FDSSDFSD

International Law K
Notes
Although we made a 1NC, this is not a complete stand-alone Kritik. Rather it includes a
variety of reasons why international law generally, and the Law of the Sea Treaty
specifically, are bad. It would be more strategic to use these cards to supplement any
of the following Kritiks:
-Western Epistemology K
-Frontier K
-Ocean Borders K
1NC
a. International law was founded by, and continues to maintain, colonialism
Treaties dont check state power, they secure it in by universalizing law and
sovereign relationships.
Gardner 10 *David, Graduate student at San Diego State University, The Colonial Nature of
International Law, E-International Relations Students, 6/8/2014, http://www.eir.info/2010/06/08/the-colonial-nature-of-international-law/, 7/28/2014] B.S
International law was principally a consequence of imperial expansion.*1+ In this paper I will argue that
international law is colonial. In order to argue this effectively I will start by defining international law and colonialism. After which, I
will show how international law is a colonial relic, having been developed at a time of colonialism, with roots in the Greek and Roman Empires. I will
then argue that international
law is not based on an inherent natural law, and thus that it is merely a
tool for the imposition of western political ideas upon the world as a whole. Finally, I will argue that
international law is colonial in the sense that by ceding sovereignty to be governed by law,
sovereigns are being colonised by the western, primarily, European legal system. For the purpose of
this paper I define international law, as the law of states, made for states. It is the law, which governs sovereign powers. In considering the nature
and development of international law states are the primary subjects of international law.*2+ Equally, colonialism
is a practice of
domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another.*3+ Colonialism is the
creation and building of colonies in a territory by the people of another territory. It is the process where,
the sovereignty over the colony is claimed by the coloniser. Colonialism brings with it the removal of a subjects sovereignty. Colonialism
implies inequality and subjugation, while international law should be equal and universal. In being
universally applicable to all, international law could not be considered simply as a method of imposing ones values on weaker states. Bederman
suggests that, while the modern international system can be traced back some 400 years, certain of the basic concepts of international law can be
discerned in political relationships thousands of years ago.*4+ Nicolson argues that even the earliest developing man may have dealt with one another
on such matters as hunting grounds and ending battles.[5] If this were the case, one of the first laws governing such relationships, and consequently
one of the first examples of inter-territorial law may have been the inviolability of a messenger or negotiator; potentially an early example of diplomatic
immunity. However, such examples from ancient civilisations are geographically and culturally restricted, and one can not logically argue, without being
overly reductionist, that such examples are the origins of modern international law. There has been much discourse surrounding this question from a
merely historical point of view.
Historians may argue that law was developed at a time of colonialism dating
back to the Chinese, Greek and Roman Empires. The Romans had a profound respect for organisation and the law.*6+
The early Roman, jus civile, applied solely to Roman citizens. However, such laws were unable to
provide a legal framework for expanding sovereigns. Jus gentium, was later developed for this
purpose; it was designed to govern relations between foreigners and Roman citizens. Shaw explains
that the instrument through which this particular system evolved was the officially known as the Praetor Peregrinus, whose function it was to oversee
all legal relationships, including bureaucratic and commercial matters, within the empire*7+. However, it must be remembered that there was no
acceptance of other nations on a basis of equality or universality, and thus jus gentium remained solely a domestic law for colonies under control of the
Roman Empire. Such empires did develop import axioms and theories of law, which have since become integral to international law but they did not
establish an international law, due to the fact that they acted with disregard to external rules in their dealings with those territories that were not
already part of their respective empires. One
of the most influential of Greek concepts taken up by the Romans

was the idea of natural law[8]: the argument that there is a body of rules of universal relevance.
Grotius, like many others believed that laws were constructed by men, but ultimately they reflected essential natural law. Grotius maintained that
natural law came from an essential universal reason, common to all man. He argued that law was not imposed from above, but rather derived from
principles. Due
to his argument that the ideas and precepts of the law of nature were rooted in
human intelligence, he maintained that such rules could not be restricted to any nation or any
group but were of worldwide relevance. Advocates of international law argue that
international law is based on natural law and is, therefore, universally applicable to all. In
principle, there is a strong case to be made for a law that is inherent in all man. Basing
international law on natural law is mistaking an a posteriori argument for an a priori truth, and
would perpetuate the spread of and dominance of western academic thought through what is
essentially a socially constructed belief and not an a priori given. The classic problem associated
with natural law is, who decides what natural law is? Using a putative theory as a basis for law,
means that natural law will always be interpreted through ones self-interest. It is intrinsically
subjective to interpret natural law and this led OConnell to argue that natural law will be
constantly found to be aimed at a particular state or group of states; and for this reason, if for
no other, the power element is obvious in international law.*9+ The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, are often criticised as
being based too heavily on the Wests importance of liberalism and individualism. Accepting
such rights as intrinsic norms, rather than western social constructions is to risk undermining
alternatives. For states to commit to one single declaration of international law would require sacrificing diverse cultures and their unique way
of viewing the world*10+. Commitment to a single declaration of international law would mean the loss of culture, and from some perspectives, it
would mean commitment to a law that has supported imperialism, militarism, male supremacy, racism, and other pathologies of human history*11+.
Within OConnells view is the argument that international law has allowed, and at times
required, the subjugation of people and suppression of distinct cultures in a similar way that
colonialism did at a time of imperialistic expansion. As a result, international law is not universal,
is not based on a given natural law, and is subject to the manipulation and interpretation of
powerful states, consequently international law perpetuates current power structures*12+.
Concrete rules of international law are derived from what states actually do, and what precedents they set, rather than what the law of nature
suggests they ought to do. Morgenthau argues that the great majority of the rules of international law are generally observed . (because) it is in the
interests of the state to oblige.*13+ Where
national self-interest demands action contrary to international

law, the only obligation on states is to act in their own self-interest. Such a realist argument
suggests that if states are economically rational they will only comply with international law if
the cost, such as war, economic sanctions or trade embargoes outweigh the benefits of such a
move. However, such enforcement methods allow the perpetuation of power to manifest itself
in selective enforcement and shows that the cost of contravening international law to the most
powerful is too small to force compliance as it they themselves who created such laws. Equally,
imposing sanctions on criminal countries may be to the detriment of the policing body. An interesting example is the comparison between the
differing enforcement policies adopted by the international community against China and Uzbekistan. Recently, there has been much media attention
about numerous counts of Human Rights abuses in China, as well as their emotive treatment of Tibet: yet, no trade sanctions, punishments or
international court appearances have resulted. This is unlike in Uzbekistan, where after a bloody crackdown*14+ in 2007, heavy economic, diplomatic
and arms sanctions were imposed on the central Asian state with a low GDP[15], compared to a powerful emerging super-power. It could be argued
that western powers and international organisations, did not impose sanctions on China, due to the large amount of exports from and the economic
importance of China, in the international system, while a weaker state such as Uzbekistan is forced to abide by international law due to its less
powerful position in the international system. In this case, we see that international law, although allegedly universally applicable to all, may only be
enforced upon certain states and that international law is used by the already powerful to protect that power*16+. Post-modern critiques of
international law hold a lot in common with classical realist arguments. They
maintain that if international law is not law,

in that one has the choice to subscribe to it. It is not international morality, as morality is a
societal construct. Then law is merely an aspect of politics, which can be manipulated to ones
self-interest and politics. If we accept colonialism as a practice of domination, which involves
the subjugation of one people to another, which brings with it the removal of a subjects
sovereignty, then international law is arguably colonising the states, who consent to
international law. Bodin argued in De Republica that to be sovereign a prince must be freed from laws*17+, yet in consenting to
international law, it seems that states are ceding their sovereignty and thus, I would argue, are being
colonised by international law, and socially constructed western values. Such values are being
imposed on weaker states, who are not powerful enough to contest international law. The
threat of becoming outcast in the global system is one that means the strong do what they can
and the weak suffer what they must*18+. As I have shown, the origins of international law are
rooted in colonial empires. Such empires, primarily in the west, developed domestic law and
treatise, which formed the basis for an adoption of international law. International law is not
objective, nor is it universal and despite being constructed on western values, it has, however,
become widely adopted by sovereign states. Ultimately, I have argued that international law is colonial.
b. The Law of the Sea is an integral part of this colonial project. The aff
represents ocean space only a site for resource extraction and territorial
control.
Genevra 10 (Garmendia Genevra, Ocean Governance: High Seas and the Shift in Construction
of Ocean Space as Social Space, Feb 12 2010, 7/28/14,
http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/4/1/7/0/5/p417052_index.
html?phpsessid=m3m08arhga3gupqouuddmi3mg5)mc
Governance of spaces such as the High Seas is based on social constructions of that space,
rather than the attributes of that space itself. Such construction is maintained through the
dialectic of societys uses, regulations and representations of that space. Cartography has mediated
our conceptualization of space and serves as a powerful tool of state rationalizing space to
materialize territorial control and secure resource extraction. Theories on the construction of
social space are concerned with the fixity and flows of both space and time. A particular
conceptualization of place as social space may be fixed by the hegemonic discourse or informed
by alternative cultural or technological representations. The signing of the UN Convention Law
on the Sea spatially and temporally fixed our conception of ocean space as simply a transport
medium for the free movement of goods and navies, or as a container for unlimited resources.
Maps reinforced the view of the ocean which took into account only surfaces the surface of the ocean and the seabed. The water
column was invisible, a non-space and therefore not social space to be governed. Our governance of High Seas was a reflection of
the construction of the deep oceans as only important as a highway to remain open; or as a future source of resources on or
below the seabed. Western
juridical ideas (Grotius 1608, Seldan 1617) have led to modern international law
such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The signing of UNCLOS spatially and
temporally fixed our conception of ocean space as simply a transport medium for the free
movement of goods, a surface for the projection of power through navies, or as a container for unlimited resources.
Cartography mediates our conception of space and serves as a powerful tool of state
rationalization of space, homogenizing it to materialize territorial control and secure resource
extraction. Maps reinforced a view of the ocean which took into account only the flat surfaces the top of the
ocean and the seabed. The water column that which makes up the entire volume of water that is the
ocean was invisible, non-space and therefore not social space to be governed. Our governance of
High Seas is a reflection of that construction of the deep oceans areas as only important as a highway to held open or a future
source of resources on or below the seabed. The
physical, chemical and biological complexity of ocean space

was undermined and ignored. The introduction of new cartographic techniques makes it
possible to create complex representations, yet maps continue maintain the homogenous view
of ocean spaces which reinforce state power relations within the constructed view of ocean space (Pramono & Garmendia 2004).
The release of Google Ocean may provide the conditions of possibility for alternative narratives that include the actions of civil
society in a social space through videos, narratives and three-D tours. This paper problematizes the dominant construction of ocean
space, the way modern maps represent and erase the complexities of ocean space; argues that such representations limit our ability
to materialize appropriate governance structures; questions whether this has brought about a shift in the social construction of
ocean space the mediated through Google Ocean on the internet; and whether such a shift may affect governance of the High Seas.
c. Vote negative Continued reliance on international law will only result in

war, inequality, environmental destruction, and racism. Instead, our
alternative is to suspend our faith in the neutrality of international law and to
speak the narrative of colonialism.
Schmidt 10 (Patrick, Department of Political Science, Macalester College, MEETING THE
ENEMY: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW, by Natsu Taylor Saito.
http://www.lawcourts.org/LPBR/reviews/saito0910.htm)
I do not have to go out on a limb to assume that the substantial majority of those in academia were pleased to see the end of the
George W. Bush administration, and a significant percentage of those likely looked for President Obama to usher in a policy seachange, doing much to return equanimity and mutual respect to Americas international engagements. In MEETING THE ENEMY,
Natsu Taylor Saito leaves no doubt about her place in the former camp, but the life of this book is her effort to put short-term
changes of tone into historical relief. In so doing she puts herself at odds with the latter camp: to Saito, it
will never be
enough for the United States to live up to its international obligations or to engage existing
international institutions, because those structures are inherently flawed. This book, part of the
Critical America series edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic for NYU Press, takes on the challenging task of detailing her
objections to contemporary international law. The primary preoccupation of this book is to chronicle and critique
the origins
and development of international law, revealing the ways that the entire intellectual
foundations of American and Western thinking have brought the world to the perilous condition
it is in today. Saito puts the problem starkly at the conclusion of chapter 8:Ifone sees extant problems of global
instability ongoing wars, ecological disintegration, and the growing disparities in income or
social well-being as incapable of being resolved by the current international regime, perhaps even
as caused by the policies and practices of civilized states, a different story will have to be told,
and lived by, that challenges both the contemporary framework of international law and the
precepts of American exceptionalism. (p. 228)That is, even though the Introduction and first chapter invoke the post2001 politics of the War of Terror, the recent behavior of the United States is a single scene in a longer play, the central plot of which
The contemporary failure of the United States to prosecute the war according
to international law demonstrates the deeply held belief that America is exceptional; recent
wars carry on a frame of seeing the civilized world struggling against an uncivilized enemy; and,
the nation has an obligation to make safe the path and lead the world toward civilization, ends
trumping means if necessary. Co-incident with these ideological commitments is the belief that the
democracy, liberty, and human rights are rational and universal values; as is the belief that the
urbane, civilized peoples must assimilate the Other [*510] to these norms through education and economic
can be sketched quite simply.
development. The bulk of the book Chapters 2 through 8 substantiates the role of this understanding of exceptionalism in the
The central conceptual narrative in this history is not international law qua
international law but colonialism. From the development of European colonialism, the need to
justify conquest resulted in the rehearsal of tropes about civilization and savages, cementing the
terms of international law today. Thus, the long journey of American Indians drives Chapters 3 through 5, which retell
how the belief in the Manifest Destiny of Americas enabled white Americans to build an empire without concern
(and sometimes with overt malevolence) for indigenous peoples. Slavery and Mexico make appearances in
American project.
these chapters as well, before Chapter 6 extends the account of the American Empire to Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and
the Philippines. Saitos unforgiving approach to these chapters emphasizes
the unvarnished racism, greed, and

brutality of Americas 19th century pursuit of empire. Saito leaves no heroes in her wake, cherry picking the most
damning quotations to represent the views of Presidents from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt and many other figures
along the way (such as Frank Baum, author of the much beloved Wizard of Oz *p.111+). Her approach throughout is to draw
extensively on secondary materials, weaving together episodes and legal cases with illustrative primary material. The histories likely
least familiar to readers (such as the Philippines) form the bridge between Saitos vision of America and the rise of the 20th century
global legal order, which is the subject of Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7s more tightly focused progression from the Hague Peace
Conferences to the United Nations at mid-century contrasts with the looser tour of international economic and legal instruments in
Chapter 8. Yet, the arc remains one of colonialism, for however rapidly the
European powers shed their colonial

holdings, the precepts of that system became part of the American approach to international
law, in which Western values would be imposed on the Other while the United States asserted
the right to act unilaterally in the interests of civilization. There are natural tensions in the argument Saito
advances. From the Introduction and the first chapter the reader might detect and share an investment in international law, with
the attendant hope that the United States would put short term interests aside and stand by principles. At the same time, she asks
the reader to confront
the centuries-old colonialism behind international law as we know it. How deeply can
it fails so consistently as to appear fundamentally
one feel an attachment to international law when
flawed?
Realists and cynics resolve the tension here by abandoning any idealism about the international legal order (if not law in
general), taking in their stride the failure of legal rhetoric to induce compliant behaviors. Doesnt every
nation, not just
the United States, desire to live by the slogan, dont do as I do, do as I say? A more critical generalization
about law might be inspired by the ease with which Saito switches between making America and Western civilization the target.
**511+ Saitos America is explicitly treated as a case study of colonialism and the law, and moving from the case
study she could have gone further to consider how power and law connect at a higher level of generality. Some abstraction is on
display in Chapter 9s concluding discussion of prescriptions. However much a reader might find themselves persuaded that an
assumption of the
superiority of Western civilization is laced through contemporary international

law, the final chapter offers a bucket of cold water. What can anyone do to provoke wholesale change in a
centuries-old conceptual frame? Perhaps not much, barring more imagination or optimism than most readers will
muster. All that seems available are general, jargon-laced calls to unleash the liberatory potential of alternative
systems of world order (p.245) by suspending the notion of universality and its concomitant
division of humanity into the civilized and the Other, (p.238), thus giving room for all voices and
a multiplicity of perspectives (p.241). Yet, dont judge this book by the final chapter but rather by the diagnosis of the
problem. Students of both American history and law should find thought-provoking the extent to which the traditional zones
of domestic and foreign policy blend, chapter-by-chapter, into one unified account about the
dominance of racist, Otherizing, colonializing ambitions. That narrative folds into the wider
argument about Western legal traditions, drawing on episodes and discussions that implicate
everything from political philosophy to development economics. In total the book makes it
difficult if not impossible to ignore the historic continuities between international politics
today and the overt racism of a century ago.
LINKS
2NC Link
Law of the Sea enforce western ideals allowing them to own the ocean
As Foucault states, space is fundamental to the exercise of power (1984) and control. The mid
twentieth century saw the territorialization of ocean space with the codification of the UN Law
of the Sea. States create territory under historical and diverse social forces (Brenner & Elden 2009) and
the historical traditions and social constructions passed down from Grotius and Seldan played out in a distinct
dialectic between the concepts of freedom of navigation and the need for the control of
resources. Unlike land where territorialization gave state control of access to an area, people
and things, the introduction of the 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) limited state
control only to things. During the mid twentieth century developing nations saw drastic declines to their fishery resources
to Deep Water Fishing Nations (DWFN) and decided they needed to assert control. A few Latin American, Asian and African countries
to began to declare 200 mile fishing zone as territorial space (Churchill & Lowe 1983). The DWFN were also the hegemonic powers of
the Cold War and needed to prevent any restriction of their ability to project power freely across ocean space. UNCLOS
preserved this contested nature of this space by giving coastal states sovereign rights to the
living resources only (UNCLOS 1982) while freedom of navigation was preserved. UNCLOS served to
confirm territorialization of 12 nautical miles adjacent to shore only while homogenizing the 200 mile coastal EEZ to maintain
freedom of navigation.
Governance structures set up through the Law of the Sea maintain the
traditional western landized control of ocean space governance flows only through land in
the form of the flag state control of any vessel or artificial island (Garmendia 2006). The lack of
any use value (or property rights) of the water column itself have erased any possibilities
currently for a new locus of governance within the ocean itself.
A2: Perm
The perm leaves the spirit of international law intact causes co-option.
Chimni 11 (B.S Chimni is a Professor of International Law at the Jawaharlal Nehru University
and a scholar in law, Capitalism, Imperialism, and International Law in the Twenty-First
Century, Revised version of keynote address from October 20-22 2011, Date Accessed:
7/28/14, http://law.uoregon.edu/org/oril/docs/14-1/Chimni.pdf)
There is a parallel story of international law; that is of the endless renewal of the spirit of international law.
Each era has seen the production of new laws and institutions that promise liberation and
emancipation from the ills that characterize the world order of the day. For instance, colonial
international law was able to reinvent itself as a democratic and universal international law
through various initiatives that supported decolonization. It then met the charge of being a neo-colonial
international law by evolving, among other things, an international development law. In the era of global imperialism
entirely new branches of international law have emerged that promise to address the urgent
problems of the day and promote the welfare of global peoples renewing the spirit of international law. The
rapid development of international human rights law in particular lends credence to
international laws pursuit of the global common good.
Modern international law is still inherently colonial and unredeemable the

perms concealment ensures survival of the current system
Anghie 99 [Antony - Professor Anghie received a B.A. and an LL.B. from Monash University in
Melbourne, Australia. He earned an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, Finding the Peripheries:
Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century International Law, Harvard International Law
Journal / Vol. 40 19999 / Sovereignty and Colonialism in International Law, Winter 1999,
http://teachers.colonelby.com/krichardson/Grade%2012/Carleton%20%20Int%20Law%20Course/Week%203/FindingPeripheries.pdf, 7/28/2014, Pgs. 66-69] B.S
My argument has been that the modern discipline operates very much within the framework it has
inherited from the nineteenth century. The problem of how to establish order in the absence of an overarching
sovereign is a problem that arises with the articulation of the positivist framework. Since its articulation, it has been and continues
to be a problem that has preoccupied both mainstream and critical theorizing about the discipline. In making this point I am not in
any way seeking to diminish the extraordinary or dening importance of this body of work. Rather, I am arguing that an
exclusive focus on this framework cannot provide an understanding of the history of the
relationship between international law and the non-European world. The non-European world, relegated
to the geographical periphery, is also relegated to the margins of theory. The specic historical experience of European states is
generalized and universalized by its metamorphosis into the dening theoretical preoccupation of the discipline.[265] Nor does it
appear sucient to me to claim that the racism of the nineteenth century has been transcended by the achievement of sovereign
statehood by the non-European world. It
is true that international law is now more open and
cosmopolitan; moreover, international law has promoted the process of decolonization by formulating doctrines of selfdetermination where once it formulated doctrines of annexation and terra nullius. Still, this movement towards the
decolonization of international law was by no means universally acclaimed. In the 1960s, when
it was clear that the emergence of developing nations would change radically the character of
the international system, a number of eminent international lawyers voiced concern about the
dilution eect of these new states on an international law that was, in the nal analysis,
European.[266] The question that remained was the possibility and eectiveness of reversing the consequences of colonialism.
The optimistic international lawyers of the 1960s, even those notable scholars from developing nations, who were the most
trenchant critics of the Eurocentric character of international law, were hopeful that the acquisition of sovereignty by developing
nations and participation in international legal forums would result in the creation of a truly universal, just, and equal international
system.[267] Thus Guha-Roy, while pointing to the obvious inequities of the doctrines of state responsibility, argued that developing
nations were intent, not on repudiating the whole of international law, but on repudiating those rules that facilitated colonialism.
The civilized/non-civilized distinction featured in the doctrines and treaties of the nineteenth
century was generally expunged from the vocabulary of international law. [268] It is clear that
scholars from developing nations never achieved the signicant reforms that they desired. For
instance, the drive by developing countries to create a New International Economic Order
ended, on the whole, in failure. The alternative position is that the nineteenth century remains an integral part of
contemporary international law. On a material level, the systems of economic and political inequality
created by colonialism under the auspices of nineteenth- century international law continue to
operate despite the ostensible change of legal regime.[269] It is doubtful whether a discipline whose
fundamental concepts, sovereignty and law, had been so explicitly and clearly formulated in ways that embodied distinctions
and discriminations that furthered colonialism could be readily reformed by the simple expedient of excising or reformulating the
oending terminology.[270] Thus, the
International Court of Justice may theoretically draw upon the

general principles of law recognized by civilized nations, where civilized must now be
understood to mean all nations. But an examination of the recent jurisprudence of the Court
suggests that little eort has been made to draw upon the legal traditions and systems of nonWestern peoples in the administration of international justice.[271] International law remains
emphatically European in this respect, regardless of its supposed receptivity to other legal
thinking. The legacies of the nineteenth century appear in even more fundamental ways: despite
recognizing that the treaties were unequal and often extracted by force, these treaties continue
to be legally binding. The doctrine of terra nullius is now understood to have been used over the
centuries to dispossess and destroy indigenous peoples throughout the non-European world.
Nevertheless, these doctrines are not so much confronted as evaded through reinterpretation of the relevant facts. For example, the
argument is made that more recent anthropological evidence suggests the Aboriginal peoples of Australia had a form of political
organization, as a consequence of which the terra nullius doctrine could not be said to apply to Australia. While the operation of
the doctrine is thus denied, the doctrine itself is rarely dismissed as outmoded because of the racist ways in which it has been almost
invariably deployed.[272] Similarly, in the Western Sahara Case, the International Court of Justice asserted that the Western Sahara
could not have been terra nullius because the people who lived there did in fact have a form of political organization.[273] Thus, the
doctrines consolidated by nineteenth-century jurists continue, in important ways, to establish the framework within which
indigenous peoples struggle to assert their rights. Jurists and courts attempting to reverse the eects of these laws are often
compelled to do so within these established frameworks. The
question is not so much whether the nineteenth

century has been transcended but how its continuing eects within the contemporary legal
system may be obscured. Any tendency to treat the nineteenth century as being only of
historical interest must be treated cautiously. As I have attempted to argue, there appears to be an
inherent reex within international law to conceal the colonial past on which its entire structure
is based. The same reex may be seen at the doctrinal level, for example, in the way that the
construction of law depends on a notion of society. Once that construction has served its
purpose, it is inverted by way of a reconstructed jurisprudence in which society has been
successfully constituted as a function of law. On a larger scale, as discussed earlier, positivists vehemently set out to
detach themselves from their naturalist past. The process of distancing and suppressing the past is a
common feature of the discipline, and a ritual enacted whenever it attempts to renew and
revive itself. The nineteenth century exists within the discipline in a way suggested by Freud, who asserted in Civilization and Its
Discontents: But have we a right to assume the survival of something that was originally there, alongside of what was later derived
from it? Undoubtedly. There is nothing strange in such a phenomenon, whether in the mental eld or elsewhere. In the animal
kingdom we hold to the view that the most highly developed species we have proceeded from the lowest; and yet we nd all the
simple forms still in existence today.[274] Positivism
and the nineteenth century are an integral part of the

contemporary discipline. Simplifying considerably, the nineteenth century could be said to embody a particular set of
attitudes and methods: it posits an essentialist dichotomy between the non-European and the European; it characterizes relations
between these entities to be inherently antagonistic; it establishes a hierarchy between these entities, suggesting that one is
advanced, just, and authoritative while the other is backward and barbaric; it asserts that the only history that may be written of the
backward is in terms of its progress towards the advanced; it silences the backward and denies it any subjectivity or autonomy; it
assumes and promotes the centrality of the civilized and legitimizes the conquest and dispossession of the backward; and it
contemplates no other approaches to solve the problems of society than those that the civilized have formulated. Many of these
elements are evident in the work of prominent international relations scholars, from Samuel Huntingtons inuential argument
regarding The Clash of Civilizations,*275+ to Francis Fukuyamas assertions as to The End of History.*276+ There is a danger that
the suggestive work being done on the liberal peace, which relies on the distinction between liberal and non-liberal states, could
embody and reproduce some of the elements and attitudes of the nineteenth century.[277] Equally
important, it must be
noted that nineteenth-century attitudes are by no means peculiar to relations between
European and non-European peoples. Many of the Asian and African societies colonized in the
nineteenth century had previously been involved in imperial projects themselves. Further, it appears
to be an enduring and unfortunate truth that non-European states that have been the victims of colonialism often have no inhibition
from themselves becoming colonial oppressors.
L International Law
Eurocentric ideology is the foundation of the worlds decision making.
Sanjay 12 (Seth, Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also
Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies. Postcolonial Theory and International Relations:
A Critical Introduction (Routledge, forthcoming December 2012), The Limits of International
Relations Theory: A Postcolonial Critique, 8/24/12, http://www.e-ir.info/2012/08/24/thelimits-of-international-relations-theory-a-postcolonial-critique/)
A great deal of IR displays little interest in history, for history is unimportant if the defining feature of the
international order is considered to be the transhistorical fact of anarchy: thus Kenneth Waltz, for instance, writes that the
enduring anarchic character of international politics accounts for the striking sameness in the quality of international life through the
millennia.*i+ There are, however, those in the discipline who, even when they see anarchy as the defining feature of the
international order, are nonetheless interested in how this historically evolved; and how an order which, in their account, first
developed in Europe in the early modern period, came to encompass the globe. I refer of course to the English School, which has
the considerable merit of enquiring into the historical origins of the contemporary international system. However, the account of
the expansion of international society offered by the English School in influential texts such as Adam Watsons The Evolution of
International Society and Buzan and Littles International Systems in World History is Eurocentric and mistaken. Ironically, many of
the authors of the English School are well aware of, and consciously seek to avoid, Eurocentrism. Buzan and Little, for instance,
argue that the Eurocentrism of IR mars its understanding of past international systems, and its capacity to comprehend changes that
may lie in the future. But its Eurocentric
assumptions make sense for most of the modern era for there is
no doubt that the existing international system, forged over the preceding few centuries, has its origins in Europe
and must be understood with reference to a specifically European history. The European empires
canbe seen as the nursery, or mechanism, by which the political form of the modern state was transposed onto the rest
of the world, write Buzan and Little, and since the modern state is a quintessentially European
phenomenonit is therefore to Europes story that one has to look to explain it.*ii+ Thus while IR is
admittedly Eurocentric in its understanding of the world, that Eurocentrism is warranted for the modern period- or as Hedley
Bull and Watson had put it sixteen years earlier,The present international political structure of the world is,
at least in its most basic features, the legacy of Europes now vanished ascendancy. Because it was in fact Europe and not
America, Asia, or Africa that first dominated and, in so doing, unified the world, it is not our perspective but the historical record
itself that can be called Eurocentric.*iii+This narrative of the expansion of political forms is
modelled on the
conventional account of the expansion of economic and social forms, that is, of the spread of
capitalism (or modernity). This conventional account, which informs many disciplines, and is deeply ingrained in
popular understandings, is one which presumes that capitalism began in Europe, and later radiated outwards through
trade, armies and the like.
International law locks in the sovereign world order and is used to suppress
non-European states (all under the guise of universality).
Melbourne, Australia. He earned an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, Finding the Peripheries:
International law is universal. It is a body of law that applies to all states regardless of their
specic cultures, belief systems, and political organizations. It is a common set of doctrines that all states use
to regulate relations with each other. The association between international law and universality is so
ingrained that pointing to this connection appears tautological. And yet, the universality of
international law is a relatively recent development. It was not until the end of the nineteenth
century that a set of doctrines was established as applicable to all states, whether these were in
Asia, Africa, or Europe. The universalization of international law was principally a consequence
of the imperial expansion that took place towards the end of the long nineteenth century.[2]
The conquest of non-European [3] peoples for economic and political advantage was the most
prominent feature of this period, which was termed by one eminent historian, Eric Hobsbawm, as the Age of
Empire.*4+ By 1914, after numerous colonial wars, virtually all the territories of Asia, Africa, and the
Pacic were controlled by the major European states, resulting in the assimilation of all these
non-European peoples into a system of law that was fundamentally European in that it derived
from European thought and experience. The late nineteenth century was also the period in
which positivism decisively replaced naturalism as the principal jurisprudential technique of the
discipline of international law.[5] Positivism was the new analytic apparatus used by the jurists of the time to
account for the events that culminated in the universalization of international law and the formulation of a body of principles that
was understood to apply globally as a result of the annexation of unoccupied territories such as the Australian continent, the
conquest of large parts of Asia, and the partitioning of Africa. This Article focuses on the relationship between positivism and
colonialism. My interest lies in examining the way in which positivism dealt with the colonial confrontation. Particularly, this
is an
attempt to examine how positivism sought to account for the expansion of European Empires
and for the dispossession of various peoples stemming therefrom. In studying this relationship, I seek not
only to outline an architecture of the legal framework, but also to question extant understandings of the relationship between
colonialism and positivism and the signicance of the nineteenth-century colonial encounter for the discipline as a whole.
Positivist jurisprudence is premised on the notion of the primacy of the state. Despite
subsequent attempts to reformulate the foundations of international law, the fundamental
positivist position, that states are the principal actors of international law and they are bound
only by that to which they have consented, continues to operate as the basic premise of the
international legal system. Positivism, furthermore, has generated the problem that governs the
major theoretical inquiries into the discipline: how can legal order be created among sovereign
states? Attempts to resolve this problem, as well as the critiques of these attempts, have, on the whole, constituted the central
theoretical debate of the discipline over the last century.*6+ The dening character of this problem to the discipline of international
law is further reected by the structure of many of the major textbooks of international law, which introduce the subject by
outlining the problem and oering some sort of solution to it.[7] Colonialism features only incidentally within this scheme. This
appears inevitable, because the
colonial confrontation was not a confrontation between two sovereign

states, but between a sovereign European state and a non-European state that, according to the
positivist jurisprudence of the time, was lacking in sovereignty. Such a confrontation poses no
conceptual diculties for the positivist jurist who basically resolves the issue by arguing that the
sovereign state can do as it wishes with regard to the non-sovereign entity, which lacks the legal
personality to assert any legal opposition. This resolution was profoundly important from a political point of
view as its operation resulted in the universalization of international law. Nevertheless, it seemingly
poses no theoretical diculties; consequently, the colonial world is relegated to both the geographical and theoretical peripheries
of the discipline. Certainly, colonies were often exasperatingly troublesome, both in terms of their governance and international
jurisprudence. But for the international lawyers, colonial problems constituted a distinct set of issues that were principally not of a
theoretical, but rather a political character: how
the colonized peoples should be governed and, later, what

role international law should play in decolonization. Even when the colonies were perceived to
challenge some of the fundamental assumptions of the discipline, as in the case of the doctrine of selfdetermination, which was used in the 1960s and 1970s to eect the transformation of colonial territories into sovereign
states, such challenges were perceived, mainly in political terms, as a threat to a stable and
established system of international law, which was ineluctably European and was now faced
with the quandary of accommodating these outsiders. The conceptualization of the problem in this way
suggested again that the non-European world was completely peripheral to the discipline proper; and it was only the disconcerting
prospect of Africans and Asians acquiring sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s that alerted international lawyers to the existence of a
multicultural world.[8]
L EEZ
Their defense of the EEZ ignores the colonial history that made it possible
The Law of the Sea is part of the imperial project of expand and control.
Nolan 13 [Peter - holds the Chong Hua Chair in Chinese Development and is Director of the
Universitys Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the Director of the
Chinese Executive Leadership Programme (CELP), IMPERIAL ARCHIPELAGOS, New Left Review,
March-April 2013, http://newleftreview.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/II/80/peter-nolan-imperialarchipelagos, 7/28/2014]B.S
The United States chose not to sign the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, but formally
recognized the legality of the EEZ. A year after UNCLOS was enacted, Reagan duly proclaimed the EEZ of the United States. It is
the largest of any state by a wide margin, encompassing more than 12 million square kilometres, larger by a fifth than the land
area of the United States; according to one legal scholar, Reagans proclamation can be characterized as the largest territorial acquisition in the history
of the United States. *6+ The
forty-eight states of the continental USA have an EEZ of 2.45 million square
kilometres in total. The territory was acquired, of course, through the long westward extension
of the frontier, primarily through military action. The original thirteen states at Independence
came into existence through the expropriation by white colonial settlers of the lands occupied
by Native Americans. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred to US ownership a vast swathe of Frances colonial possessions,
stretching from Louisiana up to Montana and North Dakota. The Mexican War of 184648 concluded with the absorption of the territories of New
Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, part of Colorado, California and Texas. The
massacre of Native Americans at Wounded

Knee in 1890 brought the construction of the continental nation-state to a conclusion,
endowing the US with long coastlines facing on to the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf of
Mexico. In that year, the US Bureau of the Census officially declared the frontier complete. In addition to the EEZ of the fortyeight states, the US has a further 9.6 million square kilometres of EEZ in the Pacific Ocean. This
derives from several different sources of territorial acquisition. The largest component consists of the state of
Alaska and the Aleutian Island chain, which Imperial Russia colonized in the eighteenth century. In 1867 the US government purchased this vast
territory from Russia for $7.2 million. The total EEZ of Alaska is 3.8 million square kilometreshalf as much again as that of the 48 mainland states. The
Aleutian chain is 1,900 kilometres long, stretching out from Alaskas southwestern tip across the Pacific Ocean, towards Russias Kamchatka peninsula.
It has a population of just over 4,000, and its EEZ accounts for around one-third of the whole exclusive zone of Alaska. Apart from Alaska and the
Aleutian island chain, the total US exclusive zone around its Pacific island territories amounts to 5.8 million square kilometres. Within this total, just 90
square kilometres of land area of uninhabited islands accounts for an exclusive economic zone of 1.95 million square kilometres. The majority of this
total is contributed by territories annexed in 1856 under the Guano Islands Act. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, guano was a
valuable source of agricultural fertilizer, and could also be used to make saltpetre for gunpowder. Washington still possesses most of the groups
acquired under the Act, including the Howland and Baker Islands, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Palmyra Atoll and Kingman Reef. They are little more
than rocks and have no permanent human inhabitants. Their combined land area is just 87 square kilometres. However, due to their dispersion across
the ocean, they have a total exclusive economic zone of 1.55 million square kilometres, almost as large as that of the entire east and west coast of the
US combined, and considerably larger than Chinas undisputed EEZ (see Table 4, below). By
the 1890s, the US was turning its

attentions to overseas expansion. An editorial in the Washington Post on the eve of the
SpanishAmerican War noted the emergence of a new appetite, the yearning to show our
strength . . . Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be,
are animated by a new sensation. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the
taste of blood in the jungle. *7+ As a result of victory over Spain in 1898, the US not only gained effective control of Cuba and Puerto
Rico, but also acquired a string of territories across the Pacific, including the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island; the latter two remain US territories
today. Hawaii was an independent kingdom from 1801 to 1893, when a group consisting mainly of American businessmen overthrew the monarchy.
Colonialism turns the case exclusive economic zones in the ocean cause
disease, violence, and environmental destruction.

Light footprints? An important justification for the UNs establishment of the concept of the
exclusive economic zone was the desire to reduce damage to exhaustible natural resources. It
was hoped that establishing clear national property rights over those resources would transform the areas in question from openaccess global commons into regions of conservation. However,
the Wests own experience in managing

resources within these areas hardly offers an adequate model. The early phases of colonialism, in
particular, had a profoundly negative impact on the Pacific Oceans animal population. The three epic
voyages of Captain James Cook between 1768 and 1780, conducted under the orders of the British Admiralty and supported by the
Royal Society, were a critically important stimulus to the Wests intervention in the region. On each of his expeditions there, Cook
was accompanied by scientists who provided a detailed record of the wildlife they encountered. One of the most surprising and
striking results of the expeditions was the superabundance of wildlife they discovered in the Great Southern Ocean, including vast
numbers of birds, seals and whales. The detailed accounts in Cooks journals and accompanying maps stimulated a wave of
commercial exploitation of the southern seas by European and American ships. Seals
were killed mainly for their

valuable skin and whales mainly for their oil. By the 1830s fur seals in the Southern Ocean were
virtually extinct. The main attack was then directed at the whale population, which came south in the summer breeding
season. The US was the leader in this industry. By 1846 New England alone had 735 whalers, each averaging a kill of 100 whales per
voyage. The killing went on until there was virtually nothing left to kill: In a period of little more than 50 yearsroughly from the
1780s to the 1840sthese little ships with their polyglot crews . . . combed these vast icy oceans so thoroughly that no large marine
animal was to be easily found any more. By the 1880s commercial whaling had been abandoned over large areas of the Pacific
Ocean. [10] The impact on human populations was on a comparable scale. Prior to the arrival of Western
colonists, the combined indigenous population of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands was relatively small; establishing
colonial rule thus did not present the same challenge as in India, China or the countries bordering the South China Sea. Nevertheless,
numerous conflicts occurred between the Western colonists and the indigenous peoples,
particularly over land. The most severe was in New Zealand, between 1843 and 1872, when as
many as 20,000 Maoris may have been killed in a series of brutal confrontations with British
troops. Colonial forces frequently used scorched earth tactics, laying waste to Maori villages
and destroying crops. Although much smaller in scale, the war in New Caledonia between French colonists and indigenous
inhabitants was equally bloody. France annexed the territory in 1853, and violent conflicts ensued as French settlers attempted to
expropriate land from the native Kanaka inhabitants. A full-scale Kanaka uprising erupted in 1878, and the French authorities
responded with attacks on their villages and crops. Indigenous
people in the Pacific were typically treated as

sub-human, and often killed without compunction. In the case of Tasmania, the settler populationmainly
convictscleared the indigenous people off their land through a ferocious manhunt. In 1830 Tasmania was put under martial law.
Aborigines were continually hunted and tracked down like fallow deer, and, once captured, are
deported, singly or in parties, to the islands of the Bass Strait. *11+ Within just five years, only 100200 of the aboriginal population
survived, out of an estimated 5,000. The
spread of disease had an even more serious impact on the

demography of the Pacific territories. Sexually transmitted diseases played an especially
important role; from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, the greatly increased
number of sealers, whalers and ordinary commercial shipping brought with it a thriving sex
industry, as well as violent sexual attacks on indigenous women. A combination of venereal
disease, tuberculosis, smallpox and dysentery was mainly responsible for the large population
declines on many Pacific islands, including Hawaii, Tahiti, the Marquesas and Easter Island. Prior to Cooks arrival in
1778, Hawaiis population was around a quarter of a million on conservative estimates, and may have been significantly higher.
L Nation State Focus

Conceptual shift needed to allow new world order to come into view
Cohen 4 (Jean L., PhD, Professor of Political Thought, Columbia University, Whose
Sovereignty? Empire Versus International Law 2004,
https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/journal/18_3/articles/5052.html/_res/id%3Dsa_
File1/5052_Cohenforweb.pdf&sa=U&ei=48RTU_b4N_SQ4gSey4HYDQ&ved=0CFcQFjAO&usg=AF
QjCNFcq1AZ6zf0me1g3nXL9toL7zDvRA Accessed July 27th, 2014)//bb
The first approach focuses on the emergence of new forms of transnational governance that have
allegedly replaced unitary states as the key actors in the global political system.20 This involves
both an epistemological and an empirical claim. We must, first, stop imagining the international
system as a system of statesunitary entities like billiard balls. In order to perceive its new structural
features, we must open up the black box of the state and apply the idea of the separation of
powers, thus far restricted to domestic governments, to the global political scene. This conceptual shift will
allow the core components of the new world order to come into view: horizontal and vertical
transgovernmental networks.21 The empirical claim is that the state has been disaggregated into
its component parts, each of which functions autonomously in the global political system.
Intergovernmental relations now occur primarily through a multiplicity of horizontal networks linking government officials in distinct
transnational judicial, regulatory, and legislative channels that operate independently of one another without any claim to represent
the state as a unitary entity. Together with vertical governmental networks between national and supranational counterparts,
these linkages comprise the main loci of global governance and law making, replacing diplomacy and interstate cooperation. The
network structure of interaction is allegedly based on the disaggregation of the state and its sovereignty: it enables officials in each
domain to solve common problems, share information, harmonize rules, generalize normative expectations, coordinate policy, and
punish violators of global law without claming to do so in the name of the state as a whole.22
L Mapping
The affs desire to map space flattens the complexity of the ocean and locks in
western modes of thinking.
space is pulverized by private property and the scientific and technical
capacity to treat space on ever more vast levels (2009). Use of maps also decontextualizes and
reduces the complexity of the relations between humans and nature (Harvey 1989). Mobile
forms of traditional land tenure are lost and the full complexity of ocean space as a dynamic
three-dimensional space is reduced to surfaces the sea surface and sea bottom (Pramano & Garmendia 2004).
This facilitates the dispossession of people ( including from the ocean if when one considers Hauofas analysis the
creation of Pacific Islanders now bounded by land). Maps of ocean space have served to reinforce the
representations of the western construction of the ocean as surfaces the surface of the water as a
As Lefebvre describes it,
highway to connect land spaces, a medium across which power is projected and a seabed (surface) important only as a source of
future resources (deep seabed mining). The water
column was invisible, non-space and therefore not social

space to be governed only the resources within it had use value. Thus the complexity of ocean
space was undermined and ignored as its three-D nature was erased. New cartographic techniques have developed
over the years that would allow for more complex representations but traditional representations that reinforce state
power relations continue manifest the fixed view of ocean space. It is easily possible to use current
technology to create three-dimensional ocean maps as a norm with a transparent ocean layer to keep the water column visible.
Rather than use such maps in negotiations between countries or with policy-makers that would
show a more complex construction of ocean space, maps continue to flatten oceans, reinforce
our constructed view of surfaces and maintain present state power relations.
L South China Sea Advantage

Representing the South China Sea as a site of Chinese military competition
hides the US history of exploitation.
We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, and we find the same result. [16]
String of pearls It is often alleged in the Western press that Beijing has a long-run string of pearls strategy to build a succession of
overseas bases in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Much of the analysis of the dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands has also
focused on the possibility that China might gain control over the natural resources in or under the South China Sea. Yet the
vast
expanse of EEZs derived from the Wests colonial expansion in and around the Pacific Ocean,
and ratified by UNCLOS, dwarfs by an enormous margin the territories that are in dispute
between China and its immediate neighbours in the South China Sea (Table 6). China has existed as a
unified state for many hundreds of years, with the Pacific Ocean forming its backyard. From early in its history China possessed the
technological and administrative capability to invade Southeast Asia, as well as the sparsely populated territories of the Pacific,
including todays Australia, New Zealand and the other archipelagos. However, it chose not to do so. By
the end of the

nineteenth century, the Western powers had turned the Pacific Ocean into their own backyard
and had colonized most of the territories around the South China Sea, while China itself had
been reduced to the status of a beggar. Its drastically altered position was symbolized by the flood of millions of
impoverished Chinese migrants to work in the mainly Western-owned mines and plantations around the South China Sea and on the
widely scattered Pacific islands. The
Wests preoccupation with Beijings involvement in the South

China Sea contrasts sharply with the complete absence of discussion of the Wests vast
exclusive economic zones in the region, deriving from colonial conquest. The former imperial
powers acquisition of control over vast marine territories and resources through UNCLOS has
received negligible attention other than in specialist legal journals, yet it eclipses by some
distance the area and resources that are in contention in the South China Sea. The contrast in
treatment of the two issues is especially disturbing in view of the talk of a new Peloponnesian War being triggered by disputes over
the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. It
is as though the Western media have succeeded in focusing the minds of

their populations on a mouse, when a mighty elephant stands behind them unnoticed.
L Property Rights
Property rights are western results in exploitation.
This tradition of property rights and land appropriation continues to play out on the land side of
the ocean/land boundary as recently as the past twenty years with the growth of shrimp farming. Aid and loans have been
given to many coastal developing nations to begin shrimp aquaculture along the shoreline as high value crop that can bring in
foreign revenue.
In many countries this meant the need to create a property rights regime so that
the rule of law could secure foreign investment. As a result, people who traditionally lived along
the coast and had no tradition or documented history of property rights were displacement.
Property rights thus continue to be rooted in the land but operate differently in the ocean. With
occasional exceptions around very near shore property; ocean space itself has not been subject to property rights. Instead, a system
of property rights has been recently been created for resources contained within ocean space. Once again the container is ignored
by Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) are a market device designed to give property rights to fisherman for a certain share of the
allowable fish catch. State
Territorializaton, Ocean Space and Governance While property rights have

not generally been applied to ocean space, state territorialization of ocean space, like land
space, has occurred. The state uses space to control places (Lefebvre 2009) and does so through
a process of territorialization a strategy to assert control of access to an area, people and
things (Sack 1986). Space that were unoccupied become commodified for its use value, which according to Sack means that
a space is considered empty if it is devoid of socially or economically valuable artifacts or things
that were intended to be controlled. The modern state production of space is homogenous, fractured, hierarchized.
L Sovereignty
The nation-state system is in flux, but invoking the value of sovereignty
secures mainstream IR knowledge.
Sanjay 12 (Seth, Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also
Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies. Postcolonial Theory and International Relations:
A Critical Introduction (Routledge, forthcoming December 2012), The Limits of International
Relations Theory: A Postcolonial Critique, 8/24/12, http://www.e-ir.info/2012/08/24/thelimits-of-international-relations-theory-a-postcolonial-critique/)
In the preceding section I suggested that we cannot treat collectivities, whether cultures or nations, as if they were like individuals,
even by analogy. But this does not mean that individuals are natural, while
cultures and nations are historical and

constructed. We are accustomed to think that the social contract theorists of the seventeenth
century awoke to the fact that men are born free, rational and equal, equipped with the
capacity for willing, desiring and promising. However there are those who have also sought to show that the free,
equal, rational and unitary individual presumed by the social sciences as an incontestable fact is no such thing; like the nation and
state, s/he is a product of processes and discourses. The prime source for such sceptical modes of thinking is of course Nietzsche,
who in Genealogy of Morals and other writings argued that the individual capable of making promises, seeing in effects a
consequence of the exercise of the will, and feeling guilt, was forged on the anvil of Greek philosophy, Christian morality and Roman
law. Partly inspired by Nietzsches work, Foucaults writings have in turn influenced those who have similarly sought to show how
the individual was produced, including produced by the knowledges which posited him, rather than discovered by a knowledge
which finally recognised what had always been there, awaiting to be unveiled (as in Jacob Burckhardts classic account, in which the
veil which made man conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation finally lifted in
Renaissance Italy, enabling man to recognise himself as a spiritual individual*xv+). In contrast and contestation with accounts
which trace the emergence into sunlight of the individual subject who had once been shrouded in darkness (but who nonetheless
had always been there, awaiting discovery), there are now accounts which trace the creation of this individual through various
historical processes, including social, economic and discursive transformations.[xvi]The free, equal, rational and unitary individual is
not a fact of the world, the starting point of knowledge, but rather, a consequence or product which has been naturalised such that
it can seem to be a fact. The elements which have produced it as a fact include those knowledges and discourses which purport to
simply recognise and represent the fact that they have helped to produce. It
is not that the individual is real and that

culture and nation are cobbled together and contingent, but rather that the former has
stabilised, and the marks of its manufacture have, over time, been erased; such is not the case
with state and nation, which continue to be contingent and contested, with the struggles that
went into their making often still inscribed on their bodies. Liberal political theory, one could say,
has had more success in naturalising the individual than mainstream IR theory has had in
naturalising state, nation and the international order.The international is a realm where endless and seemingly
irresolvable contestations- over meanings and morals as much as resources and power- testify to the fact that few things have
become so naturalised that they are not potentially subject to contestation, few presumptions so stabilised that they are not
periodically destabilised. In
this sense, there is something to the importance accorded to the

sovereignty/anarchy distinction, even if not in the sense that mainstream IR usually appreciates
it. In what is still one of the most illuminating texts on the subject, Leviathan, Hobbes shows that sovereignty is the name
and form of a capacity to impose and stabilize meanings. It is always a function of strategies and
tactics, struggles and conflicts, and to that degree, contingent and variable. This becomes
especially apparent in the international realm, where no sovereignty has yet succeeded in imposing stable
meanings.It is precisely this- the fact that in the international realm meanings have not become stabilized, and the precarious and
contested nature of modernity can be more readily seen- that makes the international especially interesting. However, the
discipline which makes the international its object of its enquiry is, for the most part, an obstacle to a recognition and exploration of
this, rather than a guide to it. Mainstream
IR seems content to naturalize what it could problematize,

and to assume that which it should deconstruct: whence the need for its critique.
IMPACTS
2NC Impact
Changes within international law doesnt challenge IMPERIAL law which will
always trump the plan the law itself is a tool that enforces imperialism the
impact is exceptional violence.
Petras 2012, Writer at Global Research, (James Petras, Writer at Global Research, Legal
Imperialism and the international Law: Legal Foundations for War Crimes, Debt Collection and
Colonization http://www.globalresearch.ca/legal-imperialism-and-international-law-legalfoundations-for-war-crimes-debt-collection-and-colonization/5313891 December 03,2012, July
30, 2014)MS
Introduction By now we are familiar with imperial states using their military power to attack, destroy and occupy independent
countries. Boatloads of important studies have documented how imperial countries have seized and pillaged the resources of
mineral-rich and agriculturally productive countries, in consort with multi-national corporations. Financial critics have provided
abundant data on the ways in which imperial creditors have extracted onerous rents, royalties and debt payments from indebted
countries and their taxpayers, workers, employees and productive sectors. What has not been examined fully is the over-arching
legal architecture which informs, justifies and facilitates imperial wars, pillage and debt collection. The
Centrality of
Imperial Law While force and violence, especially through overt and covert military intervention,
have always been an essential part of empire-building, it does not operate in a legal vacuum:
Judicial institutions, rulings and legal precedents precede, accompany and follow the process of
empire building. The legality of imperial activity is based largely on the imperial states judicial system and its own legal
experts. Their legal theories and opinions are always presented as over-ruling international law as
well as the laws of the countries targeted for imperial intervention. Imperial law supersedes
international law simply because imperial law is backed by brute force; it possesses imperial/colonial
air, ground and naval armed forces to ensure the supremacy of imperial law. In contrast, international law lacks an
effective enforcement mechanism. Moreover, international law, to the extent that it is effective, is applied only
to the weaker powers and to regimes designated by the imperial powers as violators. The very judicial processes, including the
appointment of judges and prosecutors who interpret international law, investigate
international crime and arrest, sentence and punish guilty parties are under to the influence of the reigning imperial
powers. In other words, the application and jurisdiction of international law is selective and subject to constraints imposed by the
configurations of imperial and national power. International law, at best, can provide a moral judgment, a not insignificant
basis for strengthening the political claims of countries, regimes and people seeking redress from imperial war crimes and economic
pillage. To counter the claims and judgments pertaining to international law, especially in the area of the
Geneva protocols such as war crimes and crimes against humanity, imperial legal experts, scholars and judges have elaborated a
The Uses of Imperial Law Empire-building

throughout history is the result of conquest the use or threat of superior military force. The US
global empire is no exception. Where compliant rulers invite or submit to imperial domination, such acts of treason on
legal framework to justify or exempt imperial-state activity.
the part of puppet or client rulers usually precipitate popular rebellions, which are then suppressed by joint imperial and
collaborator armies. They cite imperial legal doctrine to justify their intervention to repress a subject people in revolt. While empires
arose through the direct or indirect use of unbridled force, the
maintenance and consolidation of empires

requires a legal framework. Legal doctrines precede, accompany and follow the expansion and consolidation of empire
for several reasons. Legality is really an extension of imperial conquest by other means. A state of constant warfare raises the cost of
imperial maintenance. Force, especially in imperial democracies undermines the sense of civic virtue, which the rulers and citizens
claim to uphold. Maintaining
law and order in the conquered nations requires a legal system and
doctrine to uphold imperial rule, giving the facade of legitimacy to the outside world , attracting collaborator classes and
individuals and providing the basis for the recruitment of local military, judicial and police officials. Imperial legal pronouncements,
whether issued directly by executive, judicial, military or administrative bodies, are
deemed the supreme law of the

universe, superior to international law and protocols fashioned by non-imperial authorities and
legal experts. This does not imply that imperial rulers totally discard international law: they just
apply it selectively to their adversaries, especially against independent nations and rulers, in order to justify imperial
intervention and aggression Hence the legal bases for dismantling Yugoslavia or invading Iraq and assassinating its rulers. Legal
rulings are issued by the imperial judiciary to force states to comply with the economic demands of multi-national corporations,
banks, creditors and speculators, even after the local or national courts have ruled such claims unlawful. Imperial law protects and
provides sanctuary and financial protection to convicted former collaborator-rulers charged with human rights crimes, pillage of
public treasury and destruction of democratic institutions. Imperial judicial and administrative agencies selectively investigate,
prosecute and levy severe fines and even jail sentences on banks, individuals and financial institutions of their competitor imperial
countries, thereby strengthening the economic position of their own national imperial firms. Judicial officials are not only
instruments of closely related imperial political and economic powers; they also instrumentalize and, in some cases, override
officials from other branches of their own imperial government and economic sectors. Judges, with ties to particular financial
sectors, may rule in favor of one group of creditors thereby prejudicing others. In a recent ruling, a
New York judge ruled in favor of the demands by minority creditors that the Argentine government make full payment on longstanding national debt in, prejudicing already agreed upon payments to the majority of creditors who had negotiated an earlier
debt-restructuring arrangement. Imperial legal doctrine has played a central role in justifying and providing a basis for the exercise
of international terrorism. Executives, such as US Presidents Bush and Obama, have been provided with the legal power to
undertake cross-national targeted assassinations of opponents using predator drones and ordering military intervention, in
clear
violation of international law and national sovereignty. Imperial law, above all else, legalizes aggression
and economic pillage and undermines the laws of targeted countries, creating lawlessness and chaos among its victims. Imperial law
and judicial rulings form the basis for imperial subjugation on the assumption that the world legal systems are multi-tiered: Imperialcentered legal systems supersede those of less powerful states. Within each tier there are further refinements: Competing imperial
legal systems adjudicate in favor of their partisan political and economic elites. Imperial clients who obey their imperial overlords are
favored by imperial laws while imperial laws are applied against their adversaries. Conclusion Clearly in a world imperial system
there can be no independent judicial bodies who abide by universally accepted legal codes. Each set of judicial authorities reflect
and actively promote policies favoring and extending their imperial prerogatives. There are rare exceptions where a judge will rule
against a particular imperial policy but over the long run imperial law guides judicial opinions Imperial legal doctrines and judicial
decisions set the groundwork for imperial wars and economic pillage. The empires legal experts redefine assassinations, coercion,
torture and arbitrary arrests as compatible with the constitutional order by claiming imminent and constant threats to the security
of the imperial state. Law
is not simply part of the superstructure reflecting the power of economic

or political institutions: it also guides and directs political and economic institutions committing material resources to
implement imperial doctrines. In this sense, imperial rulers are not lawless as some liberal critics would argue; they function in
accordance with imperial jurisprudence and are faithful to the legal doctrines of empire building. It is pointless to argue that most
imperial leaders trample on constitutional guarantees and international laws. If an imperial ruler pursued a constitutional agenda
eroding imperial prerogatives or, even worse, applied
international law to prosecute those carrying out

brutal imperial policy, he would be quickly condemned for dereliction of duty and/or immoral behavior and impeached or
overthrown.
# - Exceptionalism
Colonial international law is exceptionalist and destroys democracy.
Simpson 11 [Michael - as his B.G.S., M.F.A. and Ph.D.. He has been a journalist and cultural
consultant on the Oregon coast for ten years, Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism
and International Law, Tribal College Journal, 11/3/2014,
http://www.tribalcollegejournal.org/archives/12601, 7/27/2014] B.S
Review by Michael W. Simpson The cover for this book shows that it is slated for the law section of the bookstore. But it should also
be stocked in the American Indian/ Indigenous Studies and History sections, as well as in the Serious Stuff We Need to Confront for
Human Survival section. Earlier
this year, the United States was confronted with an embarrassment

when it was revealed that Osama bin Ladens secret code name was Geronimo. This book
explains why we should not be surprised that such was the case. The alleged newness of U.S.
policy toward global terrorism isnt anything new. Rather, the choice to annihilate the
perceived Other is deeply ingrained in U.S. policy and practice. This book explains the
connections to and the continuations from American colonists to the war on terror and how
the United States both claims international law and excepts itself from it. Further, the book
explains how the United States has claimed itself the greatest beacon of freedom, liberty, and
democracy while justifying the denial of such to a substantial number of persons and groups
over time. Finally, we get a glimpse at how American exceptionalism can be confronted and why
it is important for us all to do so. It contains an especially enlightening exposition on federal
Indian law. This important piece of work needs to be read and discussed at every tribal college.
# - Genocide
International laws have been deeply entrenched by Euro-centric ideals and
beliefs, justifies genocide and violence towards those not deemed to fit in
Melbourne, Australia. He earned an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School. Finding the Peripheries:
My interest lies, however, not only in the important point that positivism legitimized conquest and dispossession, but also in the
reverse relationshipin identifying how notions of positivism and sovereignty were themselves shaped by the encounter. In
contrast to the view that the colonial confrontation illuminates a minor and negligible aspect of sovereignty doctrine, my
argument is that no adequate account of sovereignty can be given without analyzing the
constitutive eect of colonialism on sovereignty. Colonialism cannot be accounted for as an
example of the application of sovereignty; rather, sovereignty was constituted and shaped
through colonialism.11 My argument is that what passes now as the dening dilemma of the
discipline, the problem of order among states, is a problem that has been peculiar, from the
time of its origin, to the specicities of European history. Additionally, the extension and
universalization of the European experience, which is achieved by transmuting it into the major
theoretical problem of the discipline, has the effect of suppressing and subordinating other
histories of international law and the people to whom it has applied. Within the axiomatic
framework of positivism, which decrees that European states are sovereign while non-European
states are not, there is only one means of relating the history of the non-European world, and
this the positivists proceed to do: it is a history of the civilizing mission, the process by which
peoples of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacic were nally assimilated into a European
international law. This is the history I am examining, not with a view to furthering it, but in an attempt to point to the
ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it.12 In attempting this sort of a history, I
depart from the tendency, present even among writers such as Alexandrowicz who are
sympathetic to the injustices of colonialism, to focus on positivisms triumphant suppression of
the non-European world. The violence of positivist language in relation to non-European
peoples is hard to overlook. Positivists developed an elaborate vocabulary for denigrating these
peoples, presenting them as suitable objects for conquest, and legitimizing the most extreme
violence against them, all in the furtherance of the civilizing missionthe discharge of the white
mans burden.13 Despite this, it is incorrect to see the colonial encounter as a series of problems that were eortlessly
resolved by the simple application of the formidable intellectual resources of positivism. Rather, I argue, positivists were
engaged in an ongoing struggle to dene, subordinate, and exclude the uncivilized native; my
argument is that colonial problems posed a signicant and ultimately insuperable set of
challenges to positivism and its pretensions to develop a set of doctrines that could coherently
account for native personality, a task that was crucial to the positivist self-image. The brutal
realities of conquest and dispossession can hardly be ameliorated by asserting that the legal
framework legitimizing this dispossession was contradictory and incoherent. But it is perhaps by
pointing to these inconsistencies and ambiguities, by interrogating how it was that sovereignty became the exclusive preserve of
Europe, and by questioning this framework, even while describing how it came into being, that it might be possible to open the way
not only towards a dierent history of the discipline, but to a dierent understanding of the workings and eects of colonialism
itself.14 This in turn is part of a larger project that has been the preoccupation of many jurists of the non-European world: to
understand the relationship between international law and colonialism in order to formulate
more adequately the potential of the discipline to remedy the enduring inequities and
imbalances that resulted from the colonial confrontation.
# - Violence
US international policy cloaked in mindset of superiority leads to violence and
destruction
Greenwald 13 (Glenn Greenwald, former columnist on civil liberties and US national security
issues for the Guardian, the Guardian, 2/18/13,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/american-exceptionalism-northkorea-nukes, accessed 7/28/14)
Last week, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, and the US - the country with the world's
largest stockpile of that weapon and the only one in history to use it - led the condemnation (US
allies with large nuclear stockpiles, such as Britain and Israel, vocally joined in). Responding to
unnamed commentators who apparently noted this contradiction, National Review's Charles Cooke voiced these two
assertions:Nobody can reasonably dispute that North Korea is governed by a monstrous regime and that it would be better if
they lacked a nuclear weapons capability. That isn't what interests me about this. What interests me
here is that highlighted claim: that the US "is the greatest country in world history", and
therefore is entitled to do that which other countries are not. This declaration always genuinely fascinates
me. Note how it's insufficient to claim the mere mantle of Greatest Country on the Planet. It's way beyond that: the Greatest
Country Ever to Exist in All of Human History (why not The Greatest Ever in All of the Solar Systems?). The very notion that this
distinction could be objectively or even meaningfully measured is absurd. But
the desire to believe it is so strong, the

need to proclaim one's own unprecedented superiority so compelling, that it's hardly
controversial to say it despite how nonsensical it is. The opposite is true: it has been vested with the status of
orthodoxy. What I'm always so curious about is the thought process behind this formulation. Depending on how you count, there
are 179 countries on the planet. The probability that you will happen to be born into The Objectively Greatest One, to the
extent there is such a thing, is less than 1%. As the US accounts for roughly 5% of the world's population, the probability that you will
be born into it is 1/20. Those are fairly long odds for the happenstance of being born into the Greatest Country on Earth. But if you
extend the claim to the Greatest Country that Has Ever Existed in All of Human History, then the probability is minute: that you will
happen to be born not only into the greatest country on earth, but will be born at the precise historical time when the greatest of all
the countries ever to exist is thriving. It's similar to winning the lottery: something so mathematically improbable that while our
intense desire to believe it may lead us on an emotional level wildly to overestimate its likelihood, our rational faculties should tell
us that it is unlikely in the extreme and therefore to doubt seriously that it will happen. Do people who wave the Greatest Country in
All of Human History flag engage that thought process at all? I'm asking this genuinely. Given the sheer improbability that it is true,
do they search for more likely explanations for why they believe this? In
particular, given that human beings'

perceptions are shaped by the assumptions of their culture and thus have a natural inclination
to view their own culture as superior, isn't it infinitely more likely that people view their society
as objectively superior because they're inculcated from birth in all sorts of overt and subtle ways
to believe this rather than because it's objectively true? It's akin to those who believe in their own great luck
that they just happened to be born into the single religion that is the One True One rather than suspecting that they believe this
because they were taught to from birth. At the very least, the tendency of the human brain to view the world from a self-centered
perspective should render suspect any beliefs that affirm the objective superiority of oneself and one's own group, tribe, nation, etc.
The "truths" we're taught to believe from birth - whether nationalistic, religious, or cultural should be the ones treated with the greatest skepticism if we continue to embrace them in adulthood, precisely
because the probability is so great that we've embraced them because we were trained to, or because our subjective influences led
us to them, and not because we've rationally assessed them to be true (or, as in the case of the British Cooke, what we were taught
to believe about western nations closely aligned to our own). That doesn't mean that what we're taught to believe from childhood is
wrong or should be presumed erroneous. We may get lucky and be trained from the start to believe what is actually true. That's
possible. But we should at least regard those precepts with great suspicion, to subject them to particularly rigorous scrutiny,
especially when it comes to those that teach us to believe in our own objective superiority or that of the group to which we belong.
So potent is the subjective prism, especially when it's implanted in childhood, that I'm always astounded at some people's certainty
of their own objective superiority ("the greatest country in world history"). It's certainly true that Americans are justifiably proud of
certain nationalistic attributes: class mobility, ethnic diversity, religious freedom, large immigrant populations, life-improving
technological discoveries, a commitment to some basic liberties such as free speech and press, historical progress in correcting some
of its worst crimes. But all of those virtues are found in equal if not, at
this point, greater quantity in numerous

other countries. Add to that mix America's shameful attributes - its historic crimes of land theft, genocide, slavery and racism,
its sprawling penal state, the company it keeps on certain human rights abuses, the aggressive attack on Iraq, the creation of a
worldwide torture regime, its pervasive support for the world's worst tyrannies - and it becomes not just untenable, but laughable,
to lavish it with that title. This is more than just an intellectual exercise. This belief in America's unparalleled greatness has immense
impact. It is not hyperbole to say that the sentiment expressed by Cooke is the overarching belief system of the US political and
media class, the primary premise shaping political discourse. Politicians of all types routinely recite the same claim, and Cooke's
tweet was quickly re-tweeted by a variety of commentators and self-proclaimed foreign policy experts from across the spectrum.
Note that Cooke did not merely declare America's superiority, but rather used it to affirm a
principle: as a result of its objective superiority, the US has the right to do things that other
nations do not. This self-affirming belief - I can do X because I'm Good and you are barred from X
because you are Bad - is the universally invoked justification for all aggression. It's the crux of
hypocrisy. And most significantly of all, it is the violent enemy of law: the idea that everyone is bound by the same set of rules and
restraints. This
eagerness to declare oneself exempt from the rules to which others are bound, on
the grounds of one's own objective superiority, is always the animating sentiment behind
nationalistic criminality. Here's what Orwell said about that in Notes on Nationalism: "All nationalists have the
power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose
it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does
them, and there is almost no kind of outrage torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment
without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our'
side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for
not even hearing about them." Preserving
this warped morality, this nationalistic prerogative, is, far and

away, the primary objective of America's foreign policy community, composed of its political
offices, media outlets, and (especially) think tanks. What Cooke expressed here - that the US,
due to its objective superiority, is not bound by the same rules as others - is the most cherished
and aggressively guarded principle in that circle. Conversely, the notion that the US should be bound by the same
rules as everyone else is the most scorned and marginalized. Last week, the Princeton professor Cornel West denounced
Presidents Nixon, Bush and Obama as "war criminals", saying that "they have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for
freedom, but
they're suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals". West specifically
cited Obama's covert drone wars and killing of innocent people, including children. What West was
doing there was rather straightforward: applying the same legal and moral rules to US aggression that he has applied to other
countries and which the US applies to non-friendly, disobedient regimes. In other words, West did exactly that which is most
scorned and taboo in DC policy circles. And thus he had to be attacked, belittled and dismissed as irrelevant. Andrew Exum, the
Afghanistan War advocate and Senior Fellow at the Center for New American Security, eagerly volunteered for the task:
Note that there's no effort to engage Professor West's arguments. It's pure ad hominem (in the classic sense of the logical fallacy):
"who is "Cornell [sic] West" to think that anything he says should be even listened to by "national security professionals"? It's a
declaration of exclusion: West is not a member in good standing of DC's Foreign Policy Community, and therefore his views can and
should be ignored as Unserious and inconsequential. Leave aside the inane honorific of "national security professional" (is there a
licensing agency for that?). Leave aside the noxious and pompous view that the views of non-national-security-professionals whatever that means - should be ignored when it comes to militarism, US foreign policy and war crimes. And also leave aside the
fact that the vast majority of so-called "national security professionals" have been disastrously wrong about virtually everything of
significance over the last decade at least, including when most of them used their platforms and influence not only to persuade
others to support the greatest crime of our generation - the aggressive attack on Iraq - but also to scorn war opponents as too
Unserious to merit attention. As Samantha Power put it in 2007: "It was Washington's conventional wisdom that led us into the
worst strategic blunder in the history of US foreign policy. The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush
Administration, but also by editorial pages, the foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of
Congress." Given that history, if one wants to employ ad hominems: one should be listened to more, not less, if one is denied the
title of "national security professional". The key point is what constitutes West's transgression. His real crime is that he tacitly
assumed that the US should be subjected to the same rules and constraints as all other nations in the world, that he rejected the
notion that America has the right to do what others nations may not. And this is the premise - that there are any legal or moral
constraints on the US's right to use force in the world - that is the prime taboo thought in the circles of DC Seriousness. That's
why West, the Princeton professor, got mocked as someone too silly to pay attention to:
because he rejected that most cherished American license that is grounded in the self-loving
exceptionalism so purely distilled by Cooke. West made a moral and legal argument, and US "national security
professionals" simply do not recognize morality or legality when it comes to US aggression. That's why our foreign policy discourse
so rarely includes any discussion of those considerations. A US president can be a "war criminal" only if legal and moral rules apply to
his actions on equal terms as all other world leaders, and that is precisely the idea that is completely anathema to everything
"national security professionals" believe (it also happens to be the central principle the Nuremberg Tribunal sought to affirm:
"while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn
aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment"). US foreign policy analysts are permitted to
question the tactics of the US government and military (will bombing these places succeed in the goals?). They are permitted to
argue that certain policies will not advance American interests (drones may be ineffective in stopping Terrorism). But what they are
absolutely barred from doing - upon pain of being expelled from the circles of Seriousness - is to argue that there are any legal or
moral rules that restrict US aggression, and especially to argue that the US is bound by the same set of rules which it seeks to impose
on others (recall the intense attacks on Howard Dean, led by John Kerry, when Dean suggested in 2003 that the US
should support a system of universally applied rules because "we won't always have the strongest military": the very idea that the
US should think of itself as subject to the same rules as the rest of the world is pure heresy). In 2009, Les Gelb - the former Pentagon
and State Department official and Chairman Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations: the ultimate "national security
professional" - wrote an extraordinary essay in the journal Democracy explaining why he and so many others in his circle
supported the attack on Iraq. This is what he blamed it on: unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the
disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility." That someone like Les Gelb says that
"national security professionals" have career incentives to support US wars "to retain political and professional credibility" is
amazing, yet clearly true. When I interviewed Gelb in 2010 regarding that quote, he elaborated that DC foreign policy experts "national security professionals" - know that they can retain relevance in and access to key government circles only if they affirm the
unfettered right of the US to use force whenever and however it wants. They
can question tactics, but never the

supreme prerogative of the US, the unchallengeable truth of American exceptionalism. In sum, think
tank "scholars" don't get invited to important meetings by "national security professionals" in DC if they point out that the US is
committing war crimes and that the US president is a war criminal. They don't get invited to those meetings if they argue that the US
should be bound by the same rules and laws it imposes on others when it comes to the use of force. They don't get invited if they
ask US political officials to imagine how they would react if some other country were routinely bombing US soil with drones and
cruise missiles and assassinating whatever Americans they wanted to in secret and without trial. As the reaction to Cornel West
shows, making those arguments triggers nothing but ridicule and exclusion. One gets invited to those meetings only if one blindly
affirms the right of the US to do whatever it wants, and then devotes oneself to the pragmatic question of how that unfettered
license can best be exploited to promote national interests. The culture of DC think tanks, "international relations" professionals,
and foreign policy commenters breeds allegiance to these American prerogatives and US power centers - incentivizes reflexive
defenses of US government actions - because, as Gelb says, that is the only way to advance one's careerist goals as a "national
security professional". If you see a 20-something aspiring "foreign policy expert" or "international relations professional" in DC, what
you'll view, with some rare exceptions, is a mindlessly loyal defender of US force and prerogatives. It's what that culture, by design,
breeds and demands. In that crowd, Cooke's tweets aren't the slightest bit controversial. They're axioms, from which all valid
conclusions flow. This
belief in the unfettered legal and moral right of the US to use force anywhere
in the world for any reason it wants is sustained only by this belief in objective US superiority,
this myth of American exceptionalism. And the results are exactly what one would expect from
an approach grounded in a belief system so patently irrational. UPDATE Cooke has a mostly thoughtful reply,
here. I don't have time this afternoon to respond in detail, so I'll leave it to readers to decide if you think he's offered a satisfactory
explanation for what he thinks. Just two notes: (1) I explicitly said I was not contesting the view that North Korea's government is
totalitarian and horrific, and (2) I wasn't suggesting that Cooke himself believes that the US has the right to use force anywhere it
wants and for whatever reasons, only that the premise of American exceptionalism he endorses is the necessary ingredient for that
belief and is typically the animating principle behind it. I quoted Cooke because, as he himself suggests, what he wrote is a pure
distillation of a widely held view in US political discourse. Related to all of this, Harvard professor Stephen Walt (is he a national
security professional or someone to whom such professionals should listen?) wrote a post on this topic in late, 2011 entitled
"The Myth of American Exceptionalism" (see, in particular, the numerous examples he cites of people of influence espousing what
Cooke wrote here).
ALTERNATIVES
2NC Framework/Alt
Sovereignty is maintained discursively the only ethical response is to rethink
international law and refuse western modes of thought.
Vardy 11 (Mark, PhD Department of Sociology, Sovereignty as a Social Issue: The Case of Inuit
Nunangat 2011, 7/29/14,
http://www.rha.is/static/files/NRF/OpenAssemblies/Hveragerdi2011/proceedings/vardy_final.pdf) mc
To my mind, the fact that Inuit Nunangat signifies sea ice as
a constitutive part of Inuit territory as experienced in

everyday life, together with the fact that sea ice is melting, presents a set of conditions that calls for ethical responses.
The response I advocate here involves questioning the ways territory, political authority and sovereignty have
often been thought together in Western political theory. As Shadian (2010) argues, Inuit forms of governance
create the space and opportunity to reconceptualise Western practices of governance and the theories that support
them. I want to further this effort by considering what an ethical response is to the situation in which we find ourselves, which is
that the material signified by Inuit signifiers of territory is disappearing. It seems to me that if territory, in different ways, has been
configured as the necessary precondition of sovereignty (Larkins 2010; Agnew 2005, 2009), and if territory
has been
conceived as fixed land to be bought, sold, mapped for military and strategic purposes and
subjected to legal and technical definitions (Elden 2010), then an ethical response necessarily
involves rethinking sovereignty without premising it upon fixed territory land as a basis. The
concept of I am arguing for here does not treat sovereignty as a condition that preexists the constitution of societies, but
rather as a relational phenomena. That is, while sovereignty has a material component, and as such is in the world in a
concrete way, it is brought into being and enacted, materially and discursively, by actors in the name
of sovereignty (Agnew 2009: 1046). This view does not foreclose the potential actions and networks of assemblages through
which Inuit groups can and are, in concrete ways, advancing understandings and practices of sovereignty that are more beneficial to
themselves. This is an important point to note because constructivist critiques of modernist conceptions of sovereignty run the risk
of inadvertently consigning Inuit groups to a mode of politics that is irrevocably local rather than seeing how existing structures and
agencies could be used to exert Inuit self determination. As Walker (2010) suggests, moving from configuring the world as
sovereign nationstates operating within a system of states to a reordering of inter and intra state actors may not be so easy as
sometimes presumed, even if it is acknowledged that different actors and entities in different scales are operating in complex
heterogeneous fields. The
issue here is thinking about the possibilities for politics that are both
sustained and foreclosed by centering an account of politics in terms of the dualism of the
presence absence of the modern state system and individual nation states (Walker 2010: 198).
Rethinking the territorial a priori as the spatial and temporal flux of sea ice, rather than the rigid
fixity of land, supports a vision of politics that is attuned to how sovereignty, as a heterogeneous
phenomenon, is invoked and implicated in different ways in different contexts. In this way, it could
potentially support both the argument that Inuvialuit should participate in decisions regarding Beaufort Sea fossil fuels and that the
interests of the Canadian state should not trump the vision expressed in A Circumpolar Inuit Declaration of Sovereignty in the Arctic
(Inuit Circumpolar Council 2009). Crucially, however, this would depend upon reworking the broader cultural ethos through which
individuals are implicated in sovereignty. It thus extends the ethic of rethinking sovereignty, for example through the principle of
reconciliation, to the population of southern Canada, instead of leaving Inuit understandings of sovereignty as an issue that is
exclusive to local Arctic populations and their lived experiences. This follows Connollys (2007) argument that: in democratic
constitutionalism, sovereignty circulates uncertainly between the multitude, the traditions it embodies, constitutionally sanctioned
authorities, and, where operative, the written constitution that the authorities interpret. The relative weight of each element can be
specified more closely, although never completely, according to need and context (Connolly 2007: 33). Although this article is
focused on sea ice reduction, there are other changes in the Arctic environment such as sea level rise and permafrost thaw that have
profound social and political implications across different temporal and spatial scales. Rather
than maintain a
conception of social and political action that remains irrevocably bound to concepts of
sovereignty that maintain a fixed basis, thinking the flux of sea ice as a basis for social and
political life might provide the basis to meet challenging conditions with care; it might provide
the basis for thinking sovereignty as a social issue.
Alt Relational
We must make sovereignty a conceptual form of territorializing the land
Nunangat 2011, 7/29/14,
The concept of I am arguing for here does not treat sovereignty as a condition that preexists
the constitution of societies, but rather as a relational phenomena. That is, while sovereignty
has a material component, and as such is in the world in a concrete way, it is brought into being
and enacted, materially and discursively, by actors in the name of sovereignty (Agnew 2009:
1046). This view does not foreclose the potential actions and networks of assemblages through
which Inuit groups can and are, in concrete ways, advancing understandings and practices of sovereignty that
are more beneficial to themselves. This is an important point to note because constructivist
critiques of modernist conceptions of sovereignty run the risk of inadvertently consigning Inuit groups to a
mode of politics that is irrevocably local rather than seeing how existing structures and agencies
could be used to exert Inuit self determination. As Walker (2010) suggests, moving from configuring
the world as sovereign nationstates operating within a system of states to a reordering of inter
and intra state actors may not be so easy as sometimes presumed, even if it is acknowledged
that different actors and entities in different scales are operating in complex heterogeneous
fields. The issue here is thinking about the possibilities for politics that are both sustained and
foreclosed by centering an account of politics in terms of the dualism of the presence absence
of the modern state system and individual nation states (Walker 2010: 198). Rethinking the territorial
a priori as the spatial and temporal flux of sea ice, rather than the rigid fixity of land, supports a
vision of politics that is attuned to how sovereignty, as a heterogeneous phenomenon, is
invoked and implicated in different ways in different contexts.
Alt Social Rethinking

Rethinking sovereignty as a social phenomenon solves.
Nunangat 2011, 7/29/14,
Crucially, however, this would depend upon reworking the broader cultural ethos through which
individuals are implicated in sovereignty. It thus extends the ethic of rethinking sovereignty, for
example through the principle of reconciliation, to the population of southern Canada, instead of leaving Inuit understandings of
sovereignty as an issue that is exclusive to local Arctic populations and their lived experiences. This
follows Connollys
(2007) argument that: in democratic constitutionalism, sovereignty circulates uncertainly
between the multitude, the traditions it embodies, constitutionally sanctioned authorities, and,
where operative, the written constitution that the authorities interpret. The relative weight of
each element can be specified more closely, although never completely, according to need and
context (Connolly 2007: 33). Although this article is focused on sea ice reduction, there are other changes in the
Arctic environment such as sea level rise and permafrost thaw that have profound social and
political implications across different temporal and spatial scales. Rather than maintain a
conception of social and political action that remains irrevocably bound to concepts of
sovereignty that maintain a fixed basis, thinking the flux of sea ice as a basis for social and
political life might provide the basis to meet challenging conditions with care; it might provide
the basis for thinking sovereignty as a social issue.
Sovereignty needs to be seen as a social connection inability to do so can

cause a structural social failure
Nunangat 2011, 7/29/14,
At the outset of this paper, it appeared that different understandings of sovereignty are being
articulated by Inuit groups and the Government of Canada. In the former articulation,
sovereignty is seen as a way to ensure the wellbeing of people and the environment upon
which they depend. In the latter, sovereignty is seen as a way to exert control over space.
However, a closer examination show that, in practice, this binary distinction between control
over space and betterment of social conditions breaks down into multiple claims and practices.
In the first example discussed above, domestic policies regarding the language of instruction in public
education have a direct consequence on the legitimacy of claims made in an international
context. This could lend credence to the view that states only retain legitimate authority if they ensure their citizens are well
cared for, in which case there is no necessary reason why Inuit and Canadian Government understandings of sovereignty should
contradict one another: the beneficent sovereign could disperse social goods education, and social security in the face of changing
environmental conditions to subjects while protecting them from hostile outsiders. However, this example also suggests that if
subjects express their dissatisfaction with social conditions, and if this expression of dissatisfaction is recognized by other nation
states in the state system, then the ability of states to act with authority over geographic territory, in this case Canada, can be
threatened. At a minimum, then, this example shows that sovereignty
is not a static phenomenon but is

socially contestable. However, it also appears that there is nothing essential to the claim sovereignty should include social
and environmental security that would prevent it from being enfolded within the argument that sovereignty is the exercise of
control over a certain space. The second example discussed above could be interpreted as a matter of deciding how various legal
instruments and agreements contravene or do not contravene one another. However, as ManleyCasimir (2011: 38) argues, it is
more fundamentally a question of interpreting how the principle of reconciliation should be applied. The principle of reconciliation is
important to note here not only because it signals the possibility that the Canadian state can be made to consider different ethical
bases for action over time, but also because it indicates the importance of paying attention to the ways social groups do or do not
become deemed as legitimately codified actors in legal decisions and agreements. After all, one of the issues at play in the second
example involves historical agreements first signed between Britain and Russia before Canada itself became a nationstate.
Sovereignty is not automatically bestowed upon groups of people as soon as they meet a
universal set of criteria. Rather, sovereignty is a politically contestable and changeable
phenomenon. But does this mean that Inuit understandings of sovereignty are different from those that have prevailed through
western modernity, and if so, how? A more specific way of asking this question is: should the Inuvialuit Final Agreement offer a
route for the Inuvialuit to intervene in UNCLOS, thereby increasing claims to selfdetermination in an international context, would
the sovereignty thus manifested be of a different character or kind than the form sovereignty that would promote the social and
environmental security highlighted by the Inuit Declaration of Sovereignty? Clearly, the
assumptions that one holds

of sovereignty will change how one views the possible answers to these issues. This gives rise to
another question: what theoretical assumptions need to be made of sovereignty not only to analyze
the contemporary situation but also allow it to exist as it does in the first place? As has been well
documented, several competing theories of sovereignty exist. For example, Max Weber defined sovereignty as the legitimate
exercise of violence in a given geographic area, and Carl Schmidt defined it, within the modern liberal nationstate, as the capacity
of the executive to make the decision to suspend the constitution and to impose the law by acting outside of the juridical order
(Agnew 2009; Walker 2010). Despite
the various ways sovereignty has been conceptualized, however,

territory has typically been configured as its necessary precondition (Agnew 2009; Larkins 2010). Such
territorial assumptions are made evident in claims made in the popular press by politicians, including the Canadian prime minister,
that appear to invoke a Schmitian logic of sovereignty (the Canadian state declaring itself the decider of the law in the putative
absence of juridical order that the shrinking sea ice unveils), or a Weberian logic (the state as capable of deploying legitimate
violence in the form of the military and coast guard in the Arctic). The assumption that Canada could come under military threat,
which informs both of these narratives, has been cogently critiqued by (Lackenbauer 2008), who argues populist appeals to Arctic
sovereignty made by politicians detract from an understanding of the actual dynamics through which Canada and other Arctic
nations are responding to various issues. However, while Lackenbauer (2008) might be correct in his analysis, he doesnt treat
sovereignty itself as a mode of political thought. Such a critique is launched, however, from a point of view that draws on
constructivist insights. Broadhead (2010) argues Inuit
declarations of sovereignty can be used to rewrite the

colonialist mental maps through which the Arctic is often thought. Similarly, Vaninni et al. (2009) draw
from Zygmunt Baumans (2000) metaphor of modernity as liquid to argue that we need to reimagine
the Canadian Arctic archipelago as a flux of mobility, rather than think of it as a rigid space that is
an empty container waiting to be filled with the action of modernist politics imported from southern Canada. These critiques,
which assert that the difficulties of responding to environmental changes in the Arctic through
categories of political thought bequeathed by colonialism should not be ignored, are taken up by
Gerhardt et al. (2010) who argue that the limitations of making strict delineations between ocean and land, as seen in modernist
conceptions of sovereignty, are being demonstrated by the response to melting sea ice. This, together with Inuit declarations of
sovereignty, they argue, can lead to configuring the world differently than dividing it between territoriallybased sovereign
changing Arctic can be figured as a fluid space of crossings

[in which] new systems of governance can be employed that push the limits of the state form
and enable new possibilities for cooperation and inclusion within and across state borders
nationstates and international oceans; the
(Gerhardt et al. 2010: 999). Similarly, in their critique of Arctic geopolitics, Dittmer et al. (2011) argue that both neorealist political
discourses (which regard the Arctic as a site inevitably decided upon by nationstates acting in their own self interest within an
anarchic space) and liberal discourses (which regard the Arctic as a region best governed by international cooperation between
nationstates, indigenous organizations, and established institutions and governance structures) are beholden to the modern and
masculine conceits that the nationstate and science are superior ways of knowing and ordering space. They
argue instead
for an Arctic politics that emphasizes the perceptions and understandings of Arctic inhabitants
(Dittmer et al. 2011). It is this experience of territory, as a place experienced by Inuit that I want to
pursue as a way of refiguring the territorial a priori of sovereignty.
AFF
International law is only colonial when its exceptional the plan reverses this
and holds the US accountable. Affirming international institutions is essential to
democracy and challenging Empire
The first project entails acknowledging the existence and value of a dualistic world order whose core
remains the international society of states embedded within (suitably reformed) international
institutions and international law, but that also has important cosmopolitan elements and cosmopolitan legal principles
(human rights norms) upon which the discourse of transnationalism and governance relies, if inadequately.
On this approach (my own), legal cosmopolitanism is potentially linked to a project radically distinct from
empire and pure power politicsnamely, the democratization of international relations and the
updating of international law. This requires the strengthening of supranational institutions, formal
legal reform, and the creation of a global rule of law that protects both the sovereign equality of
states based on a revised conception of sovereignty and human rights. Much will depend on how the new,
and its relation to what went before, is framed. Unlike the theorists of cosmopolitan law and justice without state sovereignty, the
paradox for which I want to argue is that today the
rearticulation and democratization of sovereignty

(internal and external), configured within a multilayered world order with effective international
institutions and an updated international law, is the sine qua non for the emergence of a global rule of law and
constitutes an important part of a counterproject to empire. Without a global rule of law that
protects sovereignty as well as human rights, any talk of cosmopolitan right, especially and
above all the alleged right to intervene militarily to enforce human rights, is inherently suspect.
Cosmopolitan right can supplementbut not replacesovereignty-based public international law.
International law key to solve global problems.

Indeed, international human rights law has arguably become the only global vision of social
justice currently available.68 It has replaced all other isms and promises a just world order. Mention may also be made
of a rapidly evolving international criminal law with the International Criminal Court (ICC) at its heart. There are conventions
that seek to address the problems of organized crimes, including the trafficking and smuggling
of people, as also combating corruption.69 The rapid development of international laws to
combat international terrorism has further renewed faith in international law. A dozen international
treaties and a Counter Terrorism Committee (CTC) established by the U.N. Security Council hold out the promise of effectively
fighting international terrorism through international cooperation.70 The need to develop an appropriate response to the current
problem of piracy further fortifies the spirit of international law. The
work of bodies like the International Law

Commission (ILC), United Nations Conference on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), and the
Human Rights Council (HRC) also give the impression of a constantly developing international
law that plug gaps in global law and facilitate international cooperation to address pressing
problems. International institutions also help renew faith in international law by co-opting critique in the same way as capitalism
does. The ability of international institutions to take critique and turn it into an instrument of its
own legitimacy and advancement is a remarkable story. The World Bank is a good example of how critique is coopted to strengthen the institution. In order to deflect the censure it has faced over the years the Bank has adopted cosmetic policy
changes to represent itself today as being gender sensitive, green, and a friend of the poor.71 The role of the community of
international lawyers is also crucial in renewing the spirit of international law.
I law inevitable better to reform.

A narrative of progress informs much mainstream international law scholarship helping reaffirm
faith in international law. The fact that international law has come to be addressed by key thinkers of our times, be it a
John Rawls or a Jurgen Habermas, gives the language of international law further salience. Capitalism, Imperialism, and International
Law 39 in the Twenty-First Century In sum, the language of international law constantly offers hope by giving the impression that it
is addressing lags and filling gaps. In
that way the new spirit of international law legitimizes the new
imperial social, economic and political formation. It is not as if the renewal of the spirit of international law in the
era of accelerated globalization is altogether without substance. The world cannot do without international law in
dealing with global problems that confront humanity in the twenty-first century. It is only through the
international legal process that problems such as the global ecological crises can be addressed. Yet international law also facilitates
the imperial project. The double life of international law thus parallels the double life of capitalism; the
latter is also not altogether without achievement. It accounts for why TWAIL advocates engagement with it. It stays away from forms
of critique that invite the charge of legal nihilism. But TWAIL needs to articulate and clarify the goals and values to which it is
committed and ways in which these can be embodied in contemporary international law.
Holding the US accountable for international law can challenge the worst forms
of sovereignty.
There is an alternative to the project of empire and to the restricted set of choices Schmitt described. I
believe that it is possible to strengthen international institutions and develop international law in a
way that protects state sovereignty and human rights, supports popular sovereignty, and helps
to regulate the self-regulation of the new nonstate transnational powers while fostering a global
rule of law. This requires certain theoretical and practical steps. The disassociation of the tight link between
autonomy and exclusivity is the first theoretical step toward such a project. The second is the
abandonment of the absolutist and decisionistic concept of sovereignty in favor of the relational
model described above. If these two ideas are linked together, then it is perfectly conceivable that
international law could penetrate the black box of the state without undermining its sovereign
autonomy or integrity. When states agree to certain restrictions, when they delegate jurisdiction to
supranational entities, when they establish frameworks for cooperation that create binding rules, they
do not thereby lose or divide their sovereignty indeed, they may even enhance it.
Democratization of law solves.

Accordingly, the
articulation of sovereignty within a community of states that decides to consider

one another as equals is the political precondition for feasible and effective international law. In
other words, international law has to be based on a set of political relationships between states to which sovereignty is
ascribed within a common framework, based on shared political norms, involving mutual
recognition, balance, and institutionalized cooperation. Moreover, formal equality has to be linked to some
degree of material equality among the states. In an institutionalized structure of power and counterpowers,
no single sovereign state should be able to prevail over all the others and impose its will as law.
This does not exclude a guarantor of international right and international law that is, a state powerful enough to ensure that
others play by the rules to which it also subscribes. The ascription of sovereignty
to states by an international
community by virtue of which they become members and equals is thus a way of limiting as
well as empowering those states. Without this, an opponent becomes nothing more than an object of violent measures,
while law becomes mere window dressing. I see no reason why this conception cannot be generalized to all states construed as
equal members of the international community along the lines of the UN Charter. Equality need not be construed as a substantive
principle of homogeneity based on a friend/enemy conception of the political. It is enough that the general principles of the
international ordersovereign equality and human rightsare accepted in principle (as they are by any state that has joined the
UN), and allowed to develop into a shared culture of mutual respect of rights and accountability. The democratization
external sovereignty backed up by international law is thus the third step in the project.
of

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International Law K

of the most influential of Greek concepts taken up by the Romans

national self-interest demands action contrary to international

maintain that if international law is not law,

physical, chemical and biological complexity of ocean space

c. Vote negative Continued reliance on international law will only result in

the unvarnished racism, greed, and

European powers shed their colonial

one feel an attachment to international law when

nation, not just

superiority of Western civilization is laced through contemporary international

Modern international law is still inherently colonial and unredeemable the

is true that international law is now more open and

International Court of Justice may theoretically draw upon the

question is not so much whether the nineteenth

and the nineteenth century are an integral part of the

colonial confrontation was not a confrontation between two sovereign

the colonized peoples should be governed and, later, what

massacre of Native Americans at Wounded

the 1890s, the US was turning its

March-April 2013, http://newleftreview.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/II/80/peter-nolan-imperialarchipelagos, 7/28/2014]B.S

the Wests own experience in managing

were killed mainly for their

people in the Pacific were typically treated as

spread of disease had an even more serious impact on the

L Nation State Focus

column was invisible, non-space and therefore not social

L South China Sea Advantage

the end of the

Wests preoccupation with Beijings involvement in the South

is as though the Western media have succeeded in focusing the minds of

Territorializaton, Ocean Space and Governance While property rights have

cultures and nations are historical and

is not that the individual is real and that

this sense, there is something to the importance accorded to the

IR seems content to naturalize what it could problematize,

The Uses of Imperial Law Empire-building

maintenance and consolidation of empires

deemed the supreme law of the

is not simply part of the superstructure reflecting the power of economic

international law to prosecute those carrying out

this year, the United States was confronted with an embarrassment

the desire to believe it is so strong, the

particular, given that human beings'

this point, greater quantity in numerous

this warped morality, this nationalistic prerogative, is, far and

can question tactics, but never the

a constitutive part of Inuit territory as experienced in

Alt Social Rethinking

Sovereignty needs to be seen as a social connection inability to do so can

is not a static phenomenon but is

assumptions that one holds

the various ways sovereignty has been conceptualized, however,

declarations of sovereignty can be used to rewrite the

changing Arctic can be figured as a fluid space of crossings

rearticulation and democratization of sovereignty

International law key to solve global problems.

work of bodies like the International Law

I law inevitable better to reform.

Democratization of law solves.

articulation of sovereignty within a community of states that decides to consider

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