The aff acts as a mediator between civil society and anti-state politics – 2 impacts to this (1) It’s a survival strategy (2) It creates change through knowledge about problems in civil society.

This is where Tully's notion of a mediator is helpful. He is offering a way for philosophers, especially political philosophers, to see their own field of study in a way that includes - indeed, even demands -Aboriginal participation. But his mediator necessarily engages an Aboriginal mediator. An Aboriginal mediator - a word warrior - is an indigenous person who engages the imposed legal and political discourses of the state guided by the belief that the knowledge and skills to be gained by engaging in such discourses are necessary for the survival of all indigenous peoples. Tully's mediator and the indigenous word warrior both inhabit a social space that is difficult to define. Indigenous intellectuals must be citizens of an indigenous community, but how they will manage to move between languages, between ways of thinking about the world, remains to be determined in practice. Clearly, though, word warriors will have to assert and protect those ways of knowing the world that define indigenous peoples. This may well be a difficult task in a sometimes hostile world, but it is what we will need to do. Perhaps Edward Said' s idea of an intellectual as an exile is useful here: 'the exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.' Later on he adds: 'Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.'65