International relations are based on patriarchal norms – states are constructed and legitimized through masculinity making violence inevitable

Econ

The economy advantage is grounded in gendered epistemology – Maximizes competition and the supremacy of androcentric values

Nhanenge 7 Jytte: Master of Arts at the development studies at the University of South Africa “Ecofeminism: Towards Integrating the concerns of women, poor people and nature into development.” Pg 570-572.

In order to support this profit-making system science developed the discipline of economics. Economics is firmly founded on dualised values. It has therefore prioritized hard, masculine characteristics as being mannerly in economic profit making. It has ensured that all soft, feminine traits are considered as being subordinate and disgraceful for the economic individual. Hence, superior reason is selected over inferior emotion, competition over cooperation, self-interest over community-interest, maximization over optimization, and the needs of the individual over the needs of society. The first mentioned are superior human qualities that belong to the Ups, while the second ones are inferior traits that relate to the Downs. This bias focus on masculine characteristics has produced societies that consist of rational, competing, self-interested, and profit maximizing individuals. These individuals are often men, but may also include women, as long as they are willing to identify with the masculine traits and behaviour. The highest goals of these individuals are profit making for their own benefit. To maximize this objective the Ups are using the Downs as instruments. Hence, any rational individual with respect for himself would be exploiting nature's resources together with the free or cheap labour of women and Others. This means that all Downs are perceived as being instruments for the profit making of the Ups. Modern technology is the means to generate economic profit. Since the greed of the Ups is pressing, the need to generate more wealth is urgent. This means that technologies commonly are developed in a rush, without careful consideration about the effects from its application. The result is that modern technology often causes pollution of both society and nature. This leads to serious suffering on the part of women, Others and nature. The rational individuals may notice these effects but since the priority is maximization of economic profit making and the Downs anyway are considered of a lower value, the polluting activities are rationalized away as being necessary for the benefit of all. The rational individual has consequently no human empathy for the pain and suffering his activities are causing the dualised other. The reason for this is straightforward and simple: Human emotions of empathy, care and concern are feminine values, which are seen as being soft, naive, unimportant and disgraceful in the hard, rational, masculine, competitive, individual world. What commonly makes a society healthy and harmonious is the shared sense of mutual relationships. These are built on cooperation and reprocity based on the human emotions of care, concern and sympathy between people in a community. Such a support system is needed for a human being to develop in a balanced manner. It commonly is founded on the unpaid activities of women and Others. Thus in order to succeed rational man needs, expects and takes for granted this feminine support. However, being greedy for maximum profit rational man overlooks the importance of directing some resources to the feminine social support system. This causes it to wear out. Hence rather than being a place of cooperation society increasingly becomes a battlefield where self-interested individuals 572 compete for scarce resources. Hence, modern society has become a dominant, exploitative, and violent place to live. Its children cannot grow up in secure and caring social surroundings to become balanced adults. Such a society breads aggressive people who re-create a vicious circle of crime, pollution, human misery, poverty, ethnic conflicts, terrorism, and sometimes civil war. The main sufferers from these crises are women and Others. Hence, the greed of economic man has lead to an unhealthy social system. However, instead of trying to restore social health, the maximizing individual sees it as a great opportunity, because strife is profitable. Thus, violent technology is made available to the conflicting groups. This will increase the fighting and amplify the crises of war and violence, human rights abuses, poverty and natural destruction. The victims are mainly women and Others.

While economic conflict magnifies gendered discrimination, patriarchal structures are the underlying cause

Wang 12

Zhuqing, Associate professor of the Law Department of the University of Science and Technology Beijing. “CHINA’S SOCIAL TRANSITIONLEADS TO NEWFORMS OF WOMEN’S SUBORDINATION.” The Future of Asian Feminisms : Confronting Fundamentalisms, Conflicts and Neo-liberalism. 2012. Pg 206-7.

We found that both in cities and rural areas, women’s rights are always the ones being infringed on whenever there occurs an economic conflict. The fundamental reason is gender discrimination. The discrimination changes its form as the time changes. But it never goes away, it is evident in many aspects of society, as well as in traditional culture as in contemporary social policy and in the legal structure. That the traditional culture discriminates against women is not unique to China; it is a common problem of all nations of the world, which explains the prevalence of the global women’s movement. China’s predominant value is that women are subordinate to men. The construction of men’s rights in society leads to gender discrimination. The direct impact is women’s low social rank and the lack of women’s rights(Zhou 2007a: 43). In the situation that the family has limited resources, parents generally do not want to invest money on the education of their daughters; they prefer to give more opportunities to boys. As girls usually are less educated, their income is lower than that of boys and their contribution is underestimated by others (Women’s Studies Institute of China 2006:86). These issues have a large impact on the contemporary situation. For instance, when dealing with women’s retirement issues, the local personnel department supports employers when they force female technicians and administrative staff to retire at age 50. They claim that by doing so they can promote the reform of the employment system. They maintain that the young people’s unemployment problem should be solved by having women retire early. Even if young people’s unemployment problem needs to be solved by the early retirement of the existing labor force, it should be a responsibility that is shared by both men and women; it shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of women. Moreover, when dealing with the problem of rural women’s rights to land, the traditional culture deems that married and divorced women shouldn’t have land rights. Therefore, discriminatory rules are passed by the villages that infringe on women’s rights. The village self-governance system is a democratic one at the grass-roots level. However, decisions by the majority are potentially unfair and unequal. The most important reason for this being the discrimination against women in Chinese culture, as discussed above. Limited land resources and the increase of the rural population, combined with the commercialization of village collective land, causes conflicts between different interest groups. Rural women, one of the most vulnerable groups in rural areas, become the first victims of the violation and infringement of land rights. In addition, the traditional discrimination against women also becomes manifest in the case of sexual harassment. The majority of society thinks that it is women’s fault when sexual harassment happens. They think that whenever a man harasses a woman, the woman must have first flirted with the guy. Whenever there is a conflict between men and women, the majority of the society blames the women for the problem, which reflects the traditional discrimination against women. The situation is the same for domestic workers. In China, 96 per cent of the domestic workers are females and most of them are from the rural areas (Zhuqing 2009: 11). Domestic workers are faced with stricter service requirements in a comparatively complex work environment, where they have to undertake both physical work and communication with their employers. The problem is that domestic workers are traditionally considered to be housemaids or servants. Such a gap in identity makes it even more difficult for them to have an equal exchange with employers.

Economic theories based on free markets relegate private activities as “unpolitical”, allowing masculine repression of sexual difference to continue through the rhetoric of public v private

Peterson in 2000 (V Spike, Associate Professor of Political Science @ Arizona, SAIS Review, 20.2, rereading public and private: the dichotomy that is not one, project muse)

The public and private dichotomy takes on new meanings in the context of modern European state-making. ¹⁶ That context was marked by an emerging culture of individualism and private property, an increasingly secular world view fueled by the development of science, and expanding relations of production associated with early industrialization and capitalism. It is widely acknowledged that modern political theory is indebted to Greek, and especially Athenian, texts, not least in regard to adopting a dichotomy of public and private. Early liberal thought revitalizes the distinction and celebrates the public sphere of equal citizens engaged in rational pursuit of the common good. But the growth of individualism and reverence for autonomy introduces a complication. Even as liberals privilege politics, they fear the state's coercive power. Their framing of public and private reflects these shifts. Here, public designates both the realm of political deliberation and the site of (state) domination. The private also bifurcates--into an emerging concept of civil society and traditional family relations--and becomes a site of freedom from the coercive power of the state. Gendered identities proliferate: masculinist military and government leaders and equal citizens in the public; free, autonomous individuals in a masculinized private; feminized dependents and care-givers in a private that is marginalized by a discourse preoccupied with freedom and progress for (propertied) men. Ackelsberg and Shanley note two effects of this framing. ¹⁷ First, the "private" encompasses everything that is not labeled "political." Second, locating power in the public sphere of state actions and distinguishing it from a private sphere of voluntary exchange, intimacy and domesticity has the effect of denying the force of actual power relations in the latter sphere(s). Continuing to deploy an apparent dichotomy--in spite of its multiple meanings and blurred boundaries--also obscures the increasing importance and power of market relations. Not only does the dichotomy render the location of an emerging "social sphere"--of voluntary organizations, civic society, and "critical publics"--problematic, but it obscures economic relations and their pervasive and potent effects. Of course, Marxists argued that market transactions were political and insisted on expanding the liberal conception of politics to include economic relations. Yet a dichotomy that separates politics and economics, and simultaneously dispenses with social and familial relations, continues to dominate mainstream theories of power, with deleterious effects

The discourse of market growth as the focus of political analysis exacerbates the depoliticization of the private realm.

Peterson in 2000 (V Spike, Associate Professor of Political Science @ Arizona, SAIS Review, 20.2, rereading public and private: the dichotomy that is not one, project muse)

I conclude this "reading" by reflecting on public and private as deployed in the discourse of neoliberalism and globalization. In the context of post-international politics and transnational economic relations, the incoherence of rigid boundaries--between states and markets and between states and the interstate system--is increasingly exposed. I earlier noted how a new private sphere of disembedded economics emerged with the development of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century. In this shifting of public and private boundaries, household re/production remains feminized and drops out of sight (hence, out of analysis and out of politics). In an important historical shift, market forces begin to command more attention than the public/state. Unlike the marginalized household sphere, this new private is powerful. But like the household sphere (in contrast to state power), it is cast as private and hence depoliticized. Stated differently, in spite of their power (and Marxist critiques), market forces are depoliticized because they are cast as private. This resistance to politicizing markets is retained in neoliberal political science and IR, where the separation of politics and economics disables adequate analyses of power. Many critics of global political economy argue that today's economic restructuring resembles--or is a continuation of--the earlier disembedding of economics, played out now in reaction to the postwar welfare state and projected on a global scale. Janine Brodie argues that [End Page 24] the current moment of restructuring can be viewed as a concerted discursive and political struggle around the very meaning of the public and private. The proponents of globalization seek radically to shrink the public--the realm of political negotiation--and, at the same time, expand and reassert the autonomy of the private [corporate] sector. 35 Marchand and Runyan describe how these shifting valorizations are gendered: In neoliberal discourse on globalization, the state is typically "feminized" in relation to the more robust market by being represented as a drag on the global economy that must be subordinated and minimized. As critics have noted, however, the state also paradoxically takes on a new role by becoming more akin to the private sector (and thus remasculinized) as it is internationalized to assist global capital and as its coercive and surveillance capacities are being enhanced. 36 The private--as a reference to the family/household--appears to drop out of the picture again, as what are considered the really important (read: masculine) spheres of politics and economics monopolize our attention. But this is again misleading. The family/household is crucial in all the ways noted earlier, and even more so as restructuring reduces the state's role in (public) welfare provisioning and as women, as agents and victims in the private/family, are left to pick up the slack. Consider as well how "pro-family" discourse in the United States casts women exclusively as wives/mothers in a superficially celebrated private sphere, even as neoliberal restructuring forces women into the public work force.

Deterrence

Deterrence theory necessitates aggressive masculinity that causes violence by increasing societal hardships, gendering discourses, and depends on an international notion of rational which ignores context and cultures

Sohail and Steven 2004 (Hashmi, Sohail H., and Lee, Steven P., eds. Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 13 July 2016.)

wmd deterrence The third question asks whether it is ethical to develop and deploy WMD as deterrents only. That is, it asks the classic question of whether it is ethical to have weapons and threaten to use then, even if it is not ethical to use those weapons militarily. As the question is framed, then, “development” and “deployment” appear not as phenomena subject to ethical scrutiny unto themselves but merely as way-stations, as adjuncts subsumed under what is taken to be the core ethical issue, which is seen as deterrence. This formulation does not work for us. We need to pause and recognize that there are really several questions enfolded in that one. We must ask not only about the ethical status of deterrence, but also whether its entailments – development and deployment – are themselves ethical. 27 One of the constitutive positions of antiwar feminism is that in thinking about weapons and wars, we must accord full weight to their daily effects on the lives of women. We then find that the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, even when they are not used in warfare, exacts immense economic costs that particularly affect women. In the recent words of an Indian feminist: The social costs of nuclear weaponisation in a country where the basic needs of shelter, food and water, electricity, health and education have not been met are obvious.... [S]ince patriarchal family norms place the task of looking after the daily needs of the family mainly upon women, scarcity of resources always hits women the hardest. Less food for the family inevitably means an even smaller share for women and female children just as water shortages mean an increase in women’s labour who have to spend more time and energy in fetching water from distant places at odd hours of the day. 28 While the United States is not as poor a nation as India, Pakistan, or Russia, it has remained, throughout the nuclear age, a country in which poverty and hunger are rife, health care is still unaffordable to many, low-cost housing is unavailable, and public schools and infrastructure crumbling, are all while the American nuclear weapons program has come at the cost of $4.5 trillion. 29 In addition to being economically costly, nuclear weapons development has medical and political costs. In the U.S. program, many people have been exposed to high levels of radiation, including uranium miners, workers at reactors and processing facilities, the quarter of a million military personnel who took part in “atomic battlefield” exercises, “downwinders” from test sites, and Marshall Islanders. 30 Politically, nuclear regimes require a level of secrecy and security measures that excludes the majority of citizens and, in most countries, all women from defense policy and decision making. 31 From the perspective of women’s lives, we see not only the costs of the development of nuclear weapons, but also the spiritual, social, and psychological costs of deployment. One cost, according to some feminists, is that “Nuclearisation produces social consent for increasing levels of violence. 32 Another cost for many is that nuclear weapons create high levels of tension, insecurity, and fear. As Arundhati Roy puts it, nuclear weapons “[i]nform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains.” 33 Further, feminists are concerned about the effect of nuclear policy on moral thought, on ideas about gender, and how the two intersect. Nuclear development may legitimize male aggression and breed the idea that nuclear explosions give “virility” to the nation, which men as individuals can somehow also share. [T]he strange character of nuclear policy-making not only sidelines moral and ethical questions, but genders them. This elite gets to be represented as rational, scientific, modern, and of course masculine, while ethical questions, questions about the social and environmental costs are made to seem emotional, effeminate, regressive and not modern. This rather dangerous way of thinking, which suggests that questions about human life and welfare are somehow neither modern nor properly masculine questions, or that men have no capacity and concern for peace and morality, can have disastrous consequences for both men and women. 34 All in all, we find the daily costs of WMD development and deployment staggeringly high – in and of themselves sufficient to prevent deterrence from being an ethical moral option. A so-called realist response to this judgment might well pay lip-service to the “moral niceties” it embodies, but then argue that deterrence is worth those costs. Or perhaps to be more accurate, it might argue that the results of a nuclear attack would be so catastrophic that the rest of these considerations are really an irrelevant distraction; deterring a WMD attack on our homeland is the precondition on which political freedom and social life depend, and so it must be thought about in a class by itself. We make two rejoinders to this claim. First, we note that in the culture of nuclear defense intellectuals, even raising the issue of costs is delegitimized, in large part through its association with “the feminine.” It is the kind of thing that “hysterical housewives” do; something done by people not tough and hard enough to look harsh “reality” in the eye, unsentimentally; not strong enough to separate their feelings from theorizing mass death; people who don’t have “the stones for war.” Feminist analysis rejects the cultural division of meaning that devalues anything associated with women or femininity. It sees in that same cultural valuing of the so-called masculine over the socalled feminine an explanation of why it appears so self-evident to many that what is called “military necessity” should appropriately be prioritized over all other human necessities. And it questions the assumptions that bestow the mantle of “realism” on such a constrained focus on weapons and state power. Rather than simply being an “objective” reflection of political reality, we understand this thought system as (1) a partial and distorted picture of reality and (2) a major contributor to creating the very circumstances it purports to describe and protect against. Second, just as feminists tend to be skeptical about the efficacy of violence, they might be equally skeptical about the efficacy of deterrence. Or to put it another way, if war is a “lie,” so is deterrence. This is not, of course, to say that deterrence as a phenomenon never occurs; no doubt, one opponent is sometimes deterred from attacking another by the fear of retaliation. But rather, deterrence as a theory, a discourse, and a set of practices underwritten by that discourse is a fiction. Deterrence theory is an elaborate, abstract conceptual edifice, which posits a hypothetical relation between two different sets of weapons systems – or rather, between abstractions of two different sets of weapons systems, for in fact, as both common sense and military expertise tell us, human error and technological imperfection mean that one could not actually expect real weapons to function in the ways simply assumed in deterrence theory. Because deterrence theory sets in play the hypothetical representations of various weapons systems, rather than assessments of how they would actually perform or fail to perform in warfare, it can be nearly infinitely elaborated, in a never-ending regression of intercontinental ballistic missile gaps and theater warfare gaps and tactical “mini-nuke” gaps, ad infinitum, thus legitimating both massive vertical proliferation and arms racing. Deterrence theory is also a fiction in that it depends on “rational actors,” for whom what counts as “rational” is the same, independent of culture, history, or individual difference. It depends on those “rational actors” perfectly understanding the meaning of “signals” communicated by military actions, despite dependence on technologies that sometimes malfunction, despite cultural difference and the lack of communication that is part of being political enemies, despite the difficulties of ensuring mutual understanding even when best friends make direct face-to-face statements to each other. It depends on those same “rational actors” engaging in a very specific kind of calculus that includes one set of variables (e.g., weapons size, deliverability, survivability, as well as the “credibility” of their and their opponent’s threats) and excludes other variables (such as domestic political pressures, economics, or individual subjectivity). What is striking from a feminist perspective is that even while “realists” may worry that some opponents are so “insufficiently rational” as to be undeterrable, this does not lead them to search for a more reliable form of ensuring security or to an approach that is not so weapons-dependent. Cynthia Cockburn, in her study of women’s peace projects in conflict zones, describes one of the women’s activities as helping each other give up “dangerous day dreams.” 35 From a feminist antiwar perspective, having WMD as deterrents is a dangerous dream. The dream of perfect rationality and control that underwrites deterrence theory is a dangerous dream, since it legitimates constructing a system that could be (relatively) safe only if that perfect rationality and control were actually possible. Deterrence theory itself is a dangerous dream because it justifies producing and deploying WMD, thereby making their accidental or purposive use possible (and far more likely) than if they were not produced at all nor deployed in such numbers. “Realists” are quick to point out the dangers of not having WMD for deterrence when other states have them. Feminist perspectives suggest that that danger appears so self-evidently greater than the danger of having WMD only if you discount as “soft” serious attention to the costs of development and deployment.

Human Rights

Human rights rhetoric is used by security states to justify endless wars against a gendered enemy

Denike in 2008(Margaret, Associate Professor of Human Rights and the Coordinator of the Human Rights Program at Carleton University, “The Human Rights of Others: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and "Just Causes" for the "War on Terror"”, Hypatia, Volume 23, Number 2, Spring)

Human rights advocates have good reasons to celebrate the "triumph" of international human rights: the past half-century or so has witnessed the mobilization of international organizations and related systems of governance around the protection of the rights of vulnerable and subjugated individuals and groups; the proliferation of international treaties and agreements elaborating and codifying [End Page 95] these protections; the creation of protocols for assessing and monitoring the practices of states; and the operational success of new international criminal-justice systems that promise to hold accountable perpetrators of "crimes against humanity." The apparent willingness of the so-called "international community" to affirm the aspirations of human rights is truly exceptional: as Louis Henkin has repeatedly emphasized, they are "the only political-moral idea that has received universal acceptance"; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was approved by "virtually all governments representing all societies" when it was adopted in 1948; and "virtually every one" of the member states of the United Nations enshrine human rights in their constitutions (Henkin 1990, 1). Leveraging notions of the inherent dignity of human beings, the universalizing impulse speaks of providing certain standards of treatment to all individuals, simply by virtue of being human. As such, and as is evident in the writings of most contemporary proponents of "just war" doctrine, human rights are commonly invoked as an ethical justification or "just cause" for states to resort to military force against those who threaten them;1 fueled by such objectives and their underlying ideology, such action is cast as inherently legitimate, whether or not it is consistent with international law, and however much suffering is produced in their name. The recent trend of the past two decades, which, like the U.S.–led "war on terror," finds imperialist "security states" (Young 2003, 14) increasingly invoking humanitarian reasons to justify exceptions to the international prohibitions on armed attacks, defies the UN charter's prohibition on the use of force, and flies in the face of the 1985 ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Nicaragua, which addressed the (il)legality of the U.S. invasion of Grenada without UN Security Council authorization. The ICJ stated at the time that there were "no really persuasive examples in state practice of human rights intervention," and that in the absence of a justification under the UN Charter, the use of force was not an appropriate method to ensure respect for human rights.2 But increasingly throughout the 1990s, and despite this ruling and the Charter's explicit prohibition, there has been a spate of military interventions conducted in the name of humanity, including those authorized as exceptional Chapter VII missions by the Security Council3and those that continue to defy authorization, such as the U.S.–led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.4 The triumph of human rights has offered up a "just cause" for postmodernity's wars, as Costas Douzinas (2000) so thoroughly demonstrates in his detailed genealogy of human rights, rendering as the new norm and rule what is invariably touted as the "exceptional" use of force against sovereign territories, providing a moral gloss to occlude the imperialist interest in such force, and effectively spelling the "end of human rights" as we know them. A gendered and racial politics is operative in these humanitarian narratives and practices, various dimensions of which feminist international legal scholars [End Page 96] have examined over the past two decades. The following discussion elucidates and elaborates on such analyses from a standpoint concerned with the impact of such triumphalism on the work of women's human rights and equality-seeking organizations—which, like many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), rely extensively on human rights instruments and on the veracity and transparency of human rights discourses to engage in social and legal reform. I address certain costs of the political production and cooptation of human rights discourse in international humanitarian law and policy, as a justification for the public violence of military intervention, and its impact on the challenges of promoting and advancing the human rights of others. In doing so, I look to the narratives of progress and human rights triumphalism, and their concomitant campaigns of fear against an allegedly lawless and evil other, as performative gestures in and by which the very distinctions between civilized and uncivilized states are constituted; and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their public acts of violence are forged. Relating these processes to the politics of gender and racial colonization, I consider how the utilization of human rights discourses, in conjunction with the language of self-defense, relies on and reinforces the selective and strategic denial of humanity and citizenship to the very groups of people—such as Muslim women and refugees—that have been made to symbolize its cause (Chinkin, Wright, and Charlesworth 2005, 28). There is a certain political economy to the strategic deployment of human rights discourses by colonial and imperial states that have sights set on the profits of war, the operations and effects of which can be mapped through a resurgence of new modalities state sovereignty. My examination of these processes of entails an exploration of how such "just causes" as human rights operate on gendered and racial lines, demonizing others as tyrants and terrorists and circumscribing women within normative paternalist roles in what Iris Marion Young calls the "protectionist racket" of security states (2003).

Humanitarian discourse is used to entrench gender norms as a means of victimizing women that need to be saved by the male white savior from the evil men in another country that can’t save itself. This is used to justify new forms of imperial domination.

Denike in 2008(Margaret, Associate Professor of Human Rights and the Coordinator of the Human Rights Program at Carleton University, “The Human Rights of Others: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and "Just Causes" for the "War on Terror"”, Hypatia, Volume 23, Number 2, Spring)

From its outset, the official state discourses that have urged, supported, and sustained the U.S.–led "war on terror" have had all of the trappings of the spirit and rhetoric of "just war" that dominated the institutional religious colonization of the Middle Ages and its various political and philosophical justifications. As many commentators have noted,14 the "war on terror" has been repeatedly cast in such terms, as is exemplified by statements of the Bush administration that it entails a confrontation with "evil,"15 a battle for "civilization,"16 or a standoff against an enemy in which states are either—and only—"with us or against us." It has been construed literally and metaphorically as a crusade against a barbaric and savage other (typically Islamic fundamentalists) in need of liberation from themselves. Casting the state's relation to its "enemy" in such oppositional terms of us versus them and good versus evil enables the constitutive posturing of the legitimate benevolent protectionist sovereign and its "just wars," as it at once constitutes the eradicability of the other, whose exposed evil renders their destruction inherently just. Masquerading the profit-driven [End Page 102] "war on terror" as a chivalrous, just, and necessary response to evil also works to conceal the direct investment of its architects (and notably then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney) in the industry of war, and to cast the lucrative contracts of building schools, medical facilities, and water supplies as a matter of delivering the cherished rights to those who were previously denied them. In other words, human rights triumphalism and its narratives of progress has been harnessed in the service of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism" (2007), that is, in the devastation created and exacerbated by the very individuals who stand to personally profit from new imperial order they impose in its place, all the while talking the moral talk of "Operation Infinite Justice" or "Iraqi freedom." This shady dealings of humanitarian narratives have huge consequences for what human rights may or may not promise "humanity," as is evident in the extensively documented accounts of how their deployment has worked to "cancel the very gains of the progressive universal human rights movement in seemingly irreversible ways . . . to mute the voices of suffering and, in the process, regress human rights futures" (Baxi 1998, 168–69). Deploying human rights to substantiate public violence and to impose a privatized economic order—as with the "war on terror"—has a lasting effect on "human rights," not merely because armed conflict is in itself a leading cause of systemic human rights abuses against which NGOs need to continue to act, but because, in its nefarious moralism and "principled" self-justifications, this war, leveraged by a fear of the (Muslim, Arab) other and a concern for the rights of "humanity," conscripts the language of human rights and "humanitarian" causes to substantiate daily civilian atrocities and "exceptional" measures of racial profiling, security arrest warrants, indefinite detentions, torture, deportation, and so on, and in effect, invariably limits what "human rights" and "humanitarian concerns" can and do mean, particularly for those vast sectors of "humanity" that are not counted as "human" and that have engaged generations of struggles to obtain them. This leveraging is done through draconian racist policies that systemically deny human rights to target groups that symbolize its cause (for instance, the refugees of oppressive "regimes"), particularly to Arab and Muslim "alien" immigrants and residents of Middle Eastern countries;17 for justifying military attacks and occupations that are conducted in the name of abstract Western values (democracy, equality, freedom, security, and liberty) against so-called "rogue states" (Bush 2002a) or "failed states" (Ignatieff 2002) that are said to have none. Such policies and practices conducted in the name of human rights make a mockery of the notion that human rights ideals express "one long and steady march towards progress" (Kapur 2006, 673), as the call to respond to images of suffering in distant lands, is far less interested in admitting those who suffer as refugees than it is in intervening militarily to prevent their exodus (Orford 2003, 203). [End Page 103] The politics of sexual, racial, and ethnic difference—and hence of the equality, security, and freedom that are at stake for minorities—are central to this dynamic. A consideration of the stock figures—first, of the oppressed female human rights victim, and second, of the male tyrannical "terrorist"—that appear in the narratives and substantiate policies of this war, enables us to elucidate these politics within its various "techniques" and tactics (from security arrest warrants and deportations of immigrants to armed invasions) and to link the fear of the other to the new sovereignty of the United States, that looks nothing like Kofi Anan's vision of individuals being empowered to hold states accountable for human rights abuses, but rather a sovereignty of corporate "defensive imperialism" (Anghie 2004, 294) and nation-state patriotism masquerading as the causes of democracy and freedom, while perpetrating systematic human-rights violations. Part and parcel of the sovereignty-creating, colonizing tactics are those that constitute and entrench gender norms within and across national boundaries, preserving as a model of masculinity its roles of uniformed masculine saviors whose heroism inheres in saving helpless female victims from racialized and demonized incarnations of evil.

Disease

Disease and bioweapons impacts are nothing more than a means of generating hysteria and newfound xenophobia, and ultimately lead to a misallocation of resources

Hans and Reardon 12 [Asha Hans, Betty A. Reardon “The Gender Imperative: Human Security Vs State Security” Routledge, Dec 6, 2012]

Much of the literature on health security focuses on the role of the state in protecting people from threats (Price-Smith 2002; Heymann 2003; Chen and Narasimhan 2003). According to CHS (2003), the goal of health security is to protect ‘the vital core of human lives’ from ‘critical and pervasive threats while promoting long-term human flourishing’. In order to do this, ‘protective strategies would promote the three institutional pillars of society: to prevent, monitor and anticipate health threats’ (ibid.: 103). A. Price-Smith (2002) focuses on the necessity of ensuring state capacity to protect the health of citizens, and the environment, as a means of enhancing security. The emergence of new pathogens has the potential to create public fears which bear little relation to the risks of the actual disease itself. New diseases tend to ‘generate paranoia, hysteria and xenophobia that may affect the foreign policy of a state by impairing decision making’ (ibid.: 16). Price-Smith notes that the ability of states to respond to increasing morbidity and mortality caused by infectious disease could be economically and socially undermined by a corresponding increase in the demands of the people on the state for medical resources. The state therefore needs to play a central role in the protection of its citizens, primarily through the use of state security and medical institutions. This promotes human security, as ‘the mastery of high morbidity and mortality rates in a population has been a driver of state prosperity and economic strength throughout recorded history’ (ibid.: 78). Protectionist approaches also attempt to reduce the possibility and probable aftereffects of biological and chemical weapons, as well as the health-related implications of environmental change. D. Heymann (2003) advocates technical solutions such as the development of strong government-centred policies, better international cooperation and global surveillance. He calls for more ‘dual-use’ facilities, including additional hospitals that can address prevailing health problems while ensuring that there is sufficient emergency capacity to mitigate the effects of terrorism or natural disasters. According to this model, financial and technical support for health systems needs to be provided by wealthy industrialized nations on the basis of self-interest — globalized health threats can easily cross borders and be transmitted around the world in a matter of hours, thereby undermining national and global security. The spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and emerging and reemerging infectious diseases can be impeded through surveillance and massive campaigns against specific diseases, going beyond health ‘to include national security, defense, and international development aid’ (ibid.: 208). In protectionist approaches, disease and health-related threats are the challenges to health security that must be managed. While not negating the efforts of those working to help people facing such health threats, there is little in this approach that enables people to develop their own capacity to deal with threats to their security. Dual-use health facilities may have some benefits in improving health, but again, they may also result in misallocation of resources. The anthrax scares in the USA following the September 11th terrorist attacks did not result in increased opportunities for health but, as Petchesky (2003) put it, ‘expanded stockpiles of vaccines and antibiotics, construction of containment laboratories, research into new drugs and biodetectors — in other words, a new bioterrorism industry, not more public hospitals, clinics or sexual and reproductive health or primary health care services for the poor’ (ibid.: 251). The self-interest of states to provide protection for themselves becomes the driving argument for any intervention. This means that even though the definition of security has expanded to encompass a greater range of potential and actual threats to security, the fundamental goal of protectionist approaches is still the perpetuation of the state, and only by this ensuring its ability to protect its citizens. The state is the main actor and benefi ciary, preserving a paternalistic, top-down role as protector. Many of the health security measures suggested in this ‘protection from threats’ approach deal with protecting people who are already living in situations of violence, yet there is very little exploration of the upstream causes of that violence. Current research on health security has largely focused on only a couple of issues — primarily infectious disease and biological weapons — yet, according to Lee and McInnis (2003), these may not comprise the major threats to global health (ibid.: 47). The determinants of violence, in particular the state’s paternalistic role in sustaining gendered and potentially violent structures, need to be examined. Furthermore, by ignoring the determinants of poor health, ‘patients’ are ‘patched up’ and sent back out to face the same unclean water, lack of opportunities and threats to their physical and mental wellbeing. Few would argue that all forms of protection are completely unnecessary. The problem is more that in much of the human security literature, in particular that related to health, this has become the dominant discourse, with little discussion of alternative approaches.