Space Security Kritik

Space Security Kritik

JV

Space Security Kritik

Space Security Kritik 1

Summary 3

Glossary 4

Militarization Kritik – 1nc [1/2] 5

Militzarization Kritik – 1nc [2/2] 6

Link – China Threat 7

Link – Extinction Rhetoric 8

Link – Hegemony 9

Link - Space Travel 10

Impact – Aff No Solve 11

Impact – Global Violence [1/2] 12

Impact – Global Violence [2/2] 13

Impact – Root Cause [1/3] 14

Impact – Root Cause [2/3] 15

Impact – Root Cause [3/3] 16

Impact – Value to Life 17

Alternative Solvency – Space Exploration [1/2] 18

Alternative Solvency – Space Exploration [2/2] 19

Alternative Solvency – Rejection of Security [1/2] 20

Alternative Solvency – Rejection of Security [2/2] 21

They Say: Exploration Good 21

They Say: Exploration Solves Earthly Problems/Blue Dot Theory [1/3] 22

They Say: Exploration Solves Earthly Problems/Blue Dot Theory [2/3] 24

They Say: Exploration Solves Earthly Problems/Blue Dot Theory [3/3] 25

They Say: Exploration is Human Nature [1/3] 26

They Say: Exploration is Human Nature [2/3] 27

They Say: Exploration is Human Nature [3/3] 28

They Say: Threats Do Exist [1/2] 29

They Say: Threats Do Exist [2/2] 30

They Say: Realism Good [1/3] 31

They Say: Realism Good [2/3] 32

They Say: Realism Good [3/3] 33

They Say: Permutation 33

They Say: Security Inevitable 35

They Say: Must Leave Earth – it will go extinct [1/2] 36

They Say: Must Leave Earth – it will go extinct [2/2] 37

They Say: Must be Policy Makers 38

Framework – Representations Matter [1/2] 39

Framework – Representations Matter [2/2] 40

**AFFIRMATIVE** 41

2AC [1/] 42

2AC [2/] 43

Ext to: Exploration increases consciousness 44

Exploration does not cause Exploitation 45

Ext to: Threats are Real 46

Ext to: Alternative Fails 47

China is a Threat [1/2] 48

China is a Threat [2/2] 49

They Say: Fear of Death Bad 50

Summary

This argument is a criticism of some of the assumptions that the affirmative makes about the need for human presence in space and the need for United States action. The criticism is a criticism of the rhetoric of security (the ways we use language to describe the world as an unsafe place). Authors such as Der Derian argue that we create a false image of a false and dangerous world to justify the United States dominating others and starting fights with other countries. Other authors argue that this is especially dangerous when applied to the space race because we just assume that space will solve all of our problems without looking at how they started in the first place. For example, the SPS aff argues that we need to go to space to solve global warming but ignores all of the other things that humans do to cause global warming and refuses to deal with those. Making us feel like space is a solution is dangerous because there are deeper problems that we need to deal with. The alternative says we should think about space as a complex and interesting thing so we can have an ethical relationship to it instead of using it as an excuse to promote America or to solve complicated problems with a band-aid solution.

Glossary

Blue Dot – The idea that when we see the earth from space we will bond as humans and our problems from earth will seem trivial.

Constructions – Things we make up to justify certain courses of action.

Epistemology – The way we know the things we know. In this case, the epistemology that informs security starts from a realist standpoint.

Framework – The “framework” of a given debate is the starting point for discussion. For the aff, the framework is often the comparison of a plan to the status quo (way things are now) or a competitive policy option. For the negative, it often includes things like questions of language and assumptions.

Realism – The idea that nations will maximize their own self-interest at all costs.

Representations – The way the world is described by the affirmative and the justifications they use for action.

Rhetoric – The words and language we use to justify action. For example, “security rhetoric” refers to persuasive words that rely on the idea of security as an absolute good. See also: Representations.

Root Cause – The idea that a single thing can be the cause of the vast majority of the bad things in the world. Security authors often make the claim that the security mindset causes us to be more violent and thus it is the “root cause” of all war.

Security – Freedom from harm. In this case, security refers to the mindset that the U.S. needs to maintain dominance to be safe.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy – This occurs when we construct threats and then behave in ways that makes them become real. For instance, if we start thinking that China is a threat and treating them like one and so they become one.

Threat Construction – The idea that some threats are just products of our imagination that we make up in order to justify things we were already going to do.

Militarization Kritik – 1nc [1/2]

A. The link and impact.

First – The affirmative tries to justify U.S. space superiority through the construction of false threats. This process makes wars more likely.

Der Derian 98 (James, Professor of Political Science – University of Massachusetts, On Security, Ed. Lipschutz, p. 24-25)

No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary power of "security." In its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of nature--as well as from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of mass destruction have been developed which have transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact. And, less often noted in international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has been furthered and intellectual dissent muted. We have inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, an a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept of security lurks the entire history of western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida "as a series of substitutions of center for center" in a perpetual search for the "transcendental signified." Continues... 7 In this case, Walt cites IR scholar Robert Keohane on the hazards of "reflectivism," to warn off anyone who by inclination or error might wander into the foreign camp: "As Robert Keohane has noted, until these writers `have delineated . . . a research program and shown . . . that it can illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field.' " 8 By the end of the essay, one is left with the suspicion that the rapid changes in world politics have triggered a "security crisis" in security studies that requires extensive theoretical damage control. What if we leave the desire for mastery to the insecure and instead imagine a new dialogue of security, not in the pursuit of a utopian end but in recognition of the world as it is, other than us ? What might such a dialogue sound like? Any attempt at an answer requires a genealogy: to understand the discursive power of the concept, to remember its forgotten meanings, to assess its economy of use in the present, to reinterpret--and possibly construct through the reinterpretation--a late modern security comfortable with a plurality of centers, multiple meanings, and fluid identities. The steps I take here in this direction are tentative and preliminary. I first undertake a brief history of the concept itself. Second, I present the "originary" form of security that has so dominated our conception of international relations, the Hobbesian episteme of realism. Third, I consider the impact of two major challenges to the Hobbesian episteme, that of Marx and Nietzsche. And finally, I suggest that Baudrillard provides the best, if most nullifying, analysis of security in late modernity. In short, I retell the story of realism as an historic encounter of fear and danger with power and order that produced four realist forms of security: epistemic, social, interpretive, and hyperreal. To preempt a predictable criticism, I wish to make it clear that I am not in search of an "alternative security." An easy defense is to invoke Heidegger, who declared that "questioning is the piety of thought." Foucault, however, gives the more powerful reason for a genealogy of security: I am not looking for an alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people. You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. The hope is that in the interpretation of the most pressing dangers of late modernity we might be able to construct a form of security based on the appreciation and articulation rather than the normalization or extirpation of difference. Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbes's and Marx's interpretations of security through a genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to uncover some deep meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of the past which have been created out of fear, and to affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future. Originating in

CONTINUED..

Militzarization Kritik – 1nc [2/2]

the paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief, the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical "other" of life, the terror of death which, once generalized and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others--who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness.

Their construction of space as the single solution to all of earth’s problems turns the case – makes these problems more likely without forcing us to consider why they happened in the first place.

Williams ‘10

Lynda Williams Physics Instructor, Santa Rosa Junior College. Peace Review, a Journal of Social Justice Irrational Dreams of Space Colonization. The New Arms Race in Outer Space (22.1, Spring 2010)

Life on Earth is more urgently threatened by the destruction of the biosphere and its life sustaining habitat due environmental catastrophes such as climate change, ocean acidification, disruption of the food chain, bio-warfare, nuclear war, nuclear winter, and myriads of other man-made doomsday prophesies. If we accept these threats as inevitabilities on par with real astronomical dangers and divert our natural, intellectual, political and technological resources from solving these problems into escaping them, will we playing into a self- fulfilling prophesy of our own planetary doom? Seeking space based solutions to our Earthly problems may indeed exacerbate the planetary threats we face. This is the core of the ethical dilemma posed by space colonization: should we put our recourses and bets on developing human colonies on other worlds to survive natural and man-made catastrophes or should we focus all of our energies on solving the problems that create these threats on Earth?

B. ALTERNATIVE – Embrace the complexities of space without America the Savior/security Rhetoric – this allows us to capture the benefits of space exploration without fostering militarism and inequality –

Siddiqi ‘10

Asif A. Siddiqi is, assistant professor of history at Fordham University. Competing Technologies, National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration. Technology and Culture, Volume 51, Number 2, April 2010, pp. 425-443.

Deter- ministic explanations from the cold war often rely on simplistic binary and oppositional divisions; although not trivial, these display their limitations as tools to fully explain the complexities of space exploration both during and after the cold war. Without disposing of technological determinism, I would urge historians to incorporate a broader matrix of approaches, in- cluding, particularly, the highlighting of global flows of actors and knowl- edge across borders, communities, and identities. Ultimately, this approach might lend itself to constructing for the first time a global and transna- tional history of rocketry and space travel. Since a global history would the- oretically be decentered and a nation’s space program rendered as a more nebulous transnational process, one might expect a multitude of smaller, local, and ambiguous processes and meanings to become visible. With a new approach grounded in a global history of spaceflight, we might learn much more about how individuals, communities, and nations perceive space travel, how they imbue space exploration with meaning, and espe- cially how those meanings are contested and repeatedly reinvented as more and more nations articulate the urge to explore space.

Link – China Threat

Their description of China is a normative process that legitimates power politics and makes the “China threat” self-fulfilling

Pan 4 (Chengxin, Department of Political Science and International Relations – Australian National University, “The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 29(3), June/July, p. 305-306)

While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world."2 Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment."3 Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" [end page 305] and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature—themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions.