Borders Kritik - UTNIF 2013

8/13/2019 Borders Kritik - UTNIF 2013

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When you look at the thank yous, what

youre gonna seeis Alaina, Meridith,Uday, Chandler, Gabriel, Joseph,miniature & chill bro, Joel, Andy,

Geoffery, Als (both den and bert), Ian,Christina, Zaki, kane, Nikolai, Luke,

James, Ted, DKP, & Humza.


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-- Flynn & Nick


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The Border Kritik


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Mexico Oil 1NC

The affirmatives geopolitical imaginary is characterized by a wholly enclosedland space of bounded nation-states. This only serves the interests of status

quo power hierarchies through the construction of an inside to be securedagainst a dangerous outside, excepted from the law Such an order can only bemaintained thought he constant policing of the inside and warfare externally.

Vaughn-Williams 9 [Nick, IR MA @ university of Warwick IR PhD @Aberystwyth, Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power pg 132-36]The concept of the border of the state has enabled a dominant conception of juridicalpolitical order that is central to the modern geopolitical imaginary: a view of that order as being dividedbetween domestic and international realmsand, notwithstanding aberrations from time to time, largely settled and stable. In this way theconcept of the border of the state helps to domesticate the contingency of the juridicalpolitical order by acting as a familiar reference point on the basis of which the repetition of

diverse practices cumulates to create a sense of normality and permanence. Yet, as Agnew, Tuathail and other critical geopolitics scholars havepointed out, the role of the concept of the border of the state in maintaining this semblanceof stability and immutability contributes to a form of knowledge privileged by the modern

geopolitical imaginary that is inherently linked to questions of power and authority. In other words,the work that the concept of the border of the state does in upholding the juridicalpolitical order is not a natural norneutral practice,but one that serves to benefit those whose interests are bound up inmaintaining the status quo. Consequently, accounts of global politics that rely upon an unreflective usage of the concept of the border of the state arecomplicit in practices of forgetting the contingency of the juridicalpolitical order and therefore also the reification of it. By contrast, thinking in terms of the g eneralised biopoliticalborder reveals the contingency and performative self (re)production of juridicalpolitical order. Agamben's account of the logic and operation of sovereign power demonstrates that this

order, born of the exception, ispredicated upon the performative act of suspending the law to produce azone of indistinction in which bare life can be produced. Seen in this light, sovereign powerdoes not pre-exist bare life and neither does bare life pre-exist sovereign power. Instead,sovereign power and bare life must be thought of as co-constitutive of each other. Sovereign

power comes to exist only through the constant (re)production of bare life in zones ofindistinction that are amenable to its sway: The essence of political power in the West [] isthe power to suspend (not apply) law and thus to produce a sphere of beings (p.133)without

quantities, homines sacri, whom every being, insofar as he or she is alive, may be .4 On thisbasis, it is through the production of homo sacer that the politically qualified life of the polis,necessary for juridicalpolitical order, is ultimately defined and sustained. As Andrew Norris puts it:politics must again and again enact its internal distinction from bare life [] it mustrepeatedly define itself through the negation of bare lifea negation that can always take theform of death.5 In other words, the politically qualified life of the polis and the form of juridicalpolitical order this subjectivity enables are contingent upon a sovereigndecision about the status of some human life as not worthy of being lived as such. As Judith Butler has explored in her discussion o f Agamben against the backdrop of indefinite

detention in Guantnamo, this decision relies upon nothing other than the deeming ofcertain forms oflife to be ineligible for certain basic, if not universal, human rights: the decision to detain, to continue todetain someone indefinitely, is a unilateral judgement made by government officials whosimply deem that a given individual, or indeed a group, poses a danger to the state.6 Moreover, asButler highlights, it is a decision that is increasingly taken by government officials (such as those who sanctioned and shot Jean Charles de Menezes) rather than by democratically elected

politicians, thereby constituting an extension of sovereign power by stealth.7 Often, the decision leading to the production of bare

life is underwritten by so-called national security imperatives defined by a state ofemergency: in this way the invocation of the discourse of exceptionalism attempts tolegitimise the suspension of national and international law. Therefore, echoing Derrida's discussion of authority in Chapter 3,the legitimacy of sovereign power is legitimised by nothing other than its own legitimisation.One way of characterising how the generalised biopolitical border reconceptualises the (re)production of thejuridicalpolitical order is in terms of performance.Whereas the modern geopolitical imaginary supported by the concept of the borderof the state implies a static, immutable juridicalpolitical structure that is somehow given, Agamben's thesis reveals this as a performed fiction.The sovereigndecision that creates bare life is not necessarily a singular act but a reiterative performance:one that leads to the perpetuation of bare life detained indefinitely in camps or left to die in


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cargo containers at sea. (p.134) Moreover, as Agamben's analysis implies, this border performance is also a body performance. Bodies do not simply e ncounterpre-existing borders as if they were timeless territorial artifacts. Rather, borders are continually (re)inscribed through mobilebodies that can be risk assessed, categorised, and then treated as either trusted citizentravellers or bare life. In this way border/body performances depend upon movement and are played out at sites across everyday life. A perspective that identifiesthe performative character of the juridicalpolitical order reconfigures the way in which the relation between borders and subjectivity might be analysed.According tothe modern geopolitical imaginary, the proper political subject is the citizen: bordered and

autonomous before the law in the same way as the sovereign state of which it is a subject.Such aformulation attempts to domesticate the radical contingencies of subjects' socio-ontological status and fix their identities to territory in order to secure the presence of sovereign politicalcommunity.Thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border prompts an alternative line ofanalysis that redirects emphasis away from the modern bordered citizen. For Agamben, the realsovereign subject is not the citizen but rather homo sacer: the mute carrier of sovereigntydefined not by contract or rights but by exposure to the sovereign decision on whether it isdeemed life worthy of living.8 The insistence on the significance of the marginal figure of homo sacer highlights the need for further analysis of themultifarious methods, contexts and locations in which bare life is produced in global politics. One example, which has already received some attention in the academic literature inspiredby Agamben, is a critical engagement with the politics of humanitarianism.9 Conventional accounts of the relationship between human rights and sovereign power suggest that theformer has a capacity to act as a check on the worst excesses of the latter. Agamben, however, shows a more insidious dimension to this relationship which, ultimately, challenges thebasis for an optimistic reading of the potential of international human rights. According to an Agambenian perspective, human rights and sovereign power are not diametrically opposedbecause ultimately they both rely upon the same referent object: bare life. The subjects produced by the ideology of humanitarian intervention closely resemble the subjects of sovereignpower: mute; undifferentiated; and depoliticised. In the same way that sovereign (p.135) power produces the bare life it needs to sustain itself, humanitarianism renders p eople into needyvictims, lives to be saved taken outside of the workings of normal juridicalpolitical order, in such a way that justifies flouting norms of territorial integrity and intervening in the affairsof another sovereign state. In other words, the concept of humanity cannot be relied upon to check sovereign power: rather, as Anne Caldwell puts it, humanity instead appears as theground and object of sovereignty; it has become a political group, represented by a new political power.10 Therefore, despite the stated aims of humanitarian organisations and ventures,there is a danger that they can end up in solidarity with the very powers they ostensibly seek to overcome or at least mitigate: the discourse of human rights fails to call into question the

distinction between politically qualified life and bare life upon which the conception of rights rests. Thus, as Slavoj

iek has provocatively argued,concentration camps and refugee camps can be seen as two sides of the same sociological

matrix: perhaps the ultimate image of the treatment of the local population as homo saceris that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistanone is never sure what it willdrop, bombs or food parcels.11 Thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border also has potentially challenging implications for the way in whichanalyses of global security relations might be framed.To a large extent the concept of the border of the state offers astable and comfortingly coherent means of mapping who, where and what the enemy is: itenables the juxtaposition of an immutable realm of warfare and barbarism outside the stateon the one hand and the impression of safety, stability and possibility of progress inside thestate on the other.12 Such a picture permits a double designation of the enemy so that it istaken to be both (a) outside the state but (b)itself another state which, in turn, leads to the

possibility of a resolution of conflict through classical forms of warfare between sovereignstates. The concept of the generalised biopolitical border, however, scrambles this

conventional logic and the assumed alignment between inside/amity and outside/enmity.Rather than essentialising the enemy as the other outside the state, an Agambenianapproach is more attentive to the ways in which different threats are produced as foreign orexteriorised , as, for example, D an Bulley has shown in t he case of the London bombings on 7 July 2005.13 Furthermore, Agamben argues that under biopoliticalconditions in which security becomes the normal technique of government, classical (p.136) interstate warfare is eclipsed. Rather, as security becomes thebasic principle of state activity politics is reduced to policing, and lines of amity and enmityare fundamentally blurred. Conflict is no longer between states but potentially between theterroristic state and its citizens who are all virtually homines sacri.14

And, the construction of the US-Mexico border stabilizes American identityaround the racist projection of lawlessness and barbarity onto the Mexicanother in need of domination.Klahn 8, professor at the University of California Chicano/Latino Research Center, 2008 [Norma, The Border: Imagined, Invented orfrom the Geopolitics of Literature to Nothingness, Working Paper No.5 Chicano/Latino Research Center,clrc.soe.ucsc.edu/sites/clrcweb/files/sites/default/files/.../05_Klahn.pdf]

Thediverse, complex and contradictoryways in which Mexico, its culture, and its peoples have beenimagined,portrayed, glorified orvilified by the people of the U.S. have a long history. They began withthe conflicts betweenthe two colonizing powers, Spain and England. And they continued as the young United States expandedinto territories occupied by the Indians and possessed first by Spain and later Mexico. In the

process, a cultural and physical space known as the Border emerged in the nineteenthcentury. Ultimately, it resulted in both a physical and a psychological distancing during and


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because of the U.S. nineteenth-century expansion and its conquest of what is now the U.S.Southwest. For political, cultural and psychological purposes this movement of displacementrenderedthe region's former owners, the Mexican as 'other,'that is, the construction of a different identity seenas dissonant to monolithic Western discourses of power. 1The dynamics of "othering" finallybecomes self-serving for it affirms an on going process of, in this case, Anglo identity. Constituted as culturalcontestants, the Mexican became everything the Anglo was not. In their studies of Anglo attitudes towards Mexicans Carey

McWilliams and Arnoldo de Leon2 present the U.S. expansionist project as an acquisition of territory justified bythe mission Anglos assumed as civilizers of the hinterlands with a need to control allthat wasbarbaric-sexuality, vice, nature, and people of color.The initial constructions were racist: that 1see Edward Said, Orienta/ism (New York: VintageRandom House, 1978)Tzetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row,1982); ; Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on theOther (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). 2 Carey McWilliams,

North from Mexico (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott,1949). Arnoldo de Leon, They called them greasers is, essential characteristics of personality,intelligence and morals were attributed to physical appearances. Mexicans were perceivedin light of their differences from Anglos.Americans carried to the Southwest values constructed by the founding fathers, of English descent,male, white and Protestant-self-reliance, a puritanical morality, the erasure of the past, and a work ethic.They saw Mexicans as racially impure,descended of the Spaniards, who were contaminated by Moorish blood, and the"blood thirsty" Aztecs. " 'They areofmongrel blood, the Aztecpredominating,'asserted Gilbert D. Kingsbury, writing about the Mexicans of Brownsville in the early 1860s".3 Positioned in relation to their differences to Anglos, Mexicans appearedto be dependent, resigned, complacent, not committed to improvement or progress, but rather to fun and frolic.For these expansionists"to haveaccepted other than 'white supremacy and civilization", says de Leon, "was to submit to Mexicandomination and to admit that Americans were willing to become like Mexicans. The

prospect of being dominated by such untamed, uncivil, and disorderly creatures made acontest for racial hegemonyalmostinevitable."4 Descriptions of Mexicansthrough the nineteenth century, someinoffensive, most virulent, are all grounded onthe trope of difference, a rhetorical construct founded on paradigms ofdissimilarity.The border was the line established both to delineate and inscribe thatdifference.Where the line is de-limited, the 'other' begins. The boundary was sacred, not tobe transgressed. Yet, paradoxically, bridges and crossing passages were created aslegitimate spaces where separation is established, precisely because the frontier, as de Certeau says, iscreated by contacts where "the points of differentiation between two bodies are also theircommon points.''5In the case of the United States-Mexico border, the "contact zone" hasbecome a "combat zone" where crossings and/or transgressions are the rule, rather than the3 de Leon, 15. 4 de Leon, 13. 5 Michel de Certeau, "Spatial Stories" The Practice of E veryday Life exception.6 Constructions, concrete andimaginary, are established distancing the 'other' at least symbolically, and in this case,

south of that de-limitation. The inhabitants of the United States continue to wrestle with that "alien territory." "South of theBorderism" iswhat I have called borrowing from Edward Said, the way that the United States and its peoples havecome to terms with Mexico as they continuously invent an 'other' image, and defend anddefine their own. In their writings, and in contrast with the way Anglos constructed or invented themselves (stereotypically as morally superior, hard working, thrifty),the Mexican could in the best of cases be mysterious, romantic, fun-loving, laid back, colorfully primitive or alternatively conniving, highly sexualized, disorderly, lazy,violent, and

uncivilized. 7 Hollywood appropriated all of the images, from 'the greaser' and the violent bandits, to the Latin lover and the Mexican spitfire. 8As soon as aboundary is established, the other side becomes desirable, the threshold to cross into theunknown, the yet unexplored landscape where 'the self' is discovered and the 'other' isinvented. The trope ofdifference becomes the figure most utilized by travellers and novelists writing about their adventures "south of the border" This trope,established fromthe initial moment of encounter and still prevalenttoday, opposes U.S. 'civilization'to Mexican 'barbarism'. It seems, however,an encounter of images where language, as a code of communication, is never or seldom mentioned, stressing andacknowledging that writers cannot (or choose not to) cross one of the main borders: the spoken code. Anthropologically we could say that suchliterature remains etic, and not emic, that is,the perspective is established as outside and above the culture.

Paradoxically, and because of that positioning, the attraction to a regenerative vitality conceived as presentwithin 'Barbarism' continues to seduce the traveller to the point of demarcation, bothphysically and psychologically, where the 'other' is found. The adventure can be positive ornegative. Many times it becomes a place appropriated as material to feed the imagination back home, perceived as devoid of adventure. For Paul Theroux,the crossing resembled a descent into hell. Looking south, across the river, I realize that I

was looking toward another continent, another country, another world, ...T he frontier was actual: people didthings differently there ... No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of NuevoLaredo, was a black slope-the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America ....Laredo required the viciousness of its sister city to keep its own churches full. Laredo had


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the airport and the churches; Nuevo Laredo, the brothels and basket factories. Eachnationality had seemed to gravitate to its own level of competence. The frontier was morethan an example of cozy hypocrisy; it demonstrated all one needed to know about themorality of the Americas, the relationship between the puritanical efficiency north of theborder and the bumbling and passionate disorder-the anarchy of sex and hunger-south of it.1 0 He doesn't stop there;Theroux'sracism is rampant: Mexicans are naturally corrupt, lawless, unhygienic,

a brutal and beaten people who "cruelly beat their animals." Laredo becomes a microcosmof all the United States; Nuevo Laredo not just of Mexico, but of Latin America.Mary Pratt seesTheroux's writing as exemplifying "a discourse of negation, domination, devaluation and fear that remain in the late 20th century, a powerful ideologicalconstituent of the West's consciousness of the people and places it strives to hold insubjugation:11 In both writings, Greene's and Theroux's, a distancing occurs, either by idealization or denigration.

This construction of civilization around state borders is a colonial artifact. Itundergirds the justification for the affirmatives intervention into Mexico tostabilize, develop and extract resources from the barbaric other.Slater, Professor of Social and Political Geography at LoughboroughUniversity, in 4 [David, Geopolitics and the Post-colonial Rethinking North

South Relations]The interweavings of geopolitical power, knowledge and subordinatingrepresentations of the other havea longhistory. For example, the identityand authority of Western modernity took shape on the terrain ofcolonialand imperial power, and the production of knowledge that characterizedthedevelopment of Western scientific disciplines went together with theestablishment ofmodern imperialism. In a similar vein, the history ofcomparative literature, cultural analysis, and anthropology can be seenas affiliated withimperial power, and as contributing to its methods forensuring Western ascendancy over non-Western peoples. Together withthis intertwining of powerand knowledge one can locate varying formsof subordinating representation which are equally geopolitical andcultural. The assumption of Western

supremacy goes together with asilencing of the non-Western other.There is incorporation, inclusion,coercion but onlyinfrequently an acknowledgement that the ideas ofcolonized people should be known.Thissilencing of the non-Western other is customarily combined withrepresentations thatlegitimize the power to penetrate and to re-order.The posited superiorities of Westernprogress, modernization,democracy, development and civilization are deployed tojustify aproject of enduring invasiveness. The non-Western society is shorn of thelegitimatesymbols of independent identity and authority, and its representationtends to be frozenaround the negative attributes of lack,backwardness, inertia and violence. It becomes aspace ready to bepenetrated, worked over, restructured and transformed.This is a processthat is seen as being beneficial to the re-ordered society, so that resistance,especially in itsmilitant form, is envisaged as being deviant andirrational.Sowhile power and knowledge arecombined together, theycannot be adequately grasped if abstracted from the gravity ofimperialencounters and the geopolitical history of West/non-West relations.One of the recurrentthemes of this study has been the intersectionbetween intervention and representation. Geopolitical interventions asexamined in the nineteenth, twentiethand now twenty-first centuriesentail different forms of representation. Nevertheless, it can be arguedthat they all presuppose a combination of desire, will,

capacity andjustification.The desire to intervene, to possess, to take hold of anothersociety, even ifonly temporarily, flows from that deeply rooted sense ofsuperiority and mission. The nineteenth-century notions ofManifestDestiny or benevolent assimilation were predicated on a belief in theostensible superiority of the Western and more specifically American wayof life.It was not just thatthe United States had a ruling vision of itselfthat was associated with a destiny that needed to be fulfilled; it was avision that was alsoembedded in a hierarchical perspective on peoples,races and cultures, whereby the

white/black binary division was seen as acrucial marker of value and significance. As wassuggested in chapter 2,in the history of US expansion, race went together with notions of destinyand mission, asexemplified in the USMexico War, the colonization ofthe Philippines and the creation ofsemi-protectorates such as Cuba at thebeginning of the twentieth century. In that era, the desireto intervene wasalso linked to protecting the Americas from the insecurity of politicaldisorder, and the tenets of civilization were closely associated with thestipulated need to


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preserve socio-economic order and stability throughoutthe American hemisphere.Thedesire to intervene can also be traced through the histories ofmodernization theory and neo-liberalism. In the aftermath of theSecondWorld War, modernization ideas were formulated with a view to diffuseWestern capital,technology, and social and political values to societiesthat were judged to be traditional andin need of modern transformation.However, as I suggested in chapter 3, the desire to projectmodernizationwas also tied to a fear of the perceived vulnerability of Third Worldsocieties

to the contagion of communism. Therefore, intervention had adouble motive, and while theperceived threat from communism came toa close in 1989, the desire to modernize and re-order the other hascontinued into the post-Cold War period.Whereas, as was argued in chapter 4, the neo-liberal doctrine of developmentcan be distinguished from modernization theory in itsgreaterprioritization of the private sector and of the commodification of socialandeconomic life, it shares with modernization a privileging of a certainview of the Westernexperience in matters not only economic, but alsogovernmental, social and more indirectly psychological. Its desire tointervene was initially anchored in a perception of an economic malaise,of a debt crisis inthe Third World that called for the cure of structuraladjustment, deregulation and

privatization.The money doctors of theinternational financial institutions have written aseries of prescriptionsthat amount to much more than a case of economic intervention, andtheirwill and capacity, as well as underlying desire, have been systematicallyextended to

cover a broad social, economic and political terrain, stretchingfrom structural adjustmentthrough good governance to social capital.Desire, as I am using it here, denotes a feeling of unsatisfied longing, afeeling thatsatisfaction would be derived from obtaining or possessinga given object. Intervention is an action that would facilitate such asatisfaction, but such anaction requires both the will and the capacityto realize the desire. If desire is longing for a certain possession orattainment, will represents a kind ofconcentration of desire. The willto intervene is a focusing of the desire and is reflected in individual,collective and governmental action. Moreover, as withdesire, the willto intervene, as reflected, for example, in governmental action, can beenvisaged as a condensation of multiple determinants for instance,

cultural, economic, military, political. In both desire and will there ismultiplicity, butwith will its focusing requires a greaterdegree of discursiveorder. Governments, or more broadly states, as well as internationalinstitutions such as the IMF or the WorldBank,provide focal points forthe will to intervene; and equally, as we have seen in the case of theUnited States, such a will has been allied to a multiple capacity tointervene. The state

provides the will and also coordinates the capacityto intervene; and the desire, will and capacity all have a historyand ageopolitics (see chapters 2, 3 and 7 above).Desire, will and capacity, to be effective as an ensemble of meaningand practice, need a language of

legitimization.The will to intervene as acrystallization of desire can only be deployed with effectwhen thecapacitiesmilitary, economic, politicalto intervene are in place.Will and capacity togetherprovide a force, but their power is securedas hegemonic power through the deployment of adiscourse of justification.A will that focuses desire, and allies itself to capacity, seeks ahegemonic role through the power of inducingconsent while retainingthe ability to coerce.In the context of the imperiality of US geopolitics, the will to

power hasutilized a connected array of ideas and concepts to ground its projection.The RooseveltCorollary of 1904 invoked an international police power,thus underlining the ability when necessary to intervene coercively, but italsoincorporated notions of civilization and order that the societies ofthe Latin South wereencouraged to embrace.The Good NeighborPolicy of the 1930s and the Alliance for Progress of 1961 were alsoconcerned withpromoting order, but in a context of partnership, cooperationand progress.These were codifications of a will to power that

varied according to the geopolitical conjuncture, including the responsesto American powerfrom the societies of Latin America. Developing LatinAmerican nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s provided a key backdropto

Washingtons framing of a good neighbour policy, and the CubanRevolution provided a crucial context for Kennedysannouncement ofthe Alliance forProgress, as well as for the unsuccessful US-sponsoredinvasion of Cuba a month later at the Bay of Pigs.The plurality of responses to the colossus of theNorth reminds us ofwhat can be seen as absent from the suggested combination of desire,will, capacity and legitimization. These are notions that have

been usedto emphasize a certain projection of power, but such a projection can beinterpreted as implicitly denoting an array of passive recipients. From

thevantage point of the periphery, and especially the Latin South, therewould only seem to be an active,ubiquitous outside which as ananalytical perspective can occlude the complexities andheterogeneitiesof the inside. In this context of the interface between a mutating externalpower and the dynamic specificities ofinternal social, economicand political processes it is possible to highlight a number of differenttendencies.


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Next, bounding nation-states through the enclosure of borders is the controlof territory through violence. This production of the space of the stateobfuscates always on-going non-state violence and legitimates wars andgenocides in the name of state-making.Neocleous 3[Mark Neocleous is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Brunel University, Off the Map:

On Violence and Cartography, European Journal of Social Theory 2003 6: 409]Thus in the modern state system the overlapping frontier is as anathema as the idea of multiple sovereign bodies within a territory. The edict of PopeAlexander VI in 1492 which gave impetus to the idea of a spatially divided earth by drawing lines delineating certain parts of the globe and specifying whichpart belonged to which European power was extended and formalized in the 17th century with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), strengthened in the 18thcentury with the emphasis on territorial (national) un ity in the French and American revolutions, and consolidated in the 20th century with an internationalstate systema system which became so entrenched that the territorial state became the political form to be adopted by all nations. The modernization ofpolitics was thus as much a process of territorialization as it was a process of seculariz- ation and rationalization. The form of sovereign po wer that developedin Europe from the 16th century onward conceived space as bounded. Sovereignty, like state, implies space, and control of a territory becomes thefoundation of sovereignty (Lefebvre, 1974: 280; Foucault, 1980: 689; 1991: 87). This division of territorial sovereignty between states is most explicit at thepoint where the fields of power interface: there must be no overlap and no uncertainty about the borders of the territory. As Michael Hardt and Toni Negri

(2000: 167) put it, modern sovereignty resides precisely on the limit . This requires a new kind of political geography inwhich neither overlapping margin nor multiple sovereignty is permitted. (It is precisely because of this exclusiveterritoriality that Embassies exist. Having created mutually exclusive territories, states found that there was little space left for the conduct of diplomacy. The

outcome was little islands of alien sovereignty within the states territory: the Embassy [see Mattingly, 1955].) At the sametime, it requires thepermanent policing of territorial boundaries.States become and remain sovereignnot just in the sense thatthey are all- powerful within their territories, but also because they police the borders of a particular space and

claim to represent the citizens within those borders.The consequence of this mutuallyconstitutive relation between territory and state power is that the earths surface has beeninscribed in a particular wayaccording to the territorial ambitions of the modern stateand space has come to assume absolute priority in the statist political imaginary.Withoutthis essential conjunction of space and politics, sovereignty would lose its meaning . As such, wemight say that the modern political imaginary is a territorial imaginary. That this is so is illustrated by the policy ofcontainment in which a political counter to the Soviet Union was thought to be necessaryfor territorial reasons,and the broader20th-century terminological distinction between East and

West as friend and foe, with Cuba somehow belonging to the Eastand Japan co-opted for the West (Buck-Morss, 2000: 225). But there is more to territory than just space. The notion of territory is derived from a complex of terms:from terra (of earth, and thus a domain) and territo-rium, referring to a place from which people are warned off, but is also has links with terre-re, meaning to

frighten.And the notion of region derives from the Latinregere (to rule)with its connotations ofmilitary power. Territory is land occupied and maintained through terror; a region is space

ruled through force.The secret of territoriality is thus violence: the force necessary for theproduction of space and the terror crucial to the creation of boundaries. It is not just that sovereigntyimplies space, then, but that itimplies a space against which violence, whether latent or overt, is directed

a space established and constituted by violence (Lefebvre, 1974: 280). As macrosociologists have pointed out time andagain, it is the use of physical force in controlling a territory that is the key to the state, for

without it any claim to the territory would mean nothing. Put more simply: borders are drawn withblood (General Mladic, cited in Campbell, 1998: 45).A founding violence, and continuous creation by violentmeans, are the hallmarks of the state.Part of the construction of the states territory took theform of defining the legitimate use of violencethis is the key to Webers famous definition of the state as involving amonopoly over the means of violence. To do this, the distinction between the legitimate use of force by thestate and illegitimate use of force by non-state actors had to be made coherent andacceptable to the members of states. During its early history, the state exercised violence alongside and often in conjunction with arange of non-state or semi-state organizations. (These terms are misleading because state itself had not been fully developed, but for the sake of theargument we will leave that issue aside.) Piracy and banditry, for example, were once entirely legitimate practices within the state system, bringing, as they did,revenue to both the sovereign and private investors and weakening enemies by attacking their ships. Piracy on the seas was conducted with the full co-operation and support of cities and states, while banditry, as a form of terrestrial piracy, was conducted with the continual aid of lords. Internationalagreements now have it that piracy, as an act of violence divorced from the authority of any state, is a crime. To reach this state of affairs required a campaignagainst piracy which relied on a change in the states attitude from one in which non -state violence was an exploitable resource to one in which it was a practiceto be elim- inated. The catalyst appears to have been a clash of British interests in the 18th century, when the British East India Company began demandingBritish Royal Navy protection against British pirates who were operating in collusion with British colonists to plunder British commerce in the East. When theNavy was sent to patrol the Eastern waters, the pirates moved to the Bahamas. Suppressing it in American waters in turn pushe d the pirates back toMadagascar. Since other states and companies connected with other states found themselves in the same situation, a broader and lasting solution to theproblem was sought, and an agree- ment was reached among the European powers that each state was responsible for controlling piracy in its own waters. Butthis required that states distance themselves from piratical acts.No clear norm could develop, much less be universalized, until the state systemproduced aclear definition of what constituted piracy. And this was impossible so longas states continued to regard individual violence as an exploitable resource. Simplyput,piracy could not be expunged until it was defined, and it could not be defined untilit was distinguished from state-sponsored or -sanctioned individual


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violence.(Thomson, 1994: 11718)Distinguishing it from state-sponsored or state-sanctioned violence required thatstates be defined as the sole legitimateorganization in the exercise of violence, aprocess that only occurred towards the end of the 18th century. By challengingthe states claim to a monopoly ofthe means of violence within a particular territory,piracy and banditry threatened the state system as a whole. Crucially, thedelegitimization of piracy reliedon pirates being defined as stateless personspersons, that is, for whose actions no state could be held responsible.Similarly, the word bandit derives fromthe Italian bandire, meaning to exileor banish, and thus contains the notion of frontier or border within its verymeaning. A bandit is by definition one whoexists on the physical borders of thestate as well as at the edge of law. In struggling against banditry, states were thusinvolved in a struggle over the frontiersof territory as well as the exercise of violence.Bandits contributed to the demarcation of territorial states and were partly responsiblefor the consolidation ofstate power [through] the border effect. Boundaries tookon concrete form in space through the interactions between border guards and banditswho seizedupon the jurisdictional ambiguity of these liminal zones as cover for theirdepredations. (Gallant, 1999: 40)It is because the bandit throws down a challengeto law, state violence and theterritorial imaginary that the state sees in the bandit not just a criminal but apolitical opponent and, conversely, why many

bandits become primitive rebels(Hobsbawm, 1969; 1971). The bandit, like the pirate, was slowly but surelybanned from the kind of po litical orderemerging under the state.The ban issymptomatic of the connection between sovereignty and territory being drawnhere. The ban designates exclusion

from a territory, but also refers to thecommand and insignia of the sovereign power.The banned are not merely setoutsidethe law but rather are abandoned by it, an abandonment that has the fullforce of state

violence to implement it(physical exclusion) and which identifiesa territory within which the banholds: one who has been banned is outside thejuridical order of this or that particular state(Agamben, 1998: 29, 109; Nancy,1993: 44).In a contemporaneous development, mercenarism was also gradually eradicated.It is often claimed that theabsolutist states of the 16th and 17th centuries pioneered the professional army. But such armies were far from being the kindof national conscription force

which are now the norm. Rather, they were a mixedmass constructed from the foreign and professional soldiers then available toany state. Thecondottieri hired by the 15th-century Italian city-states were essentiallycontractorsa condotta was a contract to make war for a particularsovereign. TheGerman Unternehmer conveys the same commercial tone, whileetymologically soldier means one who serves in an army for pay not one whoserves hiscountry. The extent of mercenarism and its significance to the state isillustrated by the fact that in the 18th century, all the major European armiesreliedheavily on foreign mercenaries for troops, as Janice Thomson (1994: 10,88) has shown:Half the Prussian army was comprised of mercenaries. Foreignersconstituted onethirdof the French army. Britain used 18,000 mercenaries in the American war forIndependence and 33,000 mercenaries in its 1793 war withFrance . . . The lastinstance in which a state raised an army of foreigners was in 1854, when Britain hired16,500 German, I talian, and Swiss mercenaries forthe Crimean war.For several reasons, however, states gradually stopped hiring their soldiers andsailors from anywhere, and began substituting them withstanding armies basedon conscription. Following the example of the French Revolution and Napoleon,in which huge effective armies were raised from

within France, the practice ofmercenarism gradually died out through the 19th century. One factor was sheercost: states began to realize that fighting forcescould be constructed more cheaplyfrom its own citizens. But a further factor was reliability: states realized that anarmed force whose relation to the state

was purely contractual often dragged itsfeet and was always ready to rebel; its own citizens, however, were more reliable.To form mass national armiesstates therefore had to lay claim to a monopolyon the acts of military violence carried out by its own citizens. The US NeutralityAct of 1794, for example,prevented citizens of the United States from enlistingin the service of a foreign state, and prohibited all persons in the US fromsetting on foot militaryexpeditions against states with which the US was atpeace. Such practices of neutrality soon became the standard for o ther states. Inother words, to preventthe enlistment of those individuals increasingly seen asbeing the states own citizens, states prevented their citizens from either joiningthe armies of foreignstates or of forming their own armies.1 On the one side,then, states began to develop an international code on mercenarism. Only at thispoint doesmercenarism become mercenarismjust as contraband usuallybecomes contraband when rulers decide to monopolize the distribution of thecommodity inquestion (Tilly, 1992: 54), so mercenarism only becomes mercenarismwhen states decide to use and monopolize the exercise of violence byits own citizens.

This was crucial to the states claim to a monopoly over themeans of legitimate violence within its own borders. (It is also one reason, thoughby no meansthe only reason, why states felt threatened by the InternationalBrigade in Spain in the 1930s.) On the other side, however, to legitimize thismonopoly, eachstate had to foster a national consciousness among its citizens, in order that they would more easily imagine that allegiance to the state of whichone is amember is stronger than any allegiance formed through contract. PerryAnderson (1975: 30) suggests that the most obvious reason for the mercenaryphenomenon was the natural refusal of the noble class to arm its own peasantry;the nobility understood that it was impossible to train its subjects in the artofwar and to simultaneously keep them obedient. But by the late 18th century, thesemi-disciplined peasantry had been more or less converted into a

working classjointly disciplined through a combination of the new rules of wage-labour andthe rationalization of the legal process. Ideologically, the newlyemergent citizenswere expected to imagine themselves as part of a community held together byand through the state. It is this imagination which has meantthat many peopleare now more repulsed by the mercenary, and especially the citizen who fightsagainst his own state, than by the genuinely foreign enemy.

This nationalizationof the masses was both material and ideological. It was a component of both thepolitically centralizing tendencies of the bourgeoisclass and the ideologicaltendency to imagine political formations in national rather than internationalterms. This can be understood as the ideologicalgeneration of one national classinterest (in Marxist terms) or national identity (in sociological parlance). Eitherway, what is at stake is the generation of asubjectivity rooted in a political imaginarycentred on the state and its national institutions. It is partly for this reasonthat writers on nationalism stress theimportance of the late 18th century for theforming of the nation state. The imagined community of the nation thatemerges at this time was a product ofthe imagined community embodied in thestates territory.Little is heard these days of the bandit, p irate and mercenary, but thinkingabout them allows agreater sense of the historic importance over the struggle todelegitimize their practices. This struggle was central to the struggle over themeans of violenceand thus to the consolidation of the notion of territory. Theywere the unwitting instruments of history, as Carlo Levi comments on the bandit(1947: 137), in

that their existence acted as a major catalyst in the shaping of thestate, a process in which they themselves were (almost) swept from history. Oneeffect of this ideological isolation of non-state violence from other modal- ities of violencehas been to endow state violence with a special sanctity. Since the Peace of Westphalia, the state system has seen non-intervention in a states domestic affairs as the corollary of the ideological commitment to the protection of state sovereignty. As Cynthia Weber has shown, in

modern global political discourse, intervention generally implies a violation of state sovereignty. Inter- vention discourse begins bypositing a sovereign state with boundaries that might be violated and then regardstransgressions of these boundaries as a problem(1995: 4, 27).2 In violating sovereignty, intervention violates the norms ofthe international state system and the sanctity of the state.As a consequence, intervention comes to function as analibi for the actions carried out in the name of the sovereign state, to such an extent thatstates use their claim to territorial sovereignty to legitimize genocidal practices against

peoples under its rule. The United Nations (UN) has generated for itself a humanitarian a ir, refusing a seat on the General Assembly to suchstates, but in accepting the states claim to sovereign territorial controlthe UNhas effectivelycondoned the sacrifice of human beings to the demands of the territorial state and thusaccepted genocide as regular tool of sovereign power (Kuper, 1981: 16185). Conversely,while state

violence has been endowed with a special sanctity, non- state violence is either ignoredentirely or is invested with a unique danger. Identifying 120 wars in 1987, Bernard Nietschmann


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found that only 3 per cent involved conflict between two sovereign territorial states; the vastbulk of the wars were struggles between states and insurgent groups or nations.Yet thesestruggles receive very little media or academic attention . One reason for this is that the statist imaginary is so deeplyentrenched in our political and intellectual culture that the predominant tendency is to consider struggles againstthe state to be illegitimate or invisible. They are hidden from view because the struggles areagainst peoples, movements, formations and countries that are often not even on the map. In

this war, as Nietschmann (1987) puts it, only one-half of the geography is shown and only one side of thefighting has a name. This last point is only half the story, however, since the other side of the fighting, when it ismentioned, often does go under a generic name intended to capture the unique danger ofnon-state violence: terrorism. Terrorism retains part of the original double meaning of territory, in that it refers notonly to violence, but to space too. Things are usually labelled terrorist when the acts of

violence in question are not sanctioned by the state.Where they have been sanctioned by astate, then they always take place outside of that particular states territories (and usuallyresult in the state in question being labelled a rogue state). What this means, in effect, is that terrorismis in fact generated by the international state system; it is the other generated by the systemof states.As William Connolly notes (1991: 207), terrorism allows the stateand the interstate system to

protect the logic of sovereignty in the international sphere while veiling their inability tomodify systemic conditions that generate violence by non-state agents. Thuswhile terrorism

appears to threaten the state, any such threat is ultimately superficial, since the production ofterrorism by the state in fact protects the identity of particular states and the state system asa whole.The statist political imaginary uses terrorism to effect a political rationalization of

violence under the firm control of the state.The declaration of a- ism by the US state and itsallies in 2001 proves nothing other than the states own misunderstanding of the world it hascreated.(And note that such a declaration was immediately expanded to include designated states which it could then properly confront.) The standardLeft-liberal critique of the category terrorism is to point to the lack of any internationally agreed definition of the term (the UN, NATO and the EU have allstruggled to come up with an acceptable definition); or to point to the contradiction involved in the once-denigrated terrorist being feted as world statesman(Mandela), or to the once-celebrated freedom fighter being castigated as terrorist (Bin Laden); or, finally, to object to the hypocrisy of western liberaldemocracies training and funding armed rebellions in some parts of the globe while objecting to armed rebellions elsewhere. While pertinent, these points miss

the central point, which is that terrorismis defined according to the raison detat of hegemonic powers.States define terrorism according to their own interests, and the predominant interests arenecessarily those of the hegemonic forces. In other words the terrorist, like the mercenary and pirate, is treatedas part of a particular (rogue) states violence. Alternately, they are simply off the map .

The alternative is to begin from the epistemology of the subaltern.

It is impossible to think through the modernity from any other perspectivethat that of colonial difference. The kritiks border thinking is a way of startingfrom the knowledge of those in the exteriority of the modern world order. Noalternative can come from within the categories of modernity.Escobar 2[Arturo, department of anthropology at university of north Carolina chapel hill,Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality ResearchProgram, http://apse.or.cr/webapse/pedago/enint/escobar03.pdf]The question of whether there is an exteriorityto the modern/colonial world system Is somewhat peculiar to this group, and easily misunderstood. It was originally proposed and carefully elaborated by Dussel in his

classic work on liberation philosophy (1976) and reworked in recent y ears. In no way should this exteriority be thought about as a pure outside, untouched by the modern.The notion of

exteriority does not entail an ontological outside; it refers to an outside that is preciselyconstituted as difference by a hegemonic discourse .This notion of exteriority arises chieflyby thinking about the Otherfrom the ethical and epistemological perspective of a liberation philosophy framework: the Otheras oppressed, as

woman, as racially marked, as excluded, as poor, as nature.By appealing from the exteriorityin which s/he is located, the Other becomes the original source of an ethical discourse vis

vis a hegemonic totality.This interpellation of the Other comes from outside or beyond thesystems institutional and normative frame, as an ethical challenge.This challenge mightonly be quasi-intelligible at first (Dussel 1996: 25), given the difficulties in establishing meaningfulinterpellation that exploited peoples have with respect to a hegemonic system (contra Habermas notion of a


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communication free of domination). There are degrees of exteriority; in the last instance,the greater challenge comes from the interpellationwhich the majority of the population of the planet, located in the South, raises, demandingtheir right to live, their right to develop their own culture, economy, politics, etc . ... There is no liberationwithout rationality; but there is no critical rationality without accepting the interpellation of the excluded, or this would inadvertently be only the rationality of domination. ...From this negatedOther departs the praxis of liberation as affirmation of the Exteriority and as origin of themovement of negation of the negation (Dussel 1996: 31, 36, 54). 6This is precisely what most European

and Euro-American theorists seem unwilling to consider: that it is impossible to think abouttranscending or overcoming modernity without approaching it from the perspective of thecolonial difference. Both Mignolo and Dusselsee here a strict limit to deconstruction and to the variouseurocentered critiques of eurocentrismin short, these continue to be thought about from within eurocentric categories(of,say, liberalism,Marxism,poststructuralism), not from the border thinking enabled by the colonial difference.....Critiques of modernity, in short,are blind to the (epistemic and cultural) colonial difference thatbecomes the focus of modernity/coloniality . Dussels notion of transmodernity signals the

possibility of a non-eurocentric and critical dialogue with alterity, one that fully enables thenegation of the negation to which the subaltern others have been subjected, and one thatdoes not see critical discourse as intrinsically European. Integral to this effort is the rescuingof non-hegemonic and silenced counter-discourses, of the alterity that is constitutive of modernity itself.This is the ethical

principle of liberation of the negated Other, forwhich Dussel coins the term, transmodernity,

defined as a project for overcoming modernity not simply by negating it but by thinkingabout it from its underside, from the perspective of the excluded other. Trans- modernity is afuture-oriented project that seeks the liberation of all humanity(1996: 14, Ch. 7), a worldwide ethicalliberation project in which alterity, which was part and parcel of modernity, would be able tofulfill itself (2000: 473), in which both modernity and its negated alterity (the victims) co-realizethemselves in a process of mutual fertilization (1993: 76). In short, trans-modernity cannot be broughtabout from within modernity, but requires of the actionand the incorporative solidarityofthe subalternized groups, the objects of modernitys constitutive violence embedded in , amongotherfeatures,the developmentalist fallacy. Rather than the rational project of a discursive ethics,transmodernity becomes the expression of an ethics of liberation. Mignolos notions of border thinking,border epistemology, and pluritopichermeneutics are important in this regard. They point at the need for a kindof thinking that moves along the diversity of historical processes (Mignolo 2001: 9). There are, to be sure, no original thinking traditions to which one can go back. Rather thanreproducing Western abstract universals, however,the alternative is a kind of border thinking that

engages the colonialism of Western epistemology(from the left and from the right)from the perspective ofepistemic forces that have been turned into subaltern (traditional, folkloric, religious, emotional, etc.)forms ofknowledge (2001: 11). Resituating Anzaldas metaphor of the border into the domain of coloniality,Mignolo adumbrates the possibility of`thinking otherwise, from the interior exteriority of the border . That is, to engage in borderthinking is to move beyond the categories created an imposed by Western epistemology (p. 11).

This is not just a question of changing the contents but the very terms of the conversation. Itis not a question of replacing existing epistemologies either; these will certainly continue toexist and as such will remain viable as spaces of, and for, critique . Instead,what he claims isthe space for an epistemology that comes from the border and aims toward political andethical transformations (p. 11). Finally, while Mignolo acknowledges the continued importance of the monotopic critique of modernity byWestern criticaldiscourse(critique from a single, unified space), he suggests that thishas to be put into dialogue with the critique(s) arisingfrom the colonial difference, which constitutes border thinking.The result is apluritopic hermeneutics (a term he

seemingly adaptsfrom Pannikars diatopic hermeneutics), apossibility of thinking from different spaces which finally breaksaway from eurocentrism as sole epistemological perspective . This is the double critique of modernity from the pe rspective of coloniality,from the exterior ofthe modern/colonial world system. Let it be clear, however, thatborder thinking entails both displacement anddeparture (2000: 308), double critique and positive affirmation of an alternative ordering of the real.To sum up, Border thinking points towards a different kind of hegemony, a multiple one. As a universal project,diversity allows us to imagine alternatives touniversalism (we could say that the alternative to universalism in this view is not

particularism but multiplicity). The `West and the rest in Huntingtons phrase provides themodel to overcome, as the `rest becomes the sites where border thinking emerges in itsdiversity, where mundializacin creates new local histories remaking and readapting Western global designs .and transforming local(European) historiesfrom where such designs emerged.


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`Interdependence may be the word that summarizes the break away from the idea of totality and brings about the idea ofnetworks whose articulationwill requireepistemological principles I called in this book `border thinking and `border gnosis, as a re articulation of the colonial difference:diversality as auniversal project, which means that people and communities have the right to be different

precisely because `we are all equals (2000: 310, 311 ). There is no question, writes Mignolo (2000: 59), that Quijano, Dussel and I are re acting not only to the force of ahistorical imaginary but also to the actuality ofthis imaginary today. The corollary isthe need to build narrativesfrom the perspective of modernity/coloniality geared towardsthe search for a different logic (22).This

project has to do with the rearticulation of global designs by and from local histories;with

the articulation between subaltern and hegemonic knowledge from the perspective of thesubaltern; and with the remapping of colonial difference towards a worldly culturesuch as inthe Zapatista project, that remaps Marxism, thirdworldism, and indigenism,without beingeither of them, in an excellent example of borderthinking. While there is nothing outside oftotality ... totality is always projected from a given local history, it becomes possible to thinkof other local histories producing either alternative totalities or an alternative to totality (329).These alternatives would not play on the globalization/civilization couplet inherent to modernity/coloniality; they would rather build on a mundializacin/culture relation centered on the local histories in which colonial

global designs are necessarily transformed, thus transforming also the local histories that created them.Unlike globalization, mundializacin brings tothe fore the manifold local histories that, in questioning global designs(e.g., neo-liberalglobalization), aim at forms of globality that arise out of cultures of transience that goagainst the cultural homogeneity fostered by such designs.The diversity of mundializacin iscontrasted here with the homogeneity of globalization, aiming at multiple and diverse socialorders.


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Cuba Terror 1NC

Taking Cuba of the terror list only consolidates a world order founded on thecolonization of space instantiated in the world map of bounded nation-states,

reproducing colonial knowledge through the language of the 1AC. This short-circuits the border thinking that allows a break from the colonial structure ofmodernity.Mignolo & Tlostanova 2006 [Walter D. & Madina V., Duke University &Peoples Friendship Univ, Moscow, Theorizing from the Borders Shifting toGeo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge, European Journal of Social Theory9(2): 205221]

The modern foundation of knowledge is territorial and imperial.By modern wemean the socio-historicalorganization and classification of the world foundedon a macro-narrative and on a specific concept and principles of knowledge.The

point of reference of modernity isthe European Renaissance founded, as an ideaand interpretation of ahistorical present,on two complementary moves: thecolonization of time and the invention of the Middle Ages, and the

colonizationof spaceand the invention of America that became integrated into a Christian tripartite geo-political order: Asia,Africa and Europe. It was from and in Europethat the classification of the world emerged and notin and from Asia, Africa orAmericaborders were created therein but of different kinds.TheMiddle Ageswere integrated into the history of Europe, while the histories in Asia, AfricaandAmerica were denied as history.The world map drawn byGerardus Mercatorand JohannesOrteliusworked together with theology to create a zero point ofobservation and of knowledge:a perspective that denied all other perspectives(Castro-Gmez, 2002). Epistemological frontiers

were set in place in that doublemove: frontiers that expelled to the outside the epistemiccolonial differences(Arabic, Aymara, Hindi, Bengali, etc.). Epistemic frontiers were re-articulated intheeighteenth century with the displacement of theology and the theo-politicsof knowledge bysecular ego-logy and the ego-politics of knowledge . Epistemicfrontiers were traced also bythe creation of the imperial difference(with theOttoman, the Chinese and the Russian empires) and the

colonial difference(with Indians and Blacks in America).

Both epistemic differences, colonial and

imperial, were based on a racial classification of the population of the planet, aclassificatoryorder in which those who made the classification put themselves atthe top of Humanity. TheRenaissance idea of Man was conceptualized based onthe paradigmatic examples of Western Christianity, Europe, and white and malesubjectivity (Kant, 1798; Las Casas, 1552). Thus, from the Renaissance all theway down, the rhetoric of modernity could not have been

sustained without itsdarker and constitutive side: the logic of coloniality.Border thinking or theorizing emergedfrom and as a response to the violence(frontiers)of imperial/territorial epistemology and therhetoric ofmodernity(and globalization) of salvation that continues to be implemented on theassumptionof the inferiority or devilish intentions of the Otherand, therefore,continues tojustify oppression and exploitation as well as eradication of thedifference. Border thinking isthe epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of theoutside created from the inside; and as such, itis always a decolonial project.Recent immigration to the imperial sites of Europe and the USAcrossingtheimperial and colonial differencescontributes to maintaining the conditions forborder thinking that

emerged from the very inception of modern imperial expansion.In this regard, critical border thinkingdisplaces and subsumes MaxHorkheimers critical theory which was and still is grounded in the experienceof European internal history(Horkheimer, 1937). Critical border thinkinginstead is grounded in the experiences of the colonies and subaltern empires.Consequently, it provides the epistemology that was denied by imperial expansion.Critical border thinking also denies the epistemic

privilege of the humanitiesand the social sciencestheprivilege of an observer that makes the rest oftheworld an object of observation(from Orientalism to Area Studies). It alsomoves away from the post-colonial toward thede-colonial, shifting to the geo andbody-politics of knowledge. Why do we need border thinking? Where is it taking us? To the de-

colonialshift as a fracture of the epistemology of the zero point. Border thinking brings tothe foregrounddifferent kinds of theoretical actors and principles of knowledgethat displace Europeanmodernity(which articulated the very concept of theoryin the social sciences and the humanities) and empower those


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who have beenepistemically disempowered by the theo- and ego-politics of knowledge. Thedecolonialepistemic shift is no longer grounded in Greek and Latin categories ofthought that informed modern epistemology (since theRenaissance) in the sixEuropean imperial languages (Italian, Spanish and Portuguese for the Renaissance;French, English and German

for the Enlightenment), but in the epistemicborders between European imperial categories andlanguages and categories thatmodern epistemology ruled out as epistemically non-sustainable(e.g. Mandarin,Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Aymara, Nahuatl, Wolof, Arabic, etc.). Theepistemology of the zeropoint is managerial and it is today common tobusiness, natural sciences, professional schools, and the social sciences. Borderthinking is the epistemology of the future, without which another world will beimpossible.Epistemology is woven into language and, above all, into alphabeticallywritten languages.And languages arenot something human beings have but theyare part of what human beings are.As such,languages are embedded in the bodyand in the memories (geo-historically located) of each

person. A person formedin Aymara, Hindi or Russian who has to learn the rules and principles of knowledgemainly inscribed in thethree imperial languages of the second modernity(French, English and German), would of necessity have to deal with a gap; whileaperson formed in German or English who learns the rules and principles ofknowledge inscribed in German or English is not subject tosuch a gap. But thereis more, since the situation is not one that can be accounted for in terms of the universal history of human beings

and society. Knowledge and subjectivities havebeen and continue to be shaped by the colonialand imperial differences thatstructured the modern/colonial world.Consider, on the one hand,knowledge in the modern and imperial Europeanlanguages andon the other handRussian, Arabic and Mandarin. The difference

here is imperial. However, they are not just different. In the modern/colonial unconscious, they belong todifferent epistemic ranks. Modern science,philosophy, and the social sciences are not grounded in Russian, Chinese and

Arabic languages. That of course does not mean that there is no thinking goingon or knowledge produced in Russian, Chinese andArabic. It means, on thecontrary, that in the global distribution of intellectual and scientific labor, knowledgeproduced in English,French or German does not need to take into accountknowledge in Russian, Chinese and Arabic. Furthermore, increasingly since thesixteenth century, knowledge in Russian, Chinese and Arabic cannot avoid intellectualproduction in English, French and German. Strictlyspeaking, societiesin which Russian, Chinese and Arabic are spoken were not colonized in the waythe Americas and South Asia were.

Thus, any languages beyond the six imperialEuropean ones, and their grounding in Greek and Latin, have been disqualifiedas languageswith world-wide epistemic import. And of course, this impinges onsubject formation: people who are not trusted in their thinking, are

doubted intheir rationality and wounded in their dignity. Border thinking then emergesfrom the colonial andthe imperial wound. If we consider, instead, Hindi orAymara, the epistemic difference with modern European languages andepistemologywill be colonial. In both cases, the coloniality of knowledge and of beinggoes hand in hand with modernitys rhetoric ofsalvation. The rhetoric ofmodernity and the logic of coloniality are mutually constituted and are the twosides of the same coin. Today

the shaping of subjectivity, the coloniality ofbeing/knowledge is often described within theso-called globalization of culture,a phrase, which in the rhetoric of modernity reproducesthe logic of colonialityof knowledge and of being.

And borders produce the ordering of the world that justifies securitization andthe war-on-terror. The aff only guarantees reproducing the violence theycriticize.

Agathangelou & Ling, York University and the New School University, in 4[Anna M. & L.h.m., Power,Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire fromSeptember 11, International Studies Quarterly, 48]

We extend these insights to notions of power, borders, security, and wealth. Theydo notreflect objective, compartmentalized categories , as in realist/liberalinternational relations theory.Nor do they functionsolely as ideological rampartsto a capitalist economic structure,as in reductionist Marxian analysis.Neither arethey some cultural artifact with different meanings for different parties, assuggested by

postmodernism. Rather, postcolonial-feminism casts the concepts ofpower, borders, security, and wealth as the product ofa particular set of socialrelations, inflected by race, gender, class, and culture.Its purpose: toenableneocolonial interest and privilege in world politics. Elites and their lieutenantsappeal to the collective good to mask such maneuvers . Meanwhile,they exploitthe same forlabor, resources, and ideological support. Herein lies the systemsinherent contradictionand potential for instability.For this reason,violence anddesire become, increasingly, its identifyingcharacteristics. Violence assures elitecontrol along the three axes of power: class-race-gender. Desire motivates it.Heres how:1. Discourse normalizes violence to sustain structural hierarchies ofdesire.6 Thispower narrative must resonate culturally to elicit attention but its logicdraws from an ideologically rationalized economic infrastructure. As thispaper demonstrates, bothsuperpower state(U.S./Bush) and 9/11terrorists (Al Qaeda/bin Laden) rely on neoliberalism, if not as discoursethen


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structure, to fueltheir respective campaigns ofimperial politics.Globalized militarization serves as one recent example.7 Both Bush andbin Ladentransnationalizetheir respectivemilitaries, not only to gathermore allies by crossing borders but alsoto propagate an internationalistrhetoric that distractsattention from each campsexploitation of themasseseconomically, politically, religiously, and physically;2. Borders of our minds secure violenceto satiate elite desires for hegemonic politics.Sovereignty and borders may correlate withobjective, geographicalmarkers but their significance operates primarily in the mind (cf. Weldes,

Laffey, Gusterson, and Duvall, 1999). Peoples and societies did not expresslegalistic notions of borders orsovereignty until the spread of theWestphalian state-system in the 17th century. Indeed,European colonizationproceeded precisely on this lack. Osama bin Laden revitalizes thiscolonial past to rationalize his hegemonic politics:that is, a religioussovereignty against the West. George W.Bush seeks not just national retribution for heinous crimescommitted against America but a return to old-fashioned colonialism: that is , (Western, Christian)civilizational discipline against all terror.(The Bush administrations semantic shift fromterrorism to terror offers one small indication of this changefrom apolitical to cultural agenda.) Both leaders transgress national, physicalboundaries to reinforce their borders of the mind: that is, an internationalcoalition against terrorism for Bush; global jihad, for bin

Laden; and,3. National desires for security based on neoliberal globalization transnationalizesviolence and insecurity. By neoliberal globalization, we refer to thedevelopmental maximsof international financial institutionslike theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, U.S. Treasury,Citigroup, as well as the central banks of the worldsrichest economies.These maxims come in familiar sound bites: for example, free tradebenefits everyone,economies need direct foreign investment todevelop, liberalization and privatizationdeliver a level playing field,governments should not intervene in the economy, and

markets knowbest. Most Arabs/Muslims agree with Osama bin Ladens allegations ofWestern cultural annihilation due to neoliberal globalizations legacy inthe Middle East (Waldman,2001). But neither GeorgeW. Bush nor otherglobalizers could recognize this grievance due to their vested intere st inexisting infrastructures of power and wealth. At the same time, bin Ladenfunds his quest for pureIslam with riches made from his familysbusiness contracts with theWest, economic enterprises in the Middle Eastand Northern Africa, as well as the international opium trade (Robinson,2002). Indeed, he utilizes

neoliberal, corporate strategies to design histerrorism campaign. Each camp blurs national security with neoliberalwealth such that one comes to mean the other, regardless of the outcome.Together, theseconstructions of privilege legitimate a particular mix of violenceand desire.The Bush administration assumesuniversal acceptance of the nonviolabilityof American sovereignty despite U.S. hegemony in

world politics.8 BinLaden and Al Qaeda glorify themselves as Islamic freedom fighters or martyrsdespite their appropriation of the Great Satans neoliberal methods. Both usediscursive powerto normalizeradicalizations of identity, such as mutual accusationsof evil, to serve these e nds. Especiallyaffected are thosemental borders thatgovern the identities of daily life:that is, masculinity and femininity, insider andoutsider, leader and follower, Self and Other.George W. Bush and the U.S.government invoke violence to protect that American object of desire -ademocratic, capitalist way of life-fromthe likes of Osama bin Laden and the AlQaeda network. The latter, in tur n, are portrayed as oppressing their own society,generally, and women, specifically. Osama bin Laden seeks the same logic ofviolence and desireagainst George W. Bush and the U.S. government: that is,America and the West have raped and pillaged the Islamic world for thatindustrial object of desire: oil. In the process, they have lost their souls.

Also, you should be skeptical of their engagement with Cubaexpanding

American geopolitical influence in the region only serves to further the goalsof US regional domination and the securitization of borders.Nicol, 2011[Heather Nicol, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, TrentUniversity, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, U.S. Hegemony in the 21st century: Cuba's Place inthe regionalizing geopolitics of North America and Caribbean Countries Journal of BorderlandsStudies, 23:1, 31-52, DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2008.9695687]

The process of U.S. hegemony in North American economies is not unique orunrelated tothe larger workings of international order and world economy. The changingtenor ofCanadian,

U.S., and Mexican geopolitical rhetoric, couched in free tradeand securitization , is related to the

bigger project of condoning and supporting U.S.hegemonyin the Western Hemisphere. It is alsoclosely related to the larger project ofglobalization in which the U.S. has been a driving

forceduring the 20th and 21st centuries

(Agnew 2005). Over the past decade, the U.S. has focused closely ondefiningregional parameters for U.S. hegemonic influence or extraterritorial control within

NorthAmerica, meaning that the shape of geo-economic and geopolitical regionalizationinNorth America and its neighbors (the Caribbean and Central America for example)is directly related toU.S. responses to globalization issues. Indeed, there is a largeliterature suggesting that hegemony is centralto U.S. imperialist claims to interventionat global, hemispheric, and continental levels(Slater2004; Agnew 2003, 2005).While originally the desire for such hegemony was couched in Cold War termsregarding the right of the U.S.to intervene in Western Hemisphere affairs in general,and the need for its neighbors to support the benevolent superpower in its bid for

hemisphericsecurity as communism was contained, today such grand strategies are lessobviously stated.


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Rather than the nakedly aggressive military and economic agendasthat characterized Cold War or laterReaganomics rhetoric, U.S. hegemony is nowpromoted as a civilizing mission in support ofdemocracy, human rights, and continental(as well as global) free trade.In this sense it is not unlikethe EU mission in EasternEurope and beyond, although the EU and U.S. differ in terms of the methods theyemploy. In both North

America and the Caribbean, Cuba has figured prominently as amarker for changing bilateral and

multilateral relations with the U.S., as well as fornew geopolitical discourses concerning

the changing role of the U.S. in New Worldand global orders. For example, there has been policy convergence inthe sense thatincreasingly hegemonic and U.S.-based attitudes towards Cuba are currently beingadopted by Canada, Mexico, and the

Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Friendlyrelations have been disrupted if diplomatic ties are not.But there has also been policydivergence in others, as holding out against Helms-Burton and other U.S.prescriptionsfor regime change in Cuba have also become normative for Americas neighboringcountries. The underlying coherence, or

consistent rationale for this apparent contradictionis given by the fact that in all cases the resulting convergence anddivergence inpolicies and diplomatic relations, or compliance and resistance to U.S.insistence ofeconomic embargo and political shunning, are consciously framed to inreference to aU.S. geopolitical rhetoric. Cuba as a field of contest, or a contested arena for

U.S.intervention, and therefore contested legitimacy of U.S. hegemonic claims. Thus the

real theme is the contours of resistance or support to U.S. policy in North America andthe

success or failure in the universalization of U.S. Cuban policy(Agnew 2005; Slater2004; Nicol 2002b)

rather than actual events in Cuba.Even as the U.S. position on Cuba (made concrete in the Helms Burton Act)

continuesto reinforce the strong and impermeable physical and political border the U.S. shares with Cuba, this border is not a

hold-over from the Cold War . It is a dynamicand ongoing construction , embargo,

political, and societal shunning on severalfrontsrequiring policies which construct new

kinds of walls with neighboring countriesas well as with Cuba itself. In this sense, NAFTA is critical to this process, although

as Agnew (2003) suggests, more generally, the criterion for this ideologicalborderline are structural andhistorical, going back to the very nature of the state systemitself.This means that in even terms of its

relationship to Cuba, the apparent continuityin Cuban-American relations since the turn of the

20st century to the Post ColdWar period is actually quite deceptive. Significant shifts have

taken place, particularlywith respect to how Cuba policy has become a political marker for

compliance withU.S. strategic and economic interestsamong North American states, and how Cuba hasitselfadapted to the neoliberalization of U.S. foreign policy in terms of its own regionalrelationship within the Caribbean. Both of these are

significant outcomes.In the case of subordinating Cuba, however, the U.S. has tackled a complex problemin that conformity togeopolitical rhetoric is now required at a continental level.This complex relationshipU.S.hegemony and North American complicityor resistancehas served to define the edges or

borders of American hegemony in NorthAmerica during the 21st century.Bearing this in mind, ifwe look at foreign policies asimportant functional foundations for the construction of boundaries for a 21st centuryU.S. political space,

then it is impossible to support the idea that economic integrationcan proceed withoutsignificant structural change in the foreign policiesof North Americacountries at all levels ofengagement.The situation in North America suggests thatclear convergences have occurred in the area offoreign policy, and that these shifts aresituated in geopolitical events that have postdated the imposition of the NAFTA. Indeed,Canada, Mexico, the U.S., Caribbean countries, and Cuba have been engagedin a complex and often reactive foreign policy-making

process for a number ofyears.While U.S.-Cuba relations remain conspicuousin much Western Hemispherediscussion and foreign policy-making analysis, Canadians, Mexicans, and Caribbeannations outside of Cuba haveunderstood the relationship to Cuba in very differentways than their American neighbors.

This has meant that Canada-Cuba relations havebecome part of a broader discussion aboutCanada-U.S.-Cuba relations, or even WesternHemisphere relations towards Cuba and the Caribbean,whichcontinue to challengethe hegemonic perspectives of U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba. The

virulentrhetoric concerning Cuba which defines much of the U.S. political position is notaboutCuba per se, but about the logics of the leadership role which the U.S. has defined foritselfin the Western Hemisphere, since World War II , particularly in North Americaand the countriesimmediately touching its geographical borders.


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And, we must break from the idea of separate islands, but use an Archipelagicperspective of islands to expose imperialismviewing islands as isolated isthe linkStratford 13[Elaine, Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Center for Environmental Studies at theUniversity of Adelaide, Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies and Head of

School at UTasmania, The Idea of the Archipelago: Contemplating Island Relations, Island StudiesJournal 8(1)]Nominally a group of islands, more properly a sea studded with islands,and originally the chief seathat more commonly is known as the Aegean, the archipelago is a geographical form that invitessignificant productive thinking about island relations. I have been pondering why such labours to rethink islandrelations anew might matter, doing so most concertedly by working alongside colleagues Elizabeth McMahon, Godfrey Baldacchino,Steve Royle, and Carol Farbotko. Together, we have put the case that creative, innovative, and timely research on islands and island

futures is urgently needed. In the face of challenging changes at variousscales of impact, we suggest that island peoples andplaces are not served well by prevalent ideas of them as remote and dependent on oft-distant mainlands. Indeed, these tropes hamper more complete and nuanced understandingsof the island condition and island prospects.Alternatively, we surmise, the idea of thearchipelago suggests relations built on connection,assemblage, mobility, and multiplicity.For centuries, island worlds have been positioned as geographical entities mostly isolated

and unmappableother spaces that need to be occupied, conquered, and colonized. Yet,archipelagos were connected by nautical trade routes long before European interventions.Indeed, for Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2007), geography is an appropriate starting point to explore land/sea relationships that favoured

complex patterns of migration and settlement, and that exemplify the idea that islands are the open subjects oftransoceanic imaginaries.So, too, is geography an appropriate starting point to explore mainland/island and island/islandrelations,and the archipelago may be a useful material and theoretical tool in such labours. As ElizabethMcMahon has suggested to me

in conversation, thinking with the archipelago may reveal multiple emancipatory narratives thatenunciate exceptions to colonizing grammars of empire that rendered islands remote,isolated and backward. Thinking with the archipelago thus may also enable island scholarsand others to radically recentre positive, mobile, nomadic geopolitical and culturalorderings between and among island(er)s.This special set of papers focuses upon just such matters. Its genesismightalso be read archipelagically for, in 2010, I found myself in conversation with colleague Dr Joseph Palis (North Carolina StateUniversity) on the island of Bornholm, Denmark, at a conference of the International Small Island Studies Association. There, Joseph andI talked about our mutual interest in positioning island geographies more visibly at annual meetings of the Association of AmericanGeographers. Thus it was that at, on the archipelagic shores of Seattle at the AAG in 2011, with Arnd Holdschlag from the University ofHamburg, we brought together several presenters to focus on the theme Reframing islandness I: critical and discursive cartographiesinisland worlds. This inaugural day-long session engaged thirteen scholars, notably doctoral candidates and early career researchers, who are

working on diverse geographies of theGalpagos Islands, the Solomons, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, New Zealand, and onisland languages, island mobilities, island censuses, statistics, and place names, tropes of tropicality, and the cartographic impulse to mapisland places. Delighted at the response, we determined to organize a second session at the AAG Conference on the island of ManhattaninFebruary 2012, entitled Reframing islandness II: thinking with the archipelago. The day's sessions attracted 24 speakers and asignificant audience, attesting, we think, to the growinginterest in island studies. It included two panel discussions: one on islands, artsand the geographical imagination; and another on Island enclaves, Baldacchinos (2010a) monograph on offshoring strategies, creativegovernance, and subnational island jurisdictions. Let me now turn to the papers from the conference that comprise this special issue. Inconsidering island movements as a means to think archipelagically, Jonathan Pugh starts from the premise that islands are deeplyimplicated in the contemplation of human nature and our place in the world. He then builds a compelling argument to show that

inattention to the archipelago is problematic because we live (increasingly) in a world ofisland-island movements and not static formsboth obvious and less apparent, among them, wind turbine arrays, industrial oil and military constellations. Graciously (but not uncritically) building on Stratford et al. (2011), and setting the scene

for the papers that follow in ways that will set agenda for new scholarship, Pugh asks what does it mean to think withthe archipelago?Histwin argument is that this labour will denaturalize how we think of space and

place, and that it enables a focus on metamorphosis: the adaptation and transformationof material, cultural and political practices through island movements.Building in new ways on

work on thespatial turn (Pugh, 2009) and Caribbean islands (most recently, Pugh, 2012), he then applieshis own critical reflections to

post-colonial island movements, asking how do Caribbean people struggle with and against thelanguage that they have inherited, and is this language up to the task of effectively namingand renaming the New World that they inhabit?For Pugh, the archipelago provides aframework of transfiguration rather than repetition, and gives us another reason why weshould not only think about, but with, islands.In a study demonstrating the ongoing value of the archive and of


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meticulous historical analysis of geographical dynamics, Anyaa Anim-Addo is concerned with the Caribbean and island-to-island

movements and mappings that implicate the operations of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. I have already alluded tothe importance of the idea of networks in archipelagic thinking, and for Anim-Addo a networkedapproach offers a useful lensthrough which to analysenineteenth-century steamship services; it alsoprovides a theoretical intersection betw

Borders Kritik - UTNIF 2013

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