Neg
Shell
Security 1NC
A. Danger is manufactured through discourse that constitutes international relations
Campbell, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998
(David, has also taught at Keele University and Johns Hopkins University, Writing Security, University of Minnesota Press, pg 2-4)
Danger is not an objective condition. It [sic] is not a thing that exists independently of those to whom it may become a threat. To illustrate this, consider the manner in which the insurance industry assesses risk. In Franqois Ewald's formulation, insurance is a technology of risk the principal function of which is not compensation or reparation, but rather the operation of a schema of rationality distinguished by the calculus of probabilities. In insurance, according to this logic, danger (or, more accurately, risk) is "neither an event nor a general kind of event occurring in reality... but a specific mode of treatment of certain events capable of happening to a group of individuals." In other words, for the technology of risk in insurance, "Nothing is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyzes the danger, considers the event. As Kant might have put it, the category of risk is a category of the understanding; it cannot be given in sensibility or intuition.” z In these terms, danger is an effect of interpretation. Danger bears no essential, necessary, or unproblematic relation to the action or event from which it is said to derive. Nothing is intrinsically more dangerous for insurance technology than anything else, except when interpreted as such.
This understanding of the necessarily interpretive basis of risk has important implications for international relations. It does not deny that there are "real" dangers in the world: infectious diseases, accidents, and political violence (among others) have consequences that can literally be understood in terms of life and death. But not all risks are equal, and not all risks are interpreted as dangers. Modern society contains a veritable cornucopia of danger; indeed, there is such an abundance of risk that it is impossible to objectively know all that threatens us.3 Those events or factors that we identify as dangerous come to be ascribed as such only through an interpretation of their various dimensions of dangerousness. Moreover, that process of interpretation does not depend on the incidence of "objective" factors for its veracity. For example, HIV infection has been considered by many to be America's major public health issue, yet pneumonia and influenza, diabetes, suicide, and chronic liver disease have all been individually responsible for many more deaths 4 Equally, an interpretation of danger has licensed a "war on (illegal) drugs" in the United States, despite the fact that the consumption level of (and the number of deaths that result from) licit drugs exceeds by a considerable order of magnitude that associated with illicit drugs. And "terrorism" is often cited as a major threat to national security, even though its occurrence within the United States is minimal (notwithstanding the bombings in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Center in New York) and its contribution to international carnage minor .5
Furthermore, the, role of interpretation in the articulation of danger is not restricted to the process by which some risks come to be considered more serious than others. An important function of interpretation is the way that certain modes of representation crystallize around referents marked as dangers. Given the often tenuous relationship between an interpretation of danger and the "objective" incidence of behaviors and factors thought to constitute it, the capacity for a particular risk to be represented in terms of characteristics reviled in the community said to be threatened can be an important impetus to an interpretation of danger. As later chapters will demonstrate, the ability to represent things as alien, subversive, dirty, or sick has been pivotal to the articulation of danger in the American experience. In this context, it is also important to note that there need not be an action or event to provide the grounds for an interpretation of danger. The mere existence of an alternative mode of being, the presence of which exemplifies that different identities are possible and thus denaturalizes the claim of a particular identity to be the true identity, is sometimes enough to produce the understanding of a threat.b In consequence, only in these terms is it possible to understand how some acts of international power politics raise not a whit of concern, while something as seemingly unthreatening as the novels of a South American writer can be considered such a danger to national security that his exclusion from the country is warranted.' For both insurance and international relations, therefore, danger results from the calculation of a threat that objectifies events, disciplines relations, and sequesters an ideal of the identity of the people said to be at risk.
Security 1NC
B. The affirmative’s constitution of security as an ideal and benevolent condition utilizes human life as a tool to calculate safety with response to a discursive ideal, not a material condition
Dillon, professor of security @ Lancaster, 2008
(Michael, “Underwriting Security” Security Dialogue 32.3)
This essay enframes ‘risk’ as a biopolitical security technology. It explains how biopolitics of security take life as their referent object of security, how the grid of intelligibility for biopolitics is economic and how, in the second half of the 20th century, life also came to be understood as emergent being. Contingency is constitutive especially of the life of emergent being and so the essay argues that a biopolitics of security which seeks ‘to make life live’ cannot secure life against contingency but must secure life through governmental technologies of contingency. Risk is one of these technologies. The essay also explains how it has come to pervade the biopolitics of security of the 21st century and how through the way in which risk is traded on the capital markets it has begun to acquire the properties of money. The essay closes by describing how the biopolitics of security differ from traditional prophylactic accounts of security and how these biopolitics of security exceed the liberal political thinking which rationalises and legitimates them.
Calculability results in the devaluation of human life
Michael Dillon, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Lancaster, April 1999, Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2, “Another Justice,” p. 164-5
Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in possession of that self-possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything. The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political and material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self. The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of capitalism. They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has become manifest and global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, “we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure.” But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being.
Security 1NC
C. Voting negative repudiates the affirmative’s prioritization of a secure world—saying no to the affirmative returns the Gift of Security. The effect is to open a space so that politics may be otherwise.
Neocleous, prof. of critique of political economy @ Brunei University, 2008 p. 185-186
(Mark, Critique of Security)
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether - to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain 'this is an insecure world' and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing that it marginalises all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end - as the political end - constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible - that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this world, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve 'security', despite the fact that we are never quite told - never could be told - what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,141 dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more 'sectors' to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that's left behind? But I'm inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.142 The mistake has been to think that there is a hole: and that this hole needs to be filled with a new mission or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered}g humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently end up affirming the state as the terrain of modem politics, the ground of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another dimension of security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security an'q which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That's the point of critical politics: to develop a new political: language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while< much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as; the positive in setting thought on new paths. For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on! about insecurity and to keep demanding' more security' (while meekly
hoping that this increased security doesn't damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of
building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and political .. issues, debilitating in the sense that' security' helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and 'insecurities' that come with being human; it requires accepting that 'securitizing' an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.143