured heavily to change the China
topic.4 His firm and principled resistance is documented in an official statement

emphasizing that inherent in the controversy over the 1954 debate resolution is

an alarming distrust of the processes essential to a free society. 5 The fierce

controversy even drew in journalist Edward R. Murrow, who backed Wallaces position in an edition of
the See it Now television program seen by millions. Some complained that discussions of this topic
were channeled to bring out criticism of McCarthy himself.6 The timing of the red-baiting senators
political implosion, which followed shortly after the Wallace and Murrow statements, suggests that the
great 1954 debate about debate indeed may have helped rein in McCarthyism run amok. But this
outcome seems paradoxical. How can an activity that gives voice to extreme views moderate
extremism? Speech professor Jeffrey Auers 1954 statement may hold the key: A person, because he
supports the recognition of Communist China, isnt a communist, any more than because he supports
the recognition of Communist China, he is a Chinaman.7 Just as walking a mile in unfamiliar

shoes lends perspective, switch-side debating increases appreciation of contrary

opinions as the debater tries on an unfamiliar idea rather than relying on
simplification, reduction, or rejection. In fact, debating both sides encourages
participants to dismantle absolutist us versus them dichotomies. This may
explain why those invested in the stability of such polar categories find debate so
threatening.

TVA

2NC Shell
1. Before the TVA discussion occurs there are two things to
keep in mind.
a. Us winning the TVA is irrelevant rather it is the process of
being able to have a clash ridden dialogue that allows us
to be able to produce social change. Debate is not a
product rather a process in which a plan that supports
the entirety of the resolution allows for a strong
facilitation of advocacy skills.
b. The TVA being imperfect is an integral part of the debate.
Dont hold the TVA to a 100% solvency threshold, rather
it is the imperfections of the TVA that allow the
discussion of aff and neg to take place. Expectations of
utopian solvency trap discussion in an imaginary
discussion that allows us to forget the social barriers of
the squo.
2. On the TVA proper there are 3 Topical Versions of the aff
that resolves all their offense.
a. Support a Court ruling based in international law that
overrides the national constitution which overrides the
power structures yall indict.
b. Do the TVA that will result in serial policy failure which
causes public backlash and exposes how the state of
problematic.
c. Do your performative solvency in conjunction with a plan.
3. TVA is best theory is most convincing when applied in
policy advocacy
Wang 95 (Shaoguang, Department of Polisci @ Yale. Learning by Debating: The Changing Role of

the State in Chinas Economy and Economics Theory. Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring
1995), pp. 11-25) CTD
However, those debates were not completely manipulated by political leaders . While the
political process set the framework in which economic issues were debated, debate participants

had the desire and ability to push the parameters of the debates in directions that
were different from what political leaders had chosen, and thus to affect the policymaking process according to their own reform agendas (Fewsmith, 1994). As policy
advocates, economists possessed some propensities that policy makers generally
lacked. First of all, political leaders had to count on economists theoretical proficiency to
conceptualize reform and clarify its goals . By interpreting economic changes and
offering broad cognitive maps of transition for the leadership , the economists were in
a unique position to influence the way in which central leaders thought about
reform. Moreover, their historic and comparative perspectives enabled them to float
"fresh" ideas and introduce "new" ways of thinking for policy-makers, which could
significantly expand the range of policy options. Finally, political leaders had to rely
upon economists' technical training and relatively long term horizon to assess the

likely consequences of various policy options and thus eliminate certain harmful
alternatives from further consideration . Although policy-makers rarely accepted particular
proposal put forward by any individual or group, debates among economists did exert imperceptible
yet substantial influence on policy process in some long-range fashion.1

Neg Block Case Stuff For FWK

China FoPo Discussion Good

China is moving towards a more accessible government; this
helps open the political.
The Rights Practice 14 (The Rights practice, an organization dedicated to human rights
in China, 2002-2014 (updated 2014), Strengthening Public Participation in Decision Making,
http://www.rights-practice.org/en/programmes/participation.html) KVA

Citizen participation in public life strengthens the accountability of state institutions

and their ability to protect our rights. The right to take part in public affairs and to vote or be
elected in genuine periodic elections is inscribed in Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights. Challenges In the last two decades, China has made progress

implementing new channels of public participation -including introducing public

hearings, public budgeting, and opportunities to comment on draft legislation and
request government information -all of which hold potential for citizens to play a
greater oversight role and provide input into government affairs . Chinese law also allows
for direct election of local people's congress deputies, as well as village and resident committee
representatives. However, the implementation of these channels has been haphazard at best. With
reportedly tens of thousands of protests each year, there is growing awareness that current
approaches for resolving conflict are not sustainable in China, and citizen demands will need to be met
through more systematic processes of genuine participation in public life. What We Do The Rights
Practice has prioritised building the capacity of Chinese civil society to contribute to the development
of more meaningful mechanisms for public participation. With our local partners we seek to

raise awareness about opportunities within domestic law, as well as about

international standards and good practice, with the goal of strengthening
democratic culture. Our projects often address cross-cutting issues in relation to the
participation of persons with disabilities, women and other vulnerable groups
around issues of concern. In addition, together with Chinese civil society, our
projects seek to develop strategies for strengthening more responsive engagement
on public policy issues. In the past we have worked with civil society groups in China to provide
support for the development of domestic election monitoring as a way to raise awareness about sound
electoral practice. TRP's report on the 2011-12 local people's congress elections can be found here.

We have also supported the role of public intellectuals, with the objective of
informing improved implementation of the rights to know, participate, monitor and
express; rights that were affirmed under China's 2012-15 Human Rights Action Plan.
Past work has also sought to raise awareness of Chinese civil society's right to
participate in the UN's Universal Periodic Review. From 2006-10, TRP partnered with
the Constitutionalism Research Institute at China University of Political Science and
Law and Sciences Po in Paris to promote public participation in urban planning
decisions. The project, which was funded by the European Commission, fostered
debate among academics and urban planning officials and strengthened
professional expertise in designing public consultations.

FoPo Discussion Good

Political operations are the basis of IR theory and social
sciences which is important in analysis of governmental
decision.
Hussain 11 (Zaara Zain Hussain, Student, Feb 7 2011, The effect of domestic politics on
th

foreign policy decision making, E-International Relations Students, http://www.eir.info/2011/02/07/the-effect-of-domestic-politics-on-foreign-policy-decision-making/) KVA

Foreign Policy includes all interactions of individual nation states with other states.
In the wake of globalization, in the 21st century it is particularly important, owing to
the interdependence of states. With the advent of international society and globalization
implications of foreign policy for each nation-state are far greater . The study of Foreign Policy
therefore has become ever more critical and important. The study of Foreign Policy
is not limited to any particular school of social science but is a relevant subject for
all. In International Relations this study is particularly important as foreign policies
form the base for international interactions between individual states. I n the 21st
century, decisions by one state affect more than just the participating countries. Scholars as well
as well policy analysts and even the general public, have a greater desire to
understand foreign policy decisions and what motivates the head of government in
his foreign policy decision making. Scholarly research on leadership and foreign
policy decision making show a far more sophisticated and complex view of the issue
than most of the simplistic views seen in the popular press. The popular press prefers

pointing finger at the executor of foreign policy decisions as it is easier to blame one person than a
group or a system. However scholarly research uncovers the motivations behind foreign policy decision
taken by the executor or in better words head of a government. Foreign Policies are designed by

the head of government with the aim of achieving complex domestic and
international agendas. It usually involves an elaborate series of steps and where domestic politics
plays an important role. In this paper I will critically analyze the role of head of government of a
country in foreign policy decision making and how he is influenced by domestic politics. Foreign

policies are in most cases designed through coalitions of domestic and international
actors and groups. When analyzing the head of government or in other words the
executor of foreign policies many motivating factors can be identified to explain the
rationale behind decisions taken. Some factors of influence include the leaders own
personality and cognition, degree of rationality, domestic politics and international
and domestic interest groups. However out of all the factors mentioned it is domestic political
environment that shapes the entire framework of decision making in a country even in international
context.

Generic State can do Good

The state must be engaged because any action can be
reoriented away from historical abuses
Williams and Krause 97 (Michael, assistant professor of political science at the

University of Southern Maine and Keith, professor of political science at the Graduate Institute of
International Studies, associate professor of political science at York University, Critical Security
Studies: Concepts and Cases, edited by Krause and Williams, p. xvi, https://goo.gl/OIxDaa, EHS MKS)
Many of the chapters in this volume thus retain a concern with the centrality of the state as a locus not only of obligation but of

The task of a
critical approach is not to deny the centrality of the state in this realm but, rather, to
understand more fully its structures, dynamics, and possibilities for reorientation . From a
critical perspective, state action is flexible and capable of reorientation , and analyzing
state policy need not therefore be tantamount to embracing the statist assumptions of
orthodox conceptions . To exclude a focus on state action from a critical perspective on
effective political action. In the realm of organized violence, states also remain the preeminent actors.

the grounds that it plays inevitably within the rules of existing conceptions simply reverses
the error of essentializing the state. Moreover, it loses the possibility of influencing what
remains the most structurally capable actor in contemporary world politics.

Conjoining theory into law opens up potential opportunities to

more effectively help minorities
Alfieri 05 [Anthony V. Alfieri, April 25 2005, Gideon in White/Gideon in Black: Race and Identity in
Lawyering, Conclusion Vol. 114] vv

Culled from considerations of lawyer role, institutional function, and political

legitimacy, legal process traditions limit the reach of client centered and
community-centered lawyering models. Unsurprisingly, Elys defense of political
access and minority equality rights extended that reach , implying antisubordination
axioms of democratic empowerment and minority collaboration. Contextually applied,
the axioms offer the promise of safeguarding the legal, political, and economic interests of
unrepresented individuals and communities. Elys fusion of democracy and equality

in legal
process bridges constitutional theory and clinical practice to offer a worthy vision of
progressive lawyering. That vision holds significant, albeit unexplored, consequences
for clinical education and training as well as for lawyer ethical roles and
responsibilities. Under its guiding principles, client empowerment and lawyer-client
collaboration rise to prominence as much for their transformative potential as for
their democratic commitment. By turns race conscious and civic conscious , this
commitment reconceives the nature of the lawyering process in impoverished and
crime-ridden communities. All his life, Ely spoke of that process with reverence, defending its
mission and deepening its devotion to equal justice. Even now his voice rings out.

The politics of the aff trades off with a better model of debate
building constructive arguments through rigorous testing
allows us to combat far right extremism.
Solnit 12 (Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US contributing opinion writer, an historian, an activist and a
contributing editor at Harper's magazine. A letter to my dismal allies on the US left. The Guardian.
10/15/12 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/letter-dismal-allies-us-left) CTD
Dear allies, Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing
has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right
with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical
goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I've

come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again. O rancid sector
of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If
I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but
you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot
pony tears. Because what we're talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or
a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and
our possibilities. Leftists explain things to me The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look,
Barack Obama does bad things and I deplore them , though not with a lot of fuss, since
they're hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes

mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the
bad things. The same has been true of other politicians: the recent governor of my state, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, was in some respects quite good on climate change. Yet it was impossible for me to
say so to a radical without receiving an earful about all the other ways in which Schwarzenegger was
terrible, as if the speaker had a news scoop, as if he or she thought I had been living under a rock, as
if the presence of bad things made the existence of good ones irrelevant . As a result, it
was impossible to discuss what Schwarzenegger was doing on climate change (and unnecessary for
my interlocutors to know about it, no less figure out how to use it ). So here I want to lay out an

insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things
and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad
things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a
bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get
anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much
in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the

world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it
and maybe even work with it. Instead, I constantly encounter a response that
presumes the job at hand is to figure out what's wrong, even when dealing with an
actual victory, or a constructive development. Recently, I mentioned that California's current
attorney general, Kamala Harris, is anti-death penalty and also acting in good ways to defend people
against foreclosure. A snarky Berkeley professor's immediate response began: "Excuse me, she's antideath penalty, but let the record show that her office condoned the illegal purchase of lethal injection
drugs." Apparently, we are not allowed to celebrate the fact that the attorney general for 12% of all
Americans is pretty cool in a few key ways or figure out where that could take us. My respondent was
attempting to crush my ebullience and wither the discussion, and what purpose exactly does that
serve? This kind of response often has an air of punishing or condemning those who are less
radical, and it is exactly the opposite of movement- or alliance-building. Those who

don't simply exit the premises will be that much more cautious about opening their
mouths. Except to bitch, the acceptable currency of the realm. My friend Jaime Cortez, a magnificent
person and writer, sent this my way: "At a dinner party recently, I expressed my pleasure
that some parts of Obamacare passed, and starting 2014, the picture would be
improved. I was regaled with reminders of the horrors of the drone programme that
Obama supports, and reminded how inadequate Obamacare was . I responded that it is
not perfect, but it was an incremental improvement, and I was glad for it . But really, I
felt dumb and flat-footed for being grateful." The emperor is naked and uninteresting Maybe it's
part of our country's puritan heritage, of demonstrating one's own purity and
superiority rather than focusing on fixing problems or being compassionate. Maybe it
comes from people who grew up in the mainstream and felt like the kid who pointed out that the
emperor had no clothes, that there were naked lies, hypocrisies and corruptions in the system. Believe
me, a lot of us already know most of the dimples on the imperial derriere by now, and there are other
things worth discussing. Often, it's not the emperor that's the important news anyway, but the
peasants in their revolts and even their triumphs, while this mindset I'm trying to describe remains
locked on the emperor, in fury and maybe in self-affirmation. When you're a hammer everything looks
like a nail, but that's not a good reason to continue to pound down anything in the vicinity. Consider
what needs to be raised up as well. Consider our powers, our victories, our possibilities; ask yourself
just what you're contributing, what kind of story you're telling, and what kind you want to be telling.

Sitting around with the first occupiers of Zuccotti Park on the first anniversary of Occupy, I listened to
one lovely young man talking about the rage that his peers, particularly his gender, often have. But, he
added, fury is not a tactic or a strategy, though it might sometimes provide the necessary
energy for getting things done. There are so many ways to imagine this mindset or
maybe its many mindsets with many origins in which so many are mired. Perhaps
one version devolves from academic debate, which at its best is a constructive,
collaborative building of an argument through testing and challenge, but at its worst
represents the habitual tearing down of everything, and encourages a subculture of
sourness that couldn't be less productive . Can you imagine how far the civil rights

movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom
nothing was ever good enough? To hell with integrating the Montgomery public
transit system when the problem was so much larger ! Picture Gandhi's salt marchers
bitching all the way to the sea, or the Zapatistas, if subcomandante Marcos was merely the master
kvetcher of the Lacandon jungle, or an Aung San Suu Kyi who conducted herself like a caustic
American pundit. Why did the Egyptian revolutionary who told me about being tortured repeatedly
seem so much less bitter than many of those I run into here who have never suffered such harm ?

There is idealism somewhere under this pile of bile, the pernicious idealism that
wants the world to be perfect and is disgruntled that it isn't and that it never will
be. That's why the perfect is the enemy of the good. Because, really, people, part of how we are
going to thrive in this imperfect moment is through lan, esprit de corps, fierce hope and generous
hearts. We talk about prefigurative politics, the idea that you can embody your goal.

This is often discussed as doing your political organising through direct-democratic

means, but not as being heroic in your spirit or generous in your gestures.

Asian Identity Affs

Asians want political change to stop ideological tensions
Miller et al 13 [Yong Chan Miller, Soya Jung, Vyreak Sovann, April 2013, The Importance of

Asian Americans? Its Not What You Think., http://www.changelabinfo.com/reports/ChangeLab_TheImportance-of-Asian-Americans.pdf] vv

Many people are hungry to build a more progressive, antiracist Asian American
politics, and see this as a requirement for building interracial solidarity with other
people of color. Organizers and leaders want and need to engage in honest and
critical dialogue, to surface and address the tensions in our ideological and
experiential differences. As part of building political alignment, we also heard the
need for those who are pushing within their own communities to find space for
support and problem solving. One organizer described attempts to do this in one local base-

building organization: Weve created these spaces with our members trying to build grassroots
solidarity and support each other in this work Its really hard to keep it going on top of everything
else, but its been really powerful space to troubleshoot all of the crap that we deal with being

the outcasts in our own ethnic communities and figuring out how we negotiate
being relevant, leading with our politics stil l, and building a base at the same time. 50 One

tension is the potential for those Asian Americans with class privilege to undermine broader racial
justice goals: Theres a lot of interesting self-organizing happening among higher skilled immigrants,
largely Asian and South Asian community It made me queasy about making sure their analysis didnt
mean, This is for ourselves, the hell with the rest of the immigrant community. I havent seen that
happen yet, but those tensions are there, especially the more frustrated they get about not getting a
path to permanent legal status There is also a need to undo the damage of colonization
in order to build a shared racial identity: With our own communities, we have major
challenges in just bringing together Bangladeshis and Pakistanis and Indians and Hindus with Muslims
because of the history of racial disunity since colonial times in South Asian subcontinents. So theres
a lot to undo there

Asian Communities using political education tools to

understand class structures, political reform spreads
education of racism
Miller et al 13 [Yong Chan Miller, Soya Jung, Vyreak Sovann, April 2013, The Importance of

Asian Americans? Its Not What You Think., http://www.changelabinfo.com/reports/ChangeLab_TheImportance-of-Asian-Americans.pdf] vv

Organizers working in specific Asian American ethnic communities who are working

to build an understanding of race within their bas e need more support to develop
political education tools. Some of this work is already happening, but its unfunded and tenuous.
One person described what these efforts looked like in her organization: People are much more
easily able to grasp class and whats happening with whos controlling the economy,
whos benefiting, whats up with that For low-income people, they get it pretty
immediately, and they also get as immigrants, they have the short end of the
stick. So moving from that to really look at how, not just APIs but other communities
of color are in the same boat as us, has been one way to engage it.

Asian Communities do not have the resources to help

themselves, political engagement key to help communities
Miller et al 13 [Yong Chan Miller, Soya Jung, Vyreak Sovann, April 2013, The Importance of

Asian Americans? Its Not What You Think., http://www.changelabinfo.com/reports/ChangeLab_TheImportance-of-Asian-Americans.pdf] vv

Beyond the need for an antiracist Asian American politics , organizers need to think
and strategize outside of funding constraints , within and across issue areas and

sectors. We heard a desire to build a deeper and more robust analysis of current
conditions, to address colorblind racism, and to come up with more expansive
strategies. The work is most successful if theres a cohort or network of groups that do this together
at the same time. Its just way more inspiring You can share knowledge and resources The fact
that each community has to do it for themselves is such a heavy lift unless some
sort of super champion does it, and then it probably burns them out Thinking about how we
can collectivize the work across regions or states would be a capacity piece. Those
organizations that are doing organizing in the social/economic justice field are so
overwhelmed and under-resourced We know it takes deliberate work to build
relationships for bigger campaigns and coalitions , and oftentimes we just dont have the
capacity We come together much more tactically than strategically We dont have
that space where relationships can be built more deliberately .

Current Congress makeup provesAsian/Indian Americans can

work through the state to make political change
Camina 11 (Catalina Camina, USA TODAY, 2011-11-22,
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/11/asian-american-candidatescongress-record-/1#.VLlCsUs0x6k)

A record number of Asian Americans are running for Congress next year, reflecting
population gains and a growing sense of the need to flex political muscle .
Republican Ranjit "Ricky" Gill has already outraised Democratic incumbent Rep.
Jerry McNerney in California's newly configured 9th District. In Illinois, two
Democrats -- Raja Krishnamoorthi and Tammy Duckworth -- are vying in the new 8th
District. And two current Asian-American officeholders -- U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono of
Hawaii and state Rep. William Tong of Connecticut, both Democrats -- are running
for U.S. Senate seats. In all, at least 19 Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI)
candidates have declared their bids for Congress so far in the 2012 election cycle,
up from eight candidates in 2010. "You can't call us invisible anymore," said Gloria
Chan, president and CEO of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional
Studies (APAICS), which compiled the data. "This spike in AAPI congressional
challengers marks a definite political tipping point for our community." There are 11
members of the U.S. House and two in the U.S. Senate who have Asian, Native
Hawaiian or Pacific Islander ancestry, according to the Congressional Research
Service. Only one -- Rep. Steve Austria of Ohio -- is a Republican. Larry Shinagawa,
director of the Asian-American studies program at the University of Maryland, attributes the growth of
Asian-American candidates in part to the "Americanization" of younger generations and their
realization that elected officials can have impact. "Asian Americans are increasingly going

into politics because politicians can make people's lives different," Shinagawa says.
"They realize that civic participation is very important." Duckworth, a former
Veterans Affairs official in the Obama administration, said she has seen a
tremendous change from her first congressional race in 2006. Now, she says, there
is more support for Asian-American candidates outside of the community's big
population centers in Hawaii, California and New York -- in states such as Illinois and
Pennsylvania. Today, an estimated 17.3 million people of Asian descent live in the
United States, comprising 5.6% of the population, according to the U.S. Census
Bureau. The largest subgroups (in order) are Chinese Americans , followed by Filipino
Americans and Asian Indians. "Unlike other ethnic groups, we're not a homogenous group," Duckworth
says. "We come from many different groups. We work hard to unite." APAICS notes one-third of

the congressional candidates are South Asians. "This is a political community that
is reaching adolescence in American politics and really starting to become a big
factor in several states and districts," said David Wasserman, who analyzes House

races for the non-partisan Cook Political Report. "This could be a breakthrough year
for South Asian candidates." Gill, for example, is a first-generation Indian American who is
finishing his studies at the University of California-Berkeley's law school. Technically, he won't be
eligible to serve in Congress until next year when he turns 25. The San Francisco Chronicle reports he
has tapped into networks close to his parents, who are doctors in San Joaquin County, including fellow
Indian Americans, to raise campaign funds. Ami Bera, who is making his second bid for Congress, is
also leading in fundraising in California's 7th District against GOP Rep. Dan Lungren. Bera and three
other candidates held Lungren to about 50% of the vote in 2010

EXAMPLE- Dalip Singh Saund was an Asian activist who

convinced Congress to pass an act that granted naturalization
rights to Indian immigrants
Tisdale 8 (Breaking Barriers: Congressman Dalip Singh Saund, DECEMBER 19, 2008, Sara Tisdale: Assistant Editor, Pew

Forum on Religion & Public Life, http://www.pewforum.org/2008/12/19/breaking-barriers-congressman-dalip-singh-saund/, EHS MKS)

, Dalip Singh Saund was

Born near Amritsar, India in 1899

an unlikely future candidate for national office when he came to the United
States in 1920 to study food preservation at the University of California, Berkeley. But in 1956 Saund, whose career would span the vocations of

the first Indian-American elected to the U.S. House

of Representatives, as well as the first and so far only Sikh member of Congress.
mathematician, farmer, author, activist and judge, became

Sikhism is a monotheistic faith that was founded in the historic Punjab region of modern-day India and Pakistan. Based on the teachings of the early 16thcentury prophet Guru Nanak and his successors, Sikhism teaches belief in reincarnation, equality among all human beings and the virtues of charity,
selflessness and detachment from material possessions. In his 1960 autobiography, Congressman from India, Saund wrote that my religion teaches me
that love and service to fellow men are the road to earthly bliss and spiritual salvation. Although Saund removed his turban, a Sikh symbol of religious
devotion, soon after he immigrated to the U.S., he remained connected with the Sikh organization in central California that had provided housing for him
upon his arrival at Berkeley. The group later commissioned Saund to write My Mother India, a 1930 critique of a then-sensational book, Mother India, which

. Saund soon became a familiar figure on the local lecture circuit,

speaking to California civic organizations and churches about such topics as the
work of Mahatma Gandhi and the fight for Indian independence from Britain . In the 1940s,
Saund helped launch a successful effort to convince the U.S. Congress to pass the
Luce-Celler Act of 1946, which granted naturalization rights to Indian immigrants (then
disparaged Indian self-rule

sometimes referred to as Hindus). After becoming a citizen himself, Saund was elected to a local judgeship in 1952 and then to the U.S. House in 1956.

Saund served almost three full terms in Congress before suffering a debilitating stroke in 1962. He died in 1973.

Antiblackness Affs
Taking your theory into practice makes for better results and
better legal reforms
Foster 05 [Sheila R. Foster, Fordham University School of Law , 2005 (date not specified),
CRITICAL RACE LAWYERING, http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=4069&context=flr] vv

One of the gifts that CRT has imparted to those who study its methodology is the
importance of narrative to understanding the nature of contemporary racial injustice
and subordination.27 While the use of narratives describing experiences of racial subjects has
been a sharply criticized feature of critical theory, 8 in practice narratives represent one of the
primary ways in which critical theory has invariably shaped lawyering on behalf of
disadvantaged communities and groups. It has done so by giving those of us working on
behalf of these communities an empowering tool, not dependent upon limited legal and doctrinal
frameworks, that displaces the dominant narratives of racism as discrete, isolated, and/or intentional
incidents and outcomes. Narratives allow us to relate the story of our client's harms in

ways that they experience and understand and in doing so to identify the systemic
nature of those harms and its causes. These narratives, while often insufficient to
give rise to legal causes of action, can be very useful in building social movements ,
as well as raising the profile of, and educating policymakers and the public about, the nature of issues
like environmental racism. This client-centered, narrative approach has guided those of us
working in the environmental justice field. Among the central tenets of

environmental justice lawyering, and the movement itself, is the idea that "We
Speak for Ourselves" -that those impacted by and experiencing environmental
racism speak in their own voice. This tenet, of necessity, resituates lawyers to a
subordinate, but collaborative, position in the problem-solving exercise. As the
literature reflects, lawyers and legal scholars have recounted the stories of these
communities as a way of articulating the social, economic and legal forces that have
given rise to racially disproportionate outcomes.29 And we have done so in a way
that hews faithfully to these communities' own conceptions of the causes and
impacts of the injustice they suffer. This is not to say that lawsuits and other traditional legal
tools, like civil rights litigation, are not useful or employed in this context. To the contrary, civil rights
lawsuits can have ancillary benefits even where they are destined or predicted to be unsuccessful.
Such lawsuits can be part of the reframing of a dispute as one presumed to have nothing to do with
race to one where race is a central feature of the alleged harms.30 But a narrative, client-driven
approach displaces the lawyer and overly technical legal solutions as the main remedy pursued by
aggrieved clients. Rather, lawyers become part and parcel of a larger remedial and

liberatory project that reveals an array of potential legal and nonlegal strategies to
improve the conditions of the community and transform the responsible political
and social structures. This approach is one that is not new to critical race
scholars,31 but one that should be replicated in a broader array of fields and across
different social contexts. The Symposium at Fordham University School of Law on CRT set out to
continue the task of putting theory into action or practice. Th e scholars and practitioners in
attendance acknowledged the important contribution that critical race theory has
made to our professional and ethical developmen t. At the same time, we know that there is
more work to be done to situate more centrally its critical impulses and liberating methodology into
the lawyering work that is done on behalf of our subjects. Like CRT itself, this undertaking will

surely be arduous and contested in a professional world driven by faith in the

objectivity and neutrality of legal roles and rules. But the pursuit of this goal-placing
our theory in the service of our practice-will open the doors to pathways we have
yet to discover-but must-if we are to remain faithful to the project of racial justice .

Policy action is good as black people have used legislature to

change the ideals of the status quo by expressing oppression.
Not doing a policy action prevents black people from creating
societal change.
Matsuda 87 [Mari Matsuda, 1987 (date not specified), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings

that Formed the Movement, Looking to the Bottom Ch. 5 Pg 64-65 Sc. 2] vv
"Incoherency," as used here, is the ex- pression of extreme skepticism that law can produce
determinate results free from reference to value, politics. or historical conditions. While no CLS scholar
suggests pure incohercncy. the highly developed method of "trashing," or exposing standard liberal
legalisms as incoher- ent, emphasizes the indeterminate elements of law. Incoherency, critics contend.
is an inadequate and inaccurate description of law which fails to account for the lawyer's experience
that, given a specific doctrinal query. certain outcomes are inevitable and technically correct as a
matter of law,even when such results challenge existing power. Those who characterize the law as
incoherent are also criticized for portraying those who use legal doctrine, legal principles, and liberal
theory for positive social ends as co-opted fools or cynical intrumentalists. Look-ing to the bottom
can help to form a response to the critique of the incoherency description.The dissonance of combining
deep criticism of law with an aspirational vision of law is part of the experience of people of
color. These people have used duality as a strength and have developed strategies for resolving this
dissonance through the process of appropriation and transformation. W. E. B. Du Bois noted long ago
the resiliency of the consciousness of "Black Folk."' The consciousness he described in- cludes both
mainstream American conscious- ness and the consciousness of the outsider. Applying the double
consciousness concept to rights rhetoric allows us to see that the victim of racism can have a
mainstream consciousness of the Bill of Rights as well as a victim's con- sciousness. These two
viewpoints can combine powerfitlly to create a radical constitutionalism that is true to the radical roots
of this country. The strands of republicanism that legal histori- ans are reviving with the feather-brush
care of an archaeologist are alive and well in the constitutional discourse of nonwhite
America. Frederick Douglass's interpretive work is an example of dual conceptions. Garrisonian
abolitionists in the |84os argued that the Constitution was a comnpt document that endorsed
slavery. As 3 Garrison protege,Douglass at first accepted this interpretation and its corollary, that
reformist political action was an ineffectual means to abolish slavery. Douglass later split from the
Garrisonions and argued that the Constitution. including the Preamble and the Bill of Rights. contained
a ringing indictment of slavery. Douglass stated in his widely disseminated writings and public lectures
that slavery was unconstitutional. un-American. and inconsis- tent with the basic values necessary for
the survival of the nation. Douglass's skill in trans- forming the standard text of American political life
into a blueprint for fundamental social change is instructive: he chose to believe in the Constitution but
refused to accept a racist Constitution. In his hands. the document grew to become greater than some
of its draftcrs had intended. Douglass's reconstructed Constitution inspired his black readers to endure
the tremendous personal costs of resistance. Martin Luther King, ]r.'s reconstructed Constitution
produced the same effect in the twentieth cen- tury. This ability to adopt and transform standard
texts and mainstream consciousness is an important contribution of those on the bottom. Black
Americans. the paradigmatic victim group of our history, have turned the Bible and the Constitution
into texts of liberation, just as john Coltrane transformed the popular song "My Favorite Things" into a
jazz fugue of extraordinary power." This and other examples of the tendency to trope. appropriate.
"signify," and otherwise draw transformative power out of the dry wells of ordinary discourse is
discussed by Henry Louis Gates in his important article on black language and literary "The Blackness
of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey." Gates sees this transforming skill in
jazz composition, in black English, in the black church, and in black writ- ers' adaptive uses of standard
literary forms. This transformative skill, Gates suggests is a direct result of the experience of
oppression. Those who lack material wealth or political power still have access to thought and
language, and their development of those tools will dif'fer from that of the more privileged.
Erlene Stetson realized this distinction when. in her essay on black women poets, she wrote,
"[C]reativity has often been a survival tactic."'5 Studying the centuries-old tradition of American black
wom- en's poetry reveals. according to Stetson, three major elements: 'a compelling quest for identity, a subversive perception of reality, and subterfuge and ambivalence as creative strategies.""' ln
poetry. the most concentrated form of language, black women have employed words to criticize and
transform existing assumptions. Poetry to black women has never been merely aesthetic: it has, first
and foremost. been a tool of social change." Gwendolyn Brooks opened one 1949 sonnet: "First fight.
Then fiddle?"

Saying that you must not use the state supposes that there is
a way around that, which has always failed. Instead you must
use the state against itself.
Crenshaw 88 [Kimberle Crenshaw, Law @ UCLA, RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:

TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW, 1988, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331] vv
Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited
utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are
troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities.
Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal
discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore, trashing offers no idea of how

to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in reformist discourse or how to

work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we
think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present
world where legal protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The
fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to
legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating
function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The
Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the
conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces
not only the discourse itself but also thesociety and the world that it embodies. Yet
Critics offer little beyond this observation. Their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric
seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more
productive strategy for change, one which does not reinforce existing patterns of
domination. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated, and it is
difficult to imagine that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one . As Frances
Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the civil rights
movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic

and a
challenge to that logic. 137 People can only demand change in ways that reflect the
logic of the institutions that they are challenging. 138 Demands for change that do
not reflect the institutional logic -- that is, demands that do not engage and
subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective. 139 The

possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered
by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an

institution internally, that is, by using its own logic against it. 140Such crisis occurs
when powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between the
dominant ideology and their reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the

contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things
appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the
contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent
contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable
to the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political
society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American
society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights
ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions -- the most important being the
promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather

than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself
illegitimate or false, civil rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were
real, and demanded to exercise the rights that citizenship entailed . By seeking to
restructure reality to reflect American mythology, Blacks relied upon and
ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by
granting formal rights.Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups

with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of
legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and
limited by legitimation.

The US government should fight racism to set a precedent for

others
Bhatnagar 13 [Chandra Bhatnagar, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Human Rights Program, March

21 2013, A Roadmap for Fighting Racism, https://www.aclu.org/blog/roadmap-fighting-racism] vv

On this day in 1960, white police officers in Sharpeville, South Africa, opened fire on a peaceful antiapartheid demonstration killing 69 black South African protestors. To mark the solemn occasion of what
came to be known as the "Sharpeville Massacre," the international community proclaimed this day as
the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination an occasion to amplify efforts to
eliminate racism. Closer to home, today is a particularly appropriate time to remind the Obama
administration that it needs to make good on a promise it made to the international human rights
community to come up with a concrete plan to battle discrimination and fully comply with its
obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms or Racial Discrimination,
also known as ICERD. When it comes to racism, putting partisan differences aside should be easy . We

can all agree that racial discrimination violates the fundamental human right to
equality that all people enjoy. People of good conscience of all political stripes can
agree that our government can and should do more to combat racial discrimination
and promote inclusion and opportunity. But how do we get there from here? In the pre-GPS

days, when planning a road trip, travelers would actually have to look at (gasp!) a map and then chart
a course for the best way to get from point A to point B. Making even incremental progress on
intractable societal problems requires a similar approach: figure out where we are and where we want
to go, then chart a course. Take for example HIV and AIDS. To its credit, the Obama administration
made this issue a priority in its first term. To address the problem of HIV and AIDS, the administration
created a National HIV/AIDS Strategy Implementation Plan. So why can't we do the same for racism?
Granted, it is a different kind of "disease," but racism and discrimination also have the
power to destroy lives and to deprive people of their fundamental right to dignity . In
2010, as part of a U.N. Human Rights Council review of America's human rights performance, the

U.S. agreed to adopt "a comprehensive national work-plan to combat racial

discrimination." Though the Obama administration has created an Interagency Equality Working

Group, currently tasked with reporting on and implementing the ICERD, it has not yet moved forward
on the promise to create a National Plan of Action to fully implement this critical treaty the U.S. ratified
nearly 20 years ago. While in recent decades the U.S. has made some progress on

eliminating racism and structural discrimination, there is still a long way to go and
much work to be done to combat all forms of racism and racial discrimination , from
the criminal justice system to the housing market to the education system and
beyond. For example: African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated in the

United States 1 of 15 black male adults and 1 of 36 Latino male adults is imprisoned, compared to 1
of 106 white male adults. In the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, about 1 in 10 white
homeowners have lost their homes to foreclosure or are seriously delinquent on their loans, but the
figure for black and Latino homeowners is 1 in 4. Close to one third of black students attend schools
that are more than 90 percent black, and these schools are far more poorly funded than schools with
predominately white students. It is high time for a plan of action to combat racism and
we think that today is the day to begin this important work . So today, the ACLU joins the
U.S. Human Rights Network and dozens of other civil rights and human rights organizations around the
country to continue our call on the Obama administration to create a national plan of action to combat
racial discrimination. (Read our letter to the administration here.) This is not simply a moral
imperative, it is also a legal obligation: as a signatory to the ICERD, the U.S. government
is legally obligated to combat racism in all its forms . The committee that oversees
compliance with the ICERD treaty has called on the U.S. to implement a "national
strategy or plan of action" to combat racial discrimination. In order to meet its obligations
under the treaty, the U.S. needs to do so. So why delay the comprehensive fight against racism? There
are roadmaps out there already. Creating a plan to combat racism has been done before. Australia has
a "National Anti-Racism Partnership and Strategy," and Canada has an "Action Plan Against Racism."

Other countries like Ireland and Norway have similar plans as well. America is the country where giants
like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Cesar Chavez fought for
freedom, equality and social justice. The United States should be setting a global example

through our actions in combating racism, and that global example has to begin with
a concrete game plan. It is time for our government to prove its human rights
commitment to eradicating racism by creating a roadmap to end all forms of racism,
racial discrimination, and xenophobia.

Law reforms should be done for minorities

Equality Commission 14 [Equality Commission of Ireland, August 2014, Race Equality

Law Reform: Strengthening legal protection (Key Point Briefing),

http://www.equalityni.org/ECNI/media/ECNI/Publications/Delivering%20Equality/RaceLawReformKeyPointBriefing.pdf] vv
Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) individuals in Northern Ireland have less protection
against racial discrimination, harassment and victimisation than people in other parts of the
UK. Many of the changes we advocate have already been implemented in other parts of the UK. Law
reform has also been recommended by international human rights monitoring
bodies. For example, both the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of
National Minorities1 and the UN Committee on the Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Racial
Discrimination (CERD)2 have urged the NI Executive to address legislative shortcomings within the
race equality legislation, supplementing the Commissions consistent calls 3 4 for the Race equality
legislation to be harmonised and strengthened. Our recommendations We recommend action is
taken to address legislative gaps in the race equality legislation, including via the
proposed Racial Equality Strategy 2014-2024 (RES). We also recommend that the fair employment
legislation is strengthened in order to improve workforce monitoring on racial grounds. In summary5 ,
we recommend the race equality legislation is amended to: provide increased protection against
discrimination and harassment on the grounds of colour and nationality. We are clear that this is a
priority area for reform6 . ensure broader protection against racial discrimination and harassment
by public bodies when carrying out their public functions; give stronger protection against
racial harassment, including greater protection for employees against racial harassment by
customers or clients; 1 See Third Opinion on the United Kingdom of the Advisory Committee on the
Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, June 2011. 2 UN Committee on CERD,
Concluding Observations on UK, Sept 2011 3 Equality Commission (2000): Recommendations for
Changes to the Race Relations (NI) Order 1997. 4 Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (2009):
Proposals for legislative reform (Belfast: ECNI) 5 Further details of the Commissions proposals for race
law reform are available at: http://www.equalityni.org/Delivering-Equality/Addressing-inequality/Lawreform/Related-work/Proposals-forreform-of-the-race-law-(1)/executive-summary 6 ECNI Proposals for
Legislative Reform, 2009 2 increase protection for certain categories of agency workers against
racial discrimination and harassment; introduce new protection for Councillors against racial
discrimination and harassment by local councils; increase protection against victimisation;
introduce new protection against multiple discrimination, so that individuals have protection if

they experience discrimination or harassment because of a combination of equality

grounds; expand the scope of voluntary positive action, so as to enable employers and service

providers to lawfully take a wider range of steps to promote racial equality; remove or modify
certain exceptions, including those relating to immigration and the employment of foreign nationals in
the civil service; increase the powers of the Equality Commission to issue additional Race Codes of
Practice and to effectively carry out formal investigations; strengthen tribunal powers to ensure
effective remedies for individuals bringing race discrimination complaints; and harmonise and
simplify the enforcement mechanism for education complaints. We have also recommended, as a
priority area for reform7 , that the fair employment legislation is strengthened so as require registered
employers in Northern Ireland to collect monitoring information as regards nationality and ethnic
origin, in addition to monitoring the community background and sex of their employees and job
applicants8 . Wider benefits of reform We consider that the recommended changes will
help address key racial inequalities in Northern Ireland by strengthening the legislation; for
example, by providing greater protection for individuals against racial discrimination

and harassment who currently have no or limited protection under the race equality

law; as well as ensuring the removal of unjustifiable exceptions which limit the scope of the race
equality legislation. Further, we consider that our recommended changes will help to
harmonise, simplify, and clarify the race equality legislation ; thereby making it
easier for individuals to understand their rights and for employers, service providers and
others to comply with their responsibilities.

A2 Social Death (spec. to Antiblackness)

their use of social death doesnt actually describe black life
because their epistemological framework is bankrupt
Moten 8 (The Case of Blackness, Criticism, Volume 50, Number 2, Spring, Project Muse
,Professor of Black Studies at Duke University, EHS MKS)

So I'm interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between Dasein and things
(which is off to the side of what lies between subjects and objects), the ones who are attained or
accumulated unto death even as they are always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman,
are perhaps best understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constanta destructive, healing
agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve whose soothing lies in the
abrasive penetration of the merely typical; an ensemble always operating in excess of that ancient
juridical formulation of the thing (Ding), to which Kant subscribes, as that to which nothing can be
imputed, the impure, degraded, manufactured (in) [End Page 186] human who moves only in response
to inclination, whose reflexes lose the name of action. At the same time, this dangerous supplement,
as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It seems to me thatthis special onticontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So
that in contradistinction to Fanon's protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to
blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter
with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of
calculation to being in general. Moreover, the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at
the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already
existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather, blackness needs to be understood as
operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential. Indeed, as the
ontological is moving within the corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood
that what is now meant by ontological requires special elucidation. What is inadequate to blackness is
already given ontologies. The lived experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant
demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment
will have been (toward) the ontic or existential field of things and events. That ontology will have had
to have operated as a general critique of calculation even as it gathers diaspora as an open setor as
an openness disruptive of the very idea of setof accumulative and unaccumulable differences,
differings, departures without origin, leavings that continually defy the natal occasion in general even
as they constantly bespeak the previous. This is a Nathaniel Mackey formulation whose full
implications will have never been fully explorable.12 What Fanon's pathontological refusal of blackness
leaves unclaimed is an irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved, and the
enclosed. This is to say that what is claimed in the name of blackness is an undercommon disorder
that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is embraced by
the ones who stay there while living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem. As Amiri
Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say,"Black(ness) is a country" (and a sex) (that is not one).

social death cannot explain the nuances of slavery or black life

in general
Brown 9 (Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,, professor of history & African

American Studies, http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf, EHS

MKS)
But this was not the emphasis of Pattersons argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often
conflated his exposition of slaveholding ideology with a description of the actual condition of the
enslaved. Seen as a state of being, the concept of social death is ultimately out of place in the political
history of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for the outlooks and maneuvers of the enslaved
as an important part of that history, scholars would do better to keep in view the struggle against
alienation rather than alienation itself. To see social death as a productive peril entails a subtle but
significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing enslavement as a
predicament, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of
belonging, mourning, accounting, and regeneration. In part, the usefulness of social death as a
concept depends on what scholars of slavery seek to explainblack pathology or black politics,
resistance or attempts to remake social life? For too long, debates about whether there were black

families took precedence over discussions of how such families were formed; disputes about whether
African culture had survived in the Americas overwhelmed discussions of how particular practices
mediated slaves attempts to survive; and scholars felt compelled to prioritize the documentation of
resistance over the examination of political strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because slaves
social and political life grew directly out of the violence and dislocation of Atlantic slavery, these are
false choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and romantic modes of storytelling,
for history tinged with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy confronted by the
enslaved: it took heroic effort for them to make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic fact
that although scholars may never be able to give a satisfactory account of the human experience in
slavery, they nevertheless continue to try. If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved
more than the condition of slavery, we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the
weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world. The history of their social and political
lives lies between resistance and oblivion, not in the nature of their condition but in their continuous
struggles to remake it. Those struggles are slaverys bequest to us.

black bodies have maintained their cultural retentions in the

new world which disproves the idea of social death
Brown 9 (Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,, professor of history & African

American Studies, http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf, EHS

MKS)
In fact, the funeral was an attempt to withstand the encroachment of oblivion and to make social
meaning from the threat of anomie. As a final rite of passage and a ritual goodbye, the ceremony
provided an outlet for anguish and an opportunity for commiseration. Yet it also allowed the women to
publicly contemplate what it meant to be alive and enslaved. The death rite thus enabled them to
express and enact their social values, to articulate their visions of what it was that bound them
together, made individuals among them unique, and separated this group of people from others. The
scene thus typifies the way that people who have been pronounced socially dead, that is, utterly
alienated and with no social ties recognized as legitimate or binding, have often made a social world
out of death itself. The funeral was an act of accounting, of reckoning, and therefore one among the
multitude of acts that made up the political history of Atlantic slavery. This was politics conceived not
as a conventional battle between partisans, but as a struggle to define a social being that connected
the past and present. It could even be said that the event exemplified a politics of history, which
connects the politics of the enslaved to the politics of their descendants. Although the deaths of slaves
could inspire such active and dynamic practices of social reconnection, scholars in recent years have
made too little of events like the funeral aboard the Hudibras and have too often followed Orlando
Pattersons monumental Slavery and Social Death (1982) in positing a metaphorical social death as
the basic condition of slavery. In a comparative study of sixty-six slaveholding societies ranging from
ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Europe, precolonial Africa, and Asia, Patterson combined
statistical analysis and voluminous research with brilliant theoretical insights drawn from Marxian
theory, symbolic anthropology, law, philosophy, and literature in order to offer what he called a
preliminary definition of slavery on the level of personal relations. Recognizing violence, violations of
personhood, dishonor, and namelessness as the fundamental constituent elements of slavery,
Patterson distilled a trans-historical characterization of slavery as the permanent, violent domination
of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons. In this way the institution of slavery was and is
a relation of domination, in which slaveholders annihilated people socially by first extracting them
from meaningful relationships that defined personal status and belonging, communal memory, and
collective aspiration and then incorporating these socially dead persons into the masters world. As a
work of historical sociology concerned primarily with the comparative analysis of institutions, the book
illuminated the dynamics of a process whereby the desocialized new slave was subsumed within
slave society.

Discourse
Discourse is intrinsically tied to policy-making. Discourse is
shaped by policy formation.
Jones 09 (Harry Jones, researcher for the ODI, August 2009, Policy-making as discourse: a review
of recent knowledge-to-policy literature, IKM Working Papers, No. 5, pg. 14,
http://wiki.ikmemergent.net/files/090911-ikm-working-paper-5-policy-making-as-discourse.pdf) KVA

Approaching policy as discourse involves seeing knowledge and power as

intertwined, for example Foucault argues that the act of governing has become interdependent with
certain sorts of institutionalised analyses, reflections and knowledge (Foucault 1991). Discourse
encompasses the concepts and ideas relevant for policy, and the interactive
processes of communication and policy formulation that serve to generate and
disseminate these ideas (Schmidt and Radaelli 2004). These discursive structures
(concepts, metaphors, linguistic codes, rules of logic, etc), often taken for granted, contain
cognitive and normative elements that determine what policy-makers can more
easily understand and articulate, and hence which policy ideas they are likely to
adopt (Campbell 2002). This perspective offers an extremely rich way into
understanding the link between knowledge and policy in development, and has the
potential to bring together elements of the institution- and actor focused
approaches in relation to the role of knowledge. Discourse plays a key role in
shaping new institutional structures as a set of ideas about new rules, values and
practices, and also as a resource used by actors in the processes of interaction
focused on policy formulation and communication; and the policy network theories
and discursive institutionalism show how these in turn shape discourse (Schmidt and
Radaelli 2004).

Micro-Politics Bad Affs

Micropolitical theory dismisses the possibility of real change
within the real world while retrenching the idea of defeat in
the status quo. It nullifies the realm of macropolitics and its
possibilities to change the social world while closing off debate
from the world of politics.
Boggs 2k [Carl Boggs, 2000 (date not specified), The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the
Decline of the Public Sphere, Pg. 213, the Postmodern Political] vv
When viewed in some contexts, postmodernism is a rather

healthy break from the

past.' Surely it has helped to revitalize many aspects of intellectual and cultural life .
The problem is that the main contours of its out- look, beginning with Baudrillard
and Foucault and extending into a variety of contemporary feminist debates, tend
to devalue the general realms of power. governance, and econom y. Because the
overwhelming reality of corporate, state. and military power is submerged in the
amorphous discourse of postmodernism, the very effort to analyze social forces and
locate agencies (or strategies) of change is nullified. In its reaction against the grand historical
scope of Marxism and Leninism, the new approach- oriented mainly toward the micro
politics of everyday life-tends to dismiss in toto the realm of macro politics and with
it an indispensable locus of any large-scale project of social transformation . This

exaggerated micro focus is most visible in the work of Baudrillard and some postmodern feminists
who, as Steven Best and Douglas Kellner put it, in effect "announce the end of the political
project and the end of history and society"-a stance of a radically depoliticized culture.-" It is

probably not too far-fetched to argue that postmodernism, with a few important
exceptions, helps reproduce antipolitics in the academy , fully in line with the mood
of defeat that has permeated the Left in industrialized countries since the early
1980s.5 In this way, academic fashion coincides with broader historical trends: the strata that had

been the back- bone of New-Left politics turned in larger numbers toward professional careers and
affluent, suburban lifestyles. Radicalism in the academy, after the late 1970s, often is an
"aesthetic pose," or its ideas are submerged in unintelligible jargon . The working class
was jettisoned as a political subject, the notion of any collective action grounded in any social
constituency was increasingly viewed with contempt or scorn: oppositional forces were likely to
become assimilated into the irresistible logic of the commodity and media spectacle, the victims of a
hegemonic discourse over which they have little control. Thus, at a time of mounting pessimism and
retreat, the rhetorical question posed by Alex Callinicos becomes " What political subject does
the idea of a postmodern epoch help constitute ?" By the 1990s any serious discussion

of political subjectivity or agency among leftist academics would seem hopelessly

pass, hardly worthy of intellectual energies. 3 A great deal of postmodern theorizing
seemed inclined to close off debate altogether. especially regarding the precarious
linkage of theory and politics. what Barbara Epstein referred to as a "subcultural sect" with its
own rigidly enforced codes of discourse.

Postmodern Politics are net worse for the status quo and fail
to stop oppression while at the same time undermine the
ability of larger political movements
Handler 92 [Joel F. Handler, HA member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on the
Status of Black America and chaired the Academy's Panel on High Risk Youth. P president of the Law
and Society Association, Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3053811] vv
Scholars concerned with the struggles of subordinate groups have long emphasized protest from
below. Accounts of the resistance of blacks and poor people became prominent in the 1960s. This
tradition, joined by feminists, gays and lesbians, as well as others, continued in the 1980s. The new

social movements are, roughly, environmental, antinuclear, peace, feminist, and

gay and lesbian. Whether these broad movements are "new" or variations of older
movements is much debated. For our purposes, they are included here insofar as
they are antimaterialist, antistatist, antibureaucratic; they seek to cross traditional
class lines in favor of humanistic, interpersonal, and communitarian values . There
have always been protest movements and struggle on the part of oppressed peoples. What has this to
do with postmodernism? And what does postmodernism have to do with politics and law? The major
theme in postmodernism that I emphasize is subversion, the commitment to
undermine dominant discourse. The subversion theme-variously described as

deconstruction, radical indeterminacy, anti-essentialism, or antifoundationalism whether in art, architecture, literature, or philosophy-seeks to demonstrate the
inherent instability of seemingly hegemonic structures , that power is diffused
throughout society, and that there are multiple possibilities for resistance by
oppressed people. The postmodern conception of subversion is a key part of the explanations and
ideological commitments of contemporary theorists of protest from below and the new social
movements. I first describe postmodernism's theory of subversion in the broader culture. The
starting point is deconstruction. Deconstruction , developed first in literary theory, then
applied in art, architecture, and philosophy, seeks to destabilize dominant or privileged
interpretations. Then I discuss deconstruction or subversion in postmodern political
and legal theory. The goal, say postmodern political theorists, is radical, plural democracy. A

major criticism of postmodern politics is that deconstruction amounts to relativism

or radical indeterminacy, which, at best, results in passive, status quo politics and,
at worst, fails to defend against fascism and terrorism . Postmodern political theorists rely
on American pragmatism to meet the challenge of relativism. Postmodernism, naturally, covers a large
territory. To try to assess what postmodern politics means, I look at scholars of protest from below in
the 1960s and compare their work to contemporary stories of protest from below that I think are in the
postmodern tradition. While both sets of scholars are concerned with the struggles of oppressed
peoples, they tell very different stories. The commonality of struggle and social vision of the 1960s
disappears in the contemporary message. There are some exceptions, and I use some contemporary
feminist and minority scholars to contrast the structuralist tradition. I then look at the new social
movements and review the reasons for their lack of success. The key, I argue, to the
distinctiveness of postmodern politics lies in deconstruction . My thesis is that
deconstruction, as a form of politics, is ultimately disabling . In the final section, I
speculate on the reasons for the attractiveness of deconstruction politics. The grand theories of
the Left have collapsed. The humane side of the Enlightenment is under attack .
However, I question the value of postmodernism as transformative politics.

Gender Affs
State influence is inevitable--- shifting focus to reforms is the
only thing that can create a signficant change for women
R. W. Connell 90, The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal, Theory and

Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, (Oct., 1990), pp. 507-544, http://www.jstor.org/stable/657562, EHS MKS
Because of its power to regulate and its power to create, the state is a major stake in gender politics; and the exercise of
that power is a con- stant incitement to claim the stake. Thus the state becomes the focus of interestgroup formation and mobilization in sexual politics. It is worth recalling just how wide the liberal state's
activity in relation to gender is. This activity includes family policy, population policy, labor force and labor market management, housing
policy, regulation of sexual behavior and expression, provision of child care, mass educa- tion, taxation and income redistribution, the creation and use of

Control of the machinery that

conducts these activities is a massive asset in gender politics. In many situations it will be
tactically decisive. The state is therefore a focus for the mobilization of interests that is central to
gender politics on the large scale. Feminism's historical con- cern with the state, and attempts to
capture a share of state power, appear in this light as a necessary response to a historical reality. They
are not an error brought on by an overdose of liberalism or a capitula- tion to patriarchy. As
Franzway puts it, the state is unavoidable for feminism. The question is not whether feminism will deal with
the state, but how: on what terms, with what tactics, toward what goals .5" The same is true of the
politics of homosexuality among men. The ear- liest attempts to agitate for toleration produced a half-illegal, half-aca- demic mode of
mili- tary forces - and that is not the whole of it. This is not a sideline; it is a major realm of state policy.

organizing that reached its peak in Weimar Germany, and was smashed by the Nazis. (The Institute of Sexual Science was vandalized and its library burnt
in 1933; later, gay men were sent to concentration camps or shot.) A long period of lobbying for legal reform followed, punctuated by bouts of state

The gay liberation movement

changed the methods and expanded the goals to include social revolution, but still dealt with the state
over policing, de-criminalization, and anti-discrimination. Since the early 1970s gay politics has evolved a
complex mixture of confron- tation, cooperation, and representation. In some cities, including San Francisco and Sydney,
gay men as such have successfully run for public office. Around the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, in countries such as the United States and
Australia, gay community based organizations and state health services have entered a close - if often
tense - long-term relationship.' In a longer historical perspective, all these forms of politics are fairly new. Fantasies like
Aristophanes's Lysistrata aside, the open mobiliza- tion of groups around demands or programs in sexual politics
dates only from the mid-nineteenth century. The politics that characterized other patriarchal gender orders in history were
constructed along other lines, for instance as a politics of kinship, or faction formation in agri- cultural villages. It can plausibly be argued that modern
patterns re- sulted from a reconfiguration of gender politics around the growth of the liberal state. In
particular its structure of legitimation through plebiscite or electoral democracy invited the response of
popular mobilization
repression. (Homosexual men were, for instance, targeted in the McCarthyite period in the United States.)

Title IX created substantial impacts on the education system

for women
EMMA CHADBAND 12 (Nine Ways Title IX Has Helped Girls and Women in Education, June 21,
2012, Chadband: Transport Workers Union of America International Union,,
http://neatoday.org/2012/06/21/nine-ways-title-ix-has-helped-girls-and-women-in-education-2/, EHS
MKS)

Forty years ago this week, Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in any federally funded
education program, was signed into law. Many people think this groundbreaking laws effects have
been limited to equal access to athletics, but Title IXs impact on the education system has
been far and wide. 1.Equal access to higher education Until the 1970s, some colleges and
universities refused to admit women. Before Title IX, this was perfectly legal. Now, more women

than men are enrolled in college, and more women are going into careers previously
geared toward men in science and technology fields . 2. Career education Were there
boys in your high school home economics class? Girls in the shop class? That wouldnt have been
possible without Title IX. Before Title IX, many schools only allowed women to train for

careers they found suitable for women namely, housekeeping. Now, school
administrators cant legally dictate which students can take which classes based on
gender. 3. Protection for pregnant and parenting students Until Title IX, it was legal to
expel pregnant students. Now, schools are allowed to create separate programs for
student-parents, but the programs must be comparable to a normal school curriculum and

enrollment must be voluntary. 4. Equal access to academia Have you ever had a female
professor? Before Title IX, she probably wouldve had to work at a womens-only college, for less pay,
and she might not have ever gotten tenure. 5. Changing gender stereotypes in the
classroom It was once widely accepted that boys were good at math and science, while girls were
good at domestic activities. Textbooks showed girls as nurturing wives and mothers, while boys were
shown as powerful and aggressive. Thanks in part to Title IX, gender stereotypes are now
challenged in classrooms and in learning materials including textbooks . 6. Fighting
sexual harassment Under Title IX, schools have a legal obligation to prevent and

address any reported sexual harassment. Administrators used to be able to dismiss

claims of sexual harassment as trivial or simply as boys being boys. 7. Access to
athletics This is the most widely known impact of Title IX. According to the National Organization for
Women (NOW), before Title IX, one in 27 girls played varsity high school sports. By 2001, one in every
2.5 girls played, meaning a total of 2.8 million girls played varsity sports. 8. Athletic scholarships for
women Before Title IX, athletic scholarships for women were virtually nonexistent because so few
women were involved with sports. According to NOW, in 2003, there was more than $1 million in
scholarships for women at Division I schools. 9. Increased self-confidence in girls According to the
Womens Sports Foundation, women who are active in sports have more self confidence and are more
outgoing than women who do not participate. These women wouldve never experienced these
benefits if they werent allowed to participate in sports.

As of 2016, women are allowed to serve in all combat roles

seen as a win
ALEXANDER AND STEWART 15 (U.S. military opens all combat roles to women,

Alexander: Business Network International (BNI), Stewart: reporter for Reuters, Fri Dec 4, 2015,
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-women-combat-idUSKBN0TM28520151204, EHS MKS)

The U.S. military will let women serve in all combat roles , Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Thursday in
a historic move striking down gender barriers in the armed forces. "As long as they qualify and meet the
standards, women will now be able to contribute to our mission in ways they could
not before," Carter told a Pentagon news conference. "They'll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars,
and lead infantry soldiers into combat . They'll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Marine
Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else that was previously open only to men," he said. President Barack Obama called
the move a "historic step forward," saying it would "make our military even
stronger." "Our armed forces will draw on an even wider pool of talent. Women who can meet the high standards required will have new
opportunities to serve," Obama said in a statement Carter said the opening to women would take place following a 30-day review period, after which they
would be integrated into the new roles in a "deliberate and methodical manner" as positions come open. The waiting period enables Congress to review
the decision and raise any objections. He acknowledged the decision could lead to more debate over whether women would have to register for the draft,
an issue he said was already under litigation. The U.S. military is currently an all-volunteer force, but young men are still required to register in case the
draft is reactivated. Asked whether the decision opened the door to women being required to serve in front-line combat positions, Carter said members of
the military had some choices but not "absolute choice."

Gender examples- people

Sonia Sotomayor has consistently worked within the state to
create major reform- proves its possible
Daniel Chavez 10 (WOMAN HERO: SONIA SOTOMAYOR, (June 2010),
http://myhero.com/hero.asp?hero=sonia_sotomayor2010, EHS MKS)

Sotomayor has worked at almost every level in the judicial system over a span of
three decades. In 1979, fresh out of Yale Law School, Sotomayor became an Assistant
District Attorney in Manhattan in 1979 where she tried many criminal cases over a
span of five years and spent almost every day in the courtroom. She entered private
practice in 1984 and became a partner in 1988 at the firm Pavia and Harcourt. Her judicial service
began in October 1992 when President George H.W. Bush appointed her to the United
States District Court for the Southern District of New Yor k. From 1992-1998 she

presided around 450 cases in which she earned a reputation as a sharp and
fearless jurist who does not let powerful interests bully her into departing from the
rule of law. President William H. Clinton appointed Judge Sotomayor to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1998. She also served as an adjunct professor at the NYU School
of Law in 1998 and a lecturer at Columbia Law School in 1999. With all her achievements and
recognitions, Sotomayor has also been highly criticized and had the majority of Senate Republicans
oppose her nomination for Supreme Court Justice. She was under close observation and was attacked
by critics for when she remarked, Personal experiences and gender have a lot to do
with judges decisions. She was also, at one point, criticized for being racist when she made the
comment saying, I would hope a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more
often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasnt lived that life. But that belief
she has sustained throughout her life is what has allowed her to be where she is today. She has always
been true to her word and has defended what she thinks is right. As many people have agreed with
her, Personal experiences affect what judges choose to see, and there is nothing wrong with that
because it allows for a fair decision. Sotomayors personality not only made her liked and respected in
the courtroom, but by the people that surrounded her as well. Robin Kar, who was a clerk for
Sotomayor from 1998 to 1999, described her as a "warm, extraordinarily kind and caring person." Kar
remarked, "She has an amazing story, but she's also just an amazing person." He also added that she
has the ability to get to know all of the people around her. "She was the judge who, in the courthouse
for example, knew all of the doormen, knew the cafeteria workers, who knew the janitors -- she didn't
just know all of the other judges and the politicians. She really went out of her way to get to know
everyone and was well loved by everyone," which truly shows the kind of person Sotomayor is. Sonia
Sotomayors humility is another great trademark of hers. She mentions, I stand on the shoulders of
countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration - that person is my
mother, Celina Sotomayor. To us, Sotomayor is a one of a kind hero, but to Sonia, her mother is the
true hero. She taught her that hard-working mentality and led her to everything she has accomplished.
Celina now lives in Florida and she still speaks with her everyday. On May 26th 2009, President Barack
Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice . After
controversial hearings, Sotomayor became the first Hispanic Justice and third woman on
the U.S. Supreme Court. Through hard work and dedication, she has accomplished everything she
has set out to do. She has demonstrated that as long as you put your mind to something, you can do
it! She is a perfect role model and a prime example that anything is possible. She is a great
representative of the Hispanic community and for that we consider her our hero!

Nancy Pelosi was the first speaker of the house and

accomplished major things while within the state
Author?? Date?? (Nancy Pelosi, http://www.democraticleader.gov/about/, EHS MKS)
Nancy Pelosi is the Democratic Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives for the
114th Congress. From 2007 to 2011, Pelosi served as Speaker of the House, the first
woman to do so in American history . As the Democratic Leader, Pelosi is fighting for
bigger paychecks and better infrastructure for Americas middle class familie s. In
2013, she was inducted into the National Womens Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Seneca Falls, the

birthplace of the American womens rights movement. For 29 years, Leader Pelosi has represented San
Francisco, Californias 12th District, in Congress. She has led House Democrats for more than 12 years
and previously served as House Democratic Whip. Under the leadership of Pelosi, the 111th
Congress was heralded as one of the most productive Congresses in history by
Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein. President Barack Obama called Speaker Pelosi an
extraordinary leader for the American people, and the Christian Science Monitor wrote: make no
mistake: Nancy Pelosi is the most powerful woman in American politics and the most
powerful House Speaker since Sam Rayburn a half century ago . Working in partnership
with President Obama, Speaker Pelosi led House passage of the American Recovery and

Reinvestment Act in early 2009 to create and save millions of American jobs,
provide relief for American families, and provide a tax cut to 95 percent of working
Americans. With the House Democratic Caucus, Pelosi continues to focus on the need to create jobs
in America and prevent them from being shipped overseas. Speaker Pelosi achieved passage of
historic health insurance reform legislation in the House which establishes a Patients Bill of Rights and
will provide insurance for tens of millions more Americans while lowering health care costs over the
long term. The new law provides patients with affordable insurance choices, curbs abuses by the
insurance industry, strengthens Medicare, and reduces the deficit by more than $100 billion over the
next 10 years. In the 111th Congress, Speaker Pelosi also led the Congress in passing strong

Wall Street reforms to rein in big banks and protect consumers as well as the
Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which expands educational opportunities
and reforms the financial aid system to save billions of taxpayers dollars . Additional
key legislation passed into law included the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to restore the ability of women
and all workers to access our judicial system to fight pay discrimination; legislation to provide health
care for 11 million American children; national service legislation; and hate crimes legislation. In late
2010, Pelosi led the Congress in passing child nutrition and food safety legislation as

well as repealing the discriminatory Dont Ask, Dont Tell policy, which prohibited
gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military . Pelosi has made energy security her
flagship issue, enacting comprehensive energy legislation in 2007 that raised vehicle fuel efficiency
standards for the first time in 32 years and making an historic commitment to American home grown
biofuels. In 2009, under her leadership, the House passed the landmark American Clean Energy and
Security Act a comprehensive bill to create clean energy jobs, combat climate change, and transition
America to a clean energy economy. The legislation was blocked by Republicans in the United States
Senate, but sent a strong signal to the world about the United States commitment to fighting the
climate crisis. A leader on the environment at home and abroad, Pelosi secured passage of the

Pelosi amendment in 1989, now a global tool to assess the potential

environmental impacts of development. In San Francisco, Pelosi was the architect of
legislation to create the Presidio Trust and transform the former military post into an urban national
park. In continuing to push for accountability and transparency in government, under Speaker

Pelosi, the House passed the toughest ethics reform legislation in the history of the
Congress, including the creation of an independent ethics panel, and increased
accountability and transparency in House operations, including earmark reforms . As
Speaker, Pelosi led the fight to pass the DISCLOSE Act in the House, which fights a corporate takeover
of U.S. elections and ensures additional disclosure; she continues to fight for this legislation today.
Additional key accomplishments signed into law under the leadership of Speaker Pelosi include: an
increase in the minimum wage for the first time in 10 years; the largest college aid expansion since the
GI bill; a new GI education bill for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; and increased services for
veterans, caregivers, and the Veterans Administration. Pelosi comes from a strong family tradition of
public service. Her late father, Thomas DAlesandro Jr., served as Mayor of Baltimore for 12 years, after
representing the city for five terms in Congress. Her brother, Thomas DAlesandro III, also served as
Mayor of Baltimore. She graduated from Trinity College in Washington, D.C. She and her husband, Paul
Pelosi, a native of San Francisco, have five grown children and nine grandchildren.

Many womens rights movements and activists are actively

fighting for womens rights
McIntyre 13 (Celebrating the impact of womens rights movements over 30 years, 18 June 2013, Nicky McIntyre:
writer for Alliance magazine, http://www.alliancemagazine.org/opinion/celebrating-the-impact-of-women-s-rights-movements-over30-years/, EHS MKS)
What kind of impact can you have by funding small organizations led by marginalized women, girls and trans people globally? This is a question we are
often asked at Mama Cash. Given that we see ourselves as a social justice funder, our answer is connected to how we consider change happens and where
we, with our relatively small budget, can make the biggest contributions. In essence, at the heart of our funding model is the conviction that social justice
will be achieved only when those existing on the edges of their communities, those whose voices are often overlooked, and those facing severe
discrimination are enabled to take and make opportunities to gain power over their lives. This understanding of how change happens drives our funding
priorities. As we are celebrating our 30th anniversary this year, we thought that it was important to take some time to reflect on the achievements of
womens rights movements over the last three decades and to look at what womens rights organizations can do when given money and support. Our

The work of womens rights movements has led to nothing short of a

revolution in public attitudes, law and governance, in the private sector and civil
society. While many womens rights groups are small, their aggregate impact is
enormous. Womens movements have made great gains For Mama Cash, the achievements of womens
conclusion?

movements during the last 30 years particularly those to which we and our grantees have contributed can be broadly summarized and grouped into

The injustices, exclusion and discrimination that used to be accepted are

now unacceptable. A range of forms of violence against women used to be deemed justifiable, issues for the private sphere and not to be
four categories:

discussed. A man beating his wife or a father molesting his daughter were considered to be family matters, something that existed within the confines of

Its hard to find people these days

who would publicly admit to violence against women being justifiable. That is
progress. The One in Nine Campaign in South Africa (pictured) advocates for better implementation of laws and policies related to violence against
women. Cases of justice or equality that we once thought were exceptional have today
become more commonplace. Increased access to leadership positions is an
important achievement because in terms of gender the field is more level now:
some women will be allies, some are not, but no one is excluded only for being a
woman. Also, now few question the importance of anti-discrimination policies and laws offering protection in the workplace, educational institutions
the domestic space and not subject to norms and laws that are upheld in public spaces.

and beyond. The field is more level but not yet level: in the UK, for example, there is a significant difference in wages for men and women and very little
penetration by women of the top jobs. In Greece, not only have women been disproportionately affected by public sector cuts, but legislation designed to
further equality and fight discrimination has been put on the back-burner. Women, girls and trans people who were often spoken for by others are
demanding to speak for themselves. There is a growing recognition of the importance of the people most affected by policies and programmes being at

trong networks and funds also show that these

groups are beginning to control their own resources. Examples of such funds include
FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund, the International Forum for Indigenous Women
(FIMI) and the Red Umbrella Fund for sex workers. The focus used to be on
protecting women from harm. Now, the positive aspects of rights are championed
and womens agency is recognized. Womens rights activists continue to challenge
discourses and practices that focus only on protecting women from harm, also
championing an affirmative approach to ensure that women have agency over their
bodies, sexuality and reproductive lives. So while they continue to resist sexual violence, for example, they also insist
the heart of their design, implementation and evaluation. S

that women have the right to sexual desire and pleasure. What about tangible, measurable changes? Womens rights and feminist movements have been
at the forefront of achieving legislative and policy change to counter violence. A study of unparalleled scope was published in 2012 in the American
Political Science Review [1]. The research analysed 40 years of data on violence against women from 70 countries and concluded that the presence of
strong and autonomous feminist movements was the single most important factor in bringing about changes in a countrys willingness to recognize and
address gender-based violence. Specifically, this was more powerful in accounting for change than the wealth of a country, how progressive its politicians
were, or how many women held positions of political power. Recently, the Association of Womens Rights in Development (AWID) conducted an aggregate
analysis of the MDG3 Fund, set up in 2008 by the Dutch government. This fund awarded a record 82 million to 45 womens groups and funds worldwide
over three years. AWIDs analysis [2] drew on the results of 33 grantees and found that, among other results: At least 220 million people were reached
with new awareness of womens rights. At least 100,000 womens organizations were strengthened. Local and national governments in at least 46
countries were persuaded to improve their gender equality outcomes. One new international rights instrument (the ILO Convention 189 on Domestic Work)
was approved with Fund-supported last lap work. These two studies, as well as our own grantmaking experience, show how womens rights
organizations, many of them relatively small, can have a big impact but we must document these results. They are mobilizing to demand their rights,
making governments accountable for living up to their paper commitments, and leading legal and policy reform. With great success. Association des
Mamans Clibataires pour la paix et le dveloppement (pictured) is a group of single mothers in Burundi challenging the social and economic exclusion of
single mothers. Today, 125 countries have laws against domestic violence and 187 countries have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Achievements like these are the result of sustained lobbying, marching, and often active involvement in

Another critical achievement one often

undervalued by funders is helping to change hearts and minds, attitudes and
behaviours in families, communities and societies. This work matters. It means that
girls are not the first pulled out of school, that families do not feel the need to hide
their disabled daughters, that sex work is seen as work and not stigmatized.
Changes like this are often harder to measure and rarely happen in one-year grant
drafting laws by womens rights activists and organizations around the world.

cycles, but they are essential building blocks for democratic and peaceful societies.
Of course, these changes cannot be attributed to only one player or movement. Change is complex, usually with various players involved at the same
time. And it does not happen overnight. It is a long-term effort: it takes thousands of awareness-raising workshops, media interviews, demonstrations,
personal stories, research papers, presentations, parliamentary hearings, court cases, one-on-one conversations, coming outs, strategy meetings, long
nights, and a few parties too. What next? Work remains to be done. At Mama Cash we see the work that remains to be done not as a sign of failure but an
an inevitable process of continuing to build on the achievements made and also responding to the backlash against these achievements the so-called

Much of the gender-based violence against women that occurs

today can be seen as part of a backlash against the greater autonomy that women
now have. Examples of greater autonomy include a girl wanting to go to school, a
woman activist demanding justice in public, a wife applying for divorce, or a woman
migrating alone. The tireless work of womens rights activists has helped to create a
world where schools, courts, workplaces and the streets are womens spaces too
but these spaces are still often contested. The world today is quite different from what it was 30 years ago. New issues
downside of our successes.

and situations that demand the engagement of womens rights activists have emerged and will continue to emerge in the years ahead. This includes
new forms of violence (via the internet), new kinds of environmental crisis and economic exploitation, and growing religious fundamentalisms that
popularize conservative views on gender. Also, even though women and girls are now firmly on funders agendas, a major achievement, this has not yet
translated into meaningful and sustainable new funding for womens rights groups themselves. In many corners, womens rights organizations face
declining support and a lack of public acknowledgement, and are struggling to get the message across that they have played a significant part in
transforming the lives of women and girls. An additional challenge is the ongoing financial and economic crisis globally, and in Europe in particular. Foreign
aid is being cut as more governments face a crisis. Medium and large womens rights groups that have historically been supported by bilateral donors are
now turning to local womens funds for support. This increase in demand among larger organizations will require new strategies and increased
collaboration to ensure that smaller groups pursuing more radical agendas are not jeopardized. Contemporary realities require new strategies on the part
of womens movements, to protect the gains won and to achieve new ones. We at Mama Cash are excited about forging new partnerships and continuing
to play our part.

Against Race Affs

White Supremacy is not so complete that we cannot challenge
it from within the system
Omi and Winant 12 (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Omi is an assosciate professor of

ethnic studies at the University of Cal Berkeley, Winant is a Professor of Sociology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias Ethnic and Racial
Studies, 36:6, 961-973, p. 970-917) SDL
In conclusion, do Feagin and Elias really believe that white power is so complete , so
extensive, so sutured (as Laclau and Mouffe might say) as they suggest here? Do they mean to
suggest, in Borg-fashion, that. This seems to be the underlying political logic of the
systemic racism approach, perhaps unintentionally so. Is white racism so ubiquitous
that no meaningful political challenge can be mounted against it? Are black and brown
folk (yellow and red people, and also others unclassifiable under the always- absurd colour categories)
utterly supine, duped, abject, unable to exert any political pressure? Is such a view of race and racism
even recognizable in the USA of 2012? And is that a responsible political position to be advocating? Is
this what we want to teach our students of colour? Or our white students for that matter? We

suspect that if pressed, Feagin and Elias would concur with our judgement that
racial conflict, both within (and against) the state and in everyday life, is a
fundamentally political process. We think that they would also accept our claim that
the ongoing political realities of race provide extensive evidence that people of
colour in the USA are not so powerless, and that whites are not so omnipotent , as
Feagin and Eliass analysis suggests them to be. Racial formation theory allows us to see that
there are contradictions in racial oppression. The racial formation approach reveals
that white racism is unstable and constantly challenged, from the national and
indeed global level down to the personal and intrapsychic conflicts that we all
experience, no matter what our racial identity might be . While racism largely white
continues to flourish, it is not monolithic. Yes, there have been enormous increases in racial inequality
in recent years. But movement-based anti-racist opposition continues, and sometimes

scores victories. Challenges to white racism continue both within the state and in
civil society. Although largely and properly led by people of colour, anti-racist movements also
incorporate whites such as Feagin and Elias themselves. Movements may experience setbacks, the
reforms for which they fought may be revealed as inadequate, and indeed their leaders may be coopted or even eliminated, but racial subjectivity and self-awareness, unresolved and
conflictual both within the individual psyche and the body politic, abides . Resistance is
not futile.

Education systems under the state are able to understand and

effect dynamics of power and can influence cultural processes
and relations positively.
Apple 03 (Michael Apple, professor of curriculum and instruction and educational policy studies

at the university of Wisconsin, The state and the politics of knowledge p. 3-4) SDL
But this is not all. Nearly all of the work on the state has focused its attention either on single nations
or on nations in the West or the North. This simply will not do. Truly international studies are necessary.
But just as important, we need comparative studies that both continue but also re- focus our attention
away from, say, England or Sweden, where a E deal of research on the and education has been done.

By decentering the West and the North, by refocusing our attention on those areas
that have been historically neglecte d, a much more subtle picture of the relationship between
the state and education can be built. Given this attention to the "non-West." our analyses can
become much more subtle and dynamic. We can study many more dynamics of
power-not only class, but also race, gender. and colonial and postcolonial relations
in all their complexities and contradictions-and do so with an eye to how these
dynamics are formed in the contexts of histories and power relations that may be

strikingly different from those we are used to focusing on . At the same time, we can also
study the cultural politics of empire, of how empires engage in cultural control, of the social and
cultural dynamics of what it meant to be a colony, and how social movements challenge such control
from below and are themselves changed in the process. This kind of approach is important not only so
that our analyses are more subtle; it is also crucial for critically oriented political and educational
action. In his discussion of schooling and class relations. David Hogan (1982) argued that education

has often played a primary role in mobilizing op- pressed communities to challenge
dominant groups. It has been a set of institutions, an arena or site, in which groups
with major grievances over culture and politics struggle for both recognition and
redistribution (Fraser. 1997). In this complicated story, cultural struggles and struggles over schools
in particular play a significant part in challenging the very legitimacy of political and cultural
dominance. Thus education must not be seen as simply a reflection of forces outside itself. To
paraphrase Ting- Hong Wong's words, educational systems. rather than being merely

a dependent variable determined by processes of building profoundly affect

consciousness, identity, cultural cleavage, and social antagonism. Thus the
connections between schooling and 1 formation are two-way reciprocal, and
interactive (Wong. 2002, pp. 9-I0). This position restores the relative autonomy of educational
systems and at the same time demonstrates how the building of hegemonic relations both
incorporates and re- makes cultural processes and these relations themselves. By
dealing with the specificities of situations that have not been previously studied, we are able not only
to criticize previous theories of the role of schooling that have been accepted and too easily
generalized, but also to show how very different hegemonic strategies may lead to very
different political and cultural results . We can also begin to see much more clearly how to
challenge dominance. This in itself is a considerable achievement and will be visible in a number of the
chapters in this book.

The Government is capable of being influenced in regards to

race relations and policies.
Omi and Winant 12 (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Omi is an assosciate professor of

ethnic studies at the University of Cal Berkeley, Winant is a Professor of Sociology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias Ethnic and Racial
Studies, 36:6, 961-973, p. 964) SDL

In Feagin and Eliass account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and
permanent. There is little sense that the white racial frame evoked by systemic racism theory
changes in significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important rearrangements and
reforms as merely a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and
deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21).
Feagin and Elias use a concept they call surface flexibility to argue that white elites frame racial
realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure
of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase racial democracy is an oxymoron
a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean
the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree.

If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in
the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in
our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced
towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies,
or for that matter, imperial policies.

While the political system may not be prefect, we cant ignore

the victories made using the legal process
Omi and Winant 12 (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Omi is an assosciate professor of

ethnic studies at the University of Cal Berkeley, Winant is a Professor of Sociology at the University of

California, Santa Barbara, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias Ethnic and Racial
Studies, 36:6, 961-973, p. 965-966) SDL
So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think
that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World

War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the
major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they have set powerful
democratic forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the results of
unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined
to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil
rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and
Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v.
Virginia that declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional . While we have the
greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his interest convergence hypothesis
effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnsons famous (and possibly
apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 We have lost the South for a
generation count as convergence? The US racial regime has been transformed in
significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the
incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen
as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime under movement
pressure was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms which he calls
passive revolutions cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real
gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, w e think

there were important if partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed
the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories can
take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of
social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society.
Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the antiracist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social . In the
USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the
inclusion of racially defined others and the democratization of structurally racist
societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society
of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened
democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by
the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality,
social justice and inclusion accomplished by other new social movements:
secondwave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and anti-war
movements among others. By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was
an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the
same rearticulation (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of
colourblindness and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their mirror images in
the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and
containment, even their confrontations with the various backlash phenomena of the past few
decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of colourblindness, reveal the
transformative character of the politicization of the social. While it is not possible here to explore so
extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial

subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political arena that set off this
transformation, shaping both the democratic and antidemocratic social movements
that are evident in US politics today.

Modules/Add-ons

Foreign Policy Discussion Good

Foreign Policy discussions need to happen now otherwise ethnocentrism
gets locked in and causes wars

Etheredge 88 (Lloyd S. Etheredge has taught at MIT (where he received a graduate teaching award),
Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley, Duke University, Swarthmore and Oberlin
Colleges, the University of Toronto, and other academic institutions. He has served as Director of
Graduate Studies for International Relations at Yale, with administrative responsibility for
multidisciplinary professional training, Is American Foreign Policy Ethnocentric? Discussion paper
prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August, 1988.
http://www.policyscience.net/ethno.pdf) CTD
The question of ethnocentric bias is important for practical reasons : 1. One would like to

identify ethnocentric misperceptions, now, to prevent students from being misinformed, with the result that any American ethnocentric biases are locked in for
another generation. 2. The results will also be consequential because they bear directly
upon the professional training of political decision makers , their staffs, and the career

diplomats upon whom they rely. And conclusions about naturally-occurring ethnocentric biases will
partly outline the (corrective) briefings which diplomats and the White House staff need to prepare for
an American decision maker to help him (or her) understand events in other areas of the world. 3. A
rigorous, historically cumulative, study of ethnocentric biases in bi-lateral relations may have practical
benefits for university education and practitioner training in other countries. One need not require

that misperception models explain all wars or major conflicts to appreciate that they
ma y identify crucial contributors to some unnecessary wars and major conflicts. At
present, there are 23 wars in the world (an approximately uniform rate since World
War Il); if only 10% of them have resulted from misperception, and this 3 rate of
organized violence could be reduced by better professional training, the inquiry will
have saved thousands of lives. The question is also important for theoretical reasons. The
discovery of these biases - if they exist - is an exciting research enterprise that could substantially
enrich (and perhaps alter) international relations theory. The scientific agenda includes an immediate
methodological challenge, the need for a systematic technology to write different versions of reality,
and with alert sensitivity to diverse types of cognitive (and other) processes and biases which may
give the cases their deep structures.

State engagement is productive and necessary empirics.

Kerry 13 (John, former secretary of state. Remarks to a Foreign Policy Classroom, 2/7/13.
http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2013/02/203894.htm) CTD
Thank you very much. How are you? Hows everybody doing? Welcome. I gather weve got folks from a
bunch of colleges and universities around here, right? At least a few? Weve got some Hoyas here,
some Colonials and Bisons, Patriots? Whos a Patriot here? Im partial to the Patriots, for obvious
reasons, but we didnt do so well this year. I wanted to drop by for a few minutes. I apologize that I can
only make it a few minutes, because to be truthful, I love this kind of give-and-take and I wish I could
stay. And Marc, youre in great hands with Marc Norman, whos going to talk to you about terrorism
and counterterrorism today. But for me, one of the best parts of this kind of job is being

able to talk to folks and answer questions, have a good dialogue, and talk about
what is happening in the world and why we make some of the choices that we make
and why maybe we ought to make some choices we havent made . And you all can be
informative with respect to all of that. But this is a complicated time in the world, and Im glad you are
taking part in this Foreign Policy Classroom which the State Department engages in, in an effort to
really get you involved and to try to impress on you the realities of some of the choices that we make
so you can become ambassadors, if you will, in your own communities, in your schools, in your homes,
and explain what were doing and why were doing it. One of the most interesting things

about American foreign policy are some of the unknowns, some of the things that
people dont connect automatically. Ill give you an example. If I were to ask somebody here,

How many of you think that the percentage of the budget of the foreign affairs and State Department
of our budget of the United States is something like 15 or 20 percent? Anybody here believe its at
that level? Five percent, four percent? Youre too educated. (Laughter.) The truth is, in America, huge

numbers of people think we somehow spend something like 50 percent of our budget, or 30 and 40
percent of our budget, of what we do to reach out to the rest of the world. As I think you know, judging
by your response as we just went along, 1 percent about. If you take U.S. aid and the aid part of the
package, not the running of the State Department and so forth, its about 1 percent. It gets to be a
little more when you factor in the other components. But Ill tell you, the return we get on the
investment I do not call it spending. Its an investment. Its absolutely an investment. And theres a
return on investment, and its very hard to quantify that return completely. But I can tell you that you
could quantify it in troops that you dont have to send somewhere, lives that are not lost because you
managed to create a relationship with a country that resolves its problems peacefully and that dont
spill over into another nation, whether its a Mali or the problems were seeing in Egypt now or Syria.

The ability to be able to help people to make peaceful transitions and to move their
economies to open, accountable economies that engage with the rest of the world
makes a world of difference to the lives of people in that country and everybody
around them. So you look at the problems were having with North Korea right now, questions of the
imminency perhaps of another test, more missiles being fired, perhaps a nuclear test. To what end? I
mean, all that will happen is greater potential of conflict. And the people of North Korea are

starving. They desperately need to become more open and connected to the world
instead of harboring some of the worst gulags in the world where people are
tortured, and forced labor. So we have an impact by what we choose to do with
respect to those kinds of things. PEPFAR, the program that we engage in to try to
prevent the spread of AIDS, has saved maybe 5 million lives of children, and equally
importantly has helped us build the healthcare infrastructure across Africa and in
other parts of the world where were now able to foresee a generation of children
who will not have any transmission of AIDS from their mothers. Its amazing gains. Or the
things weve done to help people to be educated somewhere so they can aspire, like you do, to be able
to live in a democracy, understand what it means to be free, and be able to make a difference in the
lives of other people. I tell you, its an extraordinary thing. One of the things Ive learned Im
chauvinistic about it but Im not arrogant about it and thats the virtue of the system that we

have in our country that allows us to make these kinds of choices, to have
unparalleled freedom, and to take our values out and be proud of them, and let
other people decide whether they want to embrace them and live by them and be
empowered by them, or whether they want to reject them and go a different
direction. No country on this planet in the history of humankind has ever seen their military be able
to conquer territory and push back against evil and terrorism and so forth, and yet turn around and
give that country, that land, that territory, back to its rightful owners, the people who live there, and
turn around and say youve got a democracy, youve got your country, youve got your freedom. You
see Iraq today still struggling, but theyve got that choice. And thats the choice were trying to give in
Afghanistan. And when people say, Well, why? Why us? Why should we be the ones who have to
engage in that, the answer is very simple. Because America, throughout the 20th century

and now moving into this century, has proven again and again that there is an
indispensable capacity to help bring about peace, find a way for peoples rights,
their individual human rights to be able to be protected and to be able to live better
lives. And there are countless countries that we can point to in the world where
weve, I think, helped to make that kind of difference. Look at Kosovo, Bosnia,
Serbia, that part of the world, where there was huge turmoil, and President Clinton made a
courageous decision and we made a difference. The Dayton Peace Accords. And you can go back all
through history and see that. Now, were not perfect. We make mistakes. There are plenty

of examples where we havent done it quite as well as we might have or should

have. But the fundamental of the choice that we make is not one to subjugate
people, not one to deny people their rights; its to try to help people to be able to
move in the right direction. Now, were in a more complicated world . The world of World
War II was a world where it was polarized and the United States had this enormous power, the old
phrase of awakening a sleeping giant. And they awoke a sleeping giant and we flexed our muscles, and
in the end the Allies and Russia a part of that Russia suffered enormous losses in that war, and

sometimes people forget that. But we came out of that with a strong economy and a strong spirit,
sufficient that we decided under Harry Truman to help Germany and Japan rebuild. Best decision we
ever made. Do you know that most of the American people were opposed to that, for

obvious reasons? Thats what foreign policy is about, making tough decisions like
that and seeing the future and trying to prepare for that future . And so throughout the
Cold War, we were able to win, in a sense, economically certainly, because were the strongest
economy and a lot of other people were coming up from a very different place, either the destruction
of the war or from poverty, and a different place altogether economically. Now, folks, the world, youre
going to have to figure out. The reason this classroom is so important, and your thinking

about this is so important, is you have to figure out how we do this for the 21st
century where its not so simple in terms of bipolar, East-West, communism versus
the West, and so forth. It is more different entities, more sectarian energy pushing out from under
the yoke of the totalitarianism that kept it down for so long a Qadhafi in Libya, for instance. Thats
not yet a finished history. And so all of this work of democracy takes time. In a world of multiple
technologies, multiple religions, huge religious extremism, in a world of terrorists, extremism linked to,
in many cases, exploited religion, we face a challenge unlike any that we have faced in our history. And
so think about it. Im sure you will; thats what youre here to do. And youre going to get a great
discussion here with Marc about the terrorism component of it. My own belief is that there has to be

more to our efforts. And this is where were going to have to do a heck of a job
persuading Congress, because were looking at sequestration, were looking at
budget deficits, at the very time that the world is asking us to be able to be more
engaged and help them make more of a difference in their lives. If you look in Egypt or
Jordan or Syria or any of those countries, theyve got Id say probably about 60 percent of the
population is under the age of 30, and 50 percent of the population is under the age of 21, and 40
percent is under the age of 18. And if they become 18 or 21 and they dont have jobs, and they dont
have an education, and they dont see much of a future, and the governance of their country is
suppressing their aspirations in a world where they can tweet and Facebook and connect to everybody
else, youre going to get what you got in Tahrir Square, and youre going to see more energy released
that way. And I believe its a time for us, with our values and with what we know about

how you develop, to help these folks be able to find the kind of opportunity that you
have and that a lot of other people strive for in different parts of the world. Our
challenge is not to retreat and go inwards and say, Oh, let them fight it out, it
doesnt make a difference. It does make all the difference in the world , as we saw in
Afghanistan, where if you leave people to their own devices, a lot of extremists will just organize
themselves and make life miserable for people somewhere. So that is our challenge. Im delighted
that youre here today. Thank you for being part of this classroom. I want you to join into this debate. It
needs to be robust across our country, and hopefully well together make the right
decisions. Thank you very, very much.

Policy Simulation Good

Policy simulation is the best model of debate dont weigh any
impacts the aff doesnt solve vs. framework its a question of
their model of debate versus ours.
1. policy simulation teaches us about the government. State
action about [x thing the aff is] solves better learning
about pragmatic implementation is more likely to
influence things like the state. If you cant combine their
philosophy with pragmatic policy action its just hot air
their [we are a jamming or whatever] will just go back
to collecting dust on some random library shelf.
2. Talking about state action creates mutually accessible
information there is a huge literature base about whether
or not the US should engage china which allows teams to
form cohesive, well supported arguments. This has two
implications
a. this controls the internal link to fairness, the aff
interpretation of debate justifies teams running to the
fringes and talking about things completely unrelated to
the topic which explodes the research burden of the neg
and makes debate impossible
b. we control the internal link to education. Having wellprepared teams on both sides is better it forces the aff
to learn their arguments in greater depth, and teaches
them about holes in the argument that they can shore up.
It also allows the neg to engage the aff- critically
interrogating issues with the aff allows the neg to gain a
deeper understanding of the aff better (solves their
education arguments).
3. Policy simulation spills over into our daily lives learning
about complex bureaucratic mechanisms and how to make
decisions in those mechanisms increases our ability to
weigh the costs and benefits of decisions we make in our
daily lives.
4. Roleplaying good, k2 solve environment.
Ran 12 (Bing Ran, Assistant Professor of School of Public Affairs at Penn State, April 2012,
Evaluating Public Participation in Environmental Policy-Making, Journal of U.S.-China Public
Administration, 9(4), pg. 413) KVA
From a process viewpoint, social learning brings convergence and understanding

between different stakeholders when relevant parties could walk in each others
shoes and develop group solidarity . It forces relevant groups to work together and to
break down barriers between them. From an outcome perspective, social learning brings

behavior and attitude changes when relevant parties develop a sense of responsibility to
others, develop moral reasoning and problem-solving skills to solve conflicts, integrate
cognitive knowledge into ones opinion, and learn how to cooperate to solve collective
problems . It ensures the decision continuity so that lessons learned could be clearly carried over to
concurrent and future operations. Public participation exhibits many indications of social

learning. When a community of people come together, with diverse, but also
common interests, and seek to reach a collective agreement, social learning has the
characteristics: By which changes in the social condition occur-particularly changes
in popular awareness and changes in how individuals see their private interests
linked with the shared interests of their fellow citizens. This is a product of
individuals learning how to solve their shared problems in a manner that is
responsible to both, factual correctness and normative consent (meaning legal and
social responsibilities). (Webler et al., 1995, p. 446) Not only do citizens involved in public
participation gain technical knowledge about the issue being discussed, but they also learn about
collective values and preferences, and the impressions and feelings of other participants in the
decision-making process. Knowledge is enhanced through social learning when decision stakeholders
learn about the state of the problem, about the possible solutions and the accompanying
consequences, about other peoples and groups interests and values, about ones own interests
(reflection), and about methods and strategies of communicating well. Overall, literature widely
suggests that social learning is a critical component to the public participation in the

environmental decision-making process, as well as to other policy-making at the

federal, state, and local level. It is clear that public participation could bring about these social
learning effects that occur outside the specific implementation of the public policy or management
decision, thus, this paper argues that social learning is a significant factor in public participation, and
warrants inclusion to the evaluative framework that measures the quality and impact of public
participation on decision and policy-making. Based on this analysis, a revised framework (see Table 1)
could be proposed as a more comprehensive evaluative model that environmental policy-makers could
use to evaluate public participation. In the next section, we will use roundtable discussions, a major
type of public participation, to illustrate how policy-makers could use the proposed framework to
evaluate and assess quality and impact of this public policy decision-making technique.

5. Simulations allow us to apply theory anyways solves

their offense

Silvia 12 (Chris Silvia is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the
University of Kansas. His main research interests include collaborative governance, public service
delivery, and leadership. The Impact of Simulations on Higher Level Learning. Journal of Public Affair
Education. JPAE 18(2), 397422) CTD
Experiential learning activities have been a commonly employed pedagogical tool for
centuries. The physical sciences have had laboratory sessions, language classes have included roleplaying exercises, and the health sciences have held mock-ups, all of which were designed to allow the
student to use and apply what was read or presented in class. With the lectures and/or readings as a
foundation, many of these experiences were intended to crystallize the students understanding of the
material. For example, since the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration is often not
intuitive, many physics courses include a lab session where students manipulate these three
parameters and prove to themselves that force is equal to mass times acceleration. Whereas classes in
the physical sciences reinforce and build upon the concepts and theories taught in lecture with
opportunities to experiment in a laboratory setting, courses in the social sciences often do not
include similar, hands-on learning opportunities. This lack of an active learning
experience may be particularly problematic in the political science, public policy, and
public administration classrooms, for students in these disciplines must often grapple

with the conflicting facts and values that are common in public policy debates and
throughout the policy process in the real world . Since pure laboratory experiments in many
disciplines are not possible or ethical, instructors in these fields have turned to simulations as ways to
allow students a laboratory-like experience. Simulations vary widely in their lengthsome last only 5
to 10 minutes (Davis, 2009), and others are held over multiple class sessions (Woodworth, Gump, &
Forrester, 2005). Additionally, the format of simulations ranges from computerized games to elaborate,

role-playing scenarios (Moore, 2009). While not all simulations involve role playing, for the purposes of
this paper, the terms role playing, role-playing simulation, and simulations are used

synonymously to refer to active learning techniques in which students try to

become another individual and, by assuming the role, to gain a better
understanding of the person, as well as the actions and motivations that prompt
certain behaviors [and] explore their [own] feelings (Moore, 2009, p. 209)
Simulations give students the chance to apply theory, develop critical skills , and provide a
welcome relief from the everyday tasks of reading and preparing for classes (Kanner, 2007). An

additional benefit of many of these simulations is the introduction of an aspect of

realism into the students experience. Such simulations are historically seen in the medical
fields, where mock-up patients take on the signs and symptoms of a certain disease or injury and the
student is asked to assess, diagnose, and/or treat the patient. Here the students must apply
what they have learned to a reasonably realistic scenario . Further, there is evidence

that the experiential learning that occurs in role-playing simulations promotes longterm retention of course material (Bernstein & Meizlish, 2003; Brookfield, 1990).
Increasingly, public administration, public policy, and political science courses are
turning toward simulations and role playing to help their students both better
understand and apply the material. Simulations have been used in courses such as
international relations (e.g., Shellman & Turan, 2006), negotiations (e.g., Kanner, 2007), constitutional
law (e.g., Fliter, 2009), comparative politics (e.g., Shellman, 2001), professional development (e.g.,
Wechsler & Baker, 2004), economics (e.g., Campbell & McCabe, 2002), human resource management
(e.g., Dede, 2002; Yaghi, 2008), leadership (e.g., Crosby & Bryson, 2007), and American government
(e.g., Caruson, 2005).

Prefigurative Politics Bad

Even if you conclude the states irredeemable learning about
how to develop alternatives creates more effective advocates
focus on local, symbolic acts cements the status quo, Occupy
proves.
Murray 14, PhD Candidate in the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University,

Prefiguration or Actualization? Radical Democracy and Counter-Institution in the Occupy Movement,

http://berkeleyjournal.org/2014/11/prefiguration-or-actualization-radical-democracy-and-counterinstitution-in-the-occupy-movement/
The Occupy movement emerged in response to a devastating economic crisis, bringing economic
inequality to the center of political discourse. But it also emerged in response to a wave of social
movements around the world that toppled dictators, asserted the power of the people and
demonstrated their desire to take control of the decisions that affect their lives. In Occupy, as in all of
these movements, the economic and the political were linked. Participants did not merely demand an
end to foreclosures or new redistributive policies to address economic inequality; they also saw these
grievances as symptomatic of a fundamentally undemocratic political system. Though the interests
and motivations of participants in the Occupy movement were highly diverse, at the core it can be
read as a movement for radical democracy the underlying goal was to actualize the ideal of selforganizing communities of free and equal persons, expand and deepen democratic
participation in all spheres of life, and increase individuals and communities power over social,
economic and political institutions.[1] But in many ways, Occupy also sought to be a movement of
radical democracy. Rather than petitioning politicians to bring about democratizing reforms or building
a party that would hopefully instate democracy after the revolution, activists hoped to bring about a
radically democratic society through radical democratic practice. They sought to prefigure a
democracy-to-come, by actualizing radical democracy in the movement itself. They claimed public
spaces as venues in which experiments in radical democracy could be developed, tested, and
propagated. They were spaces in which to organize political action and in which all were free to
participate in agenda-setting, decision-making, and political education through the process itself.
Based on fourteen months of participant-research in two Occupy sites Occupy Wall Street and an
outgrowth of the movement called Occupy the Farm this paper evaluates the different forms
prefigurative politics has taken within the movement.[2] Many commentators have lauded the

movement as an example of prefigurative politics, which they see as the cutting edge of
contemporary radical politics.[3] However, an overemphasis on the value of prefiguration

can be debilitating, leading to a focus on internal movement dynamics at the expense of

building a broader movement, and a focus on symbolic expressions of dissent as opposed
to the development of alternatives to actually replace existing political, economic and
social institutions. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) suffered this fate, partly due to the perception
that the encampment and the decision-making procedures were prefigurative, and the
perception that prefigurative politics itself will lead to revolutionary transformations in the political,
economic and social structure. While Occupy Wall Street foundered on the prefigurative
obsession with movement process , a group of activists, students and local residents in the San
Francisco Bay Area have sought to overcome these challenges . Since 2012, they have worked

under the banner of Occupy the Farm (OTF) to create an agricultural commons on a parcel of
publicly owned land. Unlike OWS, OTF has worked to establish a counter-institution grounded in
material resources and production, that is ultimately meant to increase participants autonomy from
the state and capitalism. In this way it has been able to link radical democracy and economic justice in
a material way, rather than merely symbolically. As it is generally practiced and conceptualized today,
prefigurative politics is an inadequate framework for developing radical democratic
political strategy . Instead of prefiguration, we should redirect our efforts toward developing
and linking democratic counter-institutions that produce and manage common resources.

Occupy the Farm illustrates some of the potential and the challenges of such a strategy.

Prefigurative politics create a feeling of utopianism this

fosters complacency within movements and cements the
status quo.

Smucker 14 (Jonathan Matthew Smucker is a long-time organizer and theorist in grassroots

movements for social, economic and ecological justice. He has trained thousands of change agents in
campaign strategy, framing and messaging, direct action, and other skills, and is currently a doctoral
student of sociology at UC Berkeley. Can Prefigurative Politics ever Replace Political Strategy?.
Berkeley Journal of Sociology. http://berkeleyjournal.org/category/forum/power-prefiguration/ 10/7/14)
CTD
Before delving into the question of whether the concept of prefigurative politics is genuinely
descriptive of OWSlet alone of the broader wave of global uprisingslet us first clarify what we even
mean by politics. The words politics and political are often thrown around casually and without
precision. What does it mean for something to be political or , for that matter, apolitical?
For Antonio Gramsci, whether a certain tendency is political or not ultimately comes
down to its engagement with extant power relations and structures . When Gramsci calls
certain tendenciesapoliticism,[1] his argument is not that these tendencies are not informed by or in
reaction to political events or structural relationships, or that their adherents have no political opinions.
He is asserting, rather, that the actions of some ostensibly political groups are not

genuinely intended as political interventions, i.e., strategic attempts to shift

relationships of power as well as the outcomes of those relationships . Here we see an
important distinction: between actions (or opinions) that are informed by or in
reaction to a political situation, on the one hand, and actions that are designed to
be political interventions to reshape the world , on the other. The expression of ones
values or opinions, while informed by political realities, will not automatically amount to
political interventioneven if expressed loudly and dramatically . To be political, then, is
not merely to hold or to express political opinions about issues, either as individuals or in
groups. Rather, to be political, requires engagement with the terrain of power, with an

orientation towards the broader society and its structures. With such a political
understanding, Gramsci saw the essential task of aspiring political challengers was
the formation of a national-popular collective will, of which the modern Prince is at one and the
same time the organiser and the active, operative expression.[2] With the term modern Prince
Gramsci was referring to a revolutionary party that must operate as both the unifying

symbol and the agent of an articulated collective will, i.e., an emerging alternative
hegemony that brings disparate groups into alignment. How does Occupy Wall Street
measure up to Gramscis political vision? OWS did not have a revolutionary party , in
the sense that Gramsci elaborated. Indeed, Occupy shared many features with the anarchist
movement that Gramsci criticized.[3] Yet, despite this anarchismwith all of its ambivalence
and hostility towards the notion of building and wielding power, leadership, and organizationOWS
did, in its first few months of existence, step partially into this dual role of operative expression and
organiser of a newly articulated national-popular collective will. Indeed, OWSs initial success in the
realm of contesting popular meanings was remarkable. Practically overnight the nascent movement
broke into the national news cycle and articulated a popular, albeit ambiguous, critique of economic
inequality and a political system rigged to serve the one percent. Moreover, OWS managed

momentarily to align remnants of a long-fragmented political Left in the United

States, while simultaneously striking a resonant chord with far broader audiences. Its next logical
political step, had it followed a Gramscian political roadmap, would have been to build and
consolidate its organizational capacity by (1) constructing a capable and disciplined
organizational apparatus, and (2) activating the above-mentioned latent and
fragmented organizations and social bases into an alternative hegemonic alignment
capable of shifting political outcomes (i.e., winning ). Occupy, however, was deeply
ambivalent about even attempting such operations. Nonetheless, it is important to mention
that a tendency within OWS did make such attempts, and even enjoyed notable successes, however
localized or limited these may have been. Broadly speaking, and certainly oversimplifying for the sake

of clarity, there were two main overarching tendencies within the core of OWS. One tendency leaned
toward strategic politics and the other toward prefigurative politics.[4] To follow a Gramscian roadmap,
the former tendency would have had to build a mandate within the movement for strategic political
intervention, to a greater extent than it did. As for the prefigurative politics tendency, Gramsci
would likely not have considered much of its politics to be politics at all. This latter tendency

viewed decision-making processes and the physical occupation of public space as

manifestations of a better future now (i.e., prefiguration), rather than as tactics
within a larger strategy of political contestation . The prefigurative politics tendency
confused process, tactics, and self-expression with political content and was often
ambivalent about strategic questions, like whether Wall Street was the named target or most
anything else in its place.[5] It celebrated the act for the acts sake, struggle for the
sake of struggle, etc.[1]; Gramsci may well have called it apoliticism. Among other related
phenomena that Gramsci criticized, Occupys prefigurative politics tendency resembled his
descriptions of voluntarism, marginalism, and especially utopianism. The attribute
utopian does not apply to political will in general, he argued, but to specific wills
which are incapable of relating means to end, and hence are not even wills, but idle
whims, dreams, longings, etc.[7] Gramscis elaboration of utopianism goes further than the
popular notion of rosy-eyed visions of how the world could one day be . He dismisses utopianists
not for the content of their vision of the future, but for their lack of a plan for how to
move from Point A to Point B, from present reality to realized vision. In other words,
dreaming about how the world might possibly someday be is not the same as
political struggleeven when the dreams are punctuated with dramatic
prefigurative public spectacles. Lifeworld I want to suggest that in the prefigurative
politics on display at Zuccotti Park, Gramscis negative concept of utopianism
interacted with Jrgen Habermas theory of the lifeworld specifically the latter
theorists discussion of subcultural tendencies oriented towards the revitalization of
the lifeworld. Again, prefigurative politics purports to be about modeling or prefiguring visions of
utopian futures here and now. Indeed, such prefigurative spectacles did seem to create a
palpable feeling of utopianism at Zuccotti Park. Utopianism as a feeling is hardly about
the future; rather, it is felt here and now . During my time as an active participant
and organizer at Zuccotti Park, I began to wonder if the heightened sense of an
integrated identity was the utopia that many of my fellow participants were
seeking. What if the thing we were missing, the thing we were lackingthe thing we longed for most
was a sense of an integrated existence in a cohesive community, i.e., an intact lifeworld?What if this
longing was so potent that it could eclipse the drive to affect larger political outcomes? Habermas
argues that under a system of advanced capitalism and bureaucracy, both bureaucratic and
capitalist logics have penetrated and colonized thelifeworld , encroaching upon, and even
annihilating, the realm of traditional and organic social practice and organization. In such contexts,

social movements have dramatically shifted in their political contents, forms,

demographics, and the motivations of their participants. Social movement
participants in advanced capitalist nations may be more likely to emphasize fine distinctions
between their own groups and the broader society than they are to look for commonalities. That is,
they are more likely to marginally differentiate themselves and their groups as a

means of finding and deepening a sense of solidarity and belonging that they feel
themselves lacking. Habermas writes: For this reason, ascriptive characteristics such as
gender, age, skin color, neighborhood or locality, and religious affiliation serve to
build up and separate off communities, to establish subculturally protected communities
supportive of the search for personal and collective identity. The revaluation of the particular, the
natural, the provincial, of social spaces that are small enough to be familiar, of decentralized formsall
this is meant to foster the revitalization of possibilities for expression and communication that have
been buried alive.[8] My point here is not to diminish the importance of a groups internal life and the
sense of community, meaning, and belonging experienced by participants. I would even posit that

such spaces are indispensible to social movements ability to deepen political analysis and foster the
level of solidarity and commitment that oppositional struggle requires. The problem here is a
matter of imbalance: when a groups internal life becomes a more important motivator
than what the group accomplishes as a vehicle for change. To the extent that a group
becomes self-contentencapsulated in the project of constructing its particularized lifeworld
what motivation will participants have to strategically engage broader society and political
structures? Why would group members want to claim and contest popular meanings and symbols if
the groups individuated lifeworld can be further cultivated by an explicit rejection of such contests? If
participants are motivated by hope of psychic completionby community and a strong sense of
belongingand such motivation is insufficiently grounded in instrumental political goals, their

energies will likely go into deepening group identity over bolstering the groups
external political achievements. The problem is that the groups particularized lifeworld
can be strengthened without it ever having to actually winanything in the real world. Indeed,

this may help to explain why some ostensibly political groups have been able to
maintain a committed core of participants for decades without ever achieving a
single measurable political goal.

Prefigurative politics inevitably fail complacency sets in after

marginal improvements and the privileged few who can afford
to be fully engaged produce a new, elite class of citizens,
reproducing the power structures of the status quo and
turning the aff.
Miettunen 15 (Juuso V.M., PhD issued from School of Politics and IR, University of Kent. Doctoral

dissertation: Prefigurative Politics: Perlis and Promise. School of Politics and International Relations at
the University of Kent. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/50228/1/194PhD%20Dissertation%20-%20Juuso
%20Miettunen_hand%20in.pdf. 8/19/2015) CTD
At the moment, both movements seem to be in a kind of a perpetual transitional phase
whereby the people or the bases are not trusted with democracy . Moreover, in Buenos
Aires especially, it seems as if the movement is stuck in a limbo whereby rotation takes place when
somebody is politically formed and motivated enough to step up. Yet, rotation and the participation

deriving from there is simultaneously is seen as a way to learn and to become

motivated. In this regard, some members could be motivated and thus activated if they
were to have a role of responsibility. For the moment, the obstacles to participation
whether they derive from lack of motivation or from organizational deficiencies allow
patterns of heightened participation among some of the members, leading to hierarchy. In
addition, both movements limit the freedom of their membership in many ways . In
Mexico this is more acute in the Zapatistas control over the base communities and the memberships
freedom of movement. Moreover, the educational curriculum limits the options of young people to a
campesino life. In Buenos Aires, too, the movement has requirements for participation in work,
protests, political training workshops and the paying of the aporte as requisites for the memberships.
In general, there seems to be a constant tension between prefiguration and the

principles of the movements in that an elite within the movement seeks to make
sure that the principles are complied with . Essentially, thus, it seems that it is difficult
to balance the aims of the movement with the freedom of the membership .
Consequently, it is inevitable that membership will be treated to an extent as means to an
end, which of course is contrary to the idea of prefigurative politics . Of course, when dealing
with prefigurative movements, it is not fair to deem them a failure in the short term, given their focus
on a process of slow and fundamental transformation instead of short term gains such as legal
reforms. But when can one say that the movement has failed? In case of the Zapatistas, the second
generation arguably shows more prefigurative tendencies, but ultimately the movements real test will
come in the post-Marcos era. In Buenos Aires, the development is not very promising, given that the

movement, according to many accounts by the membership is already not what it used to be in that
decision-making has become much more descending as opposed to ascending. The transitional
phase is still evident in the accounts of the core group, even after more than fifteen years. If we take
the experiences of these movements as indicative of prefigurative politics, at the moment this
practice seems to demand much ideological commitment and sacrifice . To consequently
identify the problem with advancing the movements project as one of political commitment or
consciousness implies that social change should always require a high level of sacrifice either of time
or of financial resources. This is a difficult notion and certainly does not suggest easy

times for those seeking to change the world through prefigurative practice.
Especially given the anti-dogmatic stance of prefigurative movements, the
movements should not rely purely on ideological commitment . Viewing the problem in
this light pushes the movements towards efforts of creating critical consciousness, running the risk of
these efforts becoming much like those of previous movements. Instead, the movements should

direct their efforts more towards thinking about how to make participation in
decision-making and roles of responsibility easier, less frightening and less time
consuming. More attention should be paid to the challenges of integrating decisionmaking more into the normal flow of things . Prefigurative theory and the case studies In many
ways, the works of John Holloway and Marina Sitrin have been much influenced by the experience of
MTD Solano in Buenos Aires, as discussed in the previous chapter. The somewhat purist understanding
of autonomy as per MTD Solano explains much of its eventual demobilization. More problematically,
even if the movement would have been able to sustain itself longer, the challenge of advancing the
project beyond the immediate confines and context of one neighbourhood would have lingered on.
While Holloway has indicated on many occasions that a more general transformation will eventually be
necessary to even sustain these experiences, his work does not deal with the practical challenges of
prefiguration in a diverse group of people with different motivations and desires. It is arguably much
easier to prefigure alternative social organization if the group is already homogenous and share the
desire to do so and have come together because of their political views (like many western activist
groups). In this regard, many of the problems with the Piqueteros and the Zapatistas derive precisely
from the fact that the membership is not homogenous in these questions. This is at the same time
their strength in that they are discovering ways in which we can advance social change without
resorting to ghettoes of full-time activists, but rather they are engaged in the day-to-day challenges of
how to overcome the problems implied by seeking to harmonize the desires and viewpoints of a
diverse group. In this vein, there are some problems with Holloways theory as the case studies have
shown. His theory largely ignores the fact that the movements have not emerged out of a pre-existing
collective, but that the historical process has started by a core group of activists that until today
maintain an influential role in the organization. In particular this points to the fact that power-over
derives equally from the social as it does from the political . While he has acknowledged,
as discussed earlier, that all experiments of constructing power-to are likely tainted by
power-over he seems to view that the state route is a guaranteed way to corrupt these
experiences. To illustrate this, a quote from Holloway himself: The struggle to liberate power-to is not
the struggle to construct a counter-power, but rather an antipower, something that is radically
different from power-over. Concepts of revolution that focus on the taking of power are typically
centred on the notion of counter-power. The strategy is to construct a counter-power, a power that can
stand against the ruling power. Often the revolutionary movement has been constructed as a
mirror image of power, army against army, party against party, with the result that power
reproduces itself within the revolution itsel f. Anti-power, then, is not counter-power, but
something much more radical: it is the dissolution of power-over, the emancipation of power-to. This is
the great, absurd, inevitable challenge of the communist dream: to create a society free of power
relations through the dissolution of power-over. This project is far more radical than any notion of
revolution based on the conquest of power and at the same time far more realistic (Holloway 2002a,
24). In this light, we could problematize Holloways theory by arguing that there have never been
successful experiences of constructing and maintaining this anti-power either. Avoiding the state
in no way solves the problem of power-over. While undoubtedly in both of the case studies

there are pressures that derive from the state, this pressure is not the only source of
power-over in these experiences. In this way, one could ask, that if we are faced with what seems
an inevitable reemergence of power in the traditional sense, regardless of which way we go, why

should the state route then be rejected by default? Holloway sees, similarly to Piven and Clowards
famous argument (1979) that movements of people seek to form organizations as a last resort: I think
institutionalization is not necessarily damaging . It may or may not be, but we should not
focus on that, we should think much more in terms of movements. The danger is that we start thinking
in terms of institutionalization at the point at which movements are beginning to fail.
Institutionalization can be a way of prolonging their life, but then they turn into something thats not
very exciting and not very interesting (Roos 2013). Here too, there is a counter-argument. It may be
that institutionalization is a last resort, but it may also derive from a long period of activism and
lessons learned therein. While Holloway accepts the need for general transformation,

the question of how we get there without eventually engaging with the existing
political institutions is left open. Autonomism, as shown by the case studies, is costly and often
implies much sacrifice. We cannot expect everybody to want to choose a life of full-time
activism and personal asceticism to advance social change. State institutions, as it
stands, are capable of promoting the kinds of changes that push for the desired
world without everybody having to carve out their freedoms in their respective
spaces. In a way, too, the movements themselves do this on a smaller scale. For example, the
Zapatistas have their principles and the Revolutionary Womens law that carry out
the same function as a state legal reform would . In addition, the focus on interpersonal
social relations does not give answers to some of the difficult questions of how to
change social relations that are not necessarily merely interpersonal but wider, such
as land ownership or abortion law Similarly, FPDS indicates a much less purist understanding of
autonomy and the state. The recent move to participate in elections did not for the activists
themselves mean the acceptance of the logic of the political system and a complete move
to party organization and electoral politics, but merely one more tool in the construction
of Peoples power. Even following Holloways theory, this is not an unsustainable position. If the
state and capitalism are mere social constructions reproduced in daily human

interactions, it is not entirely inconceivable that there would be a way in which we

could interact differently within the state so as to change it, without accepting the
hierarchic package that has usually come with it. If the state really is just a
fetishized form of social relations, it should have no power of its own. Simultaneously,

in an interview for ROAR Holloway argued that it is not necessarily important that alternative ways of
living and social movements are sustained in any given place where they might have opened up
through a crisis but that the search for alternatives moves on and keeps on going somewhere else
(Roos 2013). This thought, curiously, indicates a certain hint of vanguardism in Holloways thought. If

the change is to be power-to, it should be built in many places at the same time,
and we should seek to maintain and expand these spaces rather than look for a
global guiding light. Ultimately, too, given the challenges of autonomism, the experiences seem
to need to be accompanied by other forms of political activity . In this I agree with
Adamovsky who argues that: It's critical to understand that true autonomy is fought over in all society
(including the state). I clarify again here, so as to not be misunderstood: I think that building
autonomy, what some call 'counterpower, must be the fundamental horizon of our political tactic. But
to change the world we need to find a way to disempower the state and replace it with another form of
social relationship. The neighbourhood assemblies, self-managed factories, micro-enterprises are
fundamental. But a new society is not maintained just with that (Thwaites Rey 2004, 467). For me it
seems that given the problems of avoiding the reproduction of forms of power-over,

it would be useful to consider alternatives in the building of power-to. This includes

thinking about liberating power-to by taking over instances of power-over such
as state institutions so as to not allow it to be power-over but power-to. But in this the key is
to do it differently, to engage with the state not as its mirror image but rather through a
process that seeks to be prefigurative while acknowledging the difficulties and
contradictions therein. This would involve acknowledging the elitism deriving from the costs of
non-representational political organization in that not all have the possibility or motivation to take part
as much as others. The search for a pure prefigurative experience and horizontality in itself

can easily turn into groups where those without a clear political commitment are excluded .

These groups then ultimately are not much different from past vanguardist groups .

Consequently, the challenge of prefigurative politics lies in these messy experiences, like the two case
studies here, where forms of hierarchy seem persistent given the competing desires within the
movement. Autonomism as an alternative strategy of social change In many ways, autonomist
movements seem to have inherited some of the problems of past movements. Even though
autonomism implies a certain anti-dogmatic stance, the attention given to adhering to the

principles of the movement, evident in both cases, indicates something akin to a

doctrine of social change. Moreover, there seems to be a core group in the
movements that could be characterized as the keepers of these principles. The case

studies here point to the need for shared principles for prefigurative politics. This does not necessarily
mean that the group needs to be homogenous, but if the people do not agree on a set of values and
desires, such as equality between everyone, an elite group is likely to emerge to uphold the values
that they promote. Consequently, it is unlikely that they would be able to avoid resorting to forms of
coercion or indoctrination to be able to make the movement more the way they think it should be. The
fact that they do indeed exert influence makes the movement non-prefigurative. Yet, the alternative
seems like yet another form of life-stylist isolationism whereby the ideas are not likely to spread. The
movements themselves, especially the Zapatistas, are largely aware of many of these problems and
paradoxes. However, this is not how they are perceived by those looking for inspiration from them. In
this regard, there are some things we should keep in mind when thinking about their exportability. It
would be useful to view autonomy as a paradox and an (im)possibility rather than something pure
and achievable. The same goes for horizontality. The prefigurative process stops when the group
assumes that they have actually achieved equality. This amounts to a situation not unlike the one
described in Freemans work where the group officially has no structure but inevitably will have
developed one. Of course the alternative is not so much to admit that since hierarchy is inevitable, it
should be cherished and accepted as something beneficial. In this regard the problem is similar to that
of balancing between the tyranny of the majority through majoritarian voting procedures and the
domination of a minority through consensual ones. The movements seek to overcome this by having a
process that aims at consensus and thus facilitates deliberation and discussion and does not assume
predefined interests, while ultimately allowing for the vote so as to avoid blocks. Similarly, it would
be useful to always aim at equality and horizontality while acknowledging that in practice this does not
seem possible. Key is to maintain the possibility of keeping the hierarchies in check by admitting their
existence and thus openly finding ways to tackle them. In case of these movements this would, in the
first place, mean that the problem of participation is not solely a problem of consciousness but derives
equally from the ability of some to participate more actively than others due to lesser time and other
constraints. What does this mean for others? Prefiguration and its generalizability When thinking of
the generalizability of the experiences in Argentina and Mexico, some things need to be kept in mind.
As explained in the previous chapter, both movements emerged in a society where the traditional
corporatist system that had largely structured the lives of those who became members of the
movement was in crisis. In a way, these movements can be seen as replacements for the
traditional order , and the argument could also be made about them replacing
declining state services. In both places the disintegration of traditional political
organization left a vacuum to be filled with something equally pervasive . In Mexico
especially, the movement structures to a large extent the life of its membership. The membership of
the movement defines much of the public and private life of those belonging to it. The fact that the
people work and produce together seems to be the glue that holds the movement together. Regarding
this, future research would benefit greatly from studies exploring further the external element of
autonomous movements; how and when do they spread? Is it possible for prefigurative movements to
conquer greater spaces without drastic structural changes in the economy? In this regard, those
seeking for lessons from the movements to be taken to the Western context, for example, should be
cautious as to how much we can adopt due to their specificity deriving from their respective contexts.
Both movements developed in difficult times and places. In fact, the movements were preceded

by more moderate attempts through legal and institutional means to address the
conditions giving rise to them. They also have gone through demobilization when
things generally get better. These two factors point to a kind of economic determinism
that can be quite disheartening for those interested in social change , and one that I
would like to avoid. Therefore, in the western context especially it might be appropriate to think
slightly differently. It would perhaps be more useful to think in terms of advancing on all fronts the

project of self-determination and powerto while acknowledging the paradoxes therein. It would be
more appropriate to promote the building of collective efforts in all workplaces and communities for
more collective decision-making and ownership, to generally rebel in the contexts that we are in. This

is an alternative to the efforts to try and develop all-encompassing movements that

incorporate full-time activists. The latter in itself can lead to an elitism whereby
those who can afford to partake fully will ultimately become an elite and the group as a
whole a vanguard showing the way to the rest of society that they expect at some
point to give up what they are doing and either join them or build another
movement. As far as autonomism implies a great sacrifice, monetary or time-wise, it will lead to
these kinds of elitisms. Similarly, the tendency in Occupy-style movements to fetishize
horizontality can in itself be exclusionary and lead to elitism . This is because a pure assembly
format leads to patterns of participation where some are better able to participate than others and
consequently decision-making concentrates in their hands. It would be of great use, therefore,

for us to acknowledge the (im)possibility of both autonomy and horizontality, and

work with the assumption that both do exist. Only this way we can continue carving
out spaces of freedom in our relative contexts. And this means within the state too .
Political organization and state engagement go hand in hand with
transformation of civil society policy advocacy reinforced by critical
arguments is the highest form of political development, any other
movement is eventually coopted by the state.
Green 15 (Marcus E. Green, Gramsci and Subaltern Struggles Today: Spontaneity, Political

Organization, and Occupy Wall Street, in Antonio Gramsci, edited by Mark McNally, Critical
Explorations in Contemporary Thought Series (New York: Palgrave, 2015): 156-178.) CTD
However, according to Gramsci, neither pure spontaneity nor conscious leadership exist in history.
Both are representations of scholastic and academic conceptions of abstract theory. There are

elements and gradations of spontaneity and conscious leadership in every

movement. He makes a distinction between marginal and advanced subaltern groups,
with varying levels of consciousness, leadership, and organization . Marginal and less
advanced groups, he argues, are inclined to act according to an incoherent
conglomeration of ideas drawn from common sense, such as everyday experience,
popular science, folklore, traditional conceptions of the world, and religion . Such
movements, although not constituted from a critically defined political strategy and often dispersed,
represent the will of subaltern groups to transform their conditions. It is through the practical

necessity to provide conscious direction to their activity that subaltern groups

begin to transform their common sense into what Gramsci calls good sense with
elements of historical and critical awareness.2 This process, Gramsci argues, is constitutive of
subaltern groups themselves, as they attempt to provide conscious direction to their
spontaneous political activity in coordination with the organic intellectuals and democratic
philosophers who emerge within the struggle.3 The formation of subaltern autonomous
political organizations represents an intermediate phase of conscious leadership in
which subaltern groups press for political claims and demands in a collective form .
Gramsci considers the formation of a revolutionary party that is capable of uniting and
leading subaltern groups and organizations in a hegemonic transformation of the state
and civil society as the highest level of subaltern political development . Thus, as Gramsci
writes in Notebook 3, 48, the unity of spontaneity and conscious leadership or
discipline is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes .4 In

response to the wave of global uprisings that emerged in 2011 in North Africa,
Europe, and North America, there has been a return to questions of spontaneity and
political organization in radical movements, from the embrace of spontaneous selforganization of leaderless, horizontal, rhizomatic organizational structures5 to the

necessity of the reconstitution of the revolutionary political part y.6 Within recent
discussions and movements, Gramscis idea of the political party uniting and leading an alliances of
classes and social groups in the transformation of society is often seen as being out of date, prompting
the necessity for new organizational forms.7 In addition, a number of critics have accused Gramsci of
vanguardism and elitism for his critical evaluations of spontaneity and common sense. 8 A general
criticism is that Gramscis critique of common sense creates an elitist hierarchy of knowledge and
consciousness, and that his emphasis on educating spontaneity through conscious leadership amounts
to the manipulation of the people.9 By not considering the historical context of Gramscis writings,
such criticisms overlook the limitations of spontaneity that he identifies, and the valorization of
common sense over conscious leadership creates an impasse that renders subaltern political
transformation nearly impossible. Through an examination of Gramscis writings on spontaneity and
conscious leadership in his pre-prison writings and the Prison Notebooks, this chapter examines

his point that it is only through the development of a critical and historical
consciousness combined with revolutionary political organization that subaltern groups
will be able to overcome their subordination. Gramscis position, as I will show, is informed

by his critical analysis of spontaneous political uprisings throughout Italian history and through
reflections on his own political praxis. In contrast to claims of vanguardism, as I will argue, Gramscis
political theory was essentially founded upon the democratic empowerment of subaltern groups. In his
writings as a journalist, activist, and party leader to his reflections in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci
continually returns to the importance of education, culture, and organization in the
formation of the revolutionary process.10 In his view, it is precisely through education and
organization that subaltern groups will empower themselves, overcome the limits of spontaneity, and
ultimately act as a collective will in the transformation of their conditions. Through this examination, I
will consider the contemporary relevance of Gramscis writings on spontaneity and political
organization with a discussion of Occupy Wall Street and its emerging shift from an act of occupation to
permanent organization

Prefigurative politics get coopted by the state- we have to

fight state coercion through coercion of the state.
Briziarelli & Guillem 14 (Marco, PhD from University of Colorado, and is an assistant professor at
the University of New Mexico. His work has appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies,
Critical Studies in Media Communication, Triple C, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies,
Journalism, Handbook on Global Media and Communication Policy. He is the author of the books The
Red Brigades and the Discourse of Violence: Revolution and Restoration, and the soon to be
published Gramsci, Communication and Social Change. Susana Martinez, PhD UC Boulder 2012,
Guillem is the 2014 recipient of the Outstanding Research Award, sponsored by the International and
Intercultural Communication Division at NCA, and an assistant professor at University of New Mexico.

The Counter-Hegemonic Spectacle of Occupy Wall Street: Integral State and Integral
Struggle IC Revista Cientfica de Informacin y Comunicacin 2014, 11, pp. 145 166) CTD.
As already mentioned, OWS rejects the state as an antagonist model of structuration , as
well as of hierarchical and asymmetric power relations. However , the rejection of political
society as a model should be distinguished from the refusal to fight against it. In this
sense, our goal in this section is to argue in favor of a turn toward a perspective that
considers an expansive understanding of the state, and acknowledges its still
relevant role in both reproducing hegemony and providing the conditions of
possibility for counterhegemony. More specifically, we argue that the Gramscian notion of the
integral state may serve as corrector for a currently powerful narrative that tends
to diminish the agency of the state and therefore makes its contribution to the
reproduction of a given social formation essentially invisible. Based on the previous

examination of OWS, we argue that such a narrative not only informs the movements self
understanding, but it is also conveyed by much of the academic commentary on new social
movements (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 1991; Harvey, 2005; Messner & Rosenfeld, 1997; Weiss 1998;
Castells, 1996) The narrative of a non-interventionist state is also intimately associated

with widespread claims that we are living in a post-hegemony social ecology

(Ydice, 1995; Moreiras, 2001;Williams, 2002; Hardt & Negri, 2000; Day, 2005; Lash, 2007; Thoburn,

2007; Besley-Murray, 2010; Foust, 2010). Thus, the position regarding the alleged decline of the state
frequently derives from broader statements that consider essential traits of the Gramscian social
historical context such as class, state, political parties, Fordism as being extinguished. The
abandoning of a state-centric perspective represents the logical implication of a new approach

to social struggles, since it rests on the assumption of a social reality in which power
is diffused, immaterial and discursively constructed . In fact, as Day (2005) argues, most
contemporary social movements operate in a non-hegemonic framework (rather than a counterhegemonic one). In Days view, many of these movementsinformed by the anarchist tradition
reject the statecentric classical logic of hegemony (p. 14) according to which a
state (such as the dictatorship of the proletariat ) is needed in order to create an alternative
social order. Certainly, the state can no longer be considered as the sole locus of
power in many contemporary societies. However, it is still an indispensable element in
the reproduction of socio-economic relations. Thus, despite the neoliberal rhetoric that depicts
the state as a neutral observer and guarantor of the self-corrective mechanism of the market, the
Hegelian night watchman (Hegel, 1991), we prefer to conceptualize the state as operating
both internally and externally to maintain the interests of ruling classes (Briziarelli,
2011). Accordingly, we are convinced that, even in a globalized world characterized by an
increasing internationalization of civil society (OSiochru & Girard, 2002), any movement

that seeks radical social transformation should always be involved in a confrontation

with capital and its most powerful ally: the state , or more precisely in Gramscian terms, the
integral state. A prevalent characteristic of Gramscian thought is the dilution of hypostatic categories
i.e. abstractions that treat social reality as being constructed by sealed compartmentsinto fluid social
processes. As a result, Gramsci does not treat the state as a reified or crystallized set of institutions,
but as a constellation of social relations that constantly navigate permeable social boundaries: Usually
this [the state] is understood as a political society (i.e. the dictatorship of coercive apparatus to bring
the mass of people into conformity with the type of production and economy dominant at any given
moment) and not as an equilibrium between political and civil society (1971, p. 54). Gramsci works

with a dialectical conceptualization of social reality according to which the

relationship between state and civil society must be simultaneously understood as
unity and distinction. Hence, by the idea of integral state he conceives at the same
time the broadening of the sphere of the state over that of civil society, and the
broadening of the sphere of civil society over the state . Historically, whereas the unity
and the mutual integration of those two provinces is more observable when a given
class reaches hegemonic dominance, their distinction becomes more defined when such
hegemony is in crisis. The notion of integral state is consequently linked in Gramscis
thought to the way he conceptualizes the struggle against a dominant historic
bloc that integrates both civil and political society in an organic relationship : The
historical unity is realized in the State, and their history is essentially the history of States and of
groups of States. But it would be wrong to think that this unity is simply juridical and political (though
such forms of unity do have their importance too, and not in a purely formal sense); the

fundamental historical unity, concretely, results from the organic relations between
State or political society and civil society (1971, p. 52). A new form of dominance that
compacts together the whole of society reproduces such an organic relationship. In fact, Gramscis
idea of the integral state derived from historical shifts that in modern capitalist societies modified the
relations between State and Civil Society, which the author discusses by using the metaphor of a war
of maneuver and war of position. Whereas relatively rapid movements of troops characterize the war
of maneuver, the war of position involves relatively immobile troops who dig and fortify relatively
fixed lines of trenches. The metaphor is used to signify that the state is not an empty shell of civil
society. Rather, the State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of
fortresses and earthworks (1971, p. 244). The notion of the integral state can help us

problematize the way Occupiers implicitly conceptualized power relations and,

consequently, decided to act upon them. First of all, we argue that protesters tacitly
appropriatedand at the same time reducedthe idea of a war of position. In
other words, they put forward a notion of struggle as operating solely at the level of

civil society. In our view, this understanding translates into an inefficientor at least
insufficient strategy to transform society as a whole . The option of a frontal attack, in
Gramscis view, was inadequate because it failed to include civil society as a
battleground for hegemony in Western societiesa position that Occupiers practices certainly
echo. However, we argue that, in their laudable attempt to transform society, these
protesters end up underestimating the coercive function of the state in reproducing
hegemony, since it is assumed that the terrain for action is solely grounded in civil society .
Through the preferred tactics of OWS, the struggle for equality is constantly reduced to

battle within civil society, thus eliminating the goal of aspiring to control the state
through, among other means, the use of coercion in order to fight coercion (Gramsci,
1971). In other words, Occupiers create their war of position within civil society, as if
the winning of consent at this level could, by itself, produce the radical
transformation the movement aspires to. This is clearly exemplified by the groups reticence

to intervene in conventional politics. 3.2 Integral Struggle Based on an understanding of hegemony as

a combination of force and consent, (Gramsci, 1971; Martnez Guillem & Briziarelli, 2012), we argue
that radical transformation needs to be intrinsically tied to the establishment of an
alternative hegemonic order, which in turn implies a political engagement with the integral
state . In other words, a social movement such as OWS, willing to unite 99% of the people under its
envisioning of a different world, thus daring to imagine a new socio-political and economic alternative
that offers greater possibility of equality (Principles of solidarity, 2011, 3), can only achieve such
goals from a hegemonic position. This entails not simply winning the consent of 99% of

the people, but also being able to mobilize it as a collective will, thus engaging in
the kinds of actions necessary to conduct an intellectual and moral reform
(Gramsci, 1971, p.132). Such actions should translate into the political power needed to win
and reshape the state . Even though OWS demonstrates, through many of its official declarations, a
willingness to engage in this kind of political transformation, the lack of specific initiatives that

can facilitate the movements access to a hegemonic position in society situates the
movement in an intermediate, economic stage (Gramsci, 1971, p.181). According to
Gramsci, a subaltern group such as OWS develops through three main stages. In the first stage, the
group forms itself without a clear self-understanding and then develops an awareness of its own
existence, like a corporation, or an association. In the second stage, a movement or an organization
becomes aware that there is a wider field of interests, and that there are others who share these
interests with themand will continue to share them into the foreseeable future. In such a situation,
there exists a particular sense of solidarity that is mostly based on shared economic interests, but not
on a common worldview. Finally, there is a third stage in which the members of the movement act
concretely to seize power and realize their hegemony.

Public Deliberation
Teaching active governmental processes is key to the
facilitation of strong civic knowledge.
OECD 05 (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, agency of 30 democratic

government meant to improve and implement multilateral policies to improve the global condition,
2005, Evaluating Public Participation in Policy Making, OECD Publishing, pg. 25, http://www.eiaportalat-sk.eu/attachments/article/29/OECD%202005%20evalu%20pp.pdf) KVA

Teaching active and democratic citizenship is something that pedagogical

philosophers have always emphasised, but which has been given relatively little
attention in recent decades. Indeed, the central goal of the Citizen Participation Policy
Programme is to bring about a change in this respect. Schools and other institutions of
learning are important arenas, as are vocational bodies, civil society organisations
and liberal adult education organisations (the latter being characteristic of Nordic countries).
The problem in Finland is not so much the level of knowledge of societal matters, but rather the lack
of interest in participating, which amongst young people is one of the lowest in
Europe. Active citizenship does not necessarily come into being on its own, it requires
knowledge and skills. If anywhere, the principle of learning by doing is the key method in
learning how to live together. One of our goals is that the rates of learning active and democratic
citizenship will double during the programme. Research There is a need for a better understanding of
how the growth of active citizenship can be supported. This question is a focus of attention in many
countries and international organisations, including the Council of Europe. At least three

questions are of central relevance from the perspective of schools: What knowledge
should a school impart? How can democracy, and the competences it needs, be
developed in the operation of schools? How can schools encourage pupils to take
part in the work of associations and other voluntary activities? In evaluating
progress towards achieving objectives (1) and (2) of the Governments Citizen
Participation Policy Programme, it is possible to gather information from different
sources. An excellent source is the European Social Survey, which began in 2002. In addition,
comparative studies have been carried out concerning the civic knowledge and
activities of school children. We can also draw upon statistical data on citizen
participation as well as records of time dedicated to civil society activities.

Public participation is key to dealing with international conflict

like terror and environmental hazards.
Headley and Van Wyk 12 (James Headley senior lecturer in politics at the University of
Otago, Jo-Ansie van Wyk provides lectures on International Politics in the University of South Africa,
2012, Public participation in Foreign Policy, Pagrave MacMillan publishers, pg. 3-4) KVA
Over the past few decades, accelerating economic and political globalization has increasingly eroded
the dividing line between domestic and foreign policy. Global issues such as climate change,

financial crisis and transnational security threats affect the lives of ordinary citizens
around the world. Furthermore, with the communications revolution, and the
shrinking of time and space as a result, citizens are more aware than ever before
about events beyond the borders of their country. These changes raise significant
questions about the way that foreign policy is formulated and conducted, and by
whom. In the post- Cold War period, there has been an acknowledgement of this interconnectedness
in academia as well as in official circles. For example, there is now widespread recognition of the
dangers of non- traditional security threats such as terrorism, transnational crime,
environmental hazards, epidemics and illegal immigration . These all challenge the
internal/external divide, and can only be dealt with by a combination of international cooperation and
domestic legislation and action. Climate change has emerged as the most pressing issue which by

necessity requires international cooperation and domestic measures, while its effects highlight the way
in which global developments impact on individuals everywhere. A more deliberate interconnectedness
has been created thorough the promotion of free trade, open markets, privatization and deregulation
which removes not only the barriers to trade but also the barriers to the knock- on effects of financial
and economic turmoil. In each of these cases, international developments impact on

society within states. However, this does not mean that governments are powerless
to tackle them. To say that they can only be dealt with through international
cooperation means that governments have agency. 4 Debating the Publics Role in Foreign
Policy Furthermore, the problems may result from government actions. All of this means that foreign
affairs matter: governments make decisions and take actions in areas that cross the domestic/foreign
policy divide. In democratic polities, this means that they are areas in which the public can and, it
might be argued, must have a say. In other words , foreign policy is a site for political action
(Hill, 2003a and 2003b). But these changes in international affairs challenge what we mean by foreign
policy. A conventional definition of foreign policy is that it is the sum total of the official plans and
initiatives taken by a country with respect to its external environment, plus the values and attitudes
that underlie these plans and initiatives. On the other hand, following Nel and van Wyk (2003, p. 51),
we can define foreign policy as the spontaneous, unrestricted and focused collective action taken by
citizens, either through existing state institutions, or through other collective means, to respond to,
shape and influence public policy beyond the borders of their state. This redefinition of foreign
policy beyond the state- centric notion can significantly impact on our understanding of
public participation, as it shows that in fact many ordinary citizens already are
participating in foreign policy . Increasingly, citizens can employ various other

collective means outside state practices to respond to challenges across their

states border, and to relate to their external environment . Keck and Sikkink (1998),

Patomki and Teivainen (2002) and Hall and Biersteker (2002), inter alia, refer to examples of citizen
activism beyond their borders illustrating this potential. However, even using the more conventional,
state- centric definition, we can still consider how foreign policy might be opened up to more public
input.

Engaging in local decision making spills up and helps improve

policies, political decision helps solve poverty.
Chirenje Giliba and Musamba 13 (Leonard Chirenje a part of the Great Zimbabwe

University, Richard Giliba Forestry Training Institute in Tanzania, and Emmanuel Musamba Ministry of
Natural Resources and Tourism in Tanzania, June 20th 2013, Local communities participation in
decision making processes through planning and budgeting in African countries, Chinese Journal of
Population Resources and Environment, pg. 10-11,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10042857.2013.777198) KVA
Participatory planning is a process by which a community aims to reach a given socio-economic goal
by consciously diagnosing its problems and drafting a course of action to resolve those problems FAO
2003. Experts are needed, only as facilitators. Plans prepared by outside experts, irrespective of their
technical soundness, cannot inspire the people to participate in their implementation (Rahman 2005).
Participatory budgeting is a process where people have the opportunity to affect the allocation of
public resources by means of a local government perspective taking into account sectoral priorities.
Examples all over the world have shown that the decentralization of participatory planning has opened
the path to democracy. The relationship between these two is not always very clear; however, several
studies of decentralized models have shown that participation, accountability and equity has
increased. In the developing world in general, engaging communities in local decision-

making processes especially in budgeting is often not practiced. In Africas

community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), however, a scheme has
emerged to give community participation value. This is the management of natural
resources under a detailed plan developed by governments and implemented by all concerned
stakeholders (Widianingsih and Morrell 2007). This results in dependency on central planning and
discourages local creativity and innovation. In many African countries this is the main stream idea
which naturally means community participation is limited. However, participation in

development projects has proven to increase the programs successes and long-term
sustainability. Widianingsih and Morrel (2007) indicate that these successes can be
subscribed to local government receptivity to local voices . CBNRM is one of the most

important manifestations of true decentralization as it relates to control of rural resources. CBNRM

programs, if successful, can be models of local empowerment, imbuing communities with greater
authority over the use of natural resources. CBNRM is a shift in decision-making from centre to
periphery. It takes decision-making to the local community both in the formulation

stages up to the implementation in contrast to the traditional method of involving

the communities in the implementation of programs (Murphree 2009). Under the right
circumstances, they can also bring important benefits to poor people and poor
communities. In many countries, community-based natural resource management
has improved livelihoods for the poor. The benefits of CBNRM can range from job creation to
substantial management rights and long-term revenue-generation (Malla 2000). CBNRM can
successfully benefit the poorest members of the community when it empowers them to play a full
decision-making role in resource management. Engaging civil society and citizens groups

in resources management has enabled improved service delivery and accountability

of the public sector. It has given the people greater opportunities to influence
policymaking processes and the implementation of policies, programs and projects
(Thindwa 2006). The idea of engaging the people in the management of natural resources is a key
dimension of good governance (Songorwa 1999). This paper is based on a thorough review of literature
and it examines the involvement of communities in local decision-making processes; assesses the role
of local communities in participatory planning and budgeting; and establishes the costs and benefits to
communities in participatory natural resources management. Empowerment of communities

through their involvement in the decision-making processes, from top levels to low
levels, is vital for supporting pro-poor policies, programs, projects, improved service
delivery, poverty reduction, and the attainment of the millennium development
goals (MDGs). This will contribute towards preparing appropriate policies, programs,
projects that improve service delivery, poverty reduction, and the attainment of the
millennium development goals.

Political participation is a condition towards a government that

increases human rights.
UNHR 16 (United Nations Human Rights, the principal organization of human rights in United
Nations, 2016, Good Governance and Human Rights,
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Development/GoodGovernance/Pages/GoodGovernanceIndex.aspx)
KVA

Good governance and human rights are mutually reinforcing. Human rights
principles provide a set of values to guide the work of governments and other
political and social actors. They also provide a set of performance standards against which these

actors can be held accountable. Moreover, human rights principles inform the content of good
governance efforts: they may inform the development of legislative frameworks, policies, programmes,
budgetary allocations and other measures. On the other hand, without good governance, human rights
cannot be respected and protected in a sustainable manner. The implementation of human

rights relies on a conducive and enabling environment. This includes appropriate

legal frameworks and institutions as well as political, managerial and administrative
processes responsible for responding to the rights and needs of the population . The

links between good governance and human rights can be organized around four areas: Democratic
institutions When led by human rights values, good governance reforms of democratic

institutions create avenues for the public to participate in policymaking either

through formal institutions or informal consultations. They also establish
mechanisms for the inclusion of multiple social groups in decision-making
processes, especially locally. Finally, they may encourage civil society and local
communities to formulate and express their positions on issues of importance to
them. Service delivery In the realm of delivering state services to the public, good governance

reforms advance human rights when they improve the states capacity to fulfil its responsibility to
provide public goods which are essential for the protection of a number of human rights, such as the
right to education, health and food. Reform initiatives may include mechanisms of

accountability and transparency, culturally sensitive policy tools to ensure that

services are accessible and acceptable to all, and paths for public participation in
decision-making. Rule of law When it comes to the rule of law, human rights-sensitive
good governance initiatives reform legislation and assist institutions ranging from
penal systems to courts and parliaments to better implement that legislation. Good
governance initiatives may include advocacy for legal reform, public awareness-raising on the national
and international legal framework, and capacity-building or reform of institutions. Anti-Corruption In

fighting corruption, good governance efforts rely on principles such as

accountability, transparency and participation to shape anti-corruption measures.
Initiatives may include establishing institutions such as anti-corruption commissions,
creating mechanisms of information sharing, and monitoring governments use of
public funds and implementation of policies. Good governance, human rights and
development The interconnection between good governance, human rights and sustainable
development has been made directly or indirectly by the international community in a number of
declarations and other global conference documents. For example, the Declaration on the Right to
Development proclaims that every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in,
contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development (article 1). In the
Millennium Declaration, world leaders affirmed their commitment to promote democracy and
strengthen the rule of law as well as to respect internationally recognized human rights and
fundamental freedoms, including the right to development. According to the United Nations strategy
document on the millennium development goals (MDGs), entitled The United Nations and the MDGs: a
Core Strategy', "the MDGs have to be situated within the broader norms and standards of the
Millennium Declaration," including those on human rights, democracy and good governance.

The Cascade model of politics reveals there are mechanisms

for public opinion to directly influence policy
Entman 4, (Robert, professor of international affairs at George Washington
University, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign
Policy, p. 12-13) SDL
In summary, let us consider exactly how the cascade model builds on and supplements
previous approaches. First. it acknowledges variation and hierarchy within each level
of the system that produces foreign news. By no means always a unified or skilled
actor, the administration includes a variety of players, and disunity or ineptitude
can significantly the media coverage." Sometimes a congressional party (most often, the GOP)
puts up a united front. other times it is all over the map (typically, Democrats). internal disarray
undermines a party's ability to successfully attack (or de- fend) the White House
frame. Moreover, individual participants are hardly equal: some get attention for their
ideas far more often titan others. Second, the cascade model helps explain whether
elite dissent materializes. As in- dexing theorists have shown, the news usually (not always)

supports the white House line unless American leaders have begun attacking it. But we need to
understand better why such wrangles arise in some cases and not others. and what role the media
play in triggering or suppressing dissent . The model also incorporates the posibly growing
impacts of foreign leaders on news. Third, applying the concept of framing within the cascade model
helps In distinguish the important information from all the other data and noise
flowing among policymakers. journalists, and citizens . The model generates important
distinctions among different expressions of sup- port or criticism in the news. it clarifies exactly which
aspects of the White House frame attract dissent, which earn acceptance, and what difference this
makes to politics and This approach also encourages more sys- tematic analysis of visual . not just
verbal, information. Finally, the model illuminates the way news feeds infonnation about citizens back
to offi- cials, and thereby influences foreign policy. Although public opinion does rest at the

bottom of the cascade, the citizenrys perceived and antici- pated reactions can
significantly impinge on what leaders say and do. As is true throughout the system,
it tums out to be crucial that information travels in the form of frames-in this case,

selective representations (and misrepresentations) of public sentiment moving up

the cascade to leaders.

Democracy implies interaction with the public

Shapiro 2k (Robert, a professor and former chair of the Department of Political Science at

Columbia University, Decisionmaking in a Glass House: Mass Media, Public Opinion, and American and
European foreign policy in the 21st century, p. 244) SDL
This is not a simple question. If we found that there was no relationship and that the
policymakers fully ignored the public. then , according to the standard we posed at the
beginning of this chapter. we would conclude that the level of democracy at work does
not extend beyond the existence of procedural democracy . In contrast, however, if we

found that there was frequent and substantial correspondence be- tween policies
and public opinion, and that there was evidence that policymakers waited for public
approval before establishing and implementing policies, we would caution against
caliing this evidence that strong liberal democratic processes are at work . While this
would clearly be prima facie evidence for substantive democracy- that is, for the public getting what it
wants-we and Benjamin Page have long at- gued (see Page and Shapiro 1983. 1987, 1992; Jacobs and
Shapiro 1994a) that to call this democratic in a fully normative sense requires that we

evaluate the quality of the public opinion that is so influential---and that we examine
what has influenced this opinion.

National level decision making encourages public participation

in foreign policy and increases the publics effects on policy
Headly et all, 12 (James Headley Andreas Reitzig and Joe Burton, Joe Burton has a degree in

International Relations from the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Andrew
Butcher has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Massey University, James Headley is a professor of politics at
University of Otago, Public Participation in Foreign Policy p. 8-9) SDL
This point supports Kymlickas wider argument that the most effective response to the

pressures of globalization on democracy is to democratize the foreign policy of

states; as he puts it, [t]ransnational activism is a good thing, as is the exchange of information

across borders but the only forum in which genuine democracy occurs is within national boundaries
(Kymlicka, 1999, p. 124). While Dahl is sceptical about the possibility of democratizing

international organizations because foreign policy at the national level has been far
from democratic control (Dahl, 1999; Cunningham, 2002, pp. 205, 208), Kymlicka (1999, p. 123)
turns the argument on its head: if international institutions are increasingly powerful,
they must be held accountable. But why can we not hold them accountable
indirectly, by debating at the national level how we want our national government
to act in intergovernmental contexts? (italics in original). In other words, increased
decision- making at the international level should actually be an impetus to
increased democratization of foreign policy at the state level . This might entail more
debate, more information and media coverage of international affairs, making
representatives (in government and parliament) more responsive to the public, and
increasing public participation in foreign policy making and deliberation . This is not to

say that the development of a global civil society is not happening and is not worthwhile; it means
simply that states remain the key unit of solidarity and participation as well as
retaining significant powers. Indeed, the literature on globalization often makes it seem as if it is
an inevitable, natural process with its own momentum; yet, it is the result of human actions and
decisions, including the actions and decisions of state governments. This has been evident in the

financial/economic crisis from 2007 which occurred partly as a result of government

actions (ironically, often deregulatory actions, i.e. actions that in the longer term
decreased government control); but which has also shown that governments can

respond to and shape events together and individually (far more effectively than
during the Great Depression).

There are evolving initiatives to give citizens direct input to

the government on foreign policy
Headly et all, 12 (James Headley Andreas Reitzig and Joe Burton, Joe Burton has a degree in

International Relations from the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Andrew
Butcher has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Massey University, James Headley is a professor of politics at
University of Otago, Public Participation in Foreign Policy p. 16-17) SDL

There is no reason to believe that the principles of public participation cannot be

applied to foreign policy. One option that could be further investigated, for example, is the use
of travelling deliberative hearings in which the government initiates a draft white
paper on foreign and trade policies that is then presented for deliberative polling in
selected centres by a carefully selected cross section of the population. So far there have been
some limited trials of new ways to allow more public input into foreign policy
formulation. For example, in response to the perceived democratic deficit in the European Union, a
Europe- wide deliberative poll commanding considerable resources was conducted in
October 2007 under the name Tomorrows Europe. On a more modest scale, the Department of
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (2010) facilitates eDiscussions to
provide Canadians the opportunity for discussion and input into policy
development. And the Swiss publics decision to join the United Nations in 2002
shows the extension of the countrys use of referenda to foreign policy issues . But
these are rare examples. The case of the Blair government in the United Kingdom is telling. It
pioneered the use of focus groups and political marketing in order to gain electoral success.
According to one textbook by a leading researcher on political marketing, the prominent models

all draw on the basic principle that a market- orientation involves the politician or
party being: in touch with ordinary voter concerns; interested in public views;
responsive to what the public are concerned about ; and demonstrating this in the way they
behave ( Lees- Marshment, 2009, p. 41; italics in original). In other words, political marketing
recognizes the necessity to have public input into policy and to take account of
citizens views. Yet, the decision to take part in the invasion of Iraq did most to tarnish Blairs
reputation, and it was made on his own personal convictions despite the views of the public.

Public opinion can often force politicians hands concerning

policy
Shapiro 2k (Robert, a professor and former chair of the Department of Political Science at

Columbia University, Decisionmaking in a Glass House: Mass Media, Public Opinion, and American and
European foreign policy in the 21st century, p. 5) SDL
In the new ordet-or disorder-of the post-Cold War world, in which there may not be

clear-cut national interests and foreign policy doctrines, policymakers may be

especially tempted to follow such perceptions of public opinion that may not be
based on the most valid and reliable sources. Fearing the consequences of military
engagements, especially according to the "body-bag thesis," decisionmakers may in- deed actout of uncertainty and caution-on misperceptions of public opinion . Philip Everts
(Chapter 11) sees this happening in peacekeeping and other humani- tarian missions ,
as well as in cases of responses to aggression or other conflict. Utilizing extensive survey data, Richard
Sobel (Chapter 8) examines public attitudes in the United States and Western Europe toward
intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 19905. Contrasting the relatively strong public

backing of multinational intervention in the United States and Europe, with the weak
U.S. and European responses, Sobel explores the reasons for this discrepancy between public
support for intervention in the Balkans and govemments' reluctance to intervene militarily. Isernia

data from Italy that confirm this gap between the public's intervention- ist
attitudes and decisionmakers' greater reluctance .
These discrepancies in recent cases do not square with the American elites
generally stronger and the American public's weaker support for a prominent U.S.
role in international affairs. Looking at this gap between public and elite attitudes, Eugene
presents

Wirtkopf and Ronald Hincldey (Chapter 9) examine whether domestic Factors generally affect the
public's foreign policy attitudes more than elite opinion. While differences between public and

elite opinions exist, the notion that the end of the Cold War has fundamentally
altered public attitudes toward international affairs . peace, and security, especially
specific foreign and defense policies in the United States and Western Europe , is
contradicted by Richard Eichenberg (Chapter 10) and Philip Everts (Chapter 11). While tracing some
changes in the 1990s, they found more stability than change in Western Europeans' support for a
common European security policy and NATO and. in the case of the Netherlands. for the necessity of
armed forces. Richard Sinnott (Chapter 15) traced growing support for centralized European

decisionmaking in matters of defense in some European countries, and he found

shifts in favor of national defense policies in others . Moreover, his data reveal that public
support for European integration had declined since late 1991.

While there has been some limited direct influence on

diplomacy from society groups, an opening up of the political
allows for more open input on policy.
Headly et all, 12 (James Headley Andreas Reitzig and Joe Burton, Joe Burton has a degree in

International Relations from the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Andrew
Butcher has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Massey University, James Headley is a professor of politics at
University of Otago, Public Participation in Foreign Policy p. 248) SDL
In this book, we have found a number of examples of consultation by foreign policy

making bodies and input into policy, and even direct involvement in diplomacy by
representatives of civil society groups. However, we have also seen that the wider idea of
democratic participation is lacking. In order to reinvigorate democracy in foreign policy,
governments need to explore ways in which individual citizens, and not just
stakeholders, can be involved in the policy process, and to open up spaces for
discussion and debate. It seems that the public are not necessarily apathetic and
ignorant, and do not necessarily believe that foreign affairs are irrelevant or too
complex. However, as van Wyk observed in regard to South Africa, the struggles of daily life
may make it hard for much of the public to be involved , and there may not be a demand
from below. But if policy is not to be the preserve of a privileged elite , implementing
policies it believes to be right for the country, then not only must such problems of social
exclusion be tackled, but also the arena of political action needs to be opened up .
Furthermore, education and improved media coverage can lay the basis for active
citizenship. Researchers can continue to play a part in this process by exploring
further the questions surrounding the issue of public participation in foreign policy.
No doubt the normative debate will continue over whether the public should
participate, and also in what form and at what level. These debates tie into wider
debates about democracy and participation , and more links can be made between this wider
research and foreign policy analysis. Research can also focus on comparative issues such as the
significance of individual leaders, political culture and form of political system in shaping public
participation in foreign policy. Researchers will no doubt continue to investigate
comparatively public opinion on foreign policy , but they may also explore public views on the
issue of participation, through opinion polls and other methods. They can extend experiments in

participatory methods to the foreign policy sphere, thus breaking down barriers not
just between policy elites and the public, but academia and government . And the

role of academic experts in the public arena can be broadened: they are often called
upon for sound- bites or to give their view of what should be done in a crisis; but, just as educators can
help students to understand the issues and encourage ways to think about making informed choices,
so experts can play a role in facilitating public debate.

Public opinion can influence policy makers directly and

indirectly
Entman 03 (Robert, professor of international affairs at George Washington
University, Cascading Activation: Contesting the White House's Frame After 9/11, p. 420 ) SDL
Just as with real-world cascading waterfalls, each level in the metaphorical cascade makes its own
contribution to the mix and flow (of ideas), but the ability to promote the spread of frames is also
highly stratified, both across and within each level. As is true of actual waterfalls also, moving

downward in a cascade is relatively easy, but spreading ideas higher, from lower
levels to upper, requires extra energya pumping mechanism, so to speak. Ideas
that start at the top level, the administration, possess the greatest strength. The
president and top advisors enjoy the most independent ability to decide which
mental associations to activate and the highest probability of moving their own
thoughts into general circulation. The administration is distinguished from the other elite

network that joins Washington insiders who do not work in the executive branch: members of Congress
and their staffs, and sources from the community of Washington policy experts and lobbyists (former
government officials, think tank denizens, university sages, interest groups, and public relations
firms).10 The network of journalists consists of reporters, columnists, producers,
editors, and publishers who work for the important national media . They communicate
regularly with colleagues inside and beyond their own organizations. Informal networks of
association among news organizations also set up a cueing system that runs roughly from the
pinnacle occupied by the New York Times and a few other elite outlets to other national media, to
regional newspapers, and to local papers and television stations. Administration figures and

other elites maintain social and professional contact with upper-tier journalists,
exchanging information off the record and on , at receptions, conferences, and elsewhere.
This interface between journalists and elites is a key transmission point for
spreading activation of frames, and it is not always easy to determine where the line between
elite and journalist should be drawn, or who influences whom. Arguably, a few top editors,
correspondents, and editorialists exercise more sway over the spread of ideas than all but the most
powerful public officials. Representation of the public in this process flows in both
directions. The cascade model clarifies the hierarchy: Public opinion is typically a

dependent variable, although it sometimes feeds back to influence elites. In

spreading ideas from the public up to where they affect thinking of elites and the
president, the main road is through the media. If the news creates impressions that the idea
is held widely and intensely by large swaths of the public, it can affect leaders strategic calculations
and activities. However, this perception of where the public stands itself becomes a
matter of framing, an object of political power and strategy . If, say, elites are

contending over an administration decision and the White House can disseminate
the notion that public opinion favors the president, that perception can help
delegitimize and silence the opposition. This helps explain why, in so many cases,

nonadministration elites fail to contest the White House framebut also why, when conditions permit,

elite opposition does sometimes arise and spread down the cascade to news texts
and the public and perhaps upward to alter the calculations of the administration.

Simulation k2 racism block

Simulation key to overcome egocentrism

Fischler 12 (Lisa, has a P.h.D in Philosophy and Political Science from U of Wisconsin-Madison and
was an associate professor of Political Science at Morovian College until 2013. She now works as an
ESL teacher. Encountering China: Contexts and Methods for Teaching Chinese Politics in American
Classrooms Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies. PP 363-365.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11366-012-9213-3) CTD
Engaging undergraduates with Chinese politics at the college where I teach poses a challenge to
standard lecture-based instruction. The goals of my courses, Introduction to Chinese Politics (POSC
247) and Topics in Chinese Politics, Art, and Culture (POSC 348), include not only conveying

historical and contemporary information about the Peoples Republic of China (PRC)
but also helping students to better understand motives for political choices in crosscultural perspective by encouraging them to get inside the heads of the actors who
shape Chinese politics. Lecturing exposes the students to the knowledge about
China I bring to the classroom; structured discussions give them the opportunity to
question that knowledge. However, encounters role plays and simulations that plunge
the students into a context-specific political problemfunction as important exercises that
help overcome the egocentrism that inhibits critical thinking . Egocentrism or a lack

of awareness of different, equally valid perspectives is a primary issue in my

courses on Chinese politics because the topic involves situations, actors, and
choices unfamiliar to the students.4 Engaging the students in role-play, as opposed to
relying solely on lectures, is effective in pushing students to get outside of the
assumptions of their own worldview[s] ([4], 127). In other words, encounters are
important pedagogical tools for overcoming students initial egocentric responses
when first introduced to Chinese politics. Successive encounters with Chinese
politics through in-class activities encourages students to stretch their thinking in
productive directions . This section describes students experiences with encounters set during
the Cultural Revolution and post-Maoist periods of Chinese politics. According to Beth K. Dougherty,
coming up with the rules, players, and situations [in a role-play or other encounter] can be both
difficult and time consuming, especially if you are constructing a game without historical counterpart,
[11] consequently, students and instructors preparations precede course encounters set in different
eras of Chinese politics. Discussion of the Cultural Revolution period takes place after interactive
lectures on the rise of communism in China, the early years of the PRC, and the disastrous results of
the Great Leap Forward, with more extensive coverage of these events in the lower division class. For
the introductory course, assigning material on the Cultural Revolution from June Teufel Dreyers book,
Chinas Political System, enables students to acquire some knowledge of the political situations,
players, and rules related to institutions from 19661976 in China, prior to participating in an in-class
role-play [12]. For the upper division course on art, culture, and politics, using Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gaos
Turbulent Decade serves a similar purpose, but with greater exposure to primary sources [33]. In both
classes, the instructor also presents information on the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution and
discusses key political terms and ideas of this era. In POSC 247, the instructor facilitates students
creation of posters (in English and Chinese, with the Chinese provided by the instructor) to replicate
the propaganda posters that hung in Cultural Revolution classrooms before students engage in the
problem-solving encounter. In POSC 348, the students apply Maos art standards to evaluate the
political worth of propaganda poster replications in Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donalds book,
Picturing Power in the Peoples Republic of China during in-class activities prior to tackling the design
and presentation of their poster exhibitions [13]. The encounters set in the post-1976 era are
scheduled about two-thirds of the way through the term, once students have studied Chinas
twentieth-century political history, the political institutions of contemporary China, and those actors
shaping Chinas domestic and international politics. After lectures and discussions drawn from material
in Dreyer, the students delve into the diverse perspectives offered in Dai Qings 1998 [10] and Anita
Chans [8] volumes before encountering the simulation about the Three Gorges Dam and the factory
workers role-play. While all of the encounters used in my Chinese politics courses are
learnercentered, they serve slightly varied purposes. The role-play session based on Cultural
Revolution classrooms allows students to work cooperatively in both small and large groups to

analyze and act on political instructions that are both foreign and historical . The Three
Gorges Dam (19982009) simulation helps students learn about and better understand the
opportunities and challenges associated with environmental politics in China from a comparative
perspective. The problem-solving encounter concerning factory workers had, in previous iterations,
been about rural farmers and drew from material in Kate Zhous [35] book. However, with the
publication of Anita Chans [8] volume, I chose to move to a more current source. I also found that,
when paired with assigned material from Leslie Changs Factory Girls, the revised encounter became
more attractive to students [9]. Students positive responses to this encounter more than likely
emerged from their own familiarity with urban, rather than rural life; but the emphasis on the plight of
urban labor, both domestic and foreign, in other political science courses within my department also
has a potential impact as most of the students taking POSC 247 are political science majors or minors.
Despite its perception as a complex assignment, the Cultural Revolution propaganda poster exhibition,
designed to improve visual literacy to meet a core art course requirement, evoked favorable student
responses.5 In my Chinese politics courses, encounters are used alongside interactive

lectures and discussions in order to combine skill-building, knowledge acquisition,

and motivation generation. When I began teaching at the college level, I immediately
noticed that I was going to have to find effective ways to counter students apathy,
enhance their existing academic skills, and combat their extreme trepidation on
encountering China in writing and film. I brought with me prior experience of teaching English in
China to graduate and undergraduate students, in working through outreach programs in Los Angeles
to help K-12 teachers incorporate Asian studies into their curriculum, and in conducting ethnographicstyle research for my dissertation in Hong Kong. The method of encounters helped me to

engage students in activities which approximated everyday situations in accessible

and believable ways, involved playfulness, entailed risk, contained consequences
but minimized their real-world impact, generated satisfaction through task
achievement, allowed choice, and kept the rules simple. These characteristics
constitute good simulations, role-plays or other active teaching methods.6 However,
the best activities also include clear opportunities for skill improvement (public
speaking, writing, and critical thinking) and exposure to complexity (examination of
multiple perspectives, engaging in group cooperation and competition ).7 Suggestions
on how to put these elements together, pragmatically, came through my own research on other
scholars published suggestions, by my own trial and error, and by learning from the activities
students generated when given the chance in class.8

Egocentrism = racism

Nair 15 (Chandran, hes the founder and CEO of the Global institute for tomorrow, author of
Consumptionomics and creator of The other Hundred, Foreign Lives Matter. Pub 5/30/15.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/30/foreign-lives-matter-american-racism-foreign-policy-baltimoreferguson/) CTD
Until recently, many people around the world had believed that the United States had

put its troubled history with race behind it. But how thin that veneer is became
evident in August 2014, after the police shooting of a black teenager in the city of Ferguson,

Missouri. The citys chief of police resigned following a string of outrages, including the discovery of
racist emails circulated within his police department that suggested Barack Obama would not be
president for very long because what black man holds a steady job for four years. This concerns more
than just Americans. After all, what does it mean for the rest of the world when its most

powerful nation struggles mightily with racism in its midst? For one, it
contextualizes the often-heralded notion of American exceptionalism. At its core,
that idea is an incredibly arrogant notion. It hints of racism and a barely concealed
contempt of others, especially the non-Western world. But it is a doctrine that is still
ruthlessly enforced in the carnival that is American politics . When Obama tried for a dose
of realism on this subject in 2009 saying I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism
and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism heavy criticism eventually compelled him to
backtrack. The consensus enforcers later got him to say I believe in American exceptionalism with
every fiber of my being. At a time when the United States has become the de-facto

policeman of the world and a self-appointed arbitrator of peace, Asians have

watched with concern especially with elections looming in 2016 at how the
Republican Party has even swung further to the right. The GOP has stopped even
pretending to concern itself with the welfare of non-white Americans . Many of its most
prominent members display a very shallow understanding of the world and thus a lack of appreciation
of the complex histories of other nations, yet seem itching to intervene on the slightest pretext. Worse,

they would have the United States do so based on their prejudices and ideological
fixations some of which are likely framed by their fear of those unlike themselves.
It has not gone unnoticed in Asia (or for that matter among black, Hispanic, or Asian Americans) that
the current Republican Party has earned itself the moniker White Mans Party. Not that Democrats
are all that much better. Those on the left may be willing to pay lip service to minority

rights, but many in the Democratic leadership are just as much a part of the ruling
white establishment. For them, race serves as a convenient political whip to flog the
Republicans with but little else. I mean youve got the first sort of mainstream AfricanAmerican who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guy, are the words Vice President
Joe Biden reportedly used in 2007 to describe the man who would later carry him to the White House.
Former President Bill Clinton, is also reported to have dismissed Obama by saying, A few years ago,
this guy would have been getting us coffee (or carrying our bags, depending on the source) while
speaking to the late Democratic powerhouse Ted Kennedy. This has Asians, Arabs, South

Americans, and Africans around the world concerned, though sadly few are willing
to say so publicly or given the global platform to do so. Those few who do speak out,
like former Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez, who spoke of the racism [that] is very characteristic of
imperialism and capitalism, are quickly maligned. They see the connective tissue to the

World War I-era U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who spoke about protecting white
civilization and its domination of the planet. This may seem like ancient history to
Americans, but what followed was a long tradition of foreign misadventures and
reprehensible ethics that still resonate with critics of the United States. Take, for
instance, the role that racist or at least supremacist attitudes played in
decisions such as the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam . While the United States
has often called for other nations to either acknowledge or apologize for their
crimes in previous wars, it has never apologized to the Vietnamese for its
indiscriminate use of napalm. The same can be said about Washingtons unabashed business
relations with the white apartheid regime in South Africa something that many in that region still
remember. And the long and shameful U.S. history of support for military elites of European descent in
Latin America against indigenous populations is something that explains the lingering suspicion of
many in the region toward the White House and why people like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are
still viewed as heroes. In Asia, many have not forgotten that the United States remains

the only nation to ever deploy a nuclear weapon (twice), and did so on an Asian
nation towards which many in the American leadership had deeply racist attitudes .
They recall that Franklin D. Roosevelt interned roughly 90 percent of the continental JapaneseAmerican population in prison camps during the war. His successor, Harry Truman, the man who
ultimately pushed the nuclear button that brought World War II to an end, wrote to his wife: I think
one man is as good as another so long as hes honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.

All
of which makes it not unbelievable to think that an irrational fear of Islam and
denigration of Muslims may also be the primary factor behind the fanatical
determination of many in Washington to keep Iran from crossing the nuclear
threshold. Fear and distrust of others can be found lurking in almost every corridor
of power that influences U.S. foreign policy. The rest of the world sees this. It smells
the hypocrisy in Washington when leaders resort to the old saw that America is a
nation of immigrants while kicking unaccompanied children out of the country en masse. While
Wall Street stocks wont take a hit from the riots in Baltimore, the image of the United States as a free,
fair, and prosperous land for all certainly does. Some 150 years after the end of the U.S. Civil War, the
United States has not overcome its reprehensible domestic legacy of racism. And it is time that
politicians, academics, and business leaders across the world pause before they readily embrace
American ideals and interests. To be sure, America is not the only country where racist

attitudes influence politics. There are many Asian, African, and European leaders who have
equally despicable views about race. Thankfully, they have no power to turn these views into
actions on the international stage. They cannot utterstatements such as all options
are on the table or consider bombing innocents in Iran. When it comes to racism in
geopolitics, America stands alone for two reasons: First, its own relentlessly
advertised promise and potential. Second, the sheer scale of its economic and
military muscle. So what are the implications for U.S. influence in Asia? The United States is
currently in the middle of its pivot to Asia militarily, with as much as 60 percent
of U.S. naval assets to be deployed to the Pacific; and economically, with farreaching trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), whose
proposed members make up roughly 40 percent of world GDP. Yet these overtures are
unlikely to win the hearts and minds of the worlds largest continent if Asian political leaders and their
increasingly informed electorates wake-up to Americas race-based biases. In Asia, political leaders
should remain wary of allowing their own race-based or historical grievances to become the basis for
their foreign policy. The unresolved tensions between China and Japan are a case in point. Given
Chinas growing influence in the region it must resist the temptation of fueling racist attitudes towards
Japan that might later come to dictate its actions. Instead it should stick to its admirable commitment
to rejecting the race-based oppression that drove much of European colonization of the world,
especially Africa and Asia. American political leaders should not assume that the silence

of their Asian counterparts means that they do not recognize this tendency, have no
fear of this threat, or that they do not hold deeply felt resentment about the
underlying racism that appears to frame U.S. attitudes towards Asia and other
developing regions. For their part, Asian leaders need to speak out and stop being silent on the
issue. They will earn the right to be true allies of the United States by being honest on this sensitive
topic and making clear to Americans that latent racism cannot be allowed to influence Washingtons
foreign policy. And the average American should know, too, that whats happening in

Baltimore or Ferguson reverberates thousands of miles away.

Racism is bad
Memmi 2k Albert Memmi, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism,

Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165 CTD

The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably
never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease
and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let
the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment
the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist
universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the
persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will
always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?.
Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it
illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is,
and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from
animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge .
However, it remains true that ones moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is
a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us
say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the
establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation . This is almost a
redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism,
because racism signifies the exclusion of the other , and his or her subjection to violence and
domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is the
truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanitys spiritual traditions counsels respect
for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality
and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real
utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because

injustice engenders violence and death . Of course, this is debatable. There are those who
think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is
ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society
contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with
respect so that they treat you with respect. Recall. says the Bible, that you were once a stranger in
Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger
yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appealindeed,
it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all
theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the
political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not
accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope
someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible

A2 Aff Stuff

Aff is Accessible
The aff doesnt change anything because
1. Voting for the aff doesnt mean that it will be debated
before Congress or anything, means they dont solves
accessibility
2. FW makes rules and guidelines to make nuanced debates,
makes skilled debaters who can go into the real world and
change the deficiencies of the status quo

Direction of the Resolution

Being in the direction of the Resolution is not a reason to
accept the aff because
1. Explodes neg research burdenBeing in the direction of
the resolution only talks about something in relation to
China, it doesnt necessarily include the US, or any
diplomatic or economic means. This in itself is completely
outside of the resolution still, and the neg cannot have
predictable ground against this as it opens to an infinite
amount of affs like: Chinese poets, Chinese poets, history,
events, geographical landmarks, community, traditions,
artists, immigrants, leaders, etc.
2. This is a monopolizing strategy where they assume the
neg has the time and ability to cut extra cards and expend
resources just for them. This appropriates power
structures in debate because only those who have this
time and ability can now participate.
3. Also this allows the aff to run circumvent any topicspecific links and destroys the mutual exclusivity of
methods via the perm. This destroys all in depth clash in
the debate as the neg cannot debate the aff on a
competitive level, and kills overall education.

Direction of the Resolution Links to all of our

Offense
1. (SSD) Doesnt solve switch side they always criticize the
topic.
2. (Limits) Doesnt solve limits and ground there are an
infinite number of ways the aff can be tangentially related
which is the topic is the WORST OF ALL WORLDS -- theres a
moral hazard for the aff to pick moral truisms like colonialism
bad and avoid hard mechanism questions that maximizes
their ground while minimizing neg ground the most--- the fact
that they have a better political starting point is not offense
for them, its the LINK ---. They will no link every generic K of
Mignolo or modernity their interpretation makes clash
impossible because their speech act random parts of the work
of different authors who dont agree with each other. Limits is
a terminal impact time spent cutting strategies against every
aff under the sun trades off with the ability to do other things
that matter in life besides debate also excludes those who
have other things that matter to them from the activity

Education on Aff Good

1. Cross apply SSDYou can run your education on the
negative side and still garner the education desired
simply in the other half of rounds while still preserving
the competitive integrity of the activity.
2. Forum deficitThere is no reason as to why debate
specifically is key for the aff to be run. You can achieve
the same solvency in different forums, or even simply by
reading the literature.
3. Fairness and limits turns EducationThey dont get
education claims at the point where there is no
predictability to spur a clash ridden discussion. The
burden of the negative should not have to be to make a
completely different negative strat to affs that are
borderline if not at all in correspondence to the topic.
This is a solvency takeout ot the aff.
4. This cuts both waysThe aff isnt getting a good
education on their material since the neg isnt able to test
it- in addition, having to prep out their specific aff that
may change from tournament to tournament is a huge
time suck to us, and results in unprepared debate

Fiat is illusory
Thats p cool We dont care Sorry AKA we arent
promoting fiat so to specifically implement a theoretical
affirmative. This is about having an affirmative that follows
the resolution to allow in depth clash, fiat is a mechanism that
comes with the resolution, not what we are specifically
promoting.

Ground is Given
1. Predictability filters ground. The affirmative can always
pivot the resolution whether they say they are in the
direction of the topic and pick an uncontroversial issue.
Alongside this they are armed with the perm and a vague
advocacy to spike links to arguments. Ground is only
good if the ground can be predicted and the neg has
adequate time to prepare for the debate.

Reasonability
1. Cross apply the reoslutionality blockReasonability is
arbitrary, them being able to read a counter
interpretation that is tangential or in the direction of the
resolution justifies no limits. Following the resolution is a
yes or no question, you either are topical or you aint
2. No link, they arent reasonableThey have a super
arbitrary and specific aff which is impossible to predict,
means they fundamentally dont access this
3. Voting for aff on reasonability is an RVIIts not a reason
they should win, because its not as if you cheat a little
bit, but thats ok. You either cheated, or you didnt, and
they cheated. Hold them to that, framework is a yes/no
question.

Rules Good
1. Limits are goodk2 ensure that we have a concentrated
discussion for good advocacy skills and doesnt develop
argumentative skills.
2. Rules are inevitablethings like there is a winner and a
loser act as terminal defense to their solvency.
3. Rule Breaking is a slippery slope that justifies cheating
In a world of where there are no rules debate
tournaments would be impossible (2 hour long 1AC). Kills
the competitive equity and functionality of the activity.
4. Rules are good and helps check back against corruption
Corporations that have power flows are checked back by
rules, which means there is no intrinsically wrong thing
about rules, and probably is helpful to create an equivocal
playing field. Rules like the Civil Rights Act, and the
Emancipation Proclamation are necessary and good for
social progress.
5. Rules are inevitableaccepting this allows for a real
discussion that is able to be applied to our everyday lives,
in contrast to the utopianism the aff imagines.
Utopianism thought precludes discussion over what is
possible in the squo which acts a major solvency deficit to
aff.

Silencing
1. SSD solvesFramework doesnt say certain people
shouldnt speak, it is just when you are aff, you just have
to say something within the resolution.
2. Clash precedes SubstanceBeing prepared for a debate is
the only way to increase the substantive argumentation in
round to test truth claims.

Society is Unequal Why Should We Be Equal

1. We can concede the unq question that society is unequal
although this is irrelevant towards this debate.
a. Negs framing is best forumVoting aff doesnt change
the squo and society, however learning skills through
clash ridden advocacy creates powerful voices in a
forum that is relatively accessible.
b. Only through the enactment of an advocacy that
follows the resolution will there be fairness for not only
the negative team but the affirmative team. If the
affirmative is unable to win a hard debate when the
negative is able to create a strong negative strategy
for them, it overall decreases the advocacy skills
garnered by the round.
c. Uniqueness overwhelms the advocacyVoting aff and
voting aginst fw doesnt change anything, means you
vote neg on presumption
d. Fairness saves the ForumEven if there is inequality in
the squo, it is valuable to make debate as fair as
possible because it is valuable in the form of skills and
education.
e. This isnt just unique to the neg, the aff is also missing
out on education derived from clash with a coherent
negative strategy

State Bad
1. We can concede state bad with no repurcussions, because
our framework is a framing issue of following the
resolution not specifically the substance of the resolution.
2. No link- we dont force you to engage with the state, only
to engage in advocacy, means we spike out of a lot of
their offence dealing with the state.
3. Link turn- learning about the processes of the state allows
you to not only apply these skills to any interactuions
with the state, but also to organization of movements etc.
Dealing with ideas of cost, jurisdiction, etc. can all be
applied to extra political action. Learning the minutiae of
policy allow you to learn movement organization. We
allow you to understand how the state functions in order
to break it down, maybe allowing for infiltration
strategies.

Substance Over Process (Content over Method)

1. Debate is a process not a product, even if it is valuable to
talk about the education of _____, not being able to have a
strong methodology that can be facilitated through a
discussion of process not only proves that the advocacy
has a major solvency deficit but additionally does not
make it applicable in the real world.
2. Additionally, just because the substance is good does not
mean that its discussion is equitable in debate. Being
able to choose a non-controversial point of action or
discussion precludes a debate on nuances of the topic or
the affirmative.

System is Irreparable/No Need to Engage

1. Its not a question of engaging the political process but
rather the dialogue that is garnered that is important. By
engaging in a discussion of the law it allows for stronger
social advocacy such as how to find loopholes in the
system to prevent prosecution. An example of this being
how to be able to adequately organize an insurgence
taking into account cost, agency, location, and
jurisdiction, and what are the weak spots of the system.