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In this interesting and important yet flawed book, Vitalis seeks to bridge the “vast gulf divid[ing] international relations from Africana studies,” bringing the “racism [of the discipline of international relations] to light.” Conventional narratives of the field’s history, he argues, trace it to the rise of realism and national security concerns in the years around World War II, adding a few historical thinkers, such as Thucydides, to claim a timeless intellectual pedigree. But this ignores both the extensive mainstream scholarship of the first decades of the twentieth century that dealt with colonialism and racial issues and the pioneering work of African American writers in what he calls “the Howard School.” Consigning both to the memory hole, he says, paints a distorted picture of the discipline’s origins and nature, obscuring the role that international relations scholarship has played in the construction and perpetuation of white Western dominance.

These are major claims, and some of them hold up better than others. Vitalis is correct to shine a spotlight on the forgotten academic work of the first third of the twentieth century and offers a timely reminder of just how prevalent racialized thinking was and how central a role imperialism—as opposed to straightforward great-power relations—played in global affairs. Back then, for example, “policy relevance” in political science often meant figuring out how to train good colonial administrators. Vitalis also provides a service by telling the story of scholars such as Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, and Rayford Logan, enriching readers’ understanding of midcentury intellectual debates over U.S. foreign policy and tracing how racism operated inside various professional institutions.

Weisel's critique of German education prior to world war II points to another danger of traditional argumentation instruction. Like the Nazi doctors, students in traditional argumentation courses are taught "how to reduce life and the mystery of life to abstraction." Weisel urges educators to teach students what the Nazi doctors never learned -- that people are not abstractions. Weisel urges educators to learn from the Nazi experience the importance of humanizing their charges, of teaching students to view life as special, 'with its own secrets, its own treasures, its own sources of anguish and with some measure of triumph.' Trained as technocrats with powerful sensory skills but little understanding, students participating in traditional argumentation courses would have difficulty either grasping or appreciating the importance of Weisel's critique. Similarly, they would have difficulty grasping or appreciating Christian's framework for an ethic of technology an approach that requires above all, openness, trust and care. The notion of conviviality would be particularly alien to these trained technocrats. Traditionally trained debaters are also likely to fail to grasp the complexity of issues.

Trained to view problems in black and white terms and conditioned to turn to "expertise" for solutions, students, and traditional courses become subject to ethical blindness. As Benhabib noted, 'Moral blindness implies not necessarily an evil or unprincipled person, but one who can not see the moral texture of the situation confronting him or her.' These traditional debaters, deprived of true dialogic encounter, fail to develop 'the capacity to represent' to themselves the 'multiplicity of viewpoints, the variety of perspectives, the layers of meaning, etc. which constitute a situation'. They are thus inclined to lack 'the kind of sensitivity to particulars, which most agree is essential for good and perspicacious judgment.' Encouraging students to embrace the will to control and to gain mastery, to accept uncritically a sovereign view of power, and to maintain distance from their own and others 'situatedness,' the traditional argumentation course provides an unlikely site for nurturing guardians of our world's precious resources. It would appear, in fact, that the argumentation course foster precisely the 'aggressive and manipulative intellect bred by modern science and discharged into the administration of things' associated with most of the world's human made perils. And is therefore understandable that feminist and others critics would write so harshly of traditional argumentation of debate.

In redefining “serious” games as “persuasive games,” Ian Bogost (2007) places the ethics of gaming front and center and questions the technocratic descriptors that find their way into game studies theory—such as the aforementioned “procedural logics.” Instead, he exposes the seemingly neutrality of “procedural logics” by recasting them as “procedural rhetorics.” As with Gee (2004), Bogost’s (2007) ultimate goals recall Freire (1990): “I argue that videogames’ usefulness comes not from a capacity to transfer social or workplace skills, but rather from their capacity to give consumers and workers a means to critique business, social, and moral principles” (p. x). Yannuzzi and Behrenshausen (2010) likewise see a Freirean potential for understanding the potential of gaming as radical critique

as “sites of fun,” video games present an opportunity for the playful negotiation of their logics. Here exists exploration, reiteration, arbitration, and deprecation as players probe rules, test boundaries. To play video games is to toy with codes, to structurate. (p. 88)

The idea of political mastery is further reinforced in the consciousness of the West in the nuclear age with the possession of these weapons even as the use of these weapons evoked a ‘growing sense of moral unease’ and possibility of ‘fear of revenge’ by Others.19 A ‘second form of colonization’ epitomized as racial etiquette gained ground through practices of sly civility in the nuclear order,20 a form of psychological colonization that alters cultural priorities within colonized societies and induces one to generalize that ‘the modern West’ is not just ‘a geographical and temporal entity’ but a ‘psychological category.’21 It encourages a sense of omnipresent, omnipotent, ‘The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.’22 The racial etiquette accompanying this psychological orientation is now subtly imbricated in a new ‘political order’ premised on a ‘norm against noticing’ race,23

**FOOTNOTE 23 STARTS**

Rather than the more conventional (at the time) classroom experience of textbook reading, film watching, worksheets, and lectures, we were organized into teams that moved through a variety of experiential games: farming, the Constitutioal convention, playing the stock market, the debates over slavery and abolition. In each unit, we were tasked with solving various problems (Robison’s [2008], “achievement-bound systems”): keeping a farm afloat in spite of the vagaries of weather and the commodities markets, managing a stock portfolio, forging a new nation, avoiding or starting a civil war. Our teachers acted as our Dungeon Masters, introducing each round with a new set of calamities and opportunities (a sudden drought, a market collapse, a political crisis over the expansion of slave labor).

These achievement-bound systems involved a mix of assimilation and critical questioning: we had to play the stock market game (there was no opting out of the market, and the market equally defined the farming game) and we had to (or were supposed to) stick to our appointed roles: representative to the convention, abolitionist orator. Yet over and over instances of challenging the premises kept arising, especially in the Constitutional convention game, and not always (or even mostly) for what might be considered intellectually and rhetorically polite reasons. Boredom, a desire for attention, our vexed adolescent relationship to teacherly/parental approval—all figured in the subversive mix I count as “challenging the premises.”

Nationalism is one of the central ideologies of the modem era. Not surprisingly, its hegemonic rise over the past 200 years has attracted considerable attention from historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Researchers have been especially preoccupied with those aspects of nationalism that have been most disruptive for existing social and political institutions, from the emergence of collective identification in newly forming nation-states and the struggle for statehood by minority groups to the sudden emptions of nativism and xenophobia in otherwise stable societies. Much of this literature has been based on the implicit assumption that in the absence of violent upheavals, nationalism in established democracies is simply a fait accompli rather than a source of continued social and political change.

In contrast, more recent studies have turned their attention to everyday forms of nationalism, arguing that the primacy of the nation-state as a unit of political governance and collective identification is continually reinforced - and sometimes subtly altered - through routine cognitive and affective orientations that are themselves products of institutional and ritual practices. Such work has shown that meanings attached to the nation are not uniform within a given national community, but systematically vary across individuals and social groups and are associated with other socially and politically relevant attitudes and behaviors. This article provides an analytical overview of this burgeoning literature, identifying its contributions, limitations, and potential for achieving a more nuanced understanding of nationalism in contemporary societies.

I offer this story not only as an example of everyday white delusion, but also to set the tone of this chapter: From both the Buddhist and critical race theoretical perspectives that I draw on here, ignorance (delusion) is not someone else’s problem. There is a moral, and epistemic imperative to confront our own ignorance, to dismantle the false beliefs and misunderstandings that inform our everyday sense of reality. In this chapter, I use the Buddhist concept of avidyā (ignorance, confusion, delusion) to analyze the causes, mechanisms, and possible correctives for white delusion. In Buddhist contexts, avidyā refers not only to a lack of knowledge but also (and primarily) to an active misapprehension of reality, a warped projection onto reality that reinforces our own dysfunction and vice. Ignorance is rarely innocent; it is not an isolated phenomenon of just-not-happening-to-know-something. It is maintained and reinforced through personal and social habits, including practices of personal and collective false projection, strategic ignoring, and convenient “forgetting.” This view of avidyā has striking similarities to philosophical analyses of white ignorance, such as Charles Mills’s, which understand white ignorance not in terms of a passive lack of knowledge but as an active refusal by whites to confront basic facts about our social world.

I argue that Buddhist analyses of avidyā may help us understand the mechanisms of white ignorance and the practices for deconstructing it. On the Buddhist view, the mechanisms for maintaining avidyā include obsession with self and clinging to fixed narratives about the self (in the case of white delusion, “I’m not racist” or “I’ve earned and deserve everything I have”) and the refusal to take seriously cause and effect (such as a failure to historicize racism, the failure to understand broad, systemic effects of racism, and the inability to apply abstract knowledge of racism to specific cases). In my own case of white delusion, I was guilty of both kinds of mistakes: I was clinging to a narrative that obscured reality—that it was only women who bore the burden of managing physical appearance in our society—and I failed to apply my knowledge of how racism works in the abstract to the specifics of my partner’s life. Buddhist conceptions of ignorance or delusion may also help to locate possible correctives for white ignorance. Because avidyā is not simply a lack of knowledge, it cannot be completely remedied by exposure to facts and analyses of those facts. To be receptive to such knowledge in the first place, to remember and apply it, we must overcome our own dysfunctional emotional patterns that sustain our confusion. So, on a Buddhist ethical view, white people cannot combat white ignorance simply with knowledge about racism (which is already widely available) but rather white people need to do the personal and emotional work of deconstructing our own whiteness, as it arises in our own lives, to uproot our white ignorance. This is uncomfortable and ugly (but necessary) work that will require white people to correct for major moral blind spots by developing the moral skill of equanimity (or “tarrying,” as George Yancy has argued).3

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones. “Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate. Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices. Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.” People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising. “Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’. The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong. Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error. The expert-prediction game is not much different. When television pundits make predictions, the more ingenious their forecasts the greater their cachet. An arresting new prediction means that the expert has discovered a set of interlocking causes that no one else has spotted, and that could lead to an outcome that the conventional wisdom is ignoring. On shows like “The McLaughlin Group,” these experts never lose their reputations, or their jobs, because long shots are their business. More serious commentators differ from the pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area-studies professors—are not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious. Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan. Also, people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes. We have no idea today how tomorrow’s invasion of a foreign land is going to go; after the invasion, we can actually persuade ourselves that we knew all along. The result seems inevitable, and therefore predictable. Tetlock found that, consistent with this asymmetry, experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a higher degree of certainty than, according to the record, they really did. When this was pointed out to them, by Tetlock’s researchers, they sometimes became defensive. And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of x and a one-in-four chance of y, the probability of both x and y occurring is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less. The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one. Plausible detail makes us believers. When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In 1982, an experiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail. It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says: Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess. A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out. Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”

1. Introduction the definition and framings of existential risk¶ In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has argued that a new class of risks bears closer study, for their potential extreme impact on the survival of humanity (Bostrom, 2002, 2013; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2011; Matheny, 2007; Rees, 2004). Prior research has identified a range of such human extinction risks (Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2008; Haggstrom, 2016; Pamlin & Armstrong, 2015), both natural and manmade, including risks from supervolcano eruption, asteroid impact, global warming, nuclear war, as well as more speculative risks from emerging technologies such as biotechnology, high-energy physics experiment disasters, or misaligned artificial intelligence. (Asimov, 1981; Baum & Barrett, 2016; Bostrom, 2014; Ord, Hillerbrand, & Sandberg, 2010; Posner, 2004; Sagan, 1983; Smil, 2005; Tegmark & Bostrom, 2005; Yudkowsky, 2008a).¶ While it is encouraging to see greater attention for a critical topic that has long remained understudied, it is relevant to ask how the framing of the field’s basic concepts shapes both which problems it identifies and prioritizes, as well as which policy approaches it considers and engages. In his seminal paper, Bostrom defined an existential risk as ‘[o]ne where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential’ (Bostrom, 2002). Thus in Bostrom’s view, existential risks are characterised both by their scope (pan-generational) and their intensity (crushing): the size of the group of people who are at risk1 and how badly each individual within that group is affected, respectively (Bostrom, 2002).¶ Much prior research on existential risks has thus deployed criteria and methodology which have identified discrete and independent challenges of sufficient severity and pervasiveness to bring about the ‘adverse outcome’ in a direct causal manner. In this reading, existential risks are an extreme offshoot of global catastrophic risks—disasters which “might have the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale” (Bostrom, 2013; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2011, p. 2), but which fall short of permanent collapse. While we are not necessarily averse to the Bostromian definition of ‘adverse outcomes’—a definition which indeed seems to characterize the space of eventual outcomes to be avoided—we take more issue with the limited range of pathways towards this dreaded outcome-space, which much of the literature has focused on exploring. Specifically, as noted by others in the community, much prior research “has focused mainly on tracing a causal pathway from a catastrophic event to global catastrophic loss of life” (Avin et al., 2018, p. 1). As such there remains an event-focus, in the sense that only discrete events that are causally connected to the demise of humanity within a relatively short time-frame qualify as an existential risk (rather than a ‘merely’ globally catastrophic one, or a background risk).¶ 1.1. Existential risk (re)framings as crucial consideration for law & governance approaches¶ Distinguishing existential risks as a uniquely threatening outlier along the spectrum of global risks, however, is arguably an unnecessarily narrow framing of the field of study. Indeed, a high-profile ‘one-hit-KO’ existential risk such as a global nuclear war or a pandemic may constitute only one avenue towards that ‘adverse outcome’, and concentrating predominately upon (ways to intervene in) its origin and direct pathway, risks overshadowing other potential paths or disaster interaction effects2 that functionally converge towards that same disastrous outcome, even if only indirectly or over longer timescales, with a potentially higher probability. Indeed, as recently noted by scholars in the field, a full mapping of scenarios that lead to catastrophic outcomes “requires exploring the interplay between many interacting critical systems and threats, beyond the narrow study of individual scenarios that are typically addressed by single disciplines” (Avin et al., 2018, p. 2).The precise framing of ‘existential risks’ is therefore a crucial consideration, informing ethical, strategic, and epistemological (cf. academic) priorities in facing ‘adverse outcomes’. This is particularly the case in the context of studying how global political dynamics may interact with certain existential risks, and in formulating meaningfully effective policies and governance approaches to such risks. Of course, this is not to say that the field of existential risk studies has not sought to involve and engage with policy and governance approaches and solutions. Indeed, to its credit, research in the field of existential risks has actively sought to engage with these issues—given that, as Bostrom himself observes (2013:27), global cooperation is critical to mitigating a wide range of existential risks. Likewise, researchers within the ‘AI safety’ community are beginning to highlight fields such as policy and psychology, as under-represented but potentially promising approaches to addressing risks arising from AI (Brundage, 2017; Sotala, 2017b).¶ Accordingly, there has been research into the interaction effects between technologies and politics—such as the possibility that arms races might increase the risk that untested, powerful AI systems are deployed rashly or prematurely (Armstrong, Bostrom, & Shulman, 2013; Shulman, 2009). Other work has drawn on cognitive psychology, to study how people might structurally (mis)judge the probability of risks (Yudkowsky, 2008b). Likewise, work exploring policy- and governance approaches to mitigating existential risks has explored policy approaches that include insurance arrangements for large catastrophes (Taylor, 2008); technology taxes and subsidies (Posner, 2008); and work drawing on social (and organizational) psychology to assess ways to motivate AI researchers to choose beneficial AI designs (Baum, 2016). Yet, other work has examined the cost-effectiveness of biosecurity interventions (Millett & Snyder-Beattie, 2017); pricing externalities to balance public the risks and benefits of scientific research generally (Farquhar, Cotton-Barratt, & Snyder-Beattie, 2017); and proposing a general international regulatory regime to govern global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies (Wilson, 2013). At present, a majority of existential risk research centres3 have articulated law and policy research as areas of interest, and scholars in this space have begun to translate such work into concrete proposed policy interventions—notably the 2017 GPP report, which included proposals to develop governance for geoengineering research; establish international scenario plans and exercises for engineered pandemics, and build international attention for existential risk reduction (Farquhar, Halstead et al., 2017).¶ Such work is highly encouraging, and the existential risk research agenda has benefited from it. Nonetheless, the risk remains that a too-narrow conception of ‘existential risks’ prematurely closes down the space of law and governance solutions that are possible—or necessary—in assuring humanity a non-catastrophic future—for instance, a future that, in Bostrom’s framing, meaningfully ‘maximize[s] the probability of an ok outcome’ (Bostrom, 2013, p. 19). However, if human extinction and the persistent and pervasive truncation of technological potential are not completely homologous, then tailoring our portfolio of policy responses exclusively to closing off the pathways these risks could take—and then calling it a day—would be insufficient. In fact, this might only afford future policymakers with a false sense of security, even as the world continues to reside in an overall state of ‘super-risk’ (Bermudez & Pardo, 2015).¶ This is especially the case when there is a narrow ‘technological’ (re)solution on offer—such as ‘improve global vaccine synthesis and production capability’, or ‘subsidize international technical AI safety research’—which promise to address or prevent the risk at its root. While such direct technological solutions may certainly be indispensable to averting some existential risks, they may not suffice in actually ‘plugging all the holes’ in our risk space. In a disciplinary context, there is a risk (admittedly self-correcting, given publication incentives) of the research agenda ‘halting’ early. In a real-world context, the availability of simple, straightforward ‘fixes’ might even pose a ‘moral hazard’, if policymakers or global governance systems which lack political will or the attention to explore more complex or costly changes, seize upon the ‘symbolic action’ of the straightforward, first-order mitigation strategies. Even where this is not the case, certain policy recommendations to mitigate existential risks might depend on too-optimistic a view of institutional rationality or capability.¶ 1.2. ‘Boring Apocalypses’: from existential hazards, to existential risks¶ While such efforts might mitigate specific existential risks, this might not translate into significantly lowering the overall probability of the ‘adverse outcome’, if only a part of the problem, or only one problem among many, is addressed. An alternative articulation is that only one path to the ‘adverse outcome’ is being explored by much research into existential risks: erecting obstacles along that path may indeed reduce the overall likelihood of manifesting these risks, but this might have little impact, or even no effect, upon the manifestation of the ‘adverse outcome’.¶ Thus, our view is that a materialised existential risk (what we call an ‘existential hazard’) is sufficient to lead to an (existentially) ‘adverse outcome’, but crucially, that this is unnecessary to reach that result. If the overarching objective is to lower the probability of human extinction or significant technological curtailment, adopting an array of approaches which complement the mitigation of direct existential risks are required. Within this broad spectrum of aligned approaches, we propose to introduce law, policy, regulatory and governance tools in this paper as an example. The choice of law and policy perspectives is two-fold: on one hand, they make it possible to take second-order considerations, which involve indirect and socially and culturally mediated paths towards ‘adverse outcomes’ into account; on the other hand, these recognise both the complexity of social organisation and the prospect that civilizational collapse may trigger or possibly instantiate existential outcomes. In this sense, law and policy approaches offer the possibility of complementing and enhancing the narrower approach adopted by contemporary existential risk research, to take into consideration other paths to existentially adverse outcomes; and to better anticipate vulnerabilities, exposures and failure modes in societal efforts to address existential risks.¶ 1.3

Xi’s Marxist nationalism is an ideological blueprint for the future; it is the truth about China that is hiding in plain sight. Under Xi, the CCP will evaluate changing international circumstances through the prism of dialectical analysis—and not necessarily in ways that will make sense to outsiders. For example, Xi will see new Western institutions intended to balance against China, such as the Quad (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a strategic cooperation agreement between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) and the AUKUS (a defense agreement linking Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), as both strategically hostile and ideologically predictable, requiring new forms of political, ideological, and military “struggle” to roll back. In his Marxist-Leninist view, China’s ultimate victory is guaranteed because the deep forces of historical determinism are on the CCP’s side, and the West is in structural decline.

This view will affect the likelihood of conflict in Asia. Since 2002, the CCP’s code language for its belief that war was unlikely has been the official phrase “China continues to enjoy a period of strategic opportunity.” This statement is meant to convey that China will face a low risk of conflict for the foreseeable future and can therefore seek economic and foreign policy advantages while the United States is bogged down elsewhere, especially in the broader Middle East. But in the wake of Washington’s official labeling of China as a “strategic competitor” in 2017, the ongoing U.S.-Chinese trade war, mutual (if selective) forms of economic decoupling, and the hardening of U.S. alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and NATO, the CCP is likely to change its formal analytical conclusion about the strategic environment.

In the post–Cold War era, the Western world has suffered no shortage of grand theories of history and international relations. The settings and actors may change, but the global geopolitical drama goes on: variants of realism and liberalism compete to explain and predict state behavior, scholars debate whether the world is witnessing the end of history, a clash of civilizations, or something else entirely. And it is no surprise that the question that now attracts more analytical attention than any other is the rise of China under President Xi Jinping and the challenge it presents to American power. In the run-up to the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as Xi has maneuvered to consolidate his power and secure an unprecedented third term, Western analysts have sought to decode the worldview that drives him and his ambitions for China.

One important body of thought has been largely absent from this search for understanding, however: Marxism-Leninism. This is odd because Marxism-Leninism has been China’s official ideology since 1949. But the omission is also understandable, since most Western thinkers long ago came to see communist ideology as effectively dead—even in China, where, in the late 1970s, the CCP leader Deng Xiaoping set aside the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of his predecessor, Mao Zedong, in favor of something more akin to state capitalism. Deng summed up his thoughts on the matter with characteristic bluntness: Bu zhenglun, “Let’s dispense with theory,” he told attendees at a major CCP conference in 1981. His successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed his lead, rapidly expanding the role of the market in the Chinese domestic economy and embracing a foreign policy that maximized China’s participation in a global economic order led by the United States.

Indeed, it is a peculiar enterprise that we “critical intellectuals” engage in.2 We assume an audacious capacity to contemplate the “world” and read its signs and to interpret our present and imagine better futures. We think, perhaps, this a worthwhile social endeavor; the “thinker,” we might hope, serves as a catalyst to identify, to instigate, and to provoke otherwise merely latent potentialities of suppressed insurgencies against the ossification of the future in unsatisfactory and captured presents.3 With this self-assumed sense of purpose, perhaps it is understandable that many of us seek out the “street” for our thinking;4 it is here that we search for the extraordinary “event” that marks, as we see it, a rupture, the moment of catharsis, a transformation, the “new” born into the world. We see this tendency to philosophize the street clearly in recent intellectual work of the critical “post-Enlightenment” philosophers.5 Reading “uprisings,” “resistance,” and “revolutions”, interpreting the happenings of irruptions in the squares and bazaars of anger, ascribing meaning to voice as voiced in a multitude of vernaculars in multiple locales as these events are gazed upon and made audible to consuming eyes and ears, and investing hope and dispensing disappointment, indeed, we observe that much political–legal thought is so moved by the (variously conceived of) “political” projects to open up possible pathways of “rupturing” the present. In this fashion, the street has indeed come to be the primary locale from which philosophical contemplations are undertaken in this “age of resistance” as Costas Douzinas has named our present time: A sequence of uprisings will dominate the world political landscape in the next period. Ours is an age of resistance. The possibility of radical change has been firmly placed on the historical agenda.6 What inspires such fervor, such ecstatic celebration of the street, is a perceived, hoped for, emergence,7 here, the extraordinary event is the harbinger of hope, marking the (possible, nascent) becoming of a “political subject” as the one who emerges into the street, and out from the street, breaking free from the shackles of extant sovereign-biopolitical diagrams, heralding (with “fidelity”), as Alain Badiou would have it come to be, the “rebirth” of history.8 The street, thus, portends history. This, we see, is thinking fixed on the spectacular, the heroic, and the extraordinary of “radical change.” It is this philosophical tendency—to appropriate the street as the ecstatic site of extraordinary becoming—that is my concern in this essay. It is this heroic orientation of thought that is the subject of my critique. In what follows, I consider the philosophical–political heritage from which the preoccupation with thinking the extraordinary of the street originates and question the implications of such thinking. I argue that such thinking betrays the continued coloniality of critical post-Enlightenment philosophy.9 My intention is to provide a different reading of the “extraordinary” that emerges in the street—as a physical place of embodied presence rather than a reified space of philosophical aspiration—informed by what I argue to be a decolonial understanding of the presents (and presence) of already being in the world. The essay is organized as follows. First, I trace the foundations of what I name the “ontology of abandonment and resurrection” which, I argue, founds critical Eurocentric political–legal philosophy. Central here is the invention of the mythologies of the event and of “becoming.” I argue that for the philosopher of the European (post-)Enlightenment, betrayed by the idea and abandoned by the “revolutionary subject,” the quest for a new evental becoming is all consuming. I demonstrate that the street presents precisely such an opportunity for rescue, the irruptions there witnessed serving to revive the heroic moment of “becoming subject” through the event. But this, I argue, is a philosophy that perpetuates, still, colonial categories of being. Against this philosophy of the extraordinary, I suggest a twofold correction: firstly, an emphasis on the persistent ordinariness of the perceived extraordinary of the street in order that the many worlds of resistance against the normalities of coloniality are deinvisibilized to philosophy; secondly, and consequently, a cognition of the resilient extraordinariness of the “ordinary” everyday, so that the worlds of being-otherwise to “Europe” are returned to the philosophical register as present and real possibilities of being. What is intended by this “decolonial” correction, as I elaborate below, is to return philosophy from the street to the everyday locations, material conditions, and experiences of embodied beings in the world.10 In this task of rupturing the coloniality of philosophy, I suggest, we philosophers of rupture are ourselves implicated. On the Ontology of Abandonment and Resurrection (and Disappointment) We begin by directing our attention to the constitutive categories of the European (post-)Enlightenment. By this, I mean the fundamental concepts that found the ground from which (Eurocentric) political–legal philosophy is thought and the premises from which “critical” discoveries are imagined to be made;11 examples relevant to the present discussion include (human)being, sovereignty, the political, constituent and constituted power, and subjectivity. Variously, the attempt to reclaim some emancipatory meaning and content for these foundational categories of (presumed) human beingness in the world characterizes much of the preoccupation of critical philosophy. What we are concerned to do here is to reveal the coloniality of the ontological foundations of this cosmology of the “modern,” whereby the radical, “enlightened” potentiality of human beingness was projected as the Idea of Europe onto the world. I suggest that we can best understand this past, and present, of post-Enlightenment political–legal philosophy as being founded upon an ontology of abandonment and resurrection. The so-called French Revolution, as a philosophical invention, is a good place to start in this connection. It would appear that no critical, transformative, engagement with the worlds of politics, of law, of democracy, of hope for better human futures, in short, is possible, without some return and due reference to the “French Revolution” as the ruptural moment of European human imagination and enactment presented, as it often is, as an original, and originary, Event in history. This is the moment of the great birth of “man”-post-God, “degodded” as Sylvia Wynter put it,12 as “subject” and “citizen,” a being sovereign, author in and of the world. In this construction of the “Idea” of being in history is the French Revolution, for the post-Enlightenment philosopher of the European tradition, a constitutive Event, for with it, through it, is consolidated the advent of man as a necessary rupture from emptiness and darkness into fullness and belonging, the emergence from the abandonment and void of godlessness into the secular “word” and world of reasoned Enlightenment. This is a momentous becoming indeed. With the invention of the French Revolution, as event (quite aside and distinct from the temporal happenings and outcomes in France from 1789 and onward),13 the citizen thus replaces the “believer,” the “children of revolutionary sovereignty” thus replace the “children of God,” the violent “eventual” revolutionary-becoming thus replaces the portend of the (im)possible secular resurrection of the human-as-citizen into the world of words and meaning absent mediation by the divine ascription of placements.14 Indeed, a becoming into the world through an extraordinary event—a secular resurrection as it were—is necessary to birth the “rupture” and bring into “being” the modern promise of salvation, necessary to relegate the claim of God (and his priests) on humanity to the fringes of “premodern” superstition.15 Simply put, the French Revolution—as invented by the repetitions of political–legal philosophers—marks the recurrent moment and provides the repeated enunciation for a spectacular send-off for (the Western version of the Judeo-Christian) God by the philosophy of a new (En)Light(enment) and the “liberation” and “freedom” of sovereign man thereby rebirthed.16 Thus was invented the ontology of (colonial-)modern beingness that so many take as given: That human beingness is the possibility of becoming—being out of nonbeing. We see this defined by the duality of the believer and the heathen under Occidental Christianity, traced to an earlier distinction between the (political-)sociality/civilization of bios and the “naturality” of zoe in more “classical” Grecian rationalizations.17 That beingness—as being self as self with others—is, as such, haunted by the inherent and perpetual threat of abandonment to nonbeing from bios-community to zoe-bare life. It is the (constantly strived for) universal potentiality and responsibility of man therefore to become into the “public” as (ethical-)political subject.18 That this becoming, out of nonbeing (zoe-bare life) into the world of political-being-subject, is a process filled with ontological labor pains; theories of “social contract” enacted out of the extraordinary event thus serves as the modern philosophical vehicle for this transformation from the extraordinary moment to the normalized future. This is all well and good, no doubt significant for an understanding of the evolving cosmologies and philosophoscapes of the emerging “European man” out of his ages dark; the actual in the “ideal” of this emancipation of the modern subject was, however, something quite different.19 A decolonial telling of the philosophical biography of the political subject begins with remembering that we are not merely recounting a “European-modern” philosophical tale here. The birthing of the modern universal subject of the political was coeval with its coconstitutive colonial underside;

it was an ontological birth whose origins lay in the violent gestations, both material and cosmological, of the colonial ordering of the world. I don’t intend to repeat the readings of the history of History through a colonial–modern lens; this has amply been done effectively elsewhere.20 My aim is more to draw out the constituting premises that connect the current preoccupation of extraordinary becoming of (Westernized) man with prior colonial philosophies of being that sought to deny and thereby annihilate the manifold actuals of already-(other-)beingness that constitutes the worlds of being (variously)human. We recall that the foundational assumptions and constitutive philosophical categories of being, sovereignty, subject, and political were invented alongside the material enforcement of colonial–modern politics and law.21 From the very beginning, the universal Man of the Enlightenment was constructed on a whole array of geo- and body political disqualifications;22 for all the assertions of the sovereignty of man, it was the bordering of “population” that marked the advent of the “sovereignty” of (biopolitical) “government.”23 This, to stress the point, was no “exception” but the very actuality of colonial–modernity.24 “Indeed, a matter of anguish for the Eurocentric philosopher of the Enlightened subject is the continuing realisation that the inflicted and perpetuated suffering upon the majority of the human population is a matter of everyday and ordinary reality, that the ‘exclusions’ and depravations that are daily witnessed as defining the ‘actual’ of human-beingness under national and global orders of (b)ordered populations are a constitutive feature of the condition of (colonial-)modernity.” Aside from the dire actualities of the biopolitics of “populationization,” the effects of “individualization” that has ensnared the subject perhaps pose a greater disappointment to the philosopher. The problem, simply put, is a crisis of the “present”: the apparent complacent condition of being that has come to define the settled present of a domesticated subject. As Zygmunt Bauman observed, the “imagination” that underpins the “postpolitical,” “postmodern” consensus of neoliberal “liquid modernity,” the result of the global consolidation of capitalism, is one whereby the much vaunted subject is concerned more with the “mining” of “disengaged” happiness and less with any historic mission for an enlightened humanity.25 It would appear, the enticements of consumerism and entrepreneurism, more than some resurrection of a political subject into history defines the (post)modern condition of being. And the consequence of this emptying out of “the political” from the subject? Precarious beingness and being “precariat” now are now recognised as the “normal” conditions of modern subjectivity.26 Through all this, the philosopher, it would appear, stands abandoned by her subject. The abdication by the subject of her “historic” responsibility of becoming-being-in-the-political is an ongoing disappointment for any critical political–legal philosopher who takes the universal promise of the “Enlightenment” seriously; it is after all the repudiation, by embodied actual beings, of the philosophically ascribed role of the political subject to be the maker of history. Rescue is necessary therefore; recovery of the foundational promise of the Enlightenment is, for the philosopher of rupture, imperative. And so, we understand the reasons for the following refinements to the original birth story of the political subject that we find in much current critical thinking: That to be denied being-(in the) political, is to be either in abjection or in stupor, in ontological nothingness as inexistent, or meaninglessness as a commodity, a thing not worthy of the legacy of the idea of Europe. The former is the state of “rightless” exclusion that concerned Arendt and her philosophical progeny, it is the condition of abandonment that preoccupies post-Agambenian philosophers of biopolitical sovereignty. The latter is the perceived condition of the contemporary biopolitical subject object of governmentality—the “counted” and the “accounted-for,” self-disciplining, held docile, and domesticated to be nothing useful other than as “entrepreneurial citizen consumers”—that is the object of disappointment if not contempt. And so, the crisis of the present necessitates efforts to revive, if not rescue, even resurrect, the political subject from either abandoned deprivations or hedonistic automatonity and consumptive banality. That becoming subject, therefore, is the continuing ontological potentiality of ruptural emancipation. Becoming subject, thus, is an ever incomplete project of becoming–being in history. With this critical reformulation of the idea, we arrive at the present problem to “invent,” as Badiou put it, the “problem of the present”;27 it becomes the task of the philosopher to identify the critical moments whereupon might history be glimpsed in events of rupture, of becomings. We see variously therefore that the intention to reclaim some presumed emancipatory content to these related foundational assumptions of human beingness permeate through the vast majority of critical thinking on the subject of the subject in the political. The question that is addressed in such contemplations of the present is: how to rescue the emancipatory potentiality of the subject from the normalizations, and banalizations, of the present?28 As Badiou poses it, “How are we to be faithful to changing the world within the world itself?” This becomes: How are we to weave in the world the political truth whose historic condition of possibility was the event, without it being able to be the realization of this possibility? How are we to inscribe politically, as active materiality under the sign of the Idea, a reawakening of History?29 And so we understand the particular preoccupation of the contemporary critical philosopher with the street. We witness the incessant search by philosophers of radical hope for such evental and heroic happenings; so is the world scoured for ruptural articulations, so are peoples’ struggles ascribed meaning vis-a-vis the constitutive categories of modern political–legal philosophy. From the past are the French and American Revolutions (and their enunciations of universal subject beingness) tracked through to the Russian and Chinese Revolutions (less so the Haitian and Mexican), the revolts of 1968, and now (jumping a few decades) to the antiglobalization movements post Seattle, the Occupy movements, the “Arab Spring,” all grist to the mill of the philosopher in search of signs that faith in the subject of the political may be redeemed, that history itself may be reawakened. For the purpose of the Idea, therefore, are the instances of irruptions sought to be revisited, read repeatedly, and referred to in their many and varied interpretations as (potential) instances of becoming—as Badiouian event, as Rancieriean “dissensus,” as Zizekian “truth–event/act,” as Douzinasian “resistance/insurrection.”30 The extraordinary is a constant preoccupation, we see. Yet, notwithstanding the philosophical investment in the event, life, when viewed through the lens of the heroic, inevitably disappoints. The event, in its materiality, is never quite as pure as its philosophical version, never quite enough to transform “History” sufficient for the philosopher’s satisfaction;31 moments of exalted extraordinary emancipation seemingly tire into languid returns to imperfection and corruption, domesticity, even “failure.” Zizek, for example, is quite clear: [W]e should avoid the temptation simply to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings that are doomed to fail.… What new positive order should replace the old one, once the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising has waned? It is here that we encounter the fatal weakness of the current protests. They express an authentic rage that remains unable to transform itself into even a minimal positive programme for socio-political change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.32 If only people who struggle, erupt, and promise such excitement to the philosopher could be truer to their calling, possess greater fidelity to their evental cause, be firmer in their resolve to fulfil the revolution. Still, despite the many inadequacies and failures of these uprisings, as Zizek judges them, the “radical emancipatory core” of such expressions of irruption is affirmed.33 Indeed for the Eurocentric “secular” philosopher, this fidelity to the idea is a matter of philosophical salvation/damnation. Without the extraordinary resurrection of some mythologized subject birthed through the extraordinary event, the post-Enlightenment philosopher of (becoming-)being is left devoid,34 absent a cosmology of human beingness that is able to withstand the abandonment of God, that makes such “degodding” meaningful. And so we witness: a foundational ontology of abandonment and resurrection informs the philosophical “discoveries” of critical post-Enlightenment philosophers of the street. To us who are nonbelievers of this parochial faith system, however—for those of us non-Europeans less entranced by the advent of the secular subject of becoming born out of the Enlightenment of Europe—a different reading of the philosophical “situation” of the present presents itself. With this unenchanted understanding of history, we turn now to see and read differently the street in the (extra)ordinariness of struggle. On the Ordinariness of the Extraordinary Unintended it might be, but radical readings of spectacular extraordinary becoming are premised still on prior constructions of human beingness based on a colonial–modern ontologic–epistemology of being/nonbeing. For the post-Enlightenment philosopher—Badiou is exemplary—what is assumed is that to “be” outside the political is to be abandoned to inexistence, whereby the political has come to be the ontological standard of a postdivine, secular normality of human beingness proper, a life desired, a life full; as such “inexistence” (nonbeing) in political subjectivity is the underlying abandonment that defines the condition of the captured present that requires recovery and rescue.35 The recovery and rescue of Eurocentric philosophy, that is, the ascription of extraordinary becoming to events of irruption serves precisely, it appears to me, to enable such a rescue, whereby the philosopher assumes that what is witnessed in these instances is the extraordinary ruptural assertion of the idea, of the subject, claiming a belonging in the political, out of absence, out of inexistence, out of nothingness, into (extraordinary-)being, a “liberated” entity—the subject—as the new in history. Badiou, again, is illustrative: “We shall then say that a change of world is real when an inexistent of the world starts to exist in this same world with maximum intensity.”36 The emergence of a new out of inexistence is the heroic core of post-Enlightenment political–legal philosophy. A simple counteraffirmation serves as our point of departure for a decolonial correction to “white ignorance.”37 We can state it simply thus: prior to the apparent extraordinary moment which draws the (critical) philosopher’s gaze to rest upon the manifestations and expressions of rebellious life, persists the daily maneuvrings of communities in struggle in their encounters with the totalizing desires of appropriative power. In this view, what is witnessed as the extraordinary becoming of the new into the world is but the material and exigent appearance of persistent, if largely “invisible” being(-otherwise) whose everyday is the ordinary struggle against extant orders of asserted normalities. It is this that I here term already-(other-)being that underpins a decolonial philosophy. And it is this presence, and persistence that is lost to critical Eurocentric philosophers of rupture; we see this, for example, in the philosopher’s apparent discovery of dissensus. We observe the following: the critical philosopher’s discoveries of ruptural becomings is informed repeatedly, to use Santiago-Gomez’s phrase, of a “point-zero” perspective on human life worlds.38 By this is meant a perspective whereby it is the “discovery” of the “other” (as imagined) by the philosopher that begets the worlds of meaning from whence history, as a projection of the idea, marches on. This we observe is commonplace in much recent thinking and writing on resistance and dissensus. For example, in concluding his analysis of the Tunisian uprisings which marked the start of the so-called Arab Spring, Illan Wall reflects thus: In terms of strategies of resistance then, I want to underline the importance of learning to live together without loyalty, without the everyday presupposition that the state is naturally and inexorably there. It is the interruption of everyday authority that is crucial.…this inoperativity is already there.…Let me suggest then, that the point of articulation between the critical legal theory of dissensus and the Tunisian events is the question: how to unwork sovereign power on an everyday basis, without reinstituting the same logics once more?39 Wall’s is a thoughtful, and respectful reading of resistance, rooted and influenced by Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “inoperativity”; indeed, he is mindful not to “appropriate the politics of the “postcolony” and put it to work for some “European” project.”40 However, as with all Eurocentric viewings of the worlds of “rupture/resistance,” the point-zero perspective is marked here. What I mean by this is that the analysis assumes a (dissensual) moment, an event, from which the extraordinary emergence/becoming of a new is discovered; a perspective that identifies dissensus in moments of “emergence” out of perceived absence or inexistence after all is one which assumes a prior “consensus,” a normality from which then the “interruption” is thought to be witnessed. From this point zero, then are “strategies of resistance” postulated, futures anticipated, as a new in the world. But let us pause. For whom this normality of consensus from which dissensus is celebrated? From whose location of thought this reading of the new of interruption? For whom, and from which moment on, the novelty of this discovery? Even as Wall’s account of the Ben Ali regime is nuanced, an assumption of a prior normality of the political as a consensus still persists here. A decolonial view instead, I suggest, begins precisely from a demystification of that assumption of consensus and a recognition of the many undersides of persistent refusal against such presumptions of normality. I explain below. Wall’s view and imagination suffers from a common inability of the well-intentioned Eurocentric philosopher to see a different normality when gazing upon the world, to comprehend that the “interruptions of everyday authority,” and the nonreification of the state, are perhaps, for social majorities the world over, the persistent everyday unsentimental normalities of their ordinary being even as they appear subservient; for them, the “importance of learning to live together without loyalty, without the everyday presupposition that the state is naturally and inexorably there” may rather be better understood and realized than assumed by the critical philosopher who earnestly exhorts such rupture based on some discovery of the extraordinary event. Indeed, such exuberance at fixing a meaning of extraordinariness to the eruptional manifestation of persistent refusals, however, “incompletely” as Wall claims to do, might well be to impoverish rather than enrich understandings of the extraordinariness of the normalities of resistance, it might continue invisibilizing the rich tapestry of actually present consciousness and experiences of (already-)being that refuse the consensus of the present as assumed by the critical post-Enlightenment philosopher. Let us be frank. Nothing is added to the actualities or the materialities of life and struggle by the philosophical naming of an eruption of anger or refusal as event or dissensus, neither are extant orderings of the political as bordered normalities of governmentality challenged by the invented duality of consensus/dissensus; all such ascriptions do is to attach to a given time and place particular abstracted categories based on presumed universal truths of beingness. In doing so, the pasts, presents, and infinite futures that define the materialities of life and struggle are conveniently subsumed under the celebratory reification of an instant that is read as “evental,” marking a progressive node in history as promised by the heroic mythology of the European Enlightenment; in this, Wall does not escape from the “appropriation” of the postcolony for the European project. A decolonial philosophical perspective might understand resistance and struggle differently, grounded as it is in the experiences of past and present struggles of ordinary human beingness outside of the privileging gaze of the post-Enlightenment philosopher: notwithstanding both the material infliction of violence and the ideological–biopolitical constructions of subject-ontologies, subjected human populations remain in their majority stubborn in their multiplicities of already being as other to the totalizing ascription of being-subject that is the biopolitical project of the sovereign assertion.41 What is significant in this other ontology of being—not fixated with tropes of abandonment and resurrection—is its rootedness in the histories and materialities of everyday resistance to the coloniality of power.42

Sometimes, then, intellectual property law can be a net bad. An intel- lectual property good, like a copyright or trademark, can be implicated in systems of inequality, which can reinforce specific social identities, and promote discrimination and violence based on that social identity. A trade- mark can be registered for a stereotyped image; Aunt Jemima stands as a probably. . . will endeavour to take [the S/R mark] out, or deface them." But other horrors are present as well. Peter, a human, was a good; he, a human, was used in commerce, that is, a nationwide marketplace that was organized around the sale of human bodies. In fact, we only can under- stand the fugitive advertisement as a genre-this story was replicated over and over again because these advertisements were a considerable source of revenue for newspapers during the antebellum period. famous example of this reality.

The Ku Klux Klan copyrighted its Constitution and Laws in 1921,27 and in Article V, Section 3 of the Constitution, granted the Emperor of the Invisible Empire the ability to "create and cause to be promulgated all countersigns, passwords, ritualistic or kloranic work and secret signs, symbols and work of this Order."

Samuel A. Chambers defines the imagination as a “synthetic power of creation and re-creation—an ability to combine the uncombinable, to surpass binaries without merely collapsing them, to fashion something new” (620). And from such synthesis, we are told that a democratic imagination is possible, since we would “think the limits (and their transgression) of democratic theory and of democracy as well” (620). Here, we see that the democratic imagination recasts limits as possibilities rather than complete failures. Limits become the resource for creation and re-creation rather than evidence of destruction and uselessness. A couture Kantianism / Hegelianism (mixed with a splash of deconstruction) salvages democracy from the perils of its absurdity, devastation, and brutality. Why this investment in democracy’s “intrinsic” creative power? Can this creativity finally bring an end to anti-Black violence and Black suffering? Or is the knowledge of democracy’s fabulousness enough to sustain Blacks through police terrorism, environmental racism, re-enslavement through incarceration, and food / housing insecurity and discrimination? I would suggest that what makes such creative synthesis possible is an unacknowledged dependence on time. For proponents of democracy, it is time that is malleable for creative enterprises of re-imagination, of progress fetishization, and an “ontology of change” that need not justify (or prove) itself, declaration of change seems to be enough (Badiou, “Ontology”). What if, however, democracy is clinging to a depleted resource? What if time is no longer enough to orient existence, especially for those inhabitants of an abyss—within which time, space, ethics, and law are weaponized against existence?

Put somewhat differently, democracy has exhausted the imagination. It is a speculative vampire that drains the imagination of any vital resource for its own survival. This speculation is an outrageous expenditure of energy, an enjoyment without end, a scholarly surplus-pleasure requiring an incessant (and useless) political repetition (Johnston). I would describe this speculation—the conjoining of time, democracy, and the imagination—as an interminable quest, or a certain “stuckness” in a scene of failure (a constant encircling of political and legal vacuity). This repetition is most dramatically demonstrated, for me, in Black political participation—voting, protesting, keeping hope alive, returning to the kernel of authoritarian violence (i. e., anti-Blackness) with unbridled hope, temporal determination, and an investment in the ontology of change (Warren; Farred). Time mocks Blacks, requiring historical déjà vu to be re-imagined, redeemed, rethought, or ignored, rather than accepting time as anti-Black enmity and democracy as permanence of anti-Blackness. Chants of “yes we can!” “your vote matters!” “we have power!” “we’re moving forward,” etc., serve to neglect the failure of Black political participation and to imprison the imagination within futurity.

Further, just like the modern patent law created the fiction of corporate “creative or inventive” genius to serve social and economic imperatives, non‐Western jurisprudence has legal personalities serving same or similar ends. These artificial legal personas or juridical entities are usually designed for the regulation of diverse functions including land ownership, succession, inheritance, et cetera. Indeed, the category of legal persons is not closed. Yet, domestic laws in several decolonized states have largely maintained colonially inspired categories of legal personalities, thus further enabling the irrelevance of the patent system to local needs and realities.

Another Eurocentric aspect of the patent regime is the conception of what constitutes public domain for the purposes of evaluating novelty. The prevalent notion is that TK is a matter of common knowledge and resides in the public domain. It is argued that this tenet of patent law when uncritically applied to traditional and indigenous settings is flawed on at least, three grounds. First, not all TK is in the public domain. For instance, native healers, in particular, hardly reveal the secrets of their medicinal knowledge and herbal remedies. Secrecy of their knowledge guarantees their power and influence in the local communities. Indeed, the rituals, magic and spirituality which often surrounds the practice of traditional healing is, in addition to their other myriad societal functions, a critical aspect of the “secrecy regimes” (WIPO Report, ibid in footnote) imposed on such bio‐cultural knowledge by herbalists and healers.

It is with these questions and disposition that a postcolonial understanding of time is now acutely conscious of ‘the timing of decisions to acquire nuclear power’ and willing to complicate ‘our usual linear assumptions about the influence of the past on present and future.’226 A postcolonial understanding of time is willing to engage with the problem of heterotemporality.227 Thapar contends,

[T]ime concepts and historical change interact in as much as change can be projected as either repetitive, recurrent or periodic, pointing to a wide stretch of time concepts, ranging from what are viewed as the cyclical to the continuously progressive and directional, suggesting a linear form, with many in-between positions such as a wave or a spiral.228

Contrary to popular myth, the IPRs regimes we have today are not universal verities (Drahos, 1998), but products of European political economy and history. The contemporary dominance enjoyed by modern IPRs regimes across the globe is a product of the aggressive and often violent conquest and colonization of diverse cultures and societies by European states in the past five centuries (Penrose, 1951; Helge, 1956). It is a historical fact that modern IPRs such as copyrights, trademarks, and patents regimes have deep roots in European culture, worldview, and imperial impulses (Lowenstein, 2002). Thus, modern IPRs, often portrayed as universal truths with global genetic makeup are in fact originally local expressions of European thought and philosophy. The diffusion and spread of IPRs regimes from Europe to other parts of the world followed distinct patterns of violence, suppression, and outright dispossession. Therefore, the pre‐eminence of Western‐styled IPRs is a direct manifestation of the forceful imposition of European economic, political, and cultural ideas on colonized parts of the globe. Very few erstwhile colonized states chose and institutionalized modern IPRs on their own volition.

As a colonial construct and implant, Eurocentric IPRs were part of the cultural, economic, and legal instruments for the control and subordination of colonized peoples and economies (Sagoe, 1992; Sklan, 1978). The colonization of the Americas, the Oceania, Australia, Africa, Asia and other parts of the world was premised on two main grounds, namely, a propaganda of European superiority over colonized peoples (Mgbeoji, ibid) and of course, economic exploitation of the colonized (Lindley, 1969). Although the transplantation of Eurocentric IPRs (Abbott et al,1999) to colonized territories has yielded mixed results in post‐colonial states (Mgbeoji, 2007), in the colonial encounter, Eurocentric IPRs successfully crowded out TK in many aspects with baleful consequences (Adewopo, 2002).

The call to protect the queer from Africans by ‘the West’ in Clinton’s speech and the queer from the savage Muslim in the Human Rights Report, then, is a violence that orders the world, constituting competing formations of value in these projects, while sublimating the empire’s ineluctable terrorization of blackness by analogizing (a major strategy of the redistribution of global and sexual power) the suffering of slaves with that of queers, the colonized subjects and queers, the US and Africa. In the normalizing discourse of this double move, the pursuit of desire in the present must be postponed for the sake of a putative future expressed in the institution of reproduction. A queer futurity, predicated on choice, must necessarily undermine the symbolic order of civil society. Edelman urges us to accept queerness as inauthentic, insubstantive, a ‘structural position’ working to undermine identities promised through the advancement of futurism. As such, ‘queerness can never be described in the language of progression – of "being or becoming" – but must be elucidated in the materiality of the body: queerness embodies’ (Edelman 2004 cited in Pak 2012: 172). In this view, queerness is ‘the site outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism ... queerness ... figures outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive’ (Edelman 2004: 3 emphasis mine).

Yet, the psychic space of queerness that Edelman imagines is constituted by the conditions of a sovereign power and the displacement of violence onto queers of colour, people of colour, queer blacks and blacks, who are not one and the same in the unfolding of global power and capital formation. Therefore, while Edelman’s view escapes the rights discourse that plagues Clinton’s speech and the Human Rights Report, it is challenged by Afro-pessimists and others who suggest that such formations and understandings of queer subjectivity are a key condition of possibility of queerness in the neoliberal social order (Keeling 2009: 568).

A parallel logic can be found in the work of economists. In this paper we are not specifically concerned with economic models per se, or with the differences in adaptation, impacts and mitigation analyses. We suggest that these economic analyses have broadly drawn from and supported climate stabilization discourses, usually as a heuristic that might guide decision-making. Within the framework outlined above, economists have attempted to identify an optimal and efficient approach that could give rise to a climate policy that was focused as much on a cost-effective stabilization target as reducing emissions to cause least harm. The economist William Nordhaus in 1977, for example, started to develop this now very familiar mode of reasoning in 1977. Using a highly simplified, heuristic model of the climate, and assuming a doubling of CO2 concentration as a reasonable upper limit to impose for the climatic response, Nordhaus (1977) examined the costs of controlling emissions that would meet this target. Indeed it is interesting that inasmuch as scientific work has frequently been guided by doubling concentration scenarios, so has economic work (Azar, 1998). Nordhaus explicitly made clear that the calculations were fraught with all kinds of uncertainties, but concluded that one could use a ‘best guess’ scenario since damages would be a roughly linear function of CO2 concentrations (Nordhaus, 1982).8 Bach, likewise, called for ‘‘[a] broad systems approach . . . to help define some ‘threshold’ value of CO2-induced climate change beyond which there would likely be a major disruption of the economic, social and political fabric of certain societies . . . An assessment of such a critical CO2-level ahead of time could help to define those climatic changes, which would be acceptable and those that should be averted if possible’’ (Bach, 1980, p. 4). Thus for an emerging set of economic formulations of the problem of climate change, the heuristic that would guide policy action would be one that took a fixed concentration target as a proxy for a climate target, that could then be used to analyze the costs and benefits of mitigating action to meet that target. A cost–benefit analysis of climate change would thus be possible. It is notable that this re-frames the debates from one of the costs and benefits of cutting emissions, to one that includes the costs and benefits of the resultant climate or as Oreskes et al. (2008) put it, the ‘‘carbon problem’’ becomes the ‘‘climate question.’’ Climates are to be efficiently managed. This is reflected, as they illustrate, in the Changing Climate report (National Academy, 1983) and also in the growing quantity of economic work in the early 1980s, especially as it related to energy and climate change. Boehmer-Christiansen (1994b) argues that climate policy has to be understood within changing energy politics. The late 1970s had seen rising energy prices fuelled by concerns about fossil fuel longevity of supply amidst a host of political interventions. A key question for energy politics in the 1980s was the declining price of fossil fuels, which questioned the role of the state in controlling energy supply/demand. Climate change offered a new means to tackle the fossil fuel industries and carbon constraints could highlight the need for nuclear solutions (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994b). From the late 1970s and early 1980s energy researchers were increasingly considering the technologies and economics of managing CO2 emissions that might significantly influence the climate. There were debates over whether climate change would become the main limiting factor for energy growth rather than peak oil scenarios (D’Arge and Kogiku, 1974; Nordhaus, 1974; Perry, 1982; Oreskes et al., 2008). Much depended upon assumptions of future resource availability and energy efficiency. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) concluded in work in 1983 that ‘‘transition to fast breeder nuclear reactors, centralized solar and coal synfuels must be made . . .’’ (as discussed by Wynne, 1984, p. 285) to establish a secure energy supply in the future. Climate change could offer an agenda for change (a lever) in the energy industry thus translating climate stabilization targets through political negotiations about energy growth and fossil fuel use (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994a,b). A different example comes from a study by the German Federal Environmental Agency that examined energy efficiency, but concluded that growth could be disentangled from carbon emissions (Lovins and Lovins, 1982). Their confidence in technological developments led them to suggest that energy efficiency gains resulting in CO2 reductions would reduce the time pressure on climate scientists to find the climatic answer. Assumptions about energy demand and efficiency thus filtered into the cost analyses that would suggest which climate targets might be feasible in terms of energy costs and which stabilization targets were realistic in terms of energy growth. Climate stabilization discourse provided an interface (particularly for policy advice) between climate debates and energy debates, but the interface was increasingly vulnerable to the multiplicity of assumptions (climatic, economic and energy demand) being worked into them (see also Pielke et al., 2000). Cost–benefit analysis does not provide a simple answer to climate change, because it inherently requires value judgments about discounting, costs and uncertainties. This is particularly the case when estimating damages and adaptation costs (Demeritt and Rothman, 1999), which is why some early climate economics separated out the cost–benefits of prevention and adaptation policies (Thompson and Rayner, 1998, p. 292). Cost–benefit analysis inherits the uncertainties from the climate components, but has additional uncertainties resulting from the assumptions in the costs of mitigation pathways and impacts. But as Cohen et al. (1998) point out, the aggregation of global mean climate changes serves a technocratic agenda focused on emissions controls, an agenda whose social science the economists have most readily filled. Further, Cohen et al. (1998), using the example of the US, suggest that it is difficult to pose questions about ethics, development, aid, trade and responsibility to future generations, when the analysis is framed by balancing the economic benefits of releasing carbon versus the potential GDP costs and risks of environmental change. Or, Azar (1998, p. 312) suggests that alternative interpretations of the need to avoid dangerous climate change must be made rather than trying to solve the puzzle of the ‘‘optimal level of climate change.’’ The economic justification for climate action has therefore further embedded the approach to climate stabilization within climate policy. While this was acknowledged as a heuristic this had few repercussions, but useful heuristics can rapidly be translated into direct policy guidance. Climate stabilization was taken up in policy statements and analyses from the late 1980s as a prescriptive goal for climate policy and an aim for the campaigning of environmental non- governmental organizations (ENGOs). Partly this was borrowed from similar policy logics that had been applied to controlling ozone and nitrous oxides (Franz, 1997; Grundmann, 2006; Oppenheimer and Petsonk, 2005). There is also similarity with arms issues whereby one controls both the total stock of arms as well as the location of those arms (Prins and Rayner, 2007). Here we select just a few examples to illustrate the rise of climate stabilization as a policy goal (more recent examples were given in the introduction). A Dutch Ministry of Environment funded project concluded in 1988 with the need for climate stabilization, preferably at just 1 8C above pre-industrial temperatures, but certainly a maximum target of 400ppm CO2 concentration (Krause, 1988). Drawing from Irving Mintzer’s work a Common- wealth Group of Experts the following year also agreed that while there were uncertainties it was important to make substantial emission cuts to a level that would achieve ‘approximate stability’. They suggested that doubling CO2 concentrations should be postponed beyond 2075 thus restricting temperature increases in the order of 0.6–1.7C by 2060 on top of warming already committed to (Holdgate et al., 1989). An OECD report in 1992 also concluded with the need to identify appropriate targets for policy concluding that there were three possible science-based targets: stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at current levels; not allowing global mean temperature to rise more than 2C; or not allowing a rate of change faster than 0.1C per decade (Barrett, 1992). Indeed the report pointed out the problems of inferring emissions targets in the latter two cases given the uncertainties in extrapolating from temperature targets to emissions. Yet the latter two became the focus of discussions for the European Union (EU) and since 1996, the EU has put forward a maximum temperature target of 28C, which was originally approximated to a 550 ppm CO2e concentration target (cited in European Environment Agency, 1996). Tol (2007) amongst others has disputed this figure as being weakly supported by cost–benefit analysis, but regardless of the figures it is clear that climate stabilization is politically appealing in part because of the promise of reward for (potentially costly) actions taken now. The growing numbers of ENGOs since the 1970s, spurred on by ‘Earth Day’ in the US (Gottlieb, 1993), have assimilated these ideas into their discussions of climate change too. Partly this can be associated with a ‘quasi-religious’ ideal of stability (Kwiatkowska, 2001) that holds discursive power for engaging public and government attention to ‘save the planet’. A guiding ethos of climate stabilization is the imagined future, safe, secure, stable climate, which can be engineered by our actions now; but the flipside of this myth is that if action is not taken the future will be insecure, unsafe, and unstable.9 These equilibrium and stability myths thus share static responses and polarizing dynamics that are counterposed to an approach based upon resilience and the incorporation of surprise (Timmerman, 1986; see also Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998). They reflect a project of bringing order to our existence and resonate with other environmental debates in the 1970s including that of population, not least in their demands for global management (Buttel et al., 1990; see also Sayre, 2008).10 Several examples of this polarized strategy can be highlighted. The ‘Stop Climate Chaos Coalition’ explicitly draws on an either/or approach to future climatic states in its declaration of a 2 8C threshold (climate chaos or calm—Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, 2009), while organizations such as Greenpeace have repeatedly made claims about the necessity of stabilizing global mean temperature, a figure frequently taken to be 2 8C (e.g. Kelly, 1990; see also Doyle, 2007). This is manifested directly in contemporary ENGOs such as 350.org, which is an international campaign to mitigate climate change through reducing and keeping atmo- spheric CO2 concentrations below 350 ppm. Climate stabilization has thus become an enduring myth, providing an easily graspable understanding of climate change, even though there are many questions about the framing of the problem, the accuracy of the figures and the implications for management. It has provided a ready interface between scientists, economists, policymakers and environmentalists, and it is this collective weaving that makes it so hard as a concept to disentangle from. Forsyth states that ‘‘assessments of frames should not just be limited to those that are labeled as important at present, but also seek to consider alternative framings that may not currently be considered important in political debates’’ (2003, p. 78). Considered in this way, climate stabilization – as a framing concept – has focused attention for political and policy engagement in particular ways; among them are a broad focus on mitigation rather than adaptation, and on static quantification of an equilibrium response rather than more dynamic goals of decarbonizing energy systems. Our work here traces how this discourse has developed, and how it has been fixed (or stabilized) for policy aims; yet we argue that such a discourse is problematic in that it has been consistently resisted and contested by ‘unstable’ bio-physical processes. As climate stabilization has become a guiding concept for political action on climate change, it has encased policy in areas of intractable scientific uncertainty that create all kinds of problematic assumptions and prescriptions, which influence both climate science and environmental economics. Climate stabilization presents a good example of how Levy et al. (2001) describe issue development and policy in accumulating stages from early simple, but rigid unscientific goals that are effective in anticipating policy, but which inevitably outlive their usefulness and are difficult to replace with more sophisticated goals because of the enduring socialization in the former. Scientists desiring action on climate change might have been concerned about any possible destabilization of the dominant framing, particularly as the reactionary discourses of vested interests opposed to decarbonization became stronger. With scientists and policymakers focused on the more immediate task of establishing the reality and (rough) magnitude of the problem, the stabilization-focused science-policy debate became an attractive approach and has guided many scientists, economists and policymakers into these modes of thinking. Tony Blair, in the quote at the start of the paper, suggests that stabilization provides a concept that has appealed to the instincts of scientists and economists. In terms of its historical genesis, however, stabilization is perhaps better conceived as a concept that emerged through an uneasy connecting of physical science, economics and policy thereby offering a framing of the question in a specific way that was amenable to these analyses. Climate stabilization became an intuitively reasonable heuristic during the 1980s because of a wide variety of intersecting intellectual heritages, a lack of alternatives, and model inadequacies. It has been valuable in that it has focused attention on diminishing negative human contributions to the changing climate; however, in so doing, it has encouraged policy to focus on considerations of long-term equilibrium targets, that may have posed comfortable predicaments for political and policy cycles, but have stymied short term action as policymakers wait for the answers that will solve all the questions about scientific, political, and economic uncertainty. Collectively, the recent 2008 UN COP14 provided numerous illustrations where climate negotiations have thus been lulled into contradictory unnerving comfort. For instance, former US Vice President Al Gore garnered rapturous applause when he ‘upped the ante’ of long-term promises by declaring ‘‘the truth is that the goals we are reaching toward are incredibly difficult, and even a goal of 450 parts per million, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate. We will soon need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million’’ (Gore, 2008). Yet, at this meeting in Poznan, Poland, short-term agreements and actions remained a scarcity. A number of conclusions can therefore be drawn from this paper. First, we suggest that stabilization discourse has proved valuable for supporting particular scientific approaches to ‘solving’ climate change. Second, we argue that the focus on finding a scientific answer to the question of climate policy might be misplaced and that we also need a broader engagement with the ethics and politics of the science–economics hybrid of climate stabilization. Third, we posit that climate stabilization discourses may have led to unrealistic public expectations that leave open the possibility of future public and political critique. First, some research communities may actually benefit from the focus on stabilization since it gives their research agendas an apparent policy relevance that would otherwise be hard to defend. For instance, paleoclimate modeling – while valuable as a part of fundamental research programs and process understanding in geophysics, biodiversity and ecosystems research – perhaps benefits from a prominence accorded it by its claims to help constrain climate sensitivity (Hegerl et al., 2006; Schneider von Deimling et al., 2006; Crucifix, 2006) that would be hard to sustain if the global policy community were to reframe the question in terms of the relationship between 20th century attributable warming (Stott and Kettleborough, 2002) and expected 21st warming (Frame et al., 2006). Thus, from this perspective one might not expect some researchers to embrace the sort of reframing conversation we have in mind here. Scientific centres institutionalize these conceptualizations by organizing research groups to study the specific problem of the equilibrium response, such as, for example, the Climate Sensitivity group within the Hadley Centre. The establishments of groups primarily focused on climate sensitivity is a sensible response to explicit policy direction, but focus on climate sensitivity is, in turn, a response to the fact that stabilization and its attendant notions have become ‘obligatory passage points’ (Latour, 1987) in previous scientific enquiries and policy documents. The recurring and somewhat unreflectively accepted theme of climate stabilization in proposed policy frameworks is the thing that should be questioned. The levers open to today’s policymakers are primarily related to current and future sources of emissions, and very little of the infrastructure that provides those anthropogenic sources (or sinks) will be around on equilibrium response timescales. Natural sources and sinks in a new equilibrium are subject to considerable uncertainty. Thus, the policy focus needs to move from focusing on a more static quantification of the details of the equilibrium response – stabilization – to more dynamic formulations that seek to decarbonize energy systems on multi-decadal timescales. While establishing and subsequently meeting long-term climate targets may be one of a set of sufficient conditions for mitigating the worst outcomes of anthropogenic climate change, over the next several decades a much more important task is to achieve substantial decarbonization goals. Moreover, the present lack of enforcement mechanisms to curb carbon-based energy habits makes the achievement of long-term emissions reduction proposals even less likely. Second, the focus on long-term stabilization targets places scientific certainty and uncertainty at the centre of considerations of decarbonization and distinct from political perspectives. By framing action in such a way, further scientific inputs regarding links between GHG concentrations, emissions and temperature change can unearth more questions to be answered, rather than settling already existing ones (Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998). Therefore, greater scientific inputs actually can contribute to more complicated policy decision-making by offering up a greater supply of knowledge from which to develop and argue varying interpretations of that science (Sarewitz, 2004). The allure of the scientifically focused ‘climate stabilization’ discourses distracts attention from open political debate about the timescale, respective burdens and objectives of climate policy. Instead of posing these challenges and/or objections to particular actions as scientific ones, they can more effectively be treated as political ones (too), as well as ethical ones. Rayner notes, however, that ‘‘for good or ill, we live in an era when science is culturally privileged as the ultimate source of authority in relation to decision-making’’ (2006, p. 6); often, the focus on securing scientific certainty can effectively obstruct effective policy action (see also Oreskes, 2004). Also, as mentioned before, it contributes to dominant considerations of mitigation policies, often to the detriment of considerations for policy action on adaptation. Thus, assessments of anthropogenic climate stabilization have prema- turely foreclosed around fixed international policies on mitigation (e.g. Kyoto Protocol) and associated proposals/practices (e.g. targets and timetables, temperature rise ceiling of 2 8C and 450–550 ppm CO2 atmospheric concentration caps). Third, while the stabilization-based discourse may have been valuable in building broad policy actor and public engagement in climate mitigation, it has also fostered sub-optimal aims and unrealistic expectations. For instance, the ‘Stop Climate Chaos Coalition’ based in the UK has now involved over 11 million citizens, spanning a wide range of environmental and labour organizations as well as development charities and faith-based groups. However, their mission statement includes a call to support activities that ‘‘keep global warming below the two degrees (Celsius) danger threshold to protect people and the planet’’ (Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, 2009). While those claims-makers – barring medical science breakthroughs – will not be alive to defend their claims, there is irony in claiming intergenerational equity as the ethical requirement to stabilize the climate, when the attention remains focused on stability instead of preparing our grandchildren for new relations with their future climates (through already existing commitments to a certain amount of climate change). By critiquing stabilization we are not critiquing long-term thinking per se; we posit that this should be an open engagement rather than one tied predominantly to scientific targets and notions of stability. More- over the name Stop Climate Chaos has a strange Canute-ishness about it, as though we either could or should stand together on a beach and command, in the name of good climate governance, that change and variability cease. If climate can be stabilized in this sense, then clearly the level of DAI or stabilization target becomes an intensely political and ethical question, as the future global climates will effectively be determined by actors living in the early years of this century who design and implement such a policy (in this regard an international agreement is vital). It thus privileges and instantiates their conceptions of safe, dangerous and tolerable, silencing both current and future discontents.11 It also suggests some rational basis by which certain impacts are allowable, raising the opportunity for populations to demand either protection or compensation for a stable climate that has destabilized their livelihoods. Therefore any mitigation options pursued that aim to suck carbon out of the atmosphere cannot merely be seen as technologies to benignly stabilize the climate, but rather must be seen as active and heavily politicized interventions. Critical ethical and political dilemmas are therefore obscured within the technocratic calculability of climate stabilization policies. In this paper we have argued that the elegant attraction of ‘climate stabilization’ discourses has culminated in a focus on long- term mitigation targets and a cost-effective climate policy that does not address broader political and ethical questions about the timescale, actors and costs involved. It seems appropriate, scientifically, historically and socially, to question this discursive hegemony and open up debates on more productive and effective framings of climate policy. This paper therefore argues that while the climate stabilization discourse (and associated ways of thinking/proposing/acting) has been valuable in drawing greater attention to human influences on the global climate, it is time to explicitly move to more productive ways of considering minimizing detrimental impacts from human contributions to climate change.

The Contemporary Racial Repertoire of the “China/Chinese” Threat

The outbreak of the pandemic could not have had worse timing (as if it could be timed), but timing is critically important here. Its emergence amid the ongoing intensive trade war between the United States and China is significant in that the prevailing tensions between the two countries and the discourses of Chinese unfair trade competition, scientific espionage, and technological surveillance frame the reception of the pandemic. One may argue that President Trump’s insistence on blaming China for the spread of the deadly virus is yet another tactic in his administration’s sustained attempt to quell China’s economic power at the same time that it provides a foil to distract from—and a scapegoat to blame for—the economic and public health crisis in which we find ourselves.