1NC

Circumvention
The NSA will circumvent the 4th amendment - XKEYSCORE empirically
proves
Lawyer Greenwald et al. 7/1
(Morgan Marquis-Boire [director of security for First Look Media, a senior researcher and
technical advisor at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global
Affairs], Glenn Greenwald [journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times
best-selling books on politics and law], Micah Lee [technologist with a focus on operational
security, source protection, privacy, and cryptography. He is a founder and board member of
Freedom of the Press Foundation and the author of the “Encryption Works” handbook.],
"XKEYSCORE: NSA’S GOOGLE FOR THE WORLD’S PRIVATE COMMUNICATIONS,"
The Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/01/nsas-google-worlds-privatecommunications/, MX)

, XKEYSCORE gathers communications of Americans, despite the
Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” — including searching
data without a warrant. The NSA says it does not target U.S. citizens’ communications without a warrant, but acknowledges that it
“incidentally” collects and reads some of it without one, minimizing the information that is
retained or shared. But that interpretation of the law is dubious at best. XKEYSCORE training documents say that the
By the nature of how it sweeps up information

“burden is on user/auditor to comply with USSID-18 or other rules,” apparently including the British Human Rights Act (HRA), which protects the rights of U.K. citizens. U.S.
Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) is the American directive that governs “U.S. person minimization.” Kurt Opsahl, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s general

an attempt by the intelligence community to comply with the Fourth
Amendment. But it doesn’t come from a court, it comes from the executive.” If, for instance, an analyst searched
counsel, describes USSID 18 as “

XKEYSCORE for all iPhone users, this query would violate USSID 18 due to the inevitable American iPhone users that would be grabbed without a warrant, as the NSA’s own

analysts are not prevented by technical means from making queries
that violate USSID 18. “The document discusses whether auditors will be happy or unhappy. This indicates that compliance will be achieved by after-the-fact
training materials make clear. Opsahl believes that

auditing, not by preventing the search.” Screenshots of the XKEYSCORE web-based user interface included in slides show that analysts see a prominent warning message: “This
system is audited for USSID 18 and Human Rights Act compliance.” When analysts log in to the system, they see a more detailed message warning that “an audit trail has been
established and will be searched” in response to HRA complaints, and as part of the USSID 18 and USSID 9 audit process. Because the XKEYSCORE system does not appear to
prevent analysts from making queries that would be in violation of these rules, Opsahl concludes that “there’s a tremendous amount of power being placed in the hands of
analysts.” And while those analysts may be subject to audits, “at least in the short term they can still obtain information that they shouldn’t have.” During a symposium in January
2015 hosted at Harvard University, Edward Snowden, who spoke via video call, said that NSA analysts are “completely free from any meaningful oversight.” Speaking about the

The majority of the people who are doing the
auditing are the friends of the analysts. They work in the same office. They’re not full-time
auditors, they’re guys who have other duties assigned. There are a few traveling auditors who go
around and look at the things that are out there, but really it’s not robust.”
people who audit NSA systems like XKEYSCORE for USSID 18 compliance, he said, “

Reforms are not possible—the plan will be circumvented
Greenwald 2014 (Glenn [Constitutional lawyer- patriot]; CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON
MASS SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD; Nov 19;
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-masssurveillance/; kdf)
the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers
of the U.S. government is . . . the U.S. government. Governments don’t walk around trying to
figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires. The entire system in D.C. is designed at
All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this:

its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling
fundamental limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance . Even if it somehow did, this White
House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that the U.S.
intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight
means they’d easily co-opt the entire reform process. That’s what happened after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment
of congressional intelligence committees and a special FISA “oversight” court—the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the intelligence community like Senators Dianne
Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger, while the court quickly became a rubber stamp with subservient judges who operate in total secrecy. Ever since the Snowden

the White House’s strategy has been obvious. It’s
vintage Obama: Enact something that is called “reform”—so that he can give a pretty speech
telling the world that he heard and responded to their concerns—but that in actuality changes
almost nothing, thus strengthening the very system he can pretend he “changed.” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also
supported this bill: Be able to point to something called “reform” so they can trick hundreds of
millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are
now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest . In pretty much every interview I’ve done over the last year, I’ve been asked why
there haven’t been significant changes from all the disclosures. I vehemently disagree with the premise of the question, which
equates “U.S. legislative changes” with “meaningful changes.” But it has been clear from the start that U.S. legislation
is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance, at least not
fundamentally. Those limitations are going to come from—are now coming from —very different places : 1) Individuals refusing to use internet services that compromise their privacy. The FBI and other U.S.
reporting began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began radically changing,

government agencies, as well as the U.K. Government, are apoplectic over new products from Google and Apple that are embedded with strong encryption, precisely because they know that such protections, while
far from perfect, are serious impediments to their power of mass surveillance. To make this observation does not mean, as some deeply confused people try to suggest, that one believes that Silicon Valley companies
care in the slightest about people’s privacy rights and civil liberties.

Terror
CP
Radical Democracy 1NC [2:00]

Thus the counterplan: The United States federal government should hold a
binding national referendum to Drones Surveilance, The United States
federal government should enact the aforementioned legislation if and only if
the referendum receives more than 50% of the popular vote.
The net benefit is radical democracy—
Representative structures destroy the power of the multitude to resist
biopolitical control—power of decision is key
Hardt and Negri 9 [Michael-Professor Duke University, PhD, Comparative
Literature, University of Washington, 1990 and Antonio-an Italian political
philosopher, Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, 2009, pg. 304-306]
The metaphor of a great conversation, however, paints a picture of these productive relationships that is too harmonious and pacific,
indifferent to the quality of encounters that constitute them. Many people are silenced even when included in a conversation. And simply
adding more voices without adequate means of cooperation can quickly result in cacophony, making it impossible for anyone to understand

given the current state of society, most
spontaneous encounters are infelicitous and result in a corruption of the
common or the production of a negative, noxious form of it . Although the equality required to
anything. As we saw with regard to the metropolis in De Corpore 2,

advance production and foster the expansion of productive forces is one that is characterized by participation in an open, expansive network

our first course of action to achieve this
will often require breaking off the conversation, subtracting ourselves from
detrimental relationships and corrupt forms of the common . Such practices of
rupture are, in many instances, the first step toward equality . Freedom and
equality also imply an affirmation of democracy in opposition to the political
representation that forms the basis of hegemony . Two instances of representation are most relevant
here, which, upon analysis, turn out to be very closely related. First is the representation required to
construct a people out of a multitude. A people, of course, as Ernesto Laclau explains
brilliantly, is not a natural or spontaneous formation but rather is formed by
mechanism of representation that translate the diversity and plurality of
existing subjectivities into a unity through identification with a leader, a governing group, or in some cases
a central idea. "There is no hegemony;' Laclau makes clear, "without
constructing a popular identity out of a plurality of democratic demands ."38
The second instance of representation, which is most clearly seen at the
constitutional level, operates a disjunctive synthesis between the
representatives and the represented. The U.S. Constitution, for instance, is
designed simultaneously to link the represented to the government and at
the same time separate them from it. This separation of the representatives
from the represented is likewise a basis for hegemony. 39 The logic of
representation and hegemony in both these instances dictates that a people
exists only with respect to its leadership and vice versa, and thus this arrangement
determines an aristocratic, not a democratic, form of government, even if the
people elect that aristocracy. The needs of biopolitical production, however,
directly conflict with political representation and hegemony . The act of
representation, insofar as it eclipses or homogenizes singularities in the
construction of identity, restricts the production of the common by
undermining the necessary freedom and plurality we spoke of earlier. A people might be able to
conserve the existing common, but to produce new instances of the common requires a
multitude, with its encounters, cooperation, and communication among singularities. The hegemony created by
the division between the representatives and the represented, furthermore, is
also an obstacle to the production Of the common. Not only do all such
hierarchies undermine biopolitical production, but also any instance of
hegemony of control exerted from outside the multitude over the productive
process corrupts and restricts it. Democracy-not the aristocracy configured by
representation and hegemony-is required to foster the production of the
common and the expansion of productive forces, in other words, to avoid
capital's biopolitical crises and treat its ills. This democracy of producers
entails, in addition to freedom and equality, one more essential element: the
power of decision, which would organize Production, create forms of
cooperation and communication, and push forward innovation. The mythology of the
of encounters that are as free as possible from hierarchies, then,

capitalist entrepreneur persists, although any attempt of an individual capitalist Or even the class of capitalists to innovate by intervening in

What must arise instead
is an entrepreneurship of the common, an entrepreneurship of
the multitude, which functions within a democracy of producing subjectivities
endowed together with the power of decision .
and organizing productive cooperation only corrupts the common and obstructs its production.
(and is already emerging)

Biopower eliminates the value to life and is the root cause of genocidal
violence

Babcock 11 (David John, Brown University, BIOPOWER, PROFESSIONAL
SUBJECTIVITY, AND ANGLOPHONE POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY STUDIES: ISHIGURO,
COETZEE, ONDAATJE,
http://repository.library.brown.edu:8080/fedora/objects/bdr:11224/datastreams/PDF/content) LA
The definition that Foucault himself gives for this ―life‖ that must be fostered and protected is open-ended: life

for biopower
is ―understood as the basic needs, man‘s concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a
plenitude of the possible.15 Biopower makes ―life an impersonal, abstract ―plenitude‖ that is
attached to no one in particular. Foucault writes about biopower not in terms of ―subjects but of
―forces. Biopower works to ―incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the
forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them ‖ (HS 136).
To ―disallow‖ these forces would be to rob them of their momentum, or to contain their energy without disrupting future productivity.

Many zones of state-driven violence or deprivation are abandoned to a postcolonial outside that
enters political discourse only as an abstract figure for ―human suffering .‖ What gets lost in such a
figuration is the way in which these conflicts are brought about by scarcities and divisions intrinsic to the biopolitical economy itself,
to the way it manages the movement of commodities and capital. In fact, these localized

atrocities are tightly
interwoven with the legacies of colonialism and the international division of labor. Absolute
violence still exists today, but it no longer takes the form of genocide directly overseen by the
totalitarian state; instead, it takes the form of zones whose violence is not recognized by the
global biopolitical order as its own. The challenge is to uncover our hidden complicity in this
violence. As long as these artificial disavowals exist at the level of global discourse, the only way to disrupt them may be to look to
the way these conflicts manifest themselves symptomatically at the micro-political level, in the interactions between individual
subjects. Among its conclusions, Foucault‘s

account of power maintains that every subject is
fundamentally complicit in its exercise. An apparent gap in his analysis, however, is to what degree the subject should
be held responsible for that complicity. One reason for this ethical gap may lie in the nature of biopower
itself. The subjects and juridical formations fostered by biopower inevitably lead to a withering of
individual responsibility even as it renders complicity universal. One example of this is the subject of liberal
humanism. According to Foucault, the subject of liberal humanism emerges precisely to make intelligible
the relationship between individuals and the biopolitical technologies of state rule that emerged in the
eighteenth century. This subject is known by the rights it claims: ―the right‘ to life, to one‘s body, to
health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or
s,‘ the
right‘ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this right‘...was the political response to
all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of
sovereignty‖ (HS 145). Foucault understands the rights of the liberal humanist subject as direct outgrowths of the biopolitical form
of power, which the modern nation-state was charged with protecting.

Binding referenda are key
Rourke 92 [John-Prof. of political science, Univ. of Conn. et al, Direct
Democracy and International Politics: Deciding International Issues through
Referendums, p. 17]-AC
Carole Pateman offers a classic presentation of the argument for “positive participation”: “The

theory of participatory
democracy is built around the central assertion that individuals and their institutions cannot be
considered in isolation from one another. The existence of representative institutions at the
national level is not sufficient for democracy; for maximum participation by all the people at that level of
socialization, or “social training,” for democracy must take place through the process of democracy itself .

The major functions of participation in the theory of participatory democracy is therefore an educative one, educative in the very
widest sense, including both the psychological aspect and the gaining of practice in democratic skills and procedures.” The strongest

arguments in favor of citizen referendums can be made within this theoretical context of positive
liberty, participation, and democracy. Several scholars have debated the merits of referendums, and we will look briefly
at their reasons for and against. In the last analysis, however, the argument about referendums is essentially about
participation and whether or not democracy requires this type of citizen input. Political theorist Benjamin
Barber testified before a US congressional subcommittee considering a constitutional amendment allowing the use of a
national referendum. Barber held that democracy and referendums are inseparable, contending
that: “…in the end, the real issue at stake is whether or not America believes in democracy, and
believes it can afford the risks that go with democratic life. All of the objections to it are so many
different ways of saying “the people are not to be trusted”- a skepticism which, it is perfectly true,
can be traced back to the ‘realism’ and cynical elitism of a significant group of constitutional fathers. But
there is really no democratic alternative to such trust: if the American people are not capable of self-government,
our democracy will perish- whether or not elites keep them from initiating legislation.”

K
Data has become neoliberalism’s new currency - the aff’s increase in privacy
fuels a transition to corporate surveillance - failure to foreground
neoliberalism promotes a fantasy that Snowden’s whistle might eventually be
proven false and causes a retreat into inaccessible legal discourse
Morozov 13
(Evgeny Morozov [writer and researcher of Belarusian origin who studies political and social
implications of technology. He is currently a senior editor at The New Republic], 12/26/13, "The
Snowden saga heralds a radical shift in capitalism," www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d2af6426-696d-11e3aba3-00144feabdc0.html, MX)
Edward Snowden now faces a growing wave of surveillance
fatigue among the public - and the reason is that the National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower has revealed too many
uncomfortable truths about how today's world works. Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous
Following his revelations this year about Washington's spying excesses,

surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of "internet freedom" and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control - all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead,

the spying debate has quickly turned narrow
and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent
future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon
Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we do - and pay for - our communicating today is broken as well. And it is
broken for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination, have
surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad too soon. Mr Snowden created
an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US's
surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this
overheated rhetoric - tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of
reform - has been useless. Many foreign leaders still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would
promise them a no-spy agreement, or at least stop monitoring their gadgets, the perversions
revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear. Here the politicians are making the same mistake as Mr Snowden himself, who, in his rare but thoughtful public
remarks, attributes those misdeeds to the over-reach of the intelligence agencies. Ironically, even he might not be fully aware of what he has uncovered. These are not isolated
instances of power abuse that can be corrected by updating laws, introducing tighter checks on
spying, building more privacy tools, or making state demands to tech companies more
we have focused on just one element in this long chain - state spying - but have mostly ignored all others. But

transparent. Of course, all those things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to reach and harvest. At the very least,
such measures can create the impression that something is being done. But what good are these steps to counter the much more
disturbing trend whereby our personal information - rather than money - becomes the chief way in which we pay for services - and soon, perhaps, everyday objects - that we use? No laws and
tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the
lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data - be it information about their shopping or copies
of their genome. These citizens want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it. Now that every piece
of data, no matter how trivial, is also an asset in disguise, they just need to find the right buyer. Or the
buyer might find them, offering to create a convenient service paid for by their data - which seems to be Google's model with Gmail, its email service. What eludes Mr Snowden - along with most of his detractors

we might be living through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal
data emerging as an alternative payment regime. The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As
markets in personal information proliferate, so do the externalities - with democracy the main
victim. This ongoing transition from money to data is unlikely to weaken the clout of the NSA; on the contrary, it might create more and
stronger intermediaries that can indulge its data obsession . So to remain relevant and have some political teeth, the surveillance
debate must be linked to debates about capitalism - or risk obscurity in the highly legalistic ghetto
of the privacy debate. Other overlooked dimensions are as crucial. Should we not be more critical of the rationale, advanced by the NSA and other agencies, that they need this data to engage
in pre-emptive problem-solving? We should not allow the falling costs of pre-emption to crowd out more systemic
attempts to pinpoint the origins of the problems that we are trying to solve. Just because US intelligence agencies hope to one
and supporters - is that

day rank all Yemeni kids based on their propensity to blow up aircraft does not obviate the need to address the sources of their discontent - one of which might be the excessive use of drones to target their fathers.
Unfortunately, these issues are not on today's agenda, in part because many of us have bought into the simplistic narrative - convenient to both Washington and Silicon Valley - that we just need more laws, more

Mr Snowden has revealed is the new tension at the very foundations of modern-day
capitalism and democratic life. A bit more imagination is needed to resolve it.
tools, more transparency. What

Impact is extinction – neoliberalism destabilizes neurological functioning,
dissolves ethical models and creates an endless cycle of environmental crisis
creation
Bone 12 (John, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, the Deregulation Ethic and the
Conscience of Capitalism: How the Neoliberal ‘Free Market’ Model Undermines Rationality and
Moral Conduct, Globalizations, October 2012, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 651–665)//mm

the ability to act with relative impunity is both individually as well as socially
corrosive (Durkheim, 1925, 1960, 1965). Compounding this situation, the mutual social estrangement that occurs with
increasing social polarisation diminishes the extent to which actors on both sides of the divide
identify with each other as, raising the potential for stereotyping, distrust, prejudice and stigma (Aronson, 1995; Bone, 2010;
Goffman, 1963). This process can evidently produce a situation where an exclusive elite begin to view the
masses as ‘other’ which, in turn, leads to demonization and reduced empathy, legitimating a
hardening of attitudes to the plight of those negatively affected by the actions of the powerful, a situation
that has arguably been much at play during the neoliberal era. Once more, as has been identified throughout our history, psycho-social
estrangement and the concomitant negative stereotyping and prejudice that it cultivates, further enhances the
capacity for un-empathic and amoral conduct, with potentially fateful outcomes, particularly where this can
occur with few constraints. It may even be the case, as has been argued, that social arrangements and values such as those prevalent in
contemporary capitalism not only disinhibit anti-social behaviours but actually undermine an
otherwise natural predisposition towards pro-social and empathic conduct (Olson, 2005). Conclusion As above, the
First, as Durkheim observed,

much promulgated notion that deregulated economies promote freedom, wealth and the greater good can be regarded as a touchstone of late twentieth and early twenty-first

the notion of competitive, rational and deregulated markets ,
operating by the rational laws and governed by the ‘invisible hand’, are once more presented as being the best vehicle providing
economic efficiency and the wider public good, with any restraint merely operating to the detriment of the latter. From this standpoint, the
century capitalist societies, as was the case a century before. Thus,

brief intervening period of managed capitalism, or ‘embedded liberalism’, appears as a minor detour, as opposed to the sea change that it was once assumed to represent within

the return to the economics of the
past has revived capitalism’s worst irrationalities and instabilities, culminating in the credit crisis,
major developed Western societies (Harvey, 2005; Ruggie, 1982). It has been extensively argued, however, that

as well as its capacity to generate profound inequities (Krugman, 2009). This paper asserts that, in their contribution to the above,
the deregulatory features of neoliberal capitalism imply more than mere structural adjustments to economic organisation, but might also be
understood as impacting upon the aspects of individual neurological functioning that are correlated with inhibiting
anti-social self gratifying behaviour. Thus, without a deeply neurologically ‘engrained’ set of formal and
informal rules, together with a concomitant commitment to their adherence, the habituated emotional ‘stop’ signs that routinely
inhibit socially and economically destructive conduct dissolve, as firm injunctions become pliable
obstacles to be ‘negotiated’ or simply ignored. Overall, by undermining or even eradicating the regulatory walls that guide individual
conscience—and, in turn, socially and economically rational and responsible conduct— licentiousness, self interest and short term
expediency flourish, raising the potential for further ‘irrational’ destabilization of society and
economy and the generation of continuing crises. In this way deregulation, of itself, compounds the
deleterious effects of the value system that drives it. From this perspective, the ‘spirit’ of contemporary
neoliberal capitalism and its organisational ‘form’ appears as almost the inverse of the rational,
measured and moral credo that Weber once imagined (1930).

Vote NEG to endorse an ethic of social flesh – this is an alternative political
vocabulary that privileges individual refusals of neoliberalism. Voting NEG
provides a new metric for political ideology that is the ONLY starting point
for surveillance and reform
Beasley & Bacchi 7 (Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide,
Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for
an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of
`social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)

concepts and debate in political praxis. The
languages of trust/respect, care, responsibility and generosity are clearly intended as political
interventions. Precisely because we have some doubts about these languages, the practices with which they are linked, and the political
ideals they enunciate to symbolize imagined political futures, we propose the notion of social flesh as an alternative
language. We mentioned earlier Colebrook’s view that we generate concepts to transform social life
(2002), but such a perspective requires a little more clarification. Along with Drucilla Cornell we suggest that there is an
important role for the Ideal in political thinking (2005), a role for the creation of a
political imaginary which acts as a counterfoil to the self-evident, ‘natural’
status of dominant neo-liberal political understandings and practices. As Diprose puts
it, the development of this political ideal is aimed at ‘a justice that is not
yet here’ (2002: 14), allowing us to imagine other future social landscapes and
how we might work towards them. In this context, we unapologetically propose the
concept of social flesh as a political language, as a political metaphor. Trust and care writers, in particular, would
As we noted in the Introduction, this paper presumes a role for theoretical

perhaps constitute their vocabularies as referring to actual existing practices and might be alarmed by any reference to metaphor as

social flesh – the notion of embodied
interconnection – is certainly as firmly an expression of existing social practices as the more
narrowly conceived languages of trust and care. Additionally, as we have already noted, trust and care writers
clearly do see their languages as interventions in the political arena, and thus their languages may
also be viewed as political metaphors. The point here is that most often the function of such
vocabularies as political metaphors is not spelled out . Lakoff and Johnson state in this regard that,
while metaphor is usually understood as a poetic device or rhetorical flourish, it is on the contrary
pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action . Our
inappropriately implying that all we need worry about is words. However,

The concepts
that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect . They also govern
our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what
we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. . . . If we are right in suggesting that our
ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience and what we do every day is very much a matter of

because the metaphorical ‘concepts we
live by’ are normally more or less automatic rather than highly conscious and deliberate,
interrogating such metaphors makes them explicit and consequently
provides an insight into how we live. We would add that the connections between metaphor and sociality do
metaphor. (1980: 3) Lakoff and Johnson are at pains to point out that,

more than reveal that metaphor is not a purely cognitive issue. Instead metaphor appears as an engaged sensuous process involving bodies

Metaphor is thoroughly political in other words, even if individual metaphors
interrogation of metaphorical
concepts is not just significant in considering the way in which we live
presently, as Lakoff and Johnson suggest, but also offers a means considering the way in
which we might live in the future. Social flesh is a political metaphor intended
to challenge the adequacy of dominant neo-liberal and the several alternative
understandings of social life considered in this paper, in order to both reconfigure how we see that social life and to
allow us to imagine it otherwise. Everyday life and forms of governance, including policy, rely upon an assumed
metaphorical vocabulary, upon political concepts concerning values and views of the good, upon what Foucault describes
as a certain ‘problematization’ (1991: 86; 1985: 115). Neoliberalism may thus be
considered as ‘an ethos or ethical ideal’, articulating a political knowledge, a ‘politics of truth’ (Dean, 1997, in
Larner, 2000; Lemke, 2000). To contest the dominant metaphorical vocabulary requires the development of
an ‘other’ political vocabulary. In common with Bessant et al. we believe in the value of ‘political talk’. We create and use words
and actions in the world and between people.

differ in their associations with and mobilization of the social. In this setting,

‘to make things happen’ (2006: 16, 18–19). In countering neo-liberalism’s ‘politics of truth’ as the naturalized dominant form of

we aim precisely to refuse the constitution of ‘real’/’material’ and
‘conceptual’ as distinct realms that divide practices-embodiment from metaphordiscourses and by contrast enjoin their interplay. Such a perspective is necessarily democratic since
acknowledging the pervasive and everyday connections between the
‘real’/material and conceptual knowledge challenges the institutional authority of
expert conceptual knowledge and resists the exclusion of ‘lay’
perspectives (Williams and Popay, 2005: 123). Clearly, as this instance suggests, the account of social flesh as a political
metaphor evokes practical implications, and so we turn to methodological and democratic considerations. Method Social flesh as
a political metaphor involves an attempt to develop a new ethico-political
starting place for thinking critically about politics, interconnection and sociality. In
challenging neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self /citizen and the thin eviscerated
sociality this account invokes, it highlights human embodied interdependence and brings
together the socio-political and embodiment. But what does this mean for undertaking social analysis?
knowledge/power,

What techniques might such a political metaphor bring to bear? These are questions that we expect to consider in more detail in future
publications. Nevertheless, at this early stage we can see some methodological possibilities. In the Australian context we have suggested in

social flesh might be deployed at the level of policy analysis

previous work on citizen bodies how
. In particular we
have identified distinctions made between those deemed to be controlled by their bodies as against those conceived as having control over
their bodies (Bacchi and Beasley, 2002). These distinctions are associated with differing levels of institutional intervention for people accessing
Australian health services. Women accessing health services linked to reproduction will be cast as ‘controlled by body’ (hyperembodied),
whereas women accessing cosmetic surgery will generally be perceived as decision-making, autonomous ‘consumers’ in command of their
bodies (hypo-embodied).4 Significantly, distinctions between those constituted as having control over their bodies and those conceived as
controlled by their bodies may transpose on to gender distinctions (as in the case of reproduction), but the lens of embodied sociality is not
another synonym for gender. Women may be constituted, alongside men, as autonomous consumers (as in the case of cosmetic surgery). The
work of Martin Levine in Gay Macho (Levine and Troiden, 1998) provides another instance in which the political impact of differentiated body
status does not entirely line up with gender difference. Levine’s work points to the constitution of certain forms of masculinity, indeed hypermasculinity, as hyper-embodied. Hence, far from signifying the invulnerable atomized masculine self, gay macho is deemed an instance of
‘controlled by body’, in this case subject to ‘sexual addiction’ and requiring professional therapeutic intervention. Manhood is not always able
to claim the status of an untouchable integrity and is not always therefore aligned with the sovereign subjectivity of modernity. Emily
Grabham’s application of our work on citizen bodies and social flesh to ‘intersex citizenship’ reveals a related dynamic. Paralleling the ways in
which reproductive women are reduced to the body and as a result subjected to higher degrees of government oversight/intervention in their
decision-making, ‘the child who cannot be identified at birth as “either” male or female becomes their body . . . rendering them a physical site
that is open for an unusual level of intervention by medical practitioners and family’ (Grabham, 2007). In these examples

the ethico-

political ideal of social flesh provides a significant point of departure for
investigating forms of governmentality undertaken by the state, as well as those arising in
professionalized institutional settings, interpersonal contexts and in relation to the citizen/self. This starting point
enables us to imagine progressive democratic directions for the
future.

Use the ballot to REFUSE enclosure in the coordinates of neoliberalism –
questioning is the ONLY pragmatic option to dissolve the symbolic universe
upon which neoliberalism relies – don’t focus on proposing solutions if we still
aren’t asking the right questions
Zwick 13 (Detlev, Associate Professor of Marketing at Schulich School of Business, York
University, “The myth of metaphysical enclosure: A second response to Adam Arvidsson”
ephemera volume 13(2): 413-419, http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/mythmetaphysical-enclosure-second-response-adam-arvidsson)

The second charge against my initial response was that all that criticizing is all well and good but, unless it is
combined with a solution, such criticism is not constructive. A reactionary response to criticism
that aims at foreclosing critical discourse, such a demand for constructiveness and practical
solutions, should be rejected unconditionally. First, on moral grounds, why should it be acceptable
for someone who posits as a ‘solution’ a utopian fantasy (hence no solution at all) to demand from his or her
detractors a solution? Second, we should reject the notion that criticism should always be constructive
on theoretical grounds. Constructivist criticism is a kind of criticism that accepts the coordinates
of the real within which the criticized object resides. If criticism rejects the assumptions on which
the critiqued rests, or put differently, if criticism rejects as unacceptable the entire symbolic universe that
make possible the criticized object, then it cannot be called constructive . Often, then, constructive
criticism becomes meaningless criticism. For example, how would one provide constructive criticism of
Hitler’s ideological and political project? Such a task would make little sense because it would
cast a priori Hitler’s Third Reich as a reasonable entity (see Horkheimer, 2004). Similarly, when Arvidsson calls
for us to start behaving like reasonable and constructive people, what he means is that we should
accept the coordinates of his argument – for example, that neoliberal capitalism has to be accepted as a
reality and by doing so we can move beyond it – as a reasonable entity. Trying to change these
coordinates becomes unreasonable and unconstructive. Here again we should remember Žižek’s advice
to the Wall Street occupiers not to speak to all those agents of reason, those pragmatists, from Clinton to
Obama to Goldman Sachs. At such moments of resistance and defiance, silence becomes the most
radical act against pragmatic politics, the kind of politics that wants to resolve the problem step
by step in a realistic way, rather than addressing it at its roots (see Žižek, 2008). Because what would Arvidsson’s response be to
anything outside the existing coordinates he sees structuring the domain of social and economic relations? Perhaps, then, this is not the time to articulate
solutions when we are still struggling to ask the right questions. This sentiment is expressed perfectly by a joke Žižek told at
Occupy Wall Street[2], In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic , a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of
how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: ‘Let’s establish a code: if a letter you
will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false’ .
After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: ‘Everything is wonderful here: stores are
full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair – the only
thing unavailable is red ink’. The point of the joke is that without the red ink, we lack the very language to

articulate our reality. Paraphrasing Žižek, what this lack of red ink means is that all the main terms we use to
designate the present situation – ‘productive consumer publics’, ‘informal economy and
freedom’, ‘common resources’, etc. – are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation
instead of allowing us to think it. Before we offer solutions, we need the red ink.

Collapse of neoliberalism is inevitable because of
economic and environmental trends - capitalism can only make
life worse and all of the bests parts of it are already over – makes it try or die
for the ALT’s peaceful transition
Mason 14 (Paul, The Guardian, The best of capitalism is over for rich countries – and for the
poor ones it will be over by 2060, July 7 ,2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/capitalism-rich-poor-2060-populationstechnology-human-rights-inequality)
**cites an annual report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD), an international economic organization of 34 countries as well as veteran US economist
Robert Gordon

We, the deluded masses, may have to wait for decades to
find out who the paedophiles in high places are; and which banks are criminal, or bust. But the elite are supposed to
know in real time – and on that basis to make accurate predictions . Just how difficult this has
become was shown last week when the OECD released its predictions for the world economy
until 2060. These are that growth will slow to around two-thirds its current rate; that inequality will
increase massively; and that there is a big risk that climate change will make things worse. Despite all this, says
the OECD, the world will be four times richer , more productive, more globalised and more highly educated. If you
are struggling to rationalise the two halves of that prediction then don't worry – so are some of the
best-qualified economists on earth. World growth will slow to 2.7%, says the Paris-based thinktank, because the catch-up effects
boosting growth in the developing world – population growth, education, urbanisation – will peter out. Even before that
happens, near-stagnation in advanced economies means a long-term global average over the next
50 years of just 3% growth, which is low. The growth of high-skilled jobs and the automation of medium-skilled jobs means, on the central
projection, that inequality will rise by 30%. By 2060 countries such as Sweden will have levels of
inequality currently seen in the USA: think Gary, Indiana, in the suburbs of Stockholm. The whole projection is overlaid
by the risk that the economic effects of climate change begin to destroy capital, coastal land and
agriculture in the first half of the century, shaving up to 2.5% off world GDP and 6% in south-east Asia. The bleakest part of
the OECD report lies not in what it projects but what it assumes. It assumes, first, a rapid rise in
productivity, due to information technology. Three-quarters of all the growth expected comes
from this. However, that assumption is, as the report states euphemistically, "high compared with recent history". There is
no certainty at all that the information revolution of the past 20 years will cascade down into ever more
highly productive and value-creating industries. The OECD said last year that, while the internet had probably boosted the US economy by
up to 13%, the wider economic effects were probably bigger, unmeasurable and not captured by the market. The veteran US economist Robert Gordon has suggested the
productivity boost from info-tech is real but already spent. Either way, there is a fairly big risk that the
meagre 3% growth projected comes closer to 1%. And then there's the migration problem. To make the
One of the upsides of having a global elite is that at least they know what's going on.

central scenario work, Europe and the USA each have to absorb 50 million migrants between now and 2060, with the rest of the developed world absorbing another 30 million.

The main risk the OECD models is that developing
countries improve so fast that people stop migrating. The more obvious risk – as signalled by a 27% vote for the
Front National in France and the riotous crowds haranguing migrants on the California border – is that developed-world populations will not
accept it. That, however, is not considered. Now imagine the world of the central scenario: Los Angeles
Without that, the workforce and the tax base shrinks so badly that states go bust.

and Detroit look like Manila – abject slums alongside guarded skyscrapers; the UK workforce is a mixture of old white
people and newly arrived young migrants; the middle-income job has all but disappeared . If born in 2014, then by 2060 you are either a 45year-old barrister or a 45-year-old barista. There will be not much in-between. Capitalism will be in its fourth decade of stagnation
and then – if we've done nothing about carbon emissions – the really serious impacts of climate change are starting to
kick in. The OECD has a clear message for the world: for the rich countries, the best of capitalism is over. For
the poor ones – now experiencing the glitter and haze of industrialisation – it will be over by 2060. If you want higher growth, says the OECD, you
must accept higher inequality. And vice versa. Even to achieve a meagre average global growth rate of 3% we have to make labour "more flexible", the
economy more globalised. Those migrants scrambling over the fences at the Spanish city of Melilla, next to Morocco, we have to welcome, en masse, to the tune of maybe two or

Oh and there's the tax
problem. The report points out that, with the polarisation between high and low incomes, we will have to move – as Thomas Piketty
suggests – to taxes on wealth. The problem here , the OECD points out, is that assets – whether they be a star racehorse, a secret bank
account or the copyright on a brand's logo – tend to be intangible and therefore held in jurisdictions dedicated to
avoiding wealth taxes. The OECD's prescription – more globalisation, more privatisation, more
austerity, more migration and a wealth tax if you can pull it off – will carry weight. But not with everybody. The ultimate lesson from the
report is that, sooner or later, an alternative programme to "more of the same" will emerge. Because populations
three million a year into the developed world, for the next 50 years. And we have to achieve this without the global order fragmenting.

armed with smartphones, and an increased sense of their human rights, will not accept a future of high inequality and low growth.

Neoliberalism causes war, and growth is a DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD –
short-term statistics do not disprove that the neoliberal system uses monthly
progress statements to MASK its increasingly worsening SIDE-EFFECTS
Harrison and Wolf 14 (Mark, Prof. of Economics @ U. of Warwick, research fellow of
Warwick’s Centre on Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, the Centre for Russian and
East European Studies @ U. of Birmingham, and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and
Peace @ Stanford U. and Nikolaus, Professor of Economics @ Humboldt U., Berlin, “The
frequency of wars: reply to Gleditsch and Pickering,” Volume 67, Issue 1, pages 231–
239, February 2014)

Our argument reflects a complex world. There is progress in international affairs,
but progress is double-edged. Each advance has its price. There are good reasons to associate democratization and
liberalization with a more peaceful globe, but national self-determination and long-distance trade appear to have
multiple effects, heightening some war risks while others have fallen. The pairwise probability of
conflict has fallen; the number of country pairs has risen by more than enough to offset this.
Models of the world that treat state formation as exogenous and ignore its role in spreading
conflict are oversimplified. We argue that they fail to predict an important fact : ‘One indicator has moved persistently in
the wrong direction’; ‘the frequency of bilateral militarized conflicts among independent states has risen
steadily over 131 years’.6 Approaches that neglect this are analytically incomplete , because they omit
important supply-side factors in interstate violence. Gleditsch and Pickering start from ‘a common underlying definition of interstate war as armed conflict
But this was the beginning rather than the end of our story.

between two states involving at least 1,000 battle-deaths’.7 They argue that most events in our data fall short of war, could never lead to war, and in many cases are trivial: they do not amount to interstate conflict in

First, war is conflict; even if not all conflicts are wars, observations of low-intensity conflicts
are valuable and should contribute to our understanding of war . Second, ‘low-intensity’ does not mean
trivial. In the MID3 data events are coded by their intensity from level 1 (no action) through 2 (threat of force), 3 (display of force), and 4 (use of force), to 5 (war). We
any meaningful sense. Here we make two points.

drew the line to include events of level 3 and above; level 3 is defined by ‘show of force’, ‘alert’, ‘nuclear alert’, ‘mobilization’, ‘fortify border’, or ‘border violation’.8 We accept that every field has its technical

we see a future in which we will
learn to measure and analyse ‘a continuum of violence from organized crime through civil conflict to interstate warfare’.9 Just as
violent behaviour evolves across a continuum of conflict types, it also evolves up and down a
continuum of conflict intensities. As economists we are interested in the commonality of conflictual behaviour among states more than in the typology of differences.
Gleditsch and Pickering maintain that the events in our data that fall short of war are trivial ; they are not
terms and we see that we violated a norm in using the term ‘war’ when ‘conflict’ or ‘dispute’ would have been more precise. At the same time

on the same continuum as real war. ‘In particular’, our critics argue: the ‘use of force’ category in the MID data (that is, level 4) includes events such as fishing disputes where one country's coastguard seizes a vessel
from another state. Only 313, or about 20 per cent, of the 1,553 MIDs that involved ‘use of force’ entail any recorded fatalities. Therefore, MIDs considered to include ‘use of force’ hardly correspond to what most

We refute this as follows. While some fishing disputes are included at level 4 (‘use of force’), coastguard or policing actions
it is wrong to conclude that most disputes at this level are one-sided or bloodless . Of 1,553 level 4
disputes, 844 (or more than half) are recorded as involving reciprocal action ; action by one state is followed by counteraction on the part of
another. Moreover, the level 4 disputes that lack recorded casualties or reciprocal action include a number of events that most
historians would classify as acts of war without question: for example, the German occupation of
Czechoslovakia and the Soviet occupations of the Baltic states are recorded as level 4 events with no casualties (or none recorded) and no
reciprocal action. As for fatalities, in these cases (and many others), a lack of recorded casualties is just a lack of
records. Moving closer to the present, we can analyse the more detailed narratives of level 4 disputes that transpired between 1992 and 2001. Of the 164 disputes described in this category, we can find the
people have in mind when they talk about interstate wars.10
are not typical, and

word ‘fish’ or ‘boat’ in 49 entries (or 30 per cent) but the word ‘border’ appears in 74 entries (nearly half); we can find the words ‘troop’, ‘soldier’, ‘forces’, ‘attack’, ‘bomb’, ‘shot’, or ‘kill’ in 109 entries (or two-

the general tenor of these events is darker and more ominous than Gleditsch and Pickering
imply. It would also be wrong to conclude that all level 3 conflicts (‘display of force’) are trivial. Of the 119 disputes
thirds). Thus

recorded in this category between 1992 and 2001, only nine involved ‘fish’ or ‘boat’; the word ‘border’ appears in 58 entries (again, nearly half); we can find the words ‘troop’, ‘soldier’, ‘forces’, ‘attack’, ‘bomb’,
‘shot’, or ‘kill’ in 67 entries (more than half). Some of these developed into very violent conflict (ID 4083, for example, at the Kenyan-Ugandan border), or had grave potential to do so (ID 4281, China versus

Conflict is negative-sum interaction, even if it is not a war . Dramatic events can be hard to explain because they are rare.
Precisely because low-intensity events occur more frequently, we can hope to find regularities
among them that are not apparent from the more salient events . Costly exercises of military force,
even those that are mainly symbolic, that are designed to inform international relations by intimidating the
adversary, and so to shift the balance of bargaining power , are relatively frequent and should be of interest . From the point of view of
trade versus war, even low-intensity disputes signal a state's willingness to risk the two-sided gains from
cooperation and impose a deadweight loss in order to extract a possible one-sided gain from
conflict. Gleditsch and Pickering are right, and we acknowledge, that most events in our data fall short of ‘war’. Compared with 107 events that reach level 5, we have 1,553 events of level 4 and 569 of
Taiwan).

level 3 (another 103 are excluded at level 2). As we have explained, the reader should be comfortable with this degree of inclusivity. At the same time it is useful to know how our findings are affected by the variation
in intensity. We show this in two ways. Figure 1 reproduces our original time plot of pairwise conflicts; the area shaded grey is the contribution of level 3 disputes, so the profile of the white area below it represents
disputes at levels 4 and 5. Figure 1. Militarized disputes between pairs of countries since 1870 Notes:  Disputes are coded as level 1 (no action), 2 (threat of force), 3 (display of force), 4 (use of force), and 5 (war).
Source: Militarized Inter-State Disputes dataset, version 3.1, athttp://www.correlatesofwar.org, described by Ghosn et  al., ‘MID3 data set’. In figure 1 the considerable annual volatility tends to obscure the
implications of changing composition by intensity. Figure 2 shows decadal averages normalized for the total number of disputes in the dataset (including those of level 2 that we did not use) in each period. It shows

disputes of lower intensity were more prevalent in the late nineteenth century , the 1920s, and the last decade of the
twentieth century. This is certainly of interest. It confirms that full-scale wars declined as a proportion of all
inter-state disputes over the twentieth century. It also shows that even in the last decade of the
twentieth century the proportion of disputes of lower intensity (levels 2 and 3) remained below that of the
late nineteenth century. As we have argued, none of this detracts from our findings. Figure 2. The distribution of
that

militarized disputes by intensity in decades since 1870 Source: As for fig.  1. Gleditsch and Pickering suggest that there are three selection biases in our data. The first arises from the way the Militarized Interstates
Disputes dataset codes conflicts of different intensity; as result, they maintain, trivial events will have been overrepresented: One implication of the MID coding rules is that more severe events are likely to give rise
to fewer ‘disputes’. Hence, they will be given systematically less weight in Harrison and Wolf's count of disputes. In particular, large scale wars such as the First World War and Second World War constitute a single
event in the COW MID dataset (IDs 257 and 258 respectively). By contrast, less serious militarized disputes such as those over the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea constituting approximately
five square kilometres of land … are held to constitute 12 separate events.11 We refute this as follows. If it were the case, our original time plot (figure 1) would show a reduction in the number of conflict events
around the times of the two world wars. Instead, it shows what anyone would expect to see: two spikes of violence. One reason for this is the presence in the data of many level 4 and 5 events that are associated with
each world war. The Second World War, for example, is represented by both ID 258 and at least 30 related conflicts starting from the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia with the Marco Polo Bridge incident of
1937 and ending with Mongolia's entry into the war. The 30 conflicts include the Soviet annexations in Poland and the Baltic in 1939/40; the number would rise to 36 if we included the various foreign interventions
in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and the Soviet border wars with Japan (in north China) and Finland in 1939 and 1940. All of these events are rightly in our data. As previously noted, some of them are graded level 4
rather than 5 although any historian would surely count them as acts of war. The other reason why our data show a spike is because ID 258, although a single event, involved many countries and therefore rates highly
when counting pairwise conflicts. We count pairwise because we are interested in state formation; when each new state is formed, a new potential is created for conflict with the existing set of country pairs. Of course
most of those potential conflicts are never realized, but some are; of those, most remain at a low level, but some do not. That is why we count pairwise. It may be true, as Gleditsch and Pickering point out, that ‘the
distribution of the number of wars is not particularly skewed’, but the number of country pairs does have a skew and we use logs in charting them for this reason.12 The aggregate number of pairs in the Second
World War can be counted up as follows. On a first pass, seven Axis countries fought 18 countries that were either Allies or victims of Axis aggression, making 126 pairs; 17 more pairs are added when France
changed to the side of the Axis; plus 12 more pairs when Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania changed sides the other way, making a total of 155 pairwise conflicts. Of course these conflicts were not all contemporaneous
and every country did not actually fight every other country (but alliance resources were actually or potentially fungible). For these reasons we see no particular risk that our data underrepresent more serious disputes.
The Spratly Islands lie at the other extreme. As Gleditsch and Pickering point out, disputes over the Spratlys contribute 12 events to our data, five of them rated at level 4. Twelve would be too many compared with
two world wars, but, as we have shown, the world wars contribute many times that number of events. Besides, although only ‘an archipelago in the South China Sea constituting approximately five square kilometres
of land’, the Spratlys are a far from trivial issue. ‘Long a zone of contention among a number of littoral states’, The Economist wrote recently, ‘the South China Sea is fast becoming the focus of one of the most
serious bilateral disputes between America and China’.13 Gleditsch and Pickering argue that the MID3 dataset is affected by two other biases. Both, they maintain, lead to underrepresentation of disputes in the early
period, and these bias upward our estimate of the rising trend in the data. One source is the concept of a world system of states that had diplomatic relations with the European powers, on which the MID3 data are
based. This system did not become truly global until the 1920s, so that some ‘extrasystemic conflicts’ before this period are omitted.14 We acknowledge this. We note that this source of underrepresentation was
diminishing by the 1870s when our story starts. We also note that we can drop data from the period 1870 to 1914 altogether and still find the upward trend in level 4 and 5 events. The last remaining bias that our
critics suggest is at work is that ‘lower-level militarized disputes tend to be severely undercounted the further back we go in time, due to systematic differences in the availability of sources’.15 This is plausible—yet
it is directly contradicted by the evidence of figure 2 which shows that lower level disputes are more, rather than less, prevalent in the data as we go back into the nineteenth century. We have defended our findings;

Our critics do not seriously address our main contribution. This is that state formation is
at the heart of many conflicts yet remains neglected in many empirical studies of conflict and war .
what do they imply?

Moreover, when new states are formed they acquire sovereignty, which is the capacity to decide between peace and war with their neighbours. A historical perspective that goes beyond the temporal and conceptual

state formation, democratization,
commercialization, and industrialization have interacted with conflict and have had multiple
effects on the frequency of conflict, some of which were positive. In the Kantian literature, democracy and free trade change values and incentives in such a way that peace is
more likely to be preferred to war. We do not deny the Kantian channels. But evidence also supports the existence of
other channels that flow oppositely. Historically, state formation has been tied to national selfdetermination and so to nation-building, promoted through nationalist adventures. State formation has also been
tied to the growth of state capacity, including fiscal capacity to mobilize resources for military
limits of the available quantitative datasets to include the early modern period of European history strongly suggests that

purposes. Falling trade costs have disproportionately promoted long distance trade; in turn, this has
reduced the cost of disrupting cross-border trade with close neighbours. A growing economic
literature on state capacity introduces the supply side factors in conflict that political science has
tended to ignore.16 A convergence of these literatures would seem to offer great opportunities. In our article we noted specifically a long-run decline in the relative cost of destructive power. In
response, Gleditsch and Pickering note that ‘most researchers dispute that there is any simple direct relationship between the costs of armaments and the risk of conflict’.17 So would we; it is not what we argue.

As economists, we might think of trade between two countries (a positive sum game) and conflict (a negative sum game) as
alternatives. If that is the choice, then one factor among others is the time trend in cost of the war technology relative to the trade technology. Even if war technology
costs are changing at the same rate for all countries, moreover, countries A and B could respond
differently to a common change in conflict costs if they faced different marginal trade costs. Our critics
go further when they accuse us of neglecting the full costs of war, including ‘the destruction caused by war and the opportunity costs of violent conflict’, adding ‘Any serious analysis of conflict must consider how
the full costs of war shape the incentive of actors, and their incentives to reach alternative solutions to contentious issues without the use of violence’.18 In other words, they maintain, because we left out the
dimension of increasing destructive power, we omitted an important factor biasing national choices in favour of peace. But we did not leave it out; the basis of our argument was exactly that ‘destructive power … has
risen even faster than unit costs’.19 We had in mind (but did not articulate) that, as destructive power increases, it raises issues that have been well known since the time of Kahn andSchelling: the advantage of
moving first can increase, deterrence and punishment of aggression can lose credibility, and the strategic balance that frames peaceful negotiation can be destabilized.20 Concluding their comment, Gleditsch and
Pickering contend that we have fallen prey to the ecological fallacy. The ecological fallacy states that in the presence of heterogeneity it can be misleading to predict the attributes of a member of some group from the
group mean.21 But this exactly inverts our argument. We want to shift the focus to the issue of group formation: given that individual attributes affect individual behaviour, mean behaviour in the system must reflect
both the attributes of heterogeneous individuals and the process that selects individuals for system membership. We write that according to ‘the longstanding traditions of western political and philosophical thinking
on the future of war, the spread of democracy should crowd war out of the global community. Whoever else they fight, the evidence is compelling that “Liberal or democratic states do not fight each other”  ’. 22 In
other words, we understand and accept the importance of heterogeneity among the membership of the international system. We go on to emphasize the selection aspect: if new entities are created within the system,
and new entities change the likelihood of interstate conflict, then that should be of interest. A simple example shows how. In the decade from 1992 to 2001 there were on average 187 countries, of which 92—just over
half—were non-democracies. There were also 38 pairwise conflicts a year of level 3 or above, each involving at least one non-democracy. If the probability of conflict between democratic pairs is roughly zero, then
the annual probability of conflict within any given pair involving at least one non-democracy was 0.3 per cent, which is a historically low level and certainly does not sound like much. In this context, what would be
the impact of creating one more country? Assume that conflict probabilities are independent (so conflicts are not serially related, and the fact that new states are often formed through conflict does not increase their
immediate conflict probabilities). Then, if the new country was a non-democracy, it would create 187 new country pairs, each of which has an annual conflict probability at level 3 or higher of 0.3 per cent. Across
187 pairs this makes a probability of the new country being involved in one pairwise conflict of 1  −  (1  −  0.003)187  =  43 per cent in one year, or 99.6 per cent over a decade. Even if the new state is a democracy, it
joins a world in which it must interact with 92 non-democracies. Across the 92 new pairs that include one non-democracy, the probability of one pairwise conflict is still 1  −  (1  −  0.003)92  =  24 per cent in one year, or

the formation of new states has been promoted by processes that we (with most
productivity growth, democracy, globalization, and the break-up of empires .
National self-determination is a universal value, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. Yet the formation of new states is clearly a source of
increasing conflict in global society, and has been promoted by the very things that have
underpinned an increasingly democratic and liberalized global order . New evidence demands to be
either explained or explained away. We welcome our critics' efforts to explain our evidence away. As scholars should, they ask whether our
work is robust. We have shown that it is. Our evidence has not been explained away. That is why we have tried to
94 per cent over a decade. In our view of global society,
others) would generally wish to welcome:

explain it.