AI Neg - DDI 2023 LS

DDI LS AI Case Neg 23
Security K
1NC – Shell
Link: The aff views China as a threatening “other.”
Song ’15 [Weiqing Song is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Macau, China. Song, Weiqing. Securitization of the China Threat - JSTOR, 2015, www.jstor.org/stable/24291932.]
The concept of the "China threat” is not new; its history in the West is more than a century long. Initially, the implications of the term China threat were primarily cultural and social: the Chinese people and their traditions were portrayed by popular Western writers as malevolent, alien, and threatening to the Western culture. This depiction remained in the Western imagination and later expanded to include the political realm, in which China was represented as brutal and belligerent, especially during the heyday of McCarthyism or the “Second Red Scare” following China’s regime change in 1949. In recent decades, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the so-called China threat has become a topical issue within contemporary international relations (IR). The concept has taken on a more prominent role in Western political discourse – especially, but not exclusively, in the United States – over the past two decades. It not only has been introduced into the public sphere by journalists and other opinion leaders, but has entered the domain of policy through the work of policy analysts and politicians. Those concerned by the China threat argue in essence that a rising China poses an increasing, imminent, and real threat both to its neighbors and to far-distant countries. Moreover, this threat is perceived to be comprehensive, with security-related, military, economic, and environmental implications. Naturally, this hotly debated topic has also received scholarly attention. Most researchers have taken either a positivist or a normative approach to the issue of the “China threat.” Positivist studies emphasize causal factors whereas the aim of normative research is to refute or support a given thesis from a historical and ideological perspective. Both positivist and normative researchers provide theoretical and practical insights into the study of the alleged “China threat,” together with recommendations for dealing with it. Roy, only of the first scholars to address the issue of the China threat from an IR perspective, provides a survey of the major arguments on both sides of the debate, including a literature review of neorealist and neoclassical-realist theories of the threat posed by China and policy recommendations for Western governments. Notable original research on the China threat topic has continued to emerge over the years. Taking a more liberal approach, Li argues that the challenge posed by a fast-growing China to stability in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region depends on the expectations of Chinese policy makers, who operate in a highly economically interdependent environment. They are more likely to use peaceful means to settle disputes with neighbors and others if they perceive economic benefits to arise from such a strategy. Other scholars use realist-IR theory (particularly power-transition theory) to contend that the so-called China threat has emerged in the political discourse of the United States and other Western countries in response to the rise of China. In another review article, Jeffery argues thought-provokingly for the danger of creating a real China threat through "historical analogies" with previous challenger states. For instance, power-transition theorists in the realist-IR school compare China's threat with that of 19th-century Germany, and adherents of the successor state image theory draw analogies with the Soviet Union.
Impact: China threat narratives such as the ones the 1AC perpetuates feed anti-Asian racism and harassment.
Chow ’21 [Tobita Chow is a Director of Justice Is Global at People's Action Institute Chow, Tobita. How China Threat Narratives Feed Anti-Asian Racism and How to Fight Back, June 21AD, peoplesaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/JIG_AntiAsianRacismReport_2021_0608.pdf. ]
There are a number of narratives about China that feed anti-Asian racism. Attracting the greatest amount of attention is former President Trump’s use of phrases such as “Chinese virus” or “Kung flu.” This was part of a broader narrative strategy to scapegoat China for the pandemic and to displace blame for Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of this public health crisis. The point was not only to claim that COVID-19 came from China, but also that China should take all the blame for its impacts on the US. This contributed to many people in the US blaming anyone in the US who is of Chinese descent, or who “looks Chinese.” A significant proportion of incidents of anti-Asian racism have included language from the perpetrators that assign blame for the pandemic on the victims, or otherwise identify the victims as sources of disease.³ There are also a number of other narratives that, in different ways, identify China as a threat to the US and to ordinary Americans, and thereby feed racism. In addition to blaming China for the pandemic, leaders in US politics and media speak about China as an economic threat and/or a national security threat (through military power, espionage, or so-called “influence” campaigns), and accuse China of “cheating” the US. These narratives are not limited to Republicans or figures on the right like Trump, but are also popular among many Democratic and liberal figures. When these “China threat” narratives are repeated by leaders here in the US, it creates an environment in which many Americans feel encouraged to imagine that these threats are emanating not only from China (as in the country or the government) but also from individual people who are of Chinese descent, or who are perceived to be so. And it creates a sense of license for people to express these racist sentiments in both words and actions. Why is it so easy for people to hear these narratives about the country or the government of China and translate them into racist sentiments against individuals? First, it is a long standing feature of racism against people of Chinese descent (as well as people of many other Asian ethnicities) that they are imagined as being part of a single homogeneous collective, lacking in individuality. This implies that if the collective (“China”) is a threat, then any individual member of that collective is also a threat. In addition, connecting individuals of Asian descent in the US to a threat posed by China is sometimes an explicit feature of these narratives. For example, narratives about the supposed threat of espionage or “influence” from the Chinese government consistently portray individuals of Chinese descent in the US as part of the threat. For example, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in a 2018 Senate hearing that the espionage threat from China is “not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat.” He named students and academics from China as part of this “whole-of-society threat,” language that casts anyone of Chinese descent as a potential national security threat. Wray was severely criticized by Asian American civil rights organizations but has continued to make similar sweeping claims.4 Originally appointed by President Trump, Wray was kept in place by President Biden.
Alt: We must reframe our thinking of China’s recent history in terms of a “holographic transition” as opposed to a territorialized construct and view China with the context of mutuality and connectedness to reconsider the facets of international relations.
Pan and Kavalski ‘22[Chengxin Pan is Associate Professor of International Relations at Deakin University, Australia. Emilian Raychev Kavalski is a Bulgarian political scientist and the NAWA Chair Professor at the Complex Systems Lab in the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He is the book series editor for Routledge’s Rethinking Asia and International Relations series, and an Editor of the journal Asian Studies Review. Pan, Chengxin, and Emilian Kavalski. “Projecting the Future Trajectories of China’s Rise.” China’s Rise and Rethinking International Relations Theory, vol. 18, Bristol University Press, Bristol, 2022, pp. 305–306. ]
It seems that most discussions of Beijing’s growing prominence draw on China’s historical experience in order to make inferences about its future directions. Yet, as the contributions to this special issue indicate, while welcome, such analyses are often problematic both because they project a particular territorialized idea of China into the past and treat China as a homogenous and unchanging constant. Consequently, the strategic calculations that such analyses make are suspect as they rest on and reify a stylized and idealized vision of what China is and how it interacts with others. For instance, Shih and Hwang argue that the simplistic framing of China’s rise in terms either of conformism or revisionism overlooks a variety of other possibilities as well as denies the heterogeneity of strategic cultures interacting on the world stage. Instead, meaningful observation needs to heed the nuances of specific space-time dynamics and interactions (Shih and Yu, 2015). With this in mind, Pan proposes a framework for ‘holographic transition’ to articulate the contingency of assemblages such as China and world affairs. For instance, in the case of China, the possible trajectories of its rise are embedded in the plurality of ‘holographic reflections’ of the multiple worlds with which China is inextricably bound up. Thus, China’s rise and its global implications are not linear, but contingent on its dynamic and reciprocal relations with its multiple worlds. And Nordin and Smith remind us, taking mutuality and connectedness as a point of departure for our assessments discloses more relevant depictions of global life than those premised on antagonism and disconnection. The contributions by Kavalski and Nordin and Smith suggest that the direction and future trajectories of China’s rise would be shaped in the context of international interactions – such relations provide a socially organized context within which world political effects emerge. Drawing on insights from Advaita and Daoist teaching, Ling outlines a five-rank protocol for reappraising China’s rise. While these suggestions might not be particularly palatable for the bullet-pointpreferences of foreign policy analysts, the contributions to this Special Issue demonstrate that only by acknowledging the multiple sites, voices, and faces of global affairs can we begin a meaningful conversation not only on the implications of China’s rise, but also a much-needed reconsideration of key concepts of IR (such as power, identity, security, strategy, and history).
2NC – FW
Reject their truth claims---they’re ideologically soaked exploitative practices that produce intellectual racism---they cherry pick and steal local scholarship to support erroneous Western theories – purported objectivity is only the result of a self-referential loop of misinformation
Smith 20 Karen Smith is a lecturer in International Relations at Leiden University, Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town, “Eurocentrism in IR Is a Form of Intellectual Racism”, Foreign Policy, 07-03-2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/03/why-is-mainstream-international-relations-ir-blind-to-racism-colonialism/ //AA
Eurocentrism in IR Is a Form of Intellectual Racism By Karen Smith, a lecturer in international relations at Leiden University and an honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town, is the co-editor, with Arlene Tickner, of International Relations From the Global South: Worlds of Difference. In the same way that international relations has neglected race, the discipline has been both ignorant and dismissive of alternative ways of thinking about the world that do not, according to a Eurocentric understanding of history, originate from the West. Ideas from outside the West have been deemed inferior in the field of IR and lacking in value because of their geographic origin, because they are not couched in the theoretical language regarded as legitimate by the gatekeepers of IR or do not appear in forms—such as recognized academic journal articles or books—that are considered to be appropriate sources for the study of IR. In addition, scholars from beyond the West have, in a way that reflects the global economy, been relegated to the role of providers of raw material—in the form of empirical evidence—while the transformation of these facts into more advanced, abstract forms of knowledge has been regarded as the prerogative of the West. For example, Western scholars often assess African states according to criteria developed by European theories of statehood and rely on local scholars to provide the relevant data, instead of considering alternative African understandings of the state. As a consequence, the majority of what students read about in IR continues to be written by a minority of the world’s people. The presumption that all worthwhile ideas originated in the West is not only exclusionary but false, as scholars such as Pinar Bilgin and Siba Grovogui have argued—and should be acknowledged as constituting a form of intellectual racism. The exclusion of scholars and ideas from outside Europe and North America has resulted in a field that does not provide those who study it—and often go on to practice it as, for example, diplomats and politicians—with the necessary diversity of perspectives to fully grasp the dynamics of the contemporary global system. Perhaps most significantly, it has constrained the discipline’s ability to imagine a different world.
AT – Isacoff
Isacoff 15 flows neg – they say we should focus on empirics but also theorize –the whole point of the K is that we recognize historical failures of securitization and make theories that are attached to reality – LS reads yellow
1AC Isacoff [Jonathan B. Isacoff, Associate Professor of Political Science and the Chair of Environmental Studies at Gonzaga, "Why IR Needs Deweyan Pragmatism",12-16-2014, Taylor & Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10457097.2014.946837?journalCode=vpps20, 1LEE]
The well-known RCT scholars Shepsle and Bonchek humorously note that while it might not be “rocket science,” the study of politics should be scientific.46 Others, especially postmodernist critics, argue against the notion of political science and IR as science. A Deweyan pragmatist approach would suggest that this debate is not useful. By that, I mean that what IR is or is not is not nearly as important as what it achieves. So the question should not be whether IR is scientific, but rather, how scientific does it need to be to get the job done? To this, there are many answers, but I suggest a line of reasoning: the scientific method in the most general sense is useful in helping to explain how and why, all else equal, causal processes work. Put differently, if we want to know how and why some states go to war and others do not, it would be more useful—in the sense of getting logically coherent, empirically verifiable answers—to analyze historical cases systematically than it would be to consult with a shaman or use a crystal ball to obtain an answer. This is not say that there is not an important role for textual interpretation in the process of studying war and other international phenomena. Indeed, I elsewhere argue that interpretation of historical texts is crucial to making valid claims about wars.47 But the main point here is that interpretation is a means toward an end, namely, the process of coping with the world via human experience. Toward that end, interpretation is necessary and useful, but it is not the end itself. A second point is that there is clearly a pragmatic and justifiable need for certain types of quantitative methods, namely, statistics, though not necessarily formal models, in some segments of IR. Taking a simple example for illustrative purposes, if one wished to study the effect of speed limits on motor vehicle fatalities, the use of aggregate data statistically analyzed would be far superior to standing on the corner waiting for an accident to observe or reading several diary accounts of individual accidents. The key point here, however, is not that statistical methods are inherently better, or more “rigorous” than any other type of method. Rather, the use of statistically analyzed data to find answers to problems of highway fatalities creates knowledge that if properly applied, would alleviate “concrete human woes,” which is to say it would help to save lives. That is pragmatic political science.48 What Is a Problem? Many political scientists believe in the idea of having a “problem orientation” for the field. For example, Atul Kohli asserts that there is a strong consensus among leading experts “that comparative politics is very much a problem-driven field of study.” “What motivates the best comparative politics research are puzzles of real-world significance,” writes Kohli, in “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium.”49 Similarly, Ian Shapiro, responding to the question of what would be a better alternative than RCT asks the question: “What is the phenomenon to be explained?… The formulation of alternative explanations, in other words, should be a problem-driven activity.”50 This is clearly consistent with Deweyan pragmatism; in fact, it is inherently pragmatist. “A Deweyan pragmatic approach to political inquiry,” writes Maurice Meilleur, “would transform political science from a discipline, based on a set of methods, into a profession, based on a set of problems.”51 But what, more specifically, is a “problem orientation?” First, it is clear that Kohli and his colleagues mean an empirically driven problem orientation. That is, the study of politics should be driven by empirical, not theoretical or methodological problems. Careful not to push this point too far, a Deweyan pragmatist would suggest that theorization is an important activity, but it must not lose its link to problems of human experience, which is to say empirical problems. However, Kohli and others advocating an empirically driven problem orientation have little to say about how to identify and value problems. After all, there is a limitless supply of political problems only a fraction of which can be studied. In response, I would argue that some problems are more significant to the detection and response to human suffering and thus more deserving of study, than others. This is itself a tricky ethical problem, for who is to say what is or is not a “real problem?” One reader of this manuscript suggested that “What is really going on here, when one scratches the analytical surface, is not that IR theorists aren't discussing problems; it's that they are discussing problems that the author does not feel are worthy of attention. But why should we accept that the author's “problems” are more important or privileged? Why does the author get to decide what a “real” problem is?” This is a good question but it is a misreading of the argument. Nowhere does Dewey or this author imply that any individual could or should decide or dictate which problems matter and which do not. To the contrary, the question of “who decides” is a public deliberation problem, a subject Dewey addressed exhaustively in his classic The Public and Its Problems.52 According to Dewey, problems are the direct outcome of a public's determination of its common good. A full analysis of how this works, or in some cases, fails to work in practice is beyond the scope of this article. But it is important to note that there is no argument here for the privileging of one private individual's notion of what constitutions “real problem” versus that of another. That is for the public to decide. Human Woe and Issues That Ma

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