Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China


NC/1NR Positive Peace K- Human Rights Affirmative- Overview



Download 2.62 Mb.
Page144/144
Date18.10.2016
Size2.62 Mb.
#2905
1   ...   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144

2NC/1NR Positive Peace K- Human Rights Affirmative- Overview

  1. Extend our 1NC We Charge Genocide in 2014 evidence. The U.S. routinely engages in human rights violations against its own citizens. The killing of unarmed African Americans at the hands of police, and the high rate of incarceration for small crimes are just a few of the abuses outlined in our evidence. Instead of calling our attention to these domestic abuses, the affirmative focuses on the human rights violations of the People’s Republic of China. We must critically analyze our own actions before criticizing others. In fact, activists are already challenging the notion that the U.S. is a bastion of freedom and justice by testifying about police brutality in multilateral forums.




  1. Extend our 1NC Cuomo evidence. The affirmative has a narrow and self-serving definition of militarism and peace that allows for the continuation of everyday militarism. That is, when peace is defined as just the absence of armed conflict between states, we are lulled into the false belief that everyone is at peace. Our 1NC Richmond evidence indicates that this understanding of peace glosses over instances of structural violence such as poverty and police brutality, ensuring their perpetuation.

2NC/1NR- Positive Peace K- Human Rights Affirmative- AT: Permutation do Both

  1. They say we can focus on systemic violence and nuclear war. However, there is a tradeoff. Extend our 1NC Richmond and Cuomo evidence. Their definition of peace is problematic. At numerous points in the 1AC, the affirmative asserts that if we adopt the plan we no longer have to worry about conflict. However, this framing of war glosses over systemic violence, ensuring that it will continue. They cannot backtrack on the claims they made in the 1AC regarding nuclear war, that is severance, which is a reason to reject the argument. The negative cannot generate links to off-case positions if the affirmative can change their plan in the 2AC.

  2. They say systemic violence exists in China. However, they only care about human rights as a means to perpetuate U.S. credibility and prevent global nuclear war. This is still problematic. Yes, people may also be suffering in China. However, the affirmative instrumentalizes their plight to further their own version of U.S. dominated-global peace. Framing the situation in this way not only ignores micro-level violence, it also fails to interrogate the true conditions for structural violence in China, turning the case.



Fernando, 2003 Dr. Laksiri, Director of the Centre for Democracy and Development, (“Transforming negative peace to positive peace,” http://www.dailynews.lk/2002/04/02/fea01.html
Positive peace in its broadest sense means many more things than even the above measures. No one should be asking all these overnight. But there should be a vision and a direction towards achieving positive peace in its fullest possible meaning in the future. Otherwise, there will be no future for our society. There is endemic violence in our society - violence at home, work place, university and elections. Societal violence undoubtedly breeds into ethnic violence and war. Curtailing violence at micro level obviously is necessary to curtail violence at macro level and vise versa. Positive peace in its ultimate objective means not only the absence of direct violence, but also the structural violence in its all forms. It means a full measure of justice, equality and social harmony in all respects. The negative peace is like "negative healthiness," the mere absence of sickness. But healthiness should be a positive one. Not only the absence of sickness, but also the physical fitness and good muscle tone. Peace should be like that, a positive one. Johan Galtung is the person who made the distinction between what we normally call violence (physical violence) and structural violence. Structural violence might not harm the victims directly. But the people are harmed, victimized and violated through institutional means and structures. Discrimination, inequality and social marginalization are some forms of structural violence on the ethnic front. Poverty, malnutrition, and economic marginalization are several forms of structural violence on the social front. If peace is the absence of violence, it should mean the absence of violence including structural violence as well. Peace means not only the absence of war and violence but also the absence of causes of war and violence.

  1. They say nuclear war increases structural violence. Even if this is true, the conceptualization of war under the affirmative makes us unable to address structural violence at all. Everyday forms of violence go unnoticed when we think of war as a global event. The permutation is not net-beneficial.



Cuomo, 1996 Chris J. Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, (“War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia, Volume 11, Number 4, Fall, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 36)
3) Following several influential moves in feminist philosophy, Peach rejects just-war theory's reliance on abstraction--of the realities, or "horrors," of war; of enemies as one-dimensional evil, killable Others; and of the ethical responses needed to address the morality of war, such as a privileging of justice and rights over love and caring. Following Elshtain, she believes that feminist just-war principles should be more particularized, contextualized, and individualized. But the abstraction of the particularities of war depends on an abstraction of war itself. The distance of such abstraction is created in part by willingness to think of war without considering the presence of war in "peaceful" times. Wars becomes conceptual entities—objects for consideration—rather than diverse, historically loaded exemplifications of the contexts in which they occur. In order to notice the particular and individual realities of war, attention must be given to the particular, individual, and contextualized causes and effects of pervasive militarism, as well as the patterns and connections among them.

2NC/1NR Positive Peace K- Human Rights Link Extension

  1. There is a direct tradeoff between protecting the labor and human rights of those in the U.S. and the affirmative. By pointing fingers at China, U.S. policymakers can distract us from the pressing humanitarian issues in the U.S.



Ruiz, 2012 Alberto, a long-time unionist, peace activist and associate member of the left-wing World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), April 27, “The US Labor Movement and China http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/27/the-us-labor-movement-and-china/
The statistics are chilling. In a country where workers have no real right to organize a union, they face an ever falling standard of living. The workers’ attempts to organize independent unions are faced with repression – 25% of the companies illegally fire workers who try to organize; active union supporters indeed have a 1 in 5 chance of being fired; over half of the companies threaten to have undocumented, foreign laborers deported during organizing campaigns; over half of the companies threaten to close the plant if it is organized; and nearly half of companies that are unionized never reach a labor contract with the union. Of course, this country is not China, but rather, is, according to the AFL-CIO, the United States. Notwithstanding this dismal situation for labor rights in this country, the U.S. labor movement is fixated on vilifying China and its human and labor rights situation as a cover for protecting U.S. workers from competition from albeit much lower paid Chinese workers. Of course, U.S. labor has every right, and indeed a duty, to protect the workers it represents. However, the obsession with China as an economic rival – an obsession which sometimes devolves into a racist stigmatization of the Chinese people themselves — is a distraction from the real and most pressing problems of U.S. workers: the ever growing economic and power disparity between capital and workers in this country, and a legal regime in the U.S. which only encourages this disparity.

2NC- Positive Peace K- Human Rights Affirmative- AT: Alternative Can’t Solve

  1. The alternative does solve for structural violence. Recognition of a globalized world does not preclude the recognition of everyday violence. By shifting the definition of militarism and peace, the negative is able to account for the ethical responsibility we have towards those living under repressive regimes.



Cuomo, 1996 Chris J. Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, (“War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia, Volume 11, Number 4, Fall, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 36)
It is of course crucial that the analysis I recommend here notice similarities, patterns, and connections without collapsing all forms and instances of militarism or of state-sponsored violence into one neat picture. It is also important to emphasize that an expanded conception of war is meant to disrupt crisis-based politics that distract attention from mundane, everyday violence that is rooted in injustice. Seeing the constant presence of militarism does not require that middle-class and other privileged Americans suddenly see themselves as constantly under siege. It does require the development of abilities to notice the extent to which people and ecosystems can be severely under siege by military institutions and values, even when peace seems present.

2AC Affirmative Answers to Positive Peace Kritik (Human Rights Affirmative)

  1. Permutation: do both

  1. The plan and the alternative are not mutually exclusive. One can acknowledge systemic violence that occurs domestically and also focus on foreign policy initiatives that could stave off a nuclear crisis.



Liden, 2009 Coordinator at the Research School in Peace and Conflict [Kristoffer, working paper prepared for the ISA convention, New York, “Peace, Self-Governance and International Engagement: A Postcolonial Ethic of Liberal Peacebuilding”, http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/1/2/0/6/pages312060/p312060-1.php,
The postcolonial condition is not native, indigenous, traditional, pre-modern or pre-colonial. It is an irreversible state of hybridity; heterogeneous mixtures of the modern and a-modern, liberal and a-liberal, indigenous and foreign, local and global. The political response to the critique of liberal peacebuilding should therefore not be the denial of international agency but engagement based on a better conception of the conditions of legitimate and efficient action that furthers rather than compromises local autonomy. In this connection, the conceptualization of ‘local autonomy’ makes a political difference. First, the presence of the global in the local ought to be recognized in postcolonial contexts (Dirlik, 1997). This is the key to the dependence of ‘local autonomy’ upon ‘international engagement’. The extent and character of this presence is obviously an empirical matter, but the theoretical point that ‘local’ and ‘global’ should not be treated as mutually exclusive terms is not. To quote Roland Robertson ‘...we should consider the local as a ‘micro’ manifestation of the global – in opposition, inter alia, to the implication that the local indicates enclaves of cultural, ethnic, or racial homogeneity’ (Robertson, 2006: 480). Nor should the local be defined exclusively as the sphere of the traditional, as has already been argued. If international policy is framed as supporting traditional culture, it will be an example of the very orientalism that Edward Said criticizes (Said, 1978). An orientalism based on the idea of the non-Western other. The implications of oriental peacebuilding would probably be worse than continuing on the occidental governance track. Imposing the same models everywhere at least leaves room for local interpretation and resistance. Furthermore, one should not equate the global with domination and the local with resistance. There is actually such a tendency of romanticizing the local in some postcolonial theory as well as in literature on indigenous peacemaking. The local is no less a source of repression and exclusion than the global, and locally constituted hegemonies are no more acceptable than their global counterparts from a postcolonial perspective. Furthermore, the global can be a sphere of resistance as well as the local. For instance, mass media and globalized networks of communication and political organization can be used to promote resistance as well as exploitation (Darby, 2004: 10).

  1. Our 1AC evidence indicates that numerous human rights abuses occur in China. Poor working conditions, the imprisonment of activists, and the oppression of ethnic and religious minorities are just a few of the many forms of systemic violence in the People’s Republic of China. The negative cannot claim that these matter any more or less than the violence that they outline exists in the status quo in the U.S. This means you should prefer the permutation.

  2. The permutation is net beneficial. The threat of nuclear conflict would exacerbate structural violence.



MALLAVARAPU, 2013 (Siddharth Mallavarapu, Mallavarapu is an associate professor in, and chairperson of, the Department of International Relations at South Asian University in New Delhi, “Monumental failure in an interconnected world,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 4, http://thebulletin.org/nuclear-detonations-contemplating-catastrophe/monumental-failure-interconnected-world
Dire circumstances. But given all that, how would a nuclear detonation affect poor and middle-income nations and their development goals? To begin with, nations situated well beyond the blast site would feel the effects. The world today is deeply interconnected and events can no longer be confined to the areas where they occur. The United Nations Development Programme underscores this reality in its 2013 Human Development Report, which argues that "as global development challenges become more complex and transboundary in nature, coordinated action on the most pressing challenges of our era, whether they be poverty eradication, climate change, or peace and security, is essential." And efforts to contend with the four areas of development upon which the report focuses—"enhancing equity, including on the gender dimension; enabling greater voice and participation of citizens, including youth; confronting environmental pressures; and managing demographic change"—would in every case be seriously complicated by a nuclear detonation. Indeed, as argued succinctly by Ray Acheson of the disarmament organization Reaching Critical Will, a detonation would seriously compromise efforts to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals. It would undermine poverty alleviation initiatives as well as cooperative efforts to foster development; limit agricultural productivity; undermine women's and children's well-being; damage national infrastructures; and reduce the planet's biodiversity.


  1. Their alternative cannot solve for structural violence. The plan’s shift towards a global ethical responsibility prevents genocide and other large-scale atrocities.



Garrigues, 2007 Juan Garrigues Researcher, Peace and Security Programme, FRIDE December “The responsibility to protect: from an ethical principle to an effective policy” http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/files/responsibilidad.proteger.pdf
The responsibility to protect stems from a fundamental concept: when a government does not fulfill the basic principle of the modern state of providing protection to its citizens, the international community must assume this responsibility. That is to say, that the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention that for hundreds of years served as a carte blanche for the behaviour of state governments at a domestic level are no longer sacred. Sovereignty becomes a conditional right. If a state does not fulfill its obligation of guaranteeing the security of its citizens, especially if it does so consciously, it looses its right to invoke sovereignty as the basis for preventing an international intervention which intends to exercise this responsibility. With regards to the international community, the principle represents an advance from the right to responsibility. The debate on interventions on the grounds of genocide or massive violations of human rights gained force at the end of the Cold War.3 The violent crises that took place in Somalia, Rwanda, the Great Lakes region, the former Yugoslavia and Haiti led to heated discussions, slow reactions, and controversial actions. From the point of view of the so-called “liberal intervention”, the right to protection was exercised in Kosovo in 1999, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) intervened against the Serbian forces that committed acts of ethnic cleansing against the Albanian-Kosovar population. This action was justified on the grounds of the right to humanitarian intervention. NATO’s action was controversial, especially due to the lack of support from the UN Security Council due to Russia’s opposition. From the start, the right to humanitarian intervention raised many doubts, in particular amongst governments and analysts from Southern countries. Suspicious of the interests of some Northern states, several questions arose: Who defines when it is right to intervene? Why intervene in Kosovo and not in other similar situations? What type of interventions is legitimate? In the case 2 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, December 2001. 3 The UN Convention for the Prevention and Sanction of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 defines genocide as the “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/genocide.htm 3 The responsibility to protect stems from a fundamental concept: when a government does not fulfi l the basic principle of the modern state of providing protection to its citizens, the international community must assume this responsibility. That is to say, that the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention that for hundreds of years served as a carte blanche for the behaviour of state governments at a domestic level are no longer sacred. Sovereignty becomes a conditional right. If a state does not fulfill its obligation of guaranteeing the security of its citizens, especially if it does so consciously, it looses its right to invoke sovereignty as the basis for preventing an international intervention which intends to exercise this responsibility. With regards to the international community, the principle represents an advance from the right to responsibility. The debate on interventions on the grounds of genocide or massive violations of human rights gained force at the end of the Cold War.3 The violent crises that took place in Somalia, Rwanda, the Great Lakes region, the former Yugoslavia and Haiti led to heated discussions, slow reactions, and controversial actions. From the point of view of the so-called “liberal intervention”, the right to protection was exercised in Kosovo in 1999, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) intervened against the Serbian forces that committed acts of ethnic cleansing against the Albanian-Kosovar population. This action was justifi ed on the grounds of the right to humanitarian intervention. NATO’s action was controversial, especially due to the lack of support from the UN Security Council due to Russia’s opposition. From the start, the right to humanitarian intervention raised many doubts, in particular amongst governments and analysts from Southern countries. Suspicious of the interests of some Northern states, several questions arose: Who defines when it is right to intervene? Why intervene in Kosovo and not in other similar situations? What type of interventions is legitimate? In the case 2 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 3 The UN Convention for the Prevention and Sanction of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 defi nes genocide as the “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/genocide.htm 3 Comment, November 2007 of Kosovo, several analysts, from the North and South, argued that intervention was carried out too early and too forcibly, or in colloquial Anglo-Saxon terms, “too much, too early”. In fact, the experience of the interventions of the 1990s led to something of a quagmire: there was no intervention when it was indispensable (Rwanda); intervention was too late (Bosnia, the Great Lakes); conducted under confusing mandates (all cases); prepared with the objective of trying to get out as soon as possible (the United States in Haiti) and justified by a mix of political and humanitarian reasons (Kosovo). There was a shift from the first universal impulse to intervene for humanitarian reasons towards the pragmatic caution of intervening when possible and with limited objectives. Moreover, the multiple actors involved - from the states directly affected to the United Nations and regional security organisations, to NGOs and academics, as well as journalists - went from enthusiasm with regards to interventions to disenchantment due to their failure. Against this background, it was necessary to clarify the concept in order to advance towards the useful practises that combined what was morally necessary with what was politically possible, and to place the protection horizon as far as possible, or in other words, to make it widely inclusive. In this sense, the responsibility to protect implies a significant empirical and normative progress. Not only is there a shift from the right to the responsibility of states, but some principles with regards to humanitarian intervention, such as proportional means and that military intervention should be the “last resort”, are also specified. Furthermore, the principle is not limited to interventionist measures, but it also stresses how conflict prevention should be the priority of international organisations, states and NGOs.





Download 2.62 Mb.

Share with your friends:
1   ...   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144



The database is protected by copyright ©ininet.org 2024
send message
    Main page
Guide
Instructions
Report
Request
Review