Coloniality K - Michigan 2024 STARTER

Coloniality Kritik—2024 Michigan Starter Packet
Notes
This is a critique of coloniality, which is distinct from (though related to) colonialism. Colonialism properly refers to practices of material conquest, subjugation, and expropriation of land, people, and resources. Coloniality is broader; if colonialism is a square, then coloniality is a rectangle. Coloniality is an epistemology, and this is an epistemology-centric kritik. It is a way of knowing and understanding the world that assigns objective value to both material and immaterial resources, and assumes that that value is exchangeable. Coloniality justifies many forms of violence and harmful practices in order to extract that value from the world. This extraction can occur both from nature (think oil drilling, deforestation, etc), and from people (think exploitative labor practices, as well as IP regulations that facilitate stealing ideas and practices from indigenous communities and/or prevent those communities from profiting from their knowledge).
Here’s a brief explanation of the distinction.
Vawda, 23—Senior Research Associate in the School of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Yousuf, “Rethinking intellectual property through decoloniality and other lenses,” Intellectual Property Rights in the Post Pandemic World, Chapter 7, pp. 130, dml)
If colonialism is understood to refer to conquest, subjugation and control of the colonies for the benefit of colonisers, and decolonisation 61 to a formal end to that process, ‘coloniality’ may be understood to signify a continuation of colonialism by different means:
Like colonialism, coloniality involves the expropriation of land and resources. Unlike traditional colonialism in which expropriation primarily takes place through direct forms of conquest of one group over another, under modernity/coloniality expropriation happens also through the logic of the market and of modern nation-states.62
This includes extractive market practices such as protectionism, the creation of monopolies and rent-seeking, which are enabled in the modern era by strong IP protections and abuse of those protections.
That said, this kritik uses the terms somewhat interchangeably, because that’s how the literature uses them as well, but I think the distinction is helpful for thinking through how to explain the argument in debates. I also think it’s useful for distinguishing this kritik from other colonialism kritiks that are common in debate, specifically the settler colonialism kritik, which draws from a relatively distinct literature base and makes somewhat different arguments. Again, there’s certainly overlap, but the arguments and scholarship are different—settler colonial theory is specific to colonial practices of settlement, whereas coloniality theory applies not just to settlement, but to many other forms of colonial conquest and subjugation. I predict non-settler colonialism kritiks to be pretty popular this year, so it’s worth learning the distinctions!
How to prep this file:
Highlight. I left most of the file unhighlighted because many of the cards are both a) really good and b) really repetitive when it comes to warrants and rhetorical power. This file is a good opportunity to practice efficient highlighting—keep in mind that you only need to highlight any given warrant once, and rehighlighting the same word or phrase multiple times doesn’t necessarily make your argument stronger!
Consider retagging things. Many of the tags are probably longer than necessary; I aimed for explanation over efficiency. If you’re reading a lot of cards in the block, doing a lot of analytic work, and/or saving the K for the 1NR, cutting down on the tags is a good way to save time.
Think through how you want to go for the alt. I tried to write this K to facilitate both framework-centric 2NRs as well as 2NRs that go for a more substantive and material alt. It will be hard to do both at the same time, so consider writing multiple sets of blocks so you can adapt your 2NC (or 1NR) to set up either 2NR based on the 2AC.
Consider reworking the 1NC. Some of the backshelf/block cards could very easily be a combo impact/alternative for the 1NC if you want to shorten it. You can also include more specific links, or a different alt if you want to go all-in on the more framework-centric approach that I mentioned above (if you want ideas, take a look at Vats 20 in “Solvency—Inequality—2NC” and Cowen 24 in “AT: Crackdown/No Mindset Shift,” which were both in earlier drafts of the 1NC).
Think about link uniqueness. One of the strengths of this K is the link (especially vis-à-vis aff link answers), so aff approaches will focus less on the link itself and more on the uniqueness of the link and the alt’s ability to resolve it. You won’t win by spamming links to every card in the 1AC, you’ll win by establishing that those links are reasons why the aff generates more colonial violence/extraction than is happening in the status quo.
Topshelf
K—1NC
The plan enables colonial extraction from non-Western knowledge systems across the planet.
Forsyth, 19—associate professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance in the College of Asia and Pacific at The Australian National University (Miranda, “Making Room for Magic in Intellectual Property Policy,” Understanding Oceania, Chapter 6, pp. 92-94, dml)
Although the global intellectual property regime 1 is often positioned as being the only intellectual property regime across the globe, there are currently many different regimes regulating the production of, and access to, a range of intangible resources. These alternative intellectual property regimes—such as customary systems, informal contracts, trade secrets and other informal normative systems—are often highly relational and deeply embedded in the social, cultural and political matrix of the group they regulate. Today many of these systems operate in pockets where the global intellectual property system has not as yet spread, but these areas are quickly diminishing as the global system continues to colonise both new geographical regions and also new types of subject matter.
This paper argues that local knowledge and innovation systems are often rendered invisible by the dominance of the global intellectual property system. This is largely due to the state-centric, positivistic paradigm within which the global system, and the institutions that manage it, operate. This in turn means that when new types of intangible resources or innovation start to be recognised as valuable by the global North, such as traditional knowledge, there is a tendency to fail to see the existing regulatory structures that surround them as these structures rarely operate at the level of the state. This type of myopia has been referred to as the ‘blank slate fallacy’ (Twining 2009:285–86) by legal pluralists who reveal a repeated pattern of marginalisation of non-state regulatory orders by state-based legal systems (see, for example, Griffiths 1986; von Benda-Beckmann 1985:187). As a result, the global intellectual property system often colonises these ‘new’ regulatory spaces through imposing transplanted regulatory regimes. The existing systems are often changed in fundamental ways as a result of the new rules, ideologies and categories of winners and losers, introduced by the new system.
This paper explores these issues through a discussion of the role of magic or spirits in Melanesian intellectual property systems, first identifying their importance in local intellectual property systems and then asking what happens when this dimension is left out by the introduction and dominance of the global intellectual property system. We see how the global system approaches the regulatory challenge of protecting traditional knowledge by separating the ‘object’ of protection (traditional knowledge) from the system that formed the necessary environment for its production. I then discuss two problematic consequences of failing to take local intellectual property systems into account when extending the global intellectual property regime into new areas. First, the creation of new forms of property rights is likely to interfere with the existing systems in potentially corrosive ways. This is linked in part to what Drahos has referred to as the ‘tragedy of commodification’ (Drahos 2014:203) as it involves the introduction of new forms of property rights geared towards facilitating exchange in a market system. The second problem is that it means the true value of these knowledge and innovation systems is missed by the global North, particularly the ways in which they suggest the need to expand our epistemic and metaphysical horizons. These lessons are particularly important in relation to climate change, where the value of seeing the earth as a balanced system, a central tenet of many local knowledge systems, has particular resonance (ibid.:206–07).2 The final part of the paper then explores one possible approach that could be used in order to make room for these local systems in intellectual property regulation, namely intercultural legal pluralism.
Colonial extractivism is unsustainable and causes extinction.
Dunlap, 24—visiting research fellow at the University of Helsinki (Alexander, “The Structures of Conquest: Debating Extractivism(s), Infrastructures and Environmental Justice for Advancing Post-development Pathways,” The Afterlives of Extraction: Alternatives and Sustainable Futures, Chapter 3, pp. 57-59, dml)
Extractivism and infrastructure are the two sides of the socio-ecological coin. The extraction of human and non-human life to ‘develop’ states, grow economies and modernise infrastructures, while responsible for creating living possibilities and enchantments (Alexander, 2008; Harvey and Knox, 2012), is undeniably the modality of development that is responsible for socioecological and climate catastrophe (Kallianos, Dunlap and Dalakoglou, 2022). ‘The invention of the boat’, as Paul Virilio ((2008 [1983]), 46) reminds us, ‘was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes’. Ward Churchill (2003) and Winona LaDuke and Sean Aaron Cruz (2012), taking this further, remind us that colonial genocide–ecocide process on Turtle Island are foundational to nuclear weapon production. Colonial conquest and the ‘Indian Wars’ established the means to exterminate Hiroshima and Nagasaki via atomic bombs dropped on Japan.1 With the wider public recognition of climate change, we can now say that the invention of capitalist industrialisation (as we know it) has consolidated the pathways towards ecological and climate catastrophe.
Technological progress, its speed, convenience and possibilities, offered existential purpose and enamoured people (Harvey and Knox, 2012; Anand, Gupta and Appel, 2018), meanwhile masking, ignoring and externalising the underside and ‘costs’ of this wonder—‘[t] he negative side of technology and speed was censored’, as Virilio ((2008 [1983]), 46) contends. This underside is not only accidents and disasters as Virilio indicates, but an entire self-reinforcing and administering institutional network of extractivism and infrastructure powered by capitalism(s). This, of course, refers specifically to materialintensive, or ‘hard’, infrastructures, such as roads, pipes, power lines, data centres, power stations and more (Anand, Gupta and Appel, 2018; Tarvainen, 2022), which function as the skeleton of capitalism, the shape of modernity, the driving force of extractivism. Patrick Wolfe’s (2006, 388) contention that colonial ‘invasion is a structure not an event’, indicates—past and present—how the modernist process seeks to literally ‘steamroller’ and absorb Indigenous peoples and ecologies, revealing how political economy maintains this socio-ecological apparatus of conquest. Wolfe’s ‘structure’ refers to settler colonialism and colonial societies, their political economy and forms of political organisation— the state (Dunlap, 2018; 2020). Viewing statist2 infrastructures as conquest reminds us of the extent to which intense socio-ecological destruction is tolerated and normalised within the current institutions and economies. This is to say that colonial/statist3 invasion is also infrastructural (Dunlap and Arce, 2022, 461; Tornel, 2020), which implies the necessity of rethinking and changing ‘resource’ extraction practices and modern infrastructural construction (Kallianos, Dunlap and Dalakoglou, 2022), which extends to bureaucratic, judicial and mental infrastructures. Mental infrastructures are formed by systematically bombarding people with efforts at subjectivity persuasion (e.g. ‘brain washing’) by private industries and governments in order to cultivate particular forms of public conduct and consumer practices (Bernays, [1928]2005; Herman and Chomsky, [1989]2010; Verweijen and Dunlap, 2021). If people want to mitigate ecological crisis, they must become responsive and challenge the persistence of ecologically destructive infrastructures and begin (re)transforming their habitation practices to support their environments. This chapter seeks to address an anthropocentric extractive and infrastructural bias that predominates within extractive and environmental justice (ej) literatures. This bias relates to how people chart (multi-scalar) extractive supply webs, the state and ‘justice’ phraseology. Critical approaches, the chapter argues, still suffer from ‘infrastructural coloniality’ (Dunlap, 2021a, 6), which underestimates the accumulation and interdependence of extractivism(s) and enables them through processual and egalitarian concerns that maintain the supremacy of modernist infrastructures over ecosystems. Infrastructural coloniality frequently results in ‘selling out’ ecosystems/habitats, thereby subordinating nonhuman life (e.g. animals, rivers, mountains, trees and habitats) to the desires of various human populations under the influence of colonial mentalities and, later, industrial-‘technocapitalist’ desires. Civilisation, Empire, Monarchy and Colonialism, guided by various statist forms and economic logics, have progressed alongside technological developments, which reinforce each other to continue industrial capitalist trajectories into cybernetic and computational capitalism(s) that remain normal features of (statist) market societies.
The alternative is a decolonial public domain.
Mathew, 21—MPP candidate, Harvard Kennedy School (Sasha, “A feminist manifesto of resistance against intellectual property regimes: reclaiming the public domain as an open-access information commons,” Critical African Studies, 13:1, 115-126, dml)
The rampant overprotection of intellectual property empowered by the forces of information capitalism is resulting in the growing privatization and enclosure of the public domain, and the marginalization and devaluation (or susceptibility to ‘theft’) of the knowledge produced and held in disempowered communities. The public domain, for our purposes, consists of the types and uses of information and aspects of culture that remain publicly accessible: free to use without permission or payment.
Legal scholar Deborah Halbert argues (Citation2006) that the public domain is inherently ‘feminine’ because it rejects dualities: it does not privilege a single way of knowing and doing over another.
It builds bridges to alternative ways of knowing, which are not mediated by market-based exchange. Rather, the public domain is built on social bonds – gifts, rather than commodities. It is feminine in the current global gender order (i.e. hegemonic patriarchy) because it recognizes that production is an inescapably communal activity; which makes sharing with the community ‘morally appropriate’ (Citation2006). Halbert’s conception of the public domain is resonant with Nancy Fraser’s ‘sphere of social reproduction’ (Arruzza, Fraser, and Bhattacharya Citation2019, 8). The social reproduction sphere encompasses sites upon which the young are socialized, communities built, meaning produced and social bonds forged: in ‘households, neighbourhoods, civil society associations, and public institutions, including schools, childcare and eldercare centers’. This sphere – distinct from that of commodity production and waged labour, is what sustains and makes capitalism possible (Fraser and Jaeggi Citation2018). Both conceptions of the social reproduction sphere and the public domain reflect feminist epistemologies; they are sites of subordination – and accordingly, of radical possibility. I invoke these conceptions in proposing what is an expansively feminist, decolonial project: the reclamation of the public domain in service of the social good, rather than in service of commodity production and capital accumulation.
There have been movements within IP scholarship to strengthen and protect the public domain against encroachment and enclosure (Benkler Citation1999). Other scholars caution against a ‘romanticization’ of the public domain, which they point out has been a source for the exploitation of the ‘labour and bodies of the disempowered’ (Chander and Sunder Citation2004). They propose that there is a dialectical relationship between the public domain and IP, and that the public domain rather than act as a bulwark against propertization, feeds and enables it (Chander and Sunder Citation2004). Yet, recognizing that differing resources and circumstances shape the capacity to draw advantage from a commons, enables us to also recognize that the forces that produce these differing capabilities are political in nature (Chander and Sunder Citation2004). In calling for a revolt against IP regimes, I mean to attack the institutions that such a politics of hierarchy and exclusion has produced; and in calling for the reclamation of the public domain, I hope to furnish the soil for a different type of politics – one that has nourished the social reproduction sphere and honours feminist, indigenous, and Southern ways of knowing and doing.
We participate in neoliberal capitalism, inter alia, by complying with and honouring the claims of the intellectual property regime – an edifice built on the expropriated labour of indigenous and colonized people, slaves, Dalits and oppressed people everywhere. It is a system built on ownership and exclusion; a means for the forces of financial capital to continuously enclose and appropriate the public domain. Rejecting the constructs and imaginaries of IP law opens possibilities for other organizational forms, knowledge production systems and theories of value that could be de-linked from subordination and extraction. I do not propose a reform of the IP regime or an extension of its protection to the marginal. I do not propose greater use of licenses such as GNU General Public License (Copyleft) or share-alike licenses (Creative Commons), which attempt to expand the public domain without subverting or challenging intellectual property law as an institution. I do not propose to use the master’s tools to create sites of possibility within structures of subjugation.
A reimagination of knowledge production from a feminist and decolonial epistemological standpoint would emphasize authorship and creation as acts of reaffirming the interconnectedness of human sociality. It would reject the idea of authorship as ownership and cultural production as a discrete entity with clearly defined borders, and acknowledge the intrinsically communal nature of knowledge production and consumption. In rejecting capitalist epistemologies and theories of value which are rooted in racism and caste-based patriarchy, colonialism and labour oppression, we hope to instantiate new forms of value drawing from community and the ‘raw power of connection’ (Lorde Citation2018).
Impact Framing—2NC
You should artificially scale up the wei

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