The aff’s biopolitics make WMD use and genocide inevitable

Mitchell, professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5, December 2004, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf

At some distance from these advances in biomedicine and biotechnology are the issues of life and death that are played in various arenas of international politics and human rights. These concern the effects of the break-ups of nation-states from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to Indonesia, the subsequent movement, detention, expulsion, processing, and mass death of refugees and illegal immigrants, and the conditions and forms under which military action, ʻpeacekeepingʼ and ʻhumanitarian interventionʼ are acceptable. They concern the international coalition against the polycentric network of terrorism. Detention camps are again becoming a feature of modern liberal-democratic states. On the one hand, the twentieth century gave us a name for the death of a whole people or ʻraceʼ, genocide. On the other, it sought to promote the universal rights of individuals by virtue of their mere existence as human beings. Bio-politics and thanato-politics are played out in war, in torture, and in biological, chemical and atomic weapons of mass destruction as much as in declarations of human rights and United Nationsʼ peacekeeping operations.