The 1AC’s follow-on claims rely on a vision of the global periphery as open to manipulation, reifying Western hegemony.

As I argued in Chapter 1, much of international theory is predicated upon an understanding of certain boundaries, both conceptual and practical. International theorists typically attempt to differentiate the international from the set of intra-state interactions. Here we have the reification of a particular image of the bounded nineteenth-century European sovereign, each master of its own territory, projected back and forward in time – an aspect of what R. B. J. Walker calls the discourse of eternity. The domestic condition of hierarchy is contrasted with an international ahistorical condition of anarchy between states. Lately, there is an opposing attempt in international theory to theorize the hierarchical stratification of the international system. This attempt includes aspects of the English School and social constructivism, but especially observed in the work of David Lake or John Ikenberry. Each of these approaches emphasizes the specific diffusion of social norms or the emergence of authority relationships that call into question the pristine construction of the hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy so prevalent in realist/neorealist theories. Nonetheless, these approaches typically remain Western-centric. They assume that norm diffusion is a one-way street: specifically, they assume that the periphery remains a passive receptor of norms that have historically emerged in the West. In other words, such approaches to the theorization of international hierarchy do not take into account the historical and contemporary imbrications, feedbacks, reverberations of political, social and institutional norms and practices that were experimented on in what were/are the (neo)imperial laboratories that make up the significant parts of the global order. What I have attempted to show in the preceding chapters is that we need to be much more attuned to the multidirectional reverberations that result from conditions of domination (particular historical forms of formal and informal imperialism) that have profound effects on domestic institutions and practices. To return to Hoffmann’s point made in 1959, international theory must be attentive to what “cuts across” states and not simply the interactions between states. By tracing the ways in which imperial governance resulted in experiments and innovations of violence, social control and new forms of socioeconomics, we can observe the extent to which such subordinated spaces have historically possessed forms of agency that “cut across” and into the “inside” of great powers. The previous three chapters examined the conjunction between historical changes in the international system and the effects that occurred throughout not only the global periphery but also the center. While I have stressed three different themes that remain crucial for international theory – namely violence, social control or security and political economy – my focus has been on demonstrating the links between international changes (i.e. imperial or hegemonic periods of crisis beginning in the nineteenth century) and the “management” of subaltern and Western populations. Instead of emphasizing the effects that such international changes have on systemic configurations, the number of poles in the international system, for example, or, more generally, on statecraft or foreign policy, I have shown how the materialization of the camp, the colonial surveillance state and neoliberalization were significantly affected by the transnational diffusions taking place across shifting imperial or hegemonic networks. The nineteenth-century experimentation with violence in imperial Africa, the colonization of the American West, and the tectonic shifts in imperial geopolitics during the latter part of the nineteenth century have had fateful implications for the materialization of the concentration camp and the violence perpetuated within Europe during the Second World War; concerns about internal threats in newly industrialized European nation-states provoked the emergence of a modern surveillance state that adapted techniques and technologies developed in imperial domains; the neoliberalization of the global South during the course of the 1970s proved significant for the reassertion of American hegemony, a political project that would be pushed forward by the adoption of a similar neoliberalization in the United States and the United Kingdom. Subordinated peripheries are not passive receptors of norms devised in the imperial West; historically they have proved to be significant “laboratories of modernity” where imperial agents could experiment, innovate and “discover” novel modes and technologies of governing that would undoubtedly prove problematic, at least initially, to implement directly within the metropole. As I have argued in Chapter 1, we should understand the metaphor of the laboratory in the Latourian sense. According to Latour, by forcing the social world to conform to its requirements, the laboratory becomes the vector for defining the parameters of legitimate political and social action. In an analogous way, the (neo)imperial laboratory defines the contours of valid social and political governance. What gets developed, innovated and experimented on in the crucibles of imperial domains becomes perceived as “tried and true” practice, especially in response to conditions of political, social or economic crisis. In this way, the imperial laboratory normalizes new forms of violence, social control, and the reorganization of domestic politico-economic institutions. Thus the linkages between the international, the domestic, the peripheral and the metropole are much deeper and intense than international theorists usually accept. They involve processes of horizontal as well as vertical diffusion of norms and practices, of material assemblages that connect hierarchical relations between periphery and metropole. However, the relevance of uncovering these processes of co-constitution between metropole and periphery is not just for a deeper awareness of the historical implications of imperial international relations. As I started off describing in the Introduction, the Global War on Terror is itself an intensified contemporary moment of neoimperial experimentation with significant reverberations not only for the United States itself but also across a wide array of Western states. This is not to say that the processes of militarization of the domestic space underway are novel or specific to the United States. As the epigraphs to this chapter show, the militarization of policing is a long-term process that can be traced back to the American involvement in the Philippines (as McCoy has shown) and is something that is also occurring beyond the United States, for example in France (as Mathieu Rigouste has also shown). What is perhaps novel about our contemporary period, however, is that our traditional spatial definitions that delineate the applicability of specific forms of violence are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. As Carlos Galli argues, the very notions of internal and external vis-à-vis state control over territory have essentially lost their meaning.3 “In the global age,” Galli argues: modern political spatiality – the State, with all its right and its ability to enclose an internal sphere with order and security, creating a space where “not everything can happen” – has ceased to be fully in effect, challenged as it is by the power of economic flows and the needs of capital, which demand a new politics and which no longer allow the State to be the operative center of political reality and its interpretation.4 Threats can no longer be properly demarcated (if they ever were completely) according to a fixed spatial configuration (i.e. the traditional cartography of the Westphalian order of states). What we end up with is a global form of “Empire” possessing neither “interiority” nor “external” edges, laced with a shifting multiplicity of borders, center-less and unstable. What emerges is a planetary condition in which this: global Empire [is] locked in a struggle against itself, against anomalous functions that exist within it. In short, it is an Empire whose inner discontinuity produces conflicts that, no matter where or how they are generated, all have local status, and all of which also fall immediately – with unforeseeable effects – into the Whole.5 An effect of this effacement of any notions of inside and outside – something, for example, Carl Schmitt recognized long ago – is that, as Galli puts it, “the Enemy today presents himself as the Disturber, the specter of all that is internal and domestic – as our own wicked caricature, our Double, our Shadow.”6 It is the persistent fear that an amorphous enemy infiltrates the polity, undermining it through persistent and ubiquitous subversion that conditions a specific governmental response. This concluding chapter thus explores some of the nascent consequences of these (neo)imperial experiences during the better part of a decade of the Global War on Terror, in light of a novel form of spatiality that progressively effaces distinctions between internal and external, metropole and periphery. Experimentation may well occur in Iraq or Afghanistan and reverberate back into the US; but urban American environments may also become laboratories for testing different techniques and technologies by a state that no longer entirely differentiates inside from outside. What defines the intensified proliferation of military techniques and technologies at “home” and “abroad” is a concern with the long-term maintenance of American authority.7 What this results in is a consistent hollowing out of liberal-democratic institutions and the decaying civic participation of the population largely perceived as being a threat to state authority. As Sheldon Wolin puts it, “the superimposition of empire and democracy, the corruption of representative government, the declining status of the citizen, the hegemonic status of American power in the world – suggest that the traditional categories of citizen, democracy, state and power desperately need reformulation.”8