The impact is the asymmetrical Fourth World War---war has become a scene of spectacle through digital media for the American public to consume at home, and increasingly spilling over into quotidian environments. The 1AC’s attempts at peace will reproduce War on Terror logics that use the spectacularized forms of violence to export global atrocities.

VI. Asymmetric Warfare: Globalization & The Staging Of Military Action Today’s terrorism attempts to work in opposition to the abstracted warfare which makes structural decisions that affect ‘the painful reality of millions’. The rise of paranoia has created the ‘terrorist’, and 28 inscribed within it is ‘an irrational abstract agency’; serving as the rationale for indiscriminate killings and justification for the ‘war on terror’. As the ultimate tool for legitimating death, racism is not an external 29 phenomenon, but one endemic in the sovereign state and the global neocolonialist regime. As Foucault argues, its discourse is ‘always available for recuperation, and integral to the workings of the biopolitical state’. After all, it is the ‘fierce colonial desire’ which strives to classify and categorize peoples, and 30 “blackness or race have never been fixed, they have always belonged to a chain of open-ended signifiers” We are therefore not in a post-racial moment, since not only is racial discourse revived and 31 instrumentalized for the benefits of the sovereign state’s foreign affairs, but it is used to institutionalize a new regime of existence in which people become abstractions and signifiers, agents in a staged and asymmetrical war that they never ascribed to. After all, the use of big data in order to classify ‘terrorist’ 32 activity has already been used against climate change activists in the United States, who were also accused of terrorist activity in their own country. The ‘state of exception’ created through the reign of terror on foreign and home soil creates a dangerous volatile environment. The asymmetric warfare occurring in today’s Fourth World War is not only played on the geopolitical field, it is also played on the ideological one through spectacles and extreme performances, video testimonials and leaked government files. Contemporary war zones have become more blurred and ubiquitous—taking place outside of designated war zones; as cyber warfare, terrorism, and its complementary ‘war on terror’. The military is not only deployed, it is also orchestrated; war becomes an installation; and its warfare is curated by edited drone footage, press releases, cinematic documentaries, and activist phone videos. War has become staged, curated, and installed, and as Kelleher states: “the scene does not just happen of its own accord but is put together in a particular way for our benefit, which means also put together to ‘work’ on us in particular ways.” The term theatre of war, for example, refers 33 to the way in which military action is deployed and staged. Photography, dramaturgy, and visual art are 34 also instrumentalized in order to persuade, manipulate, and create political illusions that displace subjectivities, geographical borders, public morals, and legislation. They are increasingly used within the context of warfare in order to create proxy’s and confusion. This performative analysis has vast implications, because if terrorism is performance art, it cannot be militarily defeated. Furthermore, the response to terrorism with military action has the tendency to feed the ‘event’ by meeting it on the same stage. It is a well known fact that videos and testimonies of the United States’ atrocities abroad have been used to recruit more terrorists. As Zizek states: ‘we tend to forget we all are not just abstract individuals of a world’; rather than feed the abstraction of the ‘war on terror’, perhaps it is time to lift the veil in order to see the real war: that of the economic neocolonialist regime. Rather than let American patriotism render September 11 a device for state ideology, we should note the way in which the economy increasingly takes more primacy over democracy. Despite the United States’ denouncements of the state of a 35 ‘backwards Middle East’, their simulational values mask their interests, which is precisely to keep these states undemocratic to protect the unfettered power they have over the regional oil reserves. 36 Terrorism can be seen as a decolonizing practice through which the neocolonialist reign of terror and impunity is hijacked through an embrace of death as sacrifice. Terrorism succeeds as a decolonizing practice by 1) using martyrdom in order to hijack to logic of necropolitics, signifying death as sacrifice, 2) using extreme performances in order to inspire the similar fear and impunity as the neocolonialist regime, challenging the moral legitimacy of the West, 3) using global spectacles in order to create symbolic events, and 4) instrumentalizing media in order to take part in the global ‘shock politics’ and ‘politics of illusion’. The ‘Fourth World War’ functions through abstraction, and through the dehumanization of a peoples in order to legitimize their deaths. To this end, racial discourse is ‘revived’ and instrumentalized by the global neocolonialist regime in favor of their economic interests abroad. The dramaturgical and semiotic analysis of the ‘war on terror’ showcases how, through engaging on the global media stage, both parties are feeding the ‘theatre of war’. It also showcases that terrorism cannot be defeated through military action, since its impact is geared towards the symbolic event.