T- can’t Be qpq answers 4 t-have to Be Positive Incentives Answers 6



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Orientalism K Answers

(--) Framework: Debate should be about is the plan better than the status quo or competitive policy option.

A) AFF choice—the plan was written in a policy framework—forcing the NEG to respond makes debaters ideologically flexible.

B) The resolution asks a policy question—doesn’t ask what we as individuals should do.

C) Implications: Either a reason to reject the Kritik or let us weigh our impacts.

(--) Turn: Missile defense locks in fears of the Chinese threat & risks war—NEG author agrees:


Chengxin Pan, 2004 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University) The “China Threat” in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics, Alternatives, vol. 29

For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missile-defence shield to “guarantee” its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it would be almost certain to intensify China’s sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence. In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely.


(--) Alternative doesn’t solve the case:

A) Doesn’t solve North Korean proliferation—triggers multiple scenarios of war.

B) Doesn’t solve US-Sino relations—which solves their terminal impacts.

C) Doesn’t solve South Korea-China relations—which solves their terminal impacts.

(--) Permutation: do the plan and the alternative--The permutation solves best: Methodological pluralism creates critical reflexivity and sustainable critique.


Roland Bleiker 2014 (professor of international relations at the University of Queensland) INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique, 2014. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from EBSCOhost.

Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine’s sustainable critique. He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101-102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructural deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences. The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine’s approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail.

(--) Perm do both, we can use both American and Chinese scholars to learn more about the Oriental nations because more perspectives

(--) Permutation: do the plan and all non-mutually exclusive parts of the alternative.

(--) Pan is reductionist and their theory fails


Jones, 14 [David Martin Jones, Professor of Politics at University of Glasgow, PhD from LSE, Australian Journal of Political Science, February 21, 2014, 49:1, "Managing the China Dream: Communist Party politics after the Tiananmen incident ", Taylor and Francis Online]

Notwithstanding this Western fascination with China and the positive response of former Marxists, such as Jacques, to the new China, Pan discerns an Orientalist ideology distorting Western commentary on the party state, and especially its international relations (6). Following Edward Said, Pan claims that such Western Orientalism reveals ‘not something concrete about the orient, but something about the orientalists themselves, their recurring latent desire of fears and fantasies about the orient’ (16). In order to unmask the limits of Western representations of China’s rise, Pan employs a critical ‘methodology’ that ‘draws on constructivist and deconstructivist approaches’ (9). Whereas the ‘former questions the underlying dichotomy of reality/knowledge in Western study of China’s international relations’, the latter shows how paradigmatic representations of China ‘condition the way we give meaning to that country’ and ‘are socially constitutive of it’ (9). Pan maintains that the two paradigms of ‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’ in Western discourse shape China’s reality for Western ‘China watchers’ (3). These discourses, Pan claims, are ‘ambivalent’ (65). He contends that this ‘bifocal representation of China, like Western discourses of China more generally, tell us a great deal about the west itself, its self -imagination, its torn, anxious, subjectivity, as well as its discursive effects of othering’ (65). This is a large claim. Interestingly, Pan fails to note that after the Tiananmen incident in 1989, Chinese new left scholarship also embraced Said’s critique of Orientalism in order to reinforce both the party state and a burgeoning sense of Chinese nationalism. To counter Western liberal discourse, academics associated with the Central Party School promoted an ideology of Occidentalism to deflect domestic and international pressure to democratise China. In this, they drew not only upon Said, but also upon Foucault and the post-1968 school of French radical thought that, as Richard Wolin has demonstrated, was itself initiated in an appreciation of Mao’s cultural revolution. In other words, the critical and deconstructive methodologies that came to influence American and European social science from the 1980s had a Maoist inspiration (Wolin 2010: 12–18). Subsequently, in the changed circumstances of the 1990s, as American sinologist Fewsmith has shown, young Chinese scholars ‘adopted a variety of postmodernist and critical methodologies’ (2008: 125). Paradoxically, these scholars, such as Wang Hui and Zhang Kuan (Wang 2011), had been educated in the USA and were familiar with fashionable academic criticism of a postmodern and deconstructionist hue that ‘demythified’ the West (Fewsmith 2008: 125–29). This approach, promulgated in the academic journal Dushu (Readings), deconstructed, via Said and Foucault, Western narratives about China. Zhang Kuan, in particular, rejected Enlightenment values and saw postmodern critical theory as a method to build up a national ‘discourse of resistance’ and counter Western demands regarding issues such as human rights and intellectual property. It is through its affinity with this self-strengthening, Occidentalist lens, that Pan’s critical study should perhaps be critically read. Simply put, Pan identifies a political economy of fear and desire that informs and complicates Western foreign policy and, Pan asserts, tells us more about the West’s ‘self-imagination’ than it does about Chinese reality. Pan attempts to sustain this claim via an analysis, in Chapter 5, of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the China threat, followed, in Chapters 6 and 7, by exposure of the false promises and premises of the China ‘opportunity’. Pan certainly offers a provocative insight into Western attitudes to China and their impact on Chinese political thinking. In particular, he demonstrates that China’s foreign policy-makers react negatively to what they view as a hostile American strategy of containment (101). In this context, Pan contends, accurately, that Sino–US relations are mutually constitutive and the USA must take some responsibility for the rise of China threat (107). This latter point, however, is one that Australian realists like Owen Harries, whom Pan cites approvingly, have made consistently since the late 1990s. In other words, not all Western analysis uncritically endorses the view that China’s rise is threatening. Nor is all Western perception of this rise reducible to the threat scenario advanced by recent US administrations. Pan’s subsequent argument that the China opportunity thesis leads to inevitable disappointment and subtly reinforces the China threat paradigm is, also, somewhat misleading. On the one hand, Pan notes that Western anticipation of ‘China’s transformation and democratization’ has ‘become a burgeoning cottage industry’ (111). Yet, on the other hand, Pan observes that Western commentators, such as Jacques, demonstrate a growing awareness that the democratisation thesis is a fantasy. That is, Pan, like Jacques, argues that China ‘will neither democratize nor collapse, but may instead remain politically authoritarian and economically stable at the same time’ (132). To merge, as Pan does, the democratisation thesis into its authoritarian antithesis in order to evoke ‘present Western disillusionment’ (132) with China is somewhat reductionist. Pan’s contention that we need a new paradigm shift ‘to free ourselves from the positivist aspiration to grand theory or transcendental scientific paradigm itself’ (157) might be admirable, but this will not be achieved by a constructivism that would ultimately meet with the approval of what Brady terms China’s thought managers (Brady: 6).

(--) Alternative can’t solve all instances of Orientalism.

(--) Prefer our issue-specific evidence: Scholars should look to specific contexts when analyzing China.


Karl W. Eikenberry, 2015 (retired United States Army lieutenant general who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from April 2009 to July 2011) China’s Place in U.S. Foreign Policy, June 9, 2015. Retrieved May 25, 2016 from http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/09/chinas-place-in-u-s-foreign-policy/

An effective U.S. China policy is best built on a thorough assessment of the context in which Sino-American relations exist and operate. China’s remarkable aggregation of national power over the past 35 years has been a source of wonderment: to economists, who have been surprised by that country’s consistently high rate of growth; to political scientists, who are at a loss to explain the persistence of authoritarian Communist Party rule despite its more open market order; and to historians, who describe China’s meteoric rise as unprecedented. But to the U.S. national security community, China’s swift climb up the international power ladder has been a source less of wonderment than of increasing concern.

(--) We know enough about China—we know they hate THAAD—that’s 1ac Perletz evidence that THAAD is destroying US-Chinese relations across the board.

(--) We are correct about our assumptions about China--realism empirically applies to China.


YUAN-KANG WANG 2004 (Assist prof in the Department of Diplomacy, National Chengchi U, Taipei) ISSUES & STUDIES, Offensive Realism and the Rise of China, Mar. 2004. Retrieved May 25, 2016 from http://homepages.wmich.edu/~ymz8097/articles/Wang-offensive%20realism%20and%20china.pdf

Contrary to the stance articulated in “Realism, Revisionism, and the Great Powers,” I argue that realism does a reasonable good job in explaining not only Western but also Asian experience. Although a large literature has developed on the Western experience, few international relations scholars take Asia as their empirical focus. In this article I present evidence from Chinese history to support my claim that realism can be fruitfully applied to Asia. Although the Asian state system existed separately from the European one throughout most of history, Asian states—notably China—behaved according to the dictates of realism. Imperial China placed a high premium on the utility of force and looked for opportunities to maximize China’s relative power. China adopted a more offensive posture as its power grew and shifted to a more defensive one as its power declined.


(--) We don’t link because we are not stopping China’s rise, in fact we are helping them by becoming a more influential power by working together.

(--) The aff is not based in orientalist imperialism. China is very eager to partake in the plan because it is mutually beneficial and consensual


Shan 09 (Zhong, "U.S.-China Trade Is Win-Win Game" - The Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America - 2009 - http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/xw/t675646.htm.)

A sound and stable China-U.S. economic and trade relationship is more important than ever. China-U.S. trade and economic cooperation has generated huge and real benefits for the United States, while China has been gaining a lot from it as well. In 2009 China jumped to become the third biggest market for U.S. exports. American companies have cumulatively invested over $62.2 billion in 58,000 projects in China and reaped bumper harvests. Their profits in China amounted to nearly $8 billion in 2008 alone. Since the outbreak of the international financial crisis, China has been supporting the efforts of the American people to tackle the crisis. On the one hand, China has increased imports from the U.S. While overall U.S. exports dropped 17.9% in 2009, exports to China hardly decreased. Many U.S. manufacturing firms have found comfort in the Chinese market as a shelter against the global financial storm. On the other hand, good value-for-money, labor-intensive goods imported from China have helped keep the cost of living down for Americans even when they become increasingly cash-strapped. Without consumer goods from China, the U.S. price index would go up an extra two percentage points every year. How should we approach the trade deficit, a heated topic in the China-U.S. trade and economic relationship and an issue closely tied to many others? To start with, Chinese and U.S. interests in bilateral trade are roughly balanced. China-U.S. trade and economic relations include services and investment as well as goods. From 2004 to 2008, the U.S. surplus in services with China grew by a phenomenal 35.4% annually, dwarfing the growth in China's surplus in goods with the U.S. In 2008, the total sales of American goods in the Chinese market, including goods exported from the U.S. to China, amounted to $224.7 billion, close to the value of goods China exported to the U.S. in 2008, which stood at $252.3. The two countries were almost balanced in terms of sales after adjustment for value-adding freight and insurance fees. Next, the renminbi exchange rate is not the key to addressing China-U.S. trade imbalance. From 2005 to 2008, the renminbi appreciated by 21% against the dollar but China's trade surplus with the U.S. increased by 20.8% annually. Since 2009 the renminbi exchange rate has remained basically stable, but China's surplus with the U.S. has fallen by 16.1%. Globally speaking, this is not an exceptional case. In 2009 the dollar depreciated against the euro, the Japanese yen and the South Korea won, which did not bring about fundamental changes in the trade between the U.S. and these countries. As a matter of fact, only a basically stable renminbi and dollar are conducive to the overall interest of the international community. Finally, China always upholds and seeks balanced trade. The U.S. should vigorously expand exports to China. Only balanced China-U.S. trade could bring about sustained development, mutual benefits, and a win-win relationship. The achievement of this goal rests not with restricting China's exports to the U.S. but with increasing U.S. exports to China. We hope that the U.S., while implementing its strategy to boost exports, can scrap the Cold War mentality, relax its export control against China, and expand the export of competitive products to China. Where should China-U.S. trade and economic relations go from here? First, we should refrain from politicizing economic and trade issues. We should vigorously oppose trade protectionism, and give full play to the platforms of the China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue and the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade. We hope that the U.S. can recognize China's market-economy status as soon as possible and include export-controls revision in the priority action plan of the U.S. National Export Initiative. Second, we should expand the convergence of our interests in economic and trade cooperation. The two economies are highly complementary with huge potentials. At present, both are restructuring their industries and therefore their growth potential. We should give full play to our respective advantages in capital, technology and markets, and actively explore cooperation in trade in services, low-carbon economy and high-tech products. Third, we should enhance trade and investment facilitation. The Chinese government will adhere to the opening-up policy as one of its basic state policies, and continuously improve policy transparency and trade and investment facilitation. The government protects the legitimate rights and interests of foreign investors in accordance with laws. We hope that the U.S. will ease irrational restrictions on Chinese companies' investment in the U.S., and facilitate the movement of businesspeople between the two countries. Fourth, we should promote the multilateral trading system. China and the U.S. should jointly push for a substantive progress in the Doha Round talks, and lock in the agreed outcomes from previous negotiations. As Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, recently reiterated, it is always better to have a dialogue than a confrontation, cooperation than containment, and a partnership than a rivalry. As long as we approach the China-U.S. commercial relationship in a responsible manner we will definitely be able to make it more stable and sound.

(--) We don’t economically affect China by removing THAAD

(--) The permutation is best—Not all knowledge produced by the west is unreliable


Hamid 2008 (Kbiri, Major, Royal Moroccan Air Force, April 2008“THE INFLUENCE OF ORIENTALISM ON AMERICANPERCEPTIONS AND POLICIES IN THE MIDDLE-EAST” http://www.scribd.com/doc/12070695/The-Influence-of-Orientalism-on-American-Perceptions-and-Policies-in-the-MiddleEast)

Of course, not all the knowledge produced by academic Orientalism is unreliable. There are certainly elements of truth in this knowledge,but one has to be at least aware of the bias and the imperfections of its approaches. Many of its methodologies are marred by epistemological flaws and inconsistencies. The shortcomings of the Orientalist framework of interpretation include foregrounding aspects and ignoring others and blaming socio-economic realities on religious or racial defects.196 While the Orientalist expertise should not be taken nor rejected wholesale, there is a need to enlist the expertise ofother social science disciplines which have kept up with scientific and technological development. Many Middle-East Studies researchers have indeed adopted modern empirical tools such as surveys, statistics and case studies to provide scientifically evidenced explanations of what is going on in the Middle-East. Orientalists’ authority should not be a free pass to issue overarching statements about the Middle-East based only on their mastery of some of its language and their ability to decipher a collection of dusty medieval texts. The raging academic debate in Middle-East Studies is indicative of the existence of contending visions of the Middle-East. To feed officials or military leaders just one version of “the Middle-East” is to limit their ability to effectively come to terms with the realities they might encounter on the ground. Curricula aimed at heightening cultural awareness of this region should therefore include the works of equally authoritative if not more serious and rigorous academics198 presenting different approaches to this region. Based on OIF, decision makers should not ‘slavishly’ embrace Orientalists’ pronouncements but rather take a critical distance from their expertise. Awareness, at least, of the existence of the Orientalist prismis a key step to successfully engaging this increasingly important region in the world’s greatpolitical and economic affairs. It is time to challenge the conventional wisdom infused byOrientalism. It is time to think outside the Orientalist box.

(--) We also use Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scholars, so no root cause argument.

(--) The alt is nihilism--can’t resolve anything


Valbjorn 2004 – Morten, PhD Political Science at Aarhus University, “Culture Blind and Culture Blinded: Images of Middle Eastern Conflicts in International Relations,” in Middle East and Paleastine: Global Politics and Regional Conflict, p. 67-8

As mentioned before, the relational perspective is a critique of both the neglect of the issue of Otherness by the IR mainstream and the way in which proponents of an essentialist approach relate to the Other. For this reason, it would be natural to assume that proponents of this second attempt to "culturalize" the study of international relations would be particularly keen to address the question of how to acknowledge cultural diversity without committing the sins of orientalism. Indeed, this is also what Said is stressing in the introduction to Orientalism: The most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or nonrepressive and non-manipulative perspective. (1995: 24) However, he then goes on to add that "these are all tasks left embarrassingly incomplete in this study" (Said, 1995: 24). Looking at other analyses based on a relational conception of culture, it becomes apparent that the latter remark is very telling for this kind of understanding of culture as a whole (e.g. Doty, 1993: 315). Despite a blank rejection of the universalism of IR mainstream and, at least in principle, a recognition of the existence of different Others who are not only projections of own fantasies and desires, in practice, proponents of this alternative approach nonetheless usually leave the question of how to address and approach the actual cultural Other unanswered. This might very well be an unintended outcome of the previously mentioned radical constructivism associated with this approach. Thus, by stressing how the representation of the Other is intimately related to the construction of identities or a subtle way of performing power, one risks being caught in a kind of epistemological and moral crisis, characterized by a nagging doubt about whether it really is possible to gain any knowledge of Others or if we are just projecting our own fantasies, and by a pronounced fear that our representations are silencing voices so that we unwittingly are taking part in a subtle performance of power (Hastrup, 1992: 54). In merely dealing with the relationship between the representer and his representations, these dilemmas can be "avoided." However, at the same time one writes off the opportunity to relate to cultural diversity as anything but discursive products of one's own fantasies and projections. This is precisely the critique that supporters of the relational understanding of culture have been facing. From this perspective, it appears less surprising that Said has had so much more to offer on the dynamics of Western representations of the Middle East than on real alternatives to the orientalist depiction of the region. Unfortunately, this second bid for a culturalistic approach to the study of international relations is not only aligned with a number of very welcome critical qualities that may enrich the study of international relations. It is also related to a problematic tendency to overreact when it comes to addressing the prevalent Blindness to the Self within IR mainstream and among subscribers to the essentialist conception of culture. Thus, aspirations of promoting a larger self consciousness in the study of international relation end up becoming self-centeredness, just as the attempt to promote a larger sensitivity toward the Other in reality becomes oversensitivity to saying anything substantial when it comes to actual Other. This is problematic, partly because we are left without any real idea as to how to approach actual Middle Eastern international relations rather than Western representations of these; and partly because there is the risk of losing sight of the material and very concrete consequences that specific representations may engender (Krishna, 1993). Also, the proponents of this second "culturalistic" alternative seem to be better at asking important and critical questions than at offering attractive answers.

(--) We take THAAD out with consideration of eastern nations will react: they want it, there’s been so much backlash against THAAD. We are not assuming just listening to what Chinese officials have said.

(--) Discursive orientalism doesn’t cause an impact


Rotter 2009 – Andrew, Professor Colgate, "Saidism without Said: orientalism and US diplomatic history" The American historical review, 105(4) 2000 p. 1208-10

A third and yet more troubling problem for historians reading Orientalism is Said's dubious epistemological relationship to matters of cause and effect. Discourse theory and postmodernism generally have shaken old certainties about history as a kind of science, a divining rod, which, properly wielded, will indicate the truth. In the postmodern universe, there is no truth, just self-serving "realities" promoted by regimes of power. "Reality is the creature of language," and "Western Man a modern-day Gulliver, tied down with ideological ropes and incapable of transcendence because he can never get beyond the veil of language to the reality 'out there,'" as three historians have summarized it. Following Nietzsche and Heidegger, postmodernists like Michel Foucault deny the linearity of the historical process; thus "causation should be pitched out." For better or worse, most historians still believe that they are engaged in a search for reasons why things happened as they did. An event occurs, like the American Revolution. It is not, they say, a construct or a representation but a revolution, properly named. There are reasons why the revolution occurred, and even though historians might assign different weights to these reasons or argue over whether some of them mattered at all, they still believe that the causes of the revolution are knowable, that they preceded the act of revolution itself, and that they are important to understand.6 7 One of the contributions of discourse theory has been to complicate—a virtue, in its own terms—comfortable assumptions about historical causation. But do the difficulties of ascribing cause make the effort itself a fool's errand? Said seems unsure. At times, James Clifford has pointed out, Said "suggests that 'authenticity,' 'experience,' 'reality,' 'presence,' are mere rhetorical contrivances." Elsewhere in Orientalism, he posits "an old-fashioned existential realism." Sometimes, Orientalism "distorts, dominates, or ignores some real or authentic feature of the Orient"; sometimes, Said "denies the existence of any 'real' Orient." There is, he asserts, a relationship between the discourse of Orientalism and the exercise of power by the West over the Mideast. The discourse, Said wrote, "is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in uneven exchange with various kinds of power," including political, intellectual, cultural, and moral. Making allowances for lifting this quotation out of a longer passage, it is nevertheless reasonable to wonder about the agency of that word "produced." Does Said mean to say, as his grammar suggests, that the discourse is "produced . . . with various kinds of power" rather than by power, or that the discourse has an independent source? Is discourse a dependent variable where power is concerned, providing a reservoir of culturally shaped images from which the powerful can draw to justify decisions made for reasons of perceived strategic or economic interest?7 8 Said's efforts to illuminate these connections are not always successful. Responding to Bernard Lewis's attack on Orientalism, Said insisted that "there is a remarkable (but nonetheless intelligible) coincidence between the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship and the acquisition of vast Eastern empires by Britain and France." "Coincidence" is far from cause and effect. In Culture and Imperialism, where the relationship between discourse and power is the heart of the matter, Said admitted: "It is difficult to connect these different realms, to show the involvements of culture with expanding empires, to make observations about art that preserve its unique endowments and at the same time map its affiliations." Said's subsequent use of language indicates the difficulty. His definition of imperialism includes not just the "practice" and "theory" of domination but also the "attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory"—a statement that calls to mind Mark Lilla's comment that "postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument." Said struggles to decide whether culture and politics are separate spheres in some ways connected or finally the same thing. Novels never "'caused'" imperialism, but reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness "was part of the European effort to hold on to, think about, plan for Africa"; and, while no one would construe Moby Dick as "a mere literary decoration of events in the real world . . . the fact is that during the nineteenth century the United States did expand territorially, most often at the expense of native peoples, and in time came to gain hegemony over the North American continent and the territories and seas adjacent to it." That is a fact; what it has to do with Moby Dick is less clear.8

(--) Relations and working together with China solves for the impact to orientalism because we are working together with China and viewing them as equals. There is no impact to their kritik because we are not colonizing China we are working together with their officials

(--) Reps don’t shape reality—focusing on them obscures material and political analysis


Tuathail 1996 (Gearoid, Department of Georgraphy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Political Geography, 15(6-7), p. 664, science direct)

While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers are quite different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the obvious importance of academia as a general institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do not disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse except to note that his statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways political decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought’-evades the important question of agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action possible is inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures, institutions, discursive networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action and should be theorized together with representational practices. Both here and earlier, Dalby’s reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalby’s fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalby’s book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second, let me simply note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third, Dalby’s interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace researchers in Europe is highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and his new security discourse were also strongly self- interested, an ultimately futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised by Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger of fetishizing this concern with discourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and the cultural, the political and the geographical contexts within which particular discursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in other words, should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies ‘poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the patterned mess that is human history.


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