Aff’s arbitration and moderation of violence actually perpetuates the logic of violence, which is the root of the aff’s impacts

Divine examination, evaluation, calculation and choice operate thus within a complex economy in which good and bad could be transferred and exchanged. Because in this economy all bad things necessarily appear at their minimum possible level, the world as lived is always necessarily the best of all possible worlds. 'If a lesser evil is relatively good,' Leibniz reasoned, 'so a lesser good is relatively evil ... to show that an architect could have done better is to find faults in his work. ' If this description of the economy of divine government is already reminiscent of the logic of contemporary wars, with its own scales of risk and proportionality used to evaluate the desired and undesired consequences of military acts, it is hardly surprising to find in it an early reflection on the concept of 'collateral damage'. Earlier Christian theology has indeed already described all bad things that take place as 'the collateral effects of the good'. In this immanent order of human and divine life, the destructive result of floods are nothing but the collateral effect of necessary rain. In both their theological and military contexts, as Giorgio Agamben observed, the collateral effects are structural rather than accidental. It is through the collateral - flood or blood - that a government -divine or human- can demonstrate, indeed exercise, its power. Unlike the calculations of a God, seen by the philosophers and the theologians of the eighteenth century as a perfect mathematician who could undertake instantaneous calculations and immediately arrive at a precise result, mere humans must of course guess, speculate and hedge their risks as they proceed towards the future as the blind leading the blind. It is for this reason that they ceaselessly seek to develop and perfect all sorts of technologies and techniques that might allow them to calculate the effects of violence and might harness its consequences. It is these techniques and technologies, apparatuses and spatial arrangements, that are at the heart of this book. Through them, Pangloss's Leibnizian scheme- or is it Leibniz's Panglossian scheme?-of the 'best of all possible worlds' re-emerges in the progressive tradition of liberalism. Here, in its secularized form, political rather than metaphysical, a similar structure of the argument sets up the sphere of morality as a set of calculations aimed to approximate the optimum proportion between common goods and necessary evils? But as the general outlook of liberalism shifted from Voltaire's and indeed Jeremy Bentham's later focus on the 'greater good' and the responsibility of government to increase happiness to the greatest number of people, to the liberal canards of 'just wars', and their increasingly sophisticated technologies for minimizing the number of 'necessary' corpses, the search for 'the best of all possible worlds' started giving ground to the present neo-Panglossian pessimism of the 'least of all possible evils'. This book engages with the problem of violence in its moderation and minimization, mostly with state violence that is managed according to a similar economy of calculations and justified as the least possible means. The fundamental point of this book is that the moderation of violence is part of the very logic of violence. Humanitarianism, human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL), when abused by state, supra-state and military action, have become the crucial means by which the economy of violence is calculated and managed. A dose reading of a series of case studies will show how, at present, spatial organizations and physical instruments, technical standards, procedures and systems of monitoring - the complex humanitarian assemblage that philosopher Adi Ophir called ‘moral technologies' - have become the means for exercising contemporary violence and for governing the displaced, the enemy and the unwanted. The condition of collusion of these technologies of humanitarianism, human rights and humanitarian law with military and political powers is referred to in this book as 'the humanitarian present'. Within this present condition, all political oppositions are replaced by the elasticity of degrees, negotiations, proportions and balances.