Nigeria Aff, page 41

561Pragmatists collapsed theory and practice---negation requires grounded engagement.

Ralph 25 — Jason Ralph. September 1. Professor of International Relations at the University of Leeds, author of On Global Learning. Review of International Studies, “American Pragmatism, the Frankfurt School, and the future of Critical International Relations Theory,” vol. 52, no. 2, p. 286-305 Clopus

That can be done in two ways. Firstly, Pragmatists collapsed the theory/practice binary and, in its most demanding form, ‘vocationally’ committed to a grounded form of political engagement, which included negating those exclusionary power structures that define which problems need to be solved and how to solve them. Footnote 48 Part of this was Dewey’s critique of traditional education methods. Dewey argued that to encourage learning teachers needed to be sympathetic to (i.e. include) the subject’s experiential starting point rather than impose abstract knowledge on them. Where traditional education merely habitualised subjects, Dewey’s progressive method tried to nurture critical capacity. Footnote 49 This approach was inspired by Jane Addams’s work at Hull House, which brought together the working-class, African-American, immigrant families of Chicago in an attempt to encourage new thinking. It was a very engaged form of critical praxis (i.e. a process of reflection and action directed at changing society). Footnote 50 Contrary to Horkheimer’s claims about the ‘bourgeois savant’, therefore, Dewey and Addams did unify the activities of the (problem-solving) scientist with the (critical) citizen. Footnote 51 Again, the difference is a small one of emphasis. Where Deweyan Pragmatism and Frankfurt School theories shared a fallibilist ‘sense of their own artificiality’, Footnote 52 and thus a commitment to ongoing inquiry, the latter’s emphasis on the negative weighs more heavily and thus protects the former from complacency.

The second way to demonstrate the value of negative critique in Pragmatist thought is to examine Dewey’s written work, especially The Public and Its Problems and Critique of American Civilization . Here, we see an engaged, political, almost partisan, negative critique of the power structures of American capitalism. In The Public , Dewey accepted that economic change had left communities alienated from a political system seemingly controlled by the formalised reason of the market. In this context, the public (if not reason) had been ‘eclipsed’. That, however, was not a justification for the kind of technocracy that Walter Lippmann had famously advocated. Footnote 53 It was instead a reason to politically mobilise those experiencing the consequences of this new practice while being excluded from the communities of inquiry that rationalised it. Dewey called these ‘publics’, and their mobilisation was necessary if the public interest was to be rediscovered in new circumstances. Footnote 54 To form itself in that moment a new public had to

562The campaign runs on imported airframes---and the aerial turn is what kills civilians.

Ogbozor 25 — Ernest Ogbozor. April 3. College of Arts and Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; researches Nigerian counterinsurgency and civilian harm. Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, “Counterinsurgency airstrike mishap, intelligence failure and civilian harm in northern Nigeria – 2014 to 2024,” vol. 20, no. 2, p. 193-208 Clopus

Yet, the military's triumph did not signify the end of the conflict. On the contrary, Boko Haram is still potent and targeting civilians, livelihoods, security forces, and humanitarian workers (Ogbozor, Citation2019, p. 210). Moreover, the forceful military actions and restrictions which characterised the period of OPLD lead to civilian casualties and widespread displacement (Ogbozor, Citation2019, p. 1). Some severe military counterinsurgency measures, such as the NAF’s massive aerial onslaughts and military restrictions, including prolonged closing of roads, markets, and border points, have been associated with the period of OPLD. Oyewole (Citation2021) argues that Nigeria's counterinsurgency campaign has been overly kinetic and reactive and has not yielded the desired result of defeating the insurgents. Indeed, the strategy of enforcing peace through strength rather than through mediation or negotiation undermines the very principles it aims to promote, according to McDappa (Citation2021). OPLD, seen as a peacebuilding framework in military circles, has had a negative rather than positive effect (McDappa, Citation2021).

Nigeria’s airpower dates to the establishment of the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) in 1964, which has historically depended on foreign training and equipment (Ebiye, Citation1992). Although terrorism in Nigeria predates airpower development, aerial capabilities have been pivotal in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations in northern Nigeria, leveraging drones and aircraft for real-time data acquisition (Onuoha, Citation2014). Precision airstrikes have targeted insurgents’ strongholds, though issues such as collateral damage and intelligence accuracy have long been problematic (Ewi & Salifu, Citation2017). The NAF has been integral to counterinsurgency efforts, employing airstrikes to neutralise insurgent strongholds, interrupt supply logistics, and target leadership figures. However, it is essential to note that the Army also employs airpower for purposes such as airstrikes, transportation, interception, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (Okoli et al., Citation2024, p. 5).

Despite the importance of airpower to Nigeria’s counterinsurgency campaign, the NAF faces substantial challenges, including an aging fleet and limited maintenance infrastructure, leaving many aircraft grounded and dependent on foreign spare parts (Aghedo & Osumah, Citation2015). Operational readiness is further undermined by procurement delays and geopolitical obstacles. While pilot training has improved, gaps in technical expertise and maintenance capabilities highlight the need for greater investment in capacity building (Egbewole, Citation2020). Nevertheless, according to John Campbell the acquisition of A-29 Super Tucano combat aircraft from the US in 2021 has enhanced Nigeria's counterinsurgency operations (Campbell, Citation2021). The integration of the newly acquired Tucanos significantly enhanced the aerial capabilities of the NAF. This strategic upgrade not only improved the operational readiness and effectiveness of their fleet but also expanded their ability to conduct a wider range of missions in support of national security objectives, such as aerial cover for ground forces and tactical intelligence. However, Freedom Onuoha maintains that despite the diversification in military partnerships, challenges related to interoperability with Western systems persist (Onuoha, Citation2014). There are still issues with communication and intelligence sharing with partners, especially the Western countries.

While airpower has bolstered Nigeria’s deterrent capabilities against insurgents, the increasing civilian casualties from airstrike mishaps has raised concerns about the effectiveness of aerial campaigns. The labelling of all NAF’s airstrikes on civilian population as accidents, mistakes, or mishaps by the military obscures their deeper causes, and ignores the two distinct perspectives on how these incidents should be classified – typical mistakes or failures of human or technical functions (Okoli et al., Citation2024). While these occurrences can be either accidental or incidental, accidental mishaps typically involve carelessness, inattention, or negligence, whereas incidental mishaps could occur irrespective of the level of care or intention (Okoli et al., Citation2024). Okoli further noted that while airstrikes that harm civilians may be incidental, given the frequent recurrence of such events and the rising number of civilian casualties, this needs to be examined further.

In the literature, two main factors have been linked to airstrike accidents: intelligence deficiencies and military errors. Writing in 2014, Onuoha attributes mistakes to excessive reliance on inadequate reconnaissance and the poor fusion of human intelligence (HUMINT) with technical data. More recently, Campbell (Citation2021) highlights contributory factors to the mishaps that include flawed intelligence, technical inaccuracies, and the challenge of differentiating between combatants and non-combatants in complex conflict environments.

563Militarism is one factor---drones, the volunteer force and debt did the insulating.

Krebs 24 — Ronald R. Krebs and Robert Ralston. September 27. Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and political scientist at the University of Minnesota. Political scientist at the University of Birmingham. Constitutional Political Economy, “The national security state and the uses of militarism,” https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-024-09448-x Clopus

0.00 Soldier 2 3 4 Soldier Opposes Approves

Militarism is only one of several factors that have, in recent decades, insulated democratic decision-makers from the political costs of using force and thereby loosened the constraints on force. By employing drones and other off-shore means of bombardment, rather than soldiers, democratic leaders have shifted the costs of force onto the adversary and civilians. By investing heavily in capital-intensive forces, they have replaced men with machines. By abandoning conscription in favor of a volunteer, professional force, they have ensured that the costs of military operations are concentrated in sub-populations. By paying for wars by floating debt, rather than raising taxes, they have made war seem financially painless to present citizens, by displacing the costs of war onto future citizens. They have invested heavily in medical technologies and organizations that have made war seem less bloody, and they have focused on battlefields where they can achieve air superiority and rapid medical transport, further reducing

Based on a binary operation support variable and the variables in Appendix 1, Table 7, Models 1, 3, 5, and 7.

44 fatalities. How much militarism matters compared to these other forces is not clear and requires further research.

Is the National Security State to Blame?

Given the benefits of militarism, it stands to reason that a broader, deeper, and more extensive national security state would be inclined to promote militarism. However, the fact that powerful actors profit from a particular cultural formation does not mean that they are responsible for that formation’s dominance. Even if we assume that the national security establishment’s defenders were so unified and prescient that they self-consciously and cohesively promoted militarism—a rather large assumption—it remains less clear why they would succeed. Precisely because the stakes are so high, the national security state’s efforts to promote militarism should meet with significant opposition. Moreover, militarism may well undermine democratic control of the armed forces, and civilian politicians should therefore at least be ambivalent about it. Scholars of culture are often rightly skeptical that dominant cultural formations can be traced back straightforwardly to the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Moreover, only further country-level research can establish if the basic observational hypothesis—that large national security states are more prone to militarism—has merit. It is not clear, for instance, that countries with large militaries—in terms of men and women under arms, as a percentage of the population—are more militaristic: we observe militarism in countries that recruit large militaries via conscription—like Russia and Israel—but there are also

This paragraph synthesizes the insights of Kaag and Kreps 2014; Caverley 2014; Kreps 2018; Fazal 2014.

manifestations of militarism in countries with far fewer men and women under arms—like France. It is not clear that militarism emerges as countries’ national security establishments grow: consider that militarism arose in the United States amidst the post-Cold War “peace dividend”—that is, precisely when its Cold War national-security state was under significant pressure. Militarism does not appear to be greater in countries whose militaries formally control significant portions of the economy, like China or Egypt. Militarism is alive and well in liberal democracies where the armed forces are not directly major economic players. If national security states distinguish themselves by active kinetic presences, that would seem to fit global and regional powers, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Israel, but China— which announced in 2014 that it would henceforth hold an annual Martyrs’ Day—has not fought a war since 1979. It may not be surprising that Ukraine would establish Defenders Day in 2015—right after the Russian annexation of Crimea and amidst the ongoing Russia-sponsored insurgency in eastern provinces. But consider that South Africa established a new Armed Forces Day in 2012, and Spain started celebrating Veterans Day in 2003, as did the Netherlands in 2005, Denmark in 2009, Indonesia in 2015, and Sweden in 2021. Norway started celebrating Memorial Day only in 2007. Clearly, most of these countries—hardly notable military powers before or since—were not embracing militarism as part of a scheme to weaken public opposition to the use of force. Whether larger and deeper national security states are associated with more militarism is an important research question—beyond the scope of this article. Why manifestations of militarism have, in recent decades, become so common around the world demands further investigation. Yet the fact that we cannot necessarily pin it on the national security state does not alter the fact that the national security state benefits from

militarism. Militarism promotes greater spending on the military and the growth of central state power, undermines democratic civil-military relations and civilian control, and diminishes public opposition to the use of force. Whether the national security state is responsible for militarism is an open question, but the data presented here powerfully suggest that militarism helps sustain the enduring national security state.

564Militarised escalation doesn’t defeat armed groups---it builds an interstate war.

Owolabi 1-23-26 — Ayodele S. Owolabi. January 23. Associate Lecturer in International Relations at Liverpool John Moores University. Al Jazeera, “Militarising the Sahel will not defeat terrorism,” https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/23/militarising-the-sahel-will-not-defeat-terrorism Clopus

Given Nigeria’s influence within ECOWAS, this emerging security partnership with the US is likely to shape the operational capacity of the proposed 260,000-strong ECOWAS force. This does not bode well for the AES, which is intent on insulating its member states from Western security influence in the name of sovereignty. Because ECOWAS forces would be deployed in member states at the epicentre of terrorist violence, many combat engagements would take place in locations adjacent to AES territories. With AES troops also operating in these areas, military clashes between the two sides become increasingly likely, particularly given the region’s porous borders and fluid combat environments. Given that the Christmas Day strikes reportedly hit unintended targets, the risk that future air strikes by a US-backed ECOWAS could spill into AES territory cannot be dismissed. For deterrence, the AES may seek to leverage Russia’s military backing, evoking echoes of Cold War-era security brinkmanship.

Implications for regional stability

Without reconciliation between the AES and ECOWAS, two major risks loom for regional peace and stability. First, rising geopolitical tensions could draw AES and ECOWAS member states into direct interstate military confrontations, potentially plunging West Africa into a regional war. Such a conflict would serve neither side’s counterterrorism objectives. Beyond devastating the region, it would create space for armed groups to expand their operations amid fractured and distracted security responses. Second, the standoff risks turning West Africa into a new theatre for global power rivalry, with a Russia-backed AES on one side and a US and France-backed ECOWAS on the other. In the context of an emerging New Cold War, the use of veto power by these global actors at the UN Security Council could further complicate conflict resolution, with profoundly destabilising consequences for the region.

The AES and ECOWAS now face a stark choice: to revive Cold War-style bloc politics in West Africa while the region slides towards chaos, or to negotiate a security sub-coalition that prioritises human security alongside national sovereignty. Regardless of how the AES views ECOWAS, the burden lies with the latter to manage the unintended consequences of escalating tensions. While there are few indications that the AES is willing to cooperate directly with a West-backed ECOWAS on counterterrorism, ECOWAS could pursue diplomatic engagement to negotiate a concept of operations that guarantees respect for AES sovereignty. As Africa’s most experienced regional security organisation, ECOWAS possesses the diplomatic capacity to do so. For progress to be made, Francophone ECOWAS member states should take the lead in these efforts, while Nigeria exercises its influence more discreetly. Whether ECOWAS can reclaim ownership of its security agenda and define the terms of external engagement will shape not only West Africa’s future, but that of the continent as a whole.

565...or it bars policy---but their field has always chased policy influence.

Jarvis 25 — Lee Jarvis and Michael Lister. February. Professor of International Politics at Loughborough University. Professor of Politics at Oxford Brookes University. European Journal of International Security, “Critical security research and the war on terror: From the margins to the mainstream?,” vol. 10, no. 1, p. 150-169 Clopus

frameworks, such as found within Toros’s⁷³ response to Jackson’s comments. 74 Although wary of the perks, professional incentives, and the ‘dangerous … capacity to confer legitimacy and prestige afforded by collaboration with state actors’, 75 the stakes, for Toros, are too high to refuse engagement withpolitical eliteswhose pluralityandporosity mayoffermoreopportunities forinterventionthan often assumed. In Marie Breen-Smyth’s stark warning, similarly, ‘critical scholars cannot complain about government policy on terrorism if they have not attempted to inform that policy’. 76

The case for capitalising on contemporary opportunities for greater policy engagement may benefit, too, from conceptual and historical buttressing. Conceptually, we might draw upon critical theoretical resources to question, blur, or even reject the theory/practice distinction around which discussions such as this are typically organised. As Pinar Bilgin succinctly puts it in another context, the distinction between practical, policy-relevant work and abstract theorising begins to break down when we recognise that ‘all practice is informed by theory and theory itself is a form of practice’. 77 For Ken Booth, 78 similarly, ‘scholars who study security, whether they recognise it or not, have a direct relationship with the real world conditions of relative insecurity or security; their ideas can contribute to replicating or changing people’s conditions of existence in specific situations’. Approached thus, the inventions of critical scholars are already situated – even complicit – in the ‘real world’ of security politics irrespective of whether this is acknowledged or wanted. 79 A posture of simply ‘peering down on the world’ 80 from an untainted critical Archimedean viewpoint is, therefore, either disingenuous or naive. Given the starkness of this warning, contemporary critical scholars of (counter)terrorism might take comfort from the long-standing pursuit of policy influence amongst critical security scholars with their ambitions for progressive political change. As Hynek and Chandler argue of the 1990s:

For many leading critical security scholars, work with leading Western powers and international institutions was the emancipatory way forward. … In fact, there were very few successful critical security academics who did not participate in policy advocacy, especially in the Canadian, Japanese and UN contexts. 81

One might, indeed, go further still and approach the contemporary critical reticence toward policy engagement as a reversal of the historical imbrication between critical scholarship and advocacy; an imbrication that attracted censure from more ‘traditional’ forms of security theorising with their quest for detached, objective knowledge. 82

73 Harmonie Toros, ‘Dialogue, praxis and the state: A response to Richard Jackson’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 9:1 (2016), pp. 126–30. 74 Jackson, ‘To be or not to be’. 75 Harmonie Toros, ‘Critical theory and terrorism studies’, in Richard Jackson (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Critical Terrorism Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 70–9 (p. 78). 76 Marie Breen-Smyth, ‘Subjectivities, “suspect communities”, governments, and the ethics of research on “terrorism”’, in Richard Jackson, Marie Breen-Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning (eds), Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 194–215 (p. 213). 77 Pinar Bilgin, ‘Theory/practice in critical approaches to security: An opening for dialogue?’, International Politics, 38:2 (2001), pp. 273–82 (p. 274). 78 Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 198. 79 See Laura Sjoberg, ‘Calibrating violences in critical terrorism studies’, in Alice E. Finden, Carlos Yebra López, Tarela Ike, Ugo Gaudino, and Samwel Oando (eds), Methodologies in Critical Terrorism Studies: Gaps and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Published online by Cambridge University Press (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024), pp. 15–28. 80 Solomon and Steele, cited in Michael Livesey, ‘To look for another thing, and in another way: Revitalising criticality with multimodal methodologies’, Critical Studies on Terrorism (2024), pp. 1–27 (p. 11), available at: {https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17539153.2024.2370612}. Nik Hynek and David Chandler, ‘No emancipatory alternative, no critical security studies’, Critical Studies on Security, 1:1 (2013), pp. 46–63 (p. 51). Johan Eriksson, ‘Observers or advocates? On the political role of security analysts. Cooperation and conflict’, 34:3 (1999), pp. 311–30 (pp. 312–14).

A newly invigorated critical terrorism scholarship of the sort adverted to here would, therefore, seek to capitalise on emerging synergies of interests and ideas by championing progressive policy prescriptions to powerful states and their actors. If a ‘mainstream’ appetite to move beyond the harmful counterterrorism practices of the post-9/11 period truly exists, attention might be given to more persuasively articulated engagements expressed in a style and manner appropriate to policy audiences, not least because ‘the state’ constitutes a variegated and complex terrain with varied, cross-cutting, and (sometimes) competing interests and agendas. 83 Should ‘the state’ prove a step too far, there are multiple NGOs and other civil society organisations with whom critical scholars might also engage here. Distance and/or proximity to power may shape both the nature of such interactions, the significance and reach of such, as well as diverse issues such as the (in)ability to be sincerely heard and the palatability of engagement to individual researchers. 84

The success of contemporary efforts at ‘critical policy advocacy’ 85 in relation to (counter)terrorism will depend upon internal and external factors: on scholars’ willingness and capacity to navigate diverse fields of counterterrorism professionals, on the one hand, and, indeed, on the intent, diffusion, and permanence of the new appetite for less deleterious forms of counterterrorism. There are, though, already important initiatives to which we might point here. Lindahl, for instance, offers a critical model of counterterrorism as an explicit ‘guide’ for policymakers, drawing on lessons from the Norwegian experience. 86 Less explicit, but as important, are depictions of critical terrorism scholarship as an exercise in ‘speaking truth to power’ that involves confronting the falsehoods, injustices, and violences of authoritative actors in the counterterrorism space. Jarvis and Lister see citizens participating in focus groups on counterterrorism policy, for instance, as potentially significant interlocutors with scope for intervening in established forms of security politics. 87 Martini and Silva’s call for greater critical engagement with counter-extremism policies targeting the far right is predicated on a related view of such scholarship as well positioned to do so precisely because of its long-standing engagement with the consequences of hasty, ill-considered, and deleterious security initiatives. 88 And, for McGowan, similarly, the critical attentiveness to discursive power and the complexity of subject positions such as ‘victimhood’ renders it uniquely well positioned ‘to enrich policy discussions relating to terrorism both within and outside of government by engaging with victims’. 89

Continue? A strategy of capitalising on the rhetorical and political opportunities provided by contemporary ‘mainstream’ dissatisfaction with the war on terror relies upon two leaps of faith that might be unsatisfactory to critical scholars. First is that the contemporary discrediting of the ‘war on terror’ is as genuine, thorough, and far-reaching for ‘mainstream’ policymakers and commentators as it is (or has been) for critical scholars. It might be the case, for instance, that superficial similarities between these two ‘camps’ 90 obscure rather more profound differences. One such difference, as we have seen, concerns the ‘war on terror’s’ social and political reach, and the fear that contemporary

566Their field calls the alt hollow without a practice it can be tested by.

Ralph 25 — Jason Ralph. September 1. Professor of International Relations at the University of Leeds, author of On Global Learning. Review of International Studies, “American Pragmatism, the Frankfurt School, and the future of Critical International Relations Theory,” vol. 52, no. 2, p. 286-305 Clopus

That leads to my fifth point, which I develop in this section. The real problem for CIRT is not its supposed neglect of system analysis in favour of normative theory, or its favouring of second-generation Frankfurt School analysis over its first generation. The problem is that the praxeological dimension has lacked, as Horkheimer would put it, ‘the pragmatic character of traditional theory’. CIRT has long been accused of lacking practical policy relevance, Footnote 111 and now it (and its norm studies cousin) seem ‘hollow’ as result. Footnote 112 To address that, I think CIRT should ‘reorient towards practice’ Footnote 113 by following the lead of the practice turn in ‘new constructivist’ IR. Footnote 114 More specifically, it can focus on ‘communities of practice’, i.e. those ‘spatial-organization platforms where practitioners interact, learn and end up creating and diffusing practices and promoting their adoption by future practitioners’. Footnote 115 This would be a pragmatic – and Pragmatist – adjustment to the previous focus on the normative and sociological process of norm building. It would give those interested in praxeology an empirical focus for both negative and (as Conway might say) ‘reformist’ critique. Footnote 116

An immediate problem with this suggestion is that IR practice theory can be read as ‘traditional theory’ in the way Horkheimer used that phrase. On the one hand, its grounded focus on the everyday micro-practices of practitioners is useful in addressing the concern that the ‘grand narratives’ of contemporary CIRT are too far removed from praxeology. Indeed, some see the practice turn in IR as part of a wider Pragmatist arc for these reasons. Footnote 117 On the other hand, practice theory is potentially at odds with Critical Theory’s emancipatory project if it loses ‘sight of the nature of social domination’. Footnote 118 This is especially the case if practice theory focuses only on the struggles among practitioners to prove their ‘competence’ in performing practices, and if practice is defined merely as ‘patterned actions that are embedded in particular organized contexts'. Footnote 119 This approach potentially produces knowledge of a system, and how practitioners define and realise its purpose, but it does not – to repeat Horkheimer – comment on ‘whether the purposes as such are reasonable.’ Footnote 120 Indeed, Horkheimer seemingly spoke directly to this when he expressed concern about the failure to challenge the social value of technical knowledge. It ‘is one of the reasons why men who in particular scientific areas or in other professional activity are able to do extremely competent work, can show themselves quite limited and incompetent, despite good will, when it comes to questions concerning society as a whole’. Footnote 121

Why then would the focus and methods of practice theory help CIRT? It can, I suggest, make that contribution if the (lower-case) pragmatic move to focus on practice is combined with the kind of (upper-case) Pragmatist critique I described above. Indeed, I have argued along these lines in previous work with Jess Gifkins. We looked at practice theory accounts of diplomacy at the United Nations Security Council, including its approach to cosmopolitan harm conventions like the Responsibility to Protect. While we do not directly speak to CIRT, the implication is clear. The purpose of practice theory should be to critique the competence claims of systemic practitioners (e.g. Security Council diplomats) according to the norms produced by the global ‘lifeworld’. Footnote 122 I more recently expanded on this approach developing two normative tests to ‘blow apart’ the complacency of communities of practice. The first of these is ‘inclusive reflexivity’, which assesses the openness of communities of practice to Deweyan ‘publics’, i.e. those affected by a practice but otherwise excluded from the knowledge processes that notionally legitimises them. Whereas this acts as a form of negative critique (or what Visoka might term ‘critique as alternative’), the second test – ‘deliberative practical judgement’ – reflects the Pragmatist commitment to problem-solving (or ‘critique with alternative’). Footnote 123 The emphasis on practical consequences means the Pragmatist will prudently take technical knowledge into account as it searches for that better alternative.

567Critical scholarship’s own claim is that military force is counterproductive---that is our case.

Jarvis 25 — Lee Jarvis and Michael Lister. February. Professor of International Politics at Loughborough University. Professor of Politics at Oxford Brookes University. European Journal of International Security, “Critical security research and the war on terror: From the margins to the mainstream?,” vol. 10, no. 1, p. 150-169 Clopus

The above calls for repurposing the war on terror’s focus and logics are important for our purposes because they appear to speak to a gradual mainstreaming of some critical views which were, at the war on terror’s outset, heretical, even taboo. It is, as we have seen, now relatively common to find authors from both left and right expressing arguments which, if enunciated in the autumn of 2001, would have been decried, dismissed, and derided. In this section, we discuss four instances of congruence between these arguments – concerning material instantiations of (counter)terrorism and its discursive framing – and long-standing claims within critical terrorism scholarship. 48

First is the long-standing argument within critical terrorism scholarship that military force would prove remarkably unproductive as a form of counterterrorism strategy. 49 The reasons for this are multiple. First, military power typically offers an ineffective set of resources with which to attack terrorist organisations lacking the infrastructure or centres of gravity of more traditional military targets. Second, military power may be counterproductive, in that it may generate resentment among populations geographically proximate to, or who identify with, targeted organisations. Terrorist organisations, importantly, rely upon the ideological and practical support of wider communities; therefore, military strikes by external agents – and their associated ‘collateral damage’ – risk increasing this support. Third, military force has significant financial, human, and political costs for its wielders as well as its targets; hence, casualties within Western forces have potential to generate a ‘body bag effect’ and depopularise a conflict in the eyes of the host nation. On top of this, the financial costs of military campaigns and the logistics upon which such campaigns rely are often considerable and, as a result, potentially unpopular. A second argument concerns the opportunity costs of counterterrorism, whereby money dedicated to counterterrorism campaigns – including, but not limited to, military excursions abroad – might more productively have been spent on other social or political priorities: whether relating to health, education, the environment, or beyond. 50 Depending on our conceptualisation of security (a notoriously contestable term as readers will know), reprioritising political spending toward other ambitions would not only contribute to the resolution of potentially more urgent challenges. It could also generate additional security for British or American publics by reducing other forms of structural or indirect violence or harm such as caused by poverty or illiteracy. As President Eisenhower famously argued in his ‘Chance for Peace’ speech: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger

568Their own field asks for peaceable procurement---disarmament is the movement’s demand.

Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. April. Professor of International Relations at Sussex; researches the arms trade, arms transfer control and the war in Yemen. Global Studies Quarterly, “The Arms Trade and the Transformation of Global Order: A Revitalized Research Agenda,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf033 Clopus

2020) and the platformization of the military (Hoijtink and Planqué-van Hardeveld 2022), but it is also just one element of the systematic armed violence against and occupation and oppression of the Palestinians and their land. Deeper engagement and conversation between the literatures on technology and war and on the history and politics of specific places and sites of violence (e.g., Hajjar 2017; Erakat 2019; Dana 2023; Agha et al. 2024 on Palestine, and Orkaby 2017; Lackner 2019; Philipps, and Al-Dawsari 2023 on Yemen) would give a better grounding for the analysis of the political stakes of the violence unfolding and the types of technologies being used.

self-defense as resistance, and unarmed social movement resistance. As noted earlier, military spending comes at the expense of social and economic spending, diverting resources away from socially useful and protective forms of spending, which are a racialized and masculinized choice with disproportionately negative and intersectional effects on women, racialized communities, and sexual/gender minorities. We also know from historians that war production was central to the making of the industrial economy and imperial expansion, meaning that “War did not “crowd out” infrastructure development; it produced the financial structures that could fund it” (Satia 2018, 16). Satia argues that while “There is no counterfactual of a peaceful eighteenth century in which the British economy would have industrialized,” it is still possible to “imagine other, more peaceable forms of state procurement producing similar effects” (Satia 2018, 15–6). The work of imagining more peaceable and just forms of economic development is underway in the anti-militarist climate justice movement, which notes the role that militaries have played in creating the climate crisis (Bigger 2024) and the reparative duties incumbent on states such as the United States and United Kingdom (Bigger et al. 2023). Around the world, disarmament and demilitarization are central demands of eco-social justice campaigns: from Puerto Rican resistance to US-led industrialization, militarization and urbanization; uranium mining communities’ fight against the assault on their lands and lives in Niger, aboriginal Australia, and Native America; Palestinian practices of eco-sumud; to the resistance to Montenegrin mountain ranges being used as military training grounds (Edwards 2023, 27). The arms trade provides a direct link between economic and military power and serves as a site of articulation of unevenly globalized economic power, armed violence, ecological damage, and racialized and gendered forms of violence. A second feature of resistance to domination is that it is and historically has often been transnational and armed. The Black freedom movement in the United States drew explicit connections to decolonization in the Third World (Singh 2010; Manchanda and Rossdale 2021). Armed self-defense was vital to the survival of the US civil rights movement: Nonviolent struggle and armed self-defense are “neither incompatible nor contradictory” but rather “to understand either requires understanding both” (Cobb 2014, xvii). Simultaneously, gun control in the US has historically never been intended to apply to white communities; rather, it serves primarily as a means of white control (Burkett 2008, 75–6). Empirical evidence that Black women in the United States are turning to weapons in response to the ways that they are “under siege” not just as Black people but as women (Gowrinathan 2018) should give us pause for thought in how gun control is theorized. As Renee Simms explains, “Even when we identify as feminist, as I do, we remain uncommitted to anti-gun feminism that erases our specific experience” as Black women: “I can’t enter a conversation about self-defense from a narrow anti-gun position. Not with the statistics about murder rates for black women. Not when people I know have experienced stunning gun violence” (Simms 2013). The racialized historical experience of violence should make us wary of assuming that more gun control is always better without asking whose guns and for what purpose—which can be done without falling into the right-wing, racist National Rifle Association framing of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (see, e.g., Light 2021,

569The air campaign is the problem---and their own remedy list is a capability list.

Ogbozor 25 — Ernest Ogbozor. April 3. College of Arts and Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; researches Nigerian counterinsurgency and civilian harm. Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, “Counterinsurgency airstrike mishap, intelligence failure and civilian harm in northern Nigeria – 2014 to 2024,” vol. 20, no. 2, p. 193-208 Clopus

The study acknowledges that the Nigeria Air Force (NAF) airstrikes targeting Boko Haram, ISWAP, Ansaru, Lakurawa, and bandits have unintentionally harmed civilians and damaged their properties, leading to an erosion of public trust in the military and increased instability. While the military claimed that civilian casualties from NAF airstrikes were accidental, the frequency and recurrence of these incidents raised critical concerns about potential intelligence and operational lapses, contrary to the military's stance. The military has faced criticism for its heavy-handed kinetic approaches, often involving seemingly indiscriminate bombing and shelling in populated civilian areas.

Although NAF's airstrikes have been a significant component of the Joint Task Force military strategy since the beginning of Nigeria’s counterinsurgency campaign in mid-2011, these air campaigns targeting insurgents have been plagued by errors that have frequently led to civilian casualties. The study shows that in the past 10 years, 450 civilians in 18 communities in northern Nigeria have been killed by accidental airstrikes. Even as IHL and human rights laws provide protection for civilians during armed conflicts, the Nigerian military frequently deny culpability and display a lack of transparency in investigating civilian harm. This lack of accountability is exacerbated by the lack of compensation for victims. These issues continue to undermine efforts to reduce airstrike mishaps and improve operational effectiveness. By focusing on the root causes, such as intelligence and operational lapses, instead of merely labelling incidents as accidents, the military can make significant strides in addressing the challenges.

To effectively reduce airstrike mishaps on civilians in northern Nigeria, it is imperative for the Nigerian military to implement the following recommendations: enhance intelligence capabilities, elevate military training standards, strengthen civil–military relations, and address human rights violation concerns. Given the rapidly evolving nature of threats, investing in cutting-edge technology and data analysis tools to modernise intelligence capabilities is necessary. Also, leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning will significantly enhance the ability to gather, analyse, and act on critical intelligence reporting. Additionally, fostering collaboration and information-sharing among intelligence agencies and communities is crucial for improving intelligence effectiveness. Enhancing military effectiveness hinges on prioritising comprehensive and realistic training programs focused on counterinsurgency tactics, asymmetric warfare, and rules of engagement.

570Militarism grew as the security state shrank---the causal story is backwards.

Krebs 24 — Ronald R. Krebs and Robert Ralston. September 27. Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and political scientist at the University of Minnesota. Political scientist at the University of Birmingham. Constitutional Political Economy, “The national security state and the uses of militarism,” https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-024-09448-x Clopus

Given the benefits of militarism, it stands to reason that a broader, deeper, and more extensive national security state would be inclined to promote militarism. However, the fact that powerful actors profit from a particular cultural formation does not mean that they are responsible for that formation’s dominance. Even if we assume that the national security establishment’s defenders were so unified and prescient that they self-consciously and cohesively promoted militarism—a rather large assumption—it remains less clear why they would succeed. Precisely because the stakes are so high, the national security state’s efforts to promote militarism should meet with significant opposition. Moreover, militarism may well undermine democratic control of the armed forces, and civilian politicians should therefore at least be ambivalent about it. Scholars of culture are often rightly skeptical that dominant cultural formations can be traced back straightforwardly to the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Moreover, only further country-level research can establish if the basic observational hypothesis—that large national security states are more prone to militarism—has merit. It is not clear, for instance, that countries with large militaries—in terms of men and women under arms, as a percentage of the population—are more militaristic: we observe militarism in countries that recruit large militaries via conscription—like Russia and Israel—but there are also

This paragraph synthesizes the insights of Kaag and Kreps 2014; Caverley 2014; Kreps 2018; Fazal 2014.

manifestations of militarism in countries with far fewer men and women under arms—like France. It is not clear that militarism emerges as countries’ national security establishments grow: consider that militarism arose in the United States amidst the post-Cold War “peace dividend”—that is, precisely when its Cold War national-security state was under significant pressure. Militarism does not appear to be greater in countries whose militaries formally control significant portions of the economy, like China or Egypt. Militarism is alive and well in liberal democracies where the armed forces are not directly major economic players. If national security states distinguish themselves by active kinetic presences, that would seem to fit global and regional powers, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Israel, but China— which announced in 2014 that it would henceforth hold an annual Martyrs’ Day—has not fought a war since 1979. It may not be surprising that Ukraine would establish Defenders Day in 2015—right after the Russian annexation of Crimea and amidst the ongoing Russia-sponsored insurgency in eastern provinces. But consider that South Africa established a new Armed Forces Day in 2012, and Spain started celebrating Veterans Day in 2003, as did the Netherlands in 2005, Denmark in 2009, Indonesia in 2015, and Sweden in 2021. Norway started celebrating Memorial Day only in 2007. Clearly, most of these countries—hardly notable military powers before or since—were not embracing militarism as part of a scheme to weaken public opposition to the use of force. Whether larger and deeper national security states are associated with more militarism is an important research question—beyond the scope of this article. Why manifestations of militarism have, in recent decades, become so common around the world demands further investigation. Yet the fact that we cannot necessarily pin it on the national security state does not alter the fact that the national security state benefits from

militarism. Militarism promotes greater spending on the military and the growth of central state power, undermines democratic civil-military relations and civilian control, and diminishes public opposition to the use of force. Whether the national security state is responsible for militarism is an open question, but the data presented here powerfully suggest that militarism helps sustain the enduring national security state.

571Refusal succeeds a third of the time---and the state answers with force.

Chenoweth 20 — Erica Chenoweth. July. Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School; built the standard dataset on civil resistance. Journal of Democracy, “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance,” vol. 31, no. 3, p. 69-84 Clopus

Of course, civil-resistance campaigns do not always usher in peace and prosperity. In Syria in 2011, dictator Bashar al-Assad responded to a nonviolent struggle by unleashing military force and even chemical weapons against his civilian population. The resulting conflict has continued for nearly ten years now and has become the bloodiest civil war of the current century, forcing some three-million people to flee the country. In 2011, the U.S.-backed government of Bahrain crushed a nonviolent movement that tried to challenge the monarchy there. And in Ukraine, a people-power movement managed to push Russian-backed kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014—but rather than permitting Ukraine to move deeper into the European orbit, Russia seized the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and has fueled an ongoing and deadly war of secession in Ukraine’s east.

Nonviolent campaigns over the past ten years have succeeded less often than their historical counterparts. From the 1960s until about 2010, success rates for revolutionary nonviolent campaigns remained above 40 percent, climbing as high as 65 percent in the 1990s. But success rates for all revolutions have since declined, as shown in Figure 2. Since 2010, less than 34 percent of nonviolent revolutions and a mere 8 percent of violent ones have succeeded.

While governments have had greater success at beating down challenges to their authority, nonviolent resistance still outperformed violent resistance by a 4-to-1 margin. That is because armed confrontation has grown even less successful, continuing a downward trend that has been underway since the 1970s. These caveats notwithstanding, the last decade has seen a sharp decline in the success rate for civil resistance—reversing much of the overall upward trend of the previous sixty years.

The past decade therefore presents a troubling paradox: Just as civil resistance has become the most common approach to challenging regimes, it has begun to grow less effective—at least in the short term.

572The alt’s normative preference is a hangover of European peace---useless where danger is daily.

Holland 24 — Jack Holland and Lee Jarvis. October 7. Professor of Global Security Challenges at the University of Leeds. Professor of International Politics at Loughborough University. Journal of Global Security Studies, “COVID-19 and the Limits of Critical Security Theory: Securitization, Cosmopolitanism, and Pandemic Politics,” https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogae031 Clopus

3 Covid’s variegated impact on the UK population was later reflected in policy responses such as demographic and geographic risk categorization.

Kettell and Kerr’s (2022, 15) analysis of the UK government’s communication strategy in response to COVID-19 is important for traditional political science literature because it demonstrates how the depoliticization of issues such as pandemics is incremental, ongoing, contextual, reliant on changing circumstances, and incomplete. Our suggestion, here, is that approaches to securitization would benefit, similarly, from greater recognition of security’s fluctuations and the role of context and audience, as well as actor and act in the production thereof (see also Salter 2008; Jarvis and Legrand 2017). Turning the tap of security on and off in the governance of COVID-19 made for a security politics in which risk was increasingly omnipresent, even while threat levels fluctuated across time, space, and for particular individuals or groups. Such nuances remain poorly accounted for within critical security theories premised upon the existential and exceptional (see Lister 2019; Neal 2019). To put it succinctly, as weeks dragged into months, COVID- 19 and its mitigations became the (widely publicized) “new normal.” Second, the attempted establishment of “covid-secure spaces” also sheds dramatic light on the interaction of language and materiality in security politics, not least in the performance of hygiene theater. Security is a speech act but it is so much more than this: It is discursive. That is to say, security is formed at the intersection of the material and ideational. It can be brought into being through language and the extra-linguistic, but it is made sense of—and made meaningful—where words meet things. Securitization theory was pushed to its limits by the security work done through the material and visual designation of such spaces (through COVID signage, floor tape, masks, and so forth). And such designations communicated, of course, with wider visualizations of the pandemic such as in social media photographs of lateral flow tests, televisual images of COVID wards, or the sharing of PowerPoint slides by official experts. The United Kingdom’s problematic messaging, obsessed as it was with hygiene theater such as handwashing and “hands, face, space”slogans, also paid testament to the material reality of a threat that interacted with the spaces and bodies of everyday (co-habited) life. As Richard Jackson (2005)and many others have pointed out, how threat and its implications are understood depends on the framings and narratives that give it meaning, and the security dimension of COVID-19 was, to significant extent, extra-linguistic (see Williams 2003). Third, the pandemic also served to reverse the assumed background ontology of securitization theory— a Kantian peace—posing significant normative implications for the theory. The Copenhagen School has an

established normative preference for de-securitization (Buzan et al. 1998, 29; Roe 2004, 282–4)—the moving of an issue out of the exceptional realm of security and back into the contestations of politics-as-normal— not least because this enables slower and more deliberative policy formation, where contestations and account-ability (sometimes, problematically, framed as “normal politics”) are afforded time to play out (Roe 2012, 251–2). In the Global North that normative preference often makes sense. Panicking about refugees—securitized as existential threat—can lead to harmful and unethical policy decisions, for example. But the COVID-19 pandemic upended that logic to highlight the plight of very many inside and outside of Europe who experience daily insecurities in myriad forms. Suddenly, with COVID- 19 bearing down on all—including wealthy, white, and ostensibly secure citizens—there emerged a strong and widespread normative appetite for securitization not desecuritization among elites and “ordinary”citizens alike. Rule-flaunting, especially among young people, was met with derision, outrage, and calls for exceptional punishment befitting this new state of emergency, including the (widely ridiculed) threat of 10 years imprisonment announced by Health Secretary Matthew Hancock in February 2021 (see Elgot and Weaver 2021). Such outrage, of course, only intensified with subsequent revelations of rule-flouting by those at the center of the UK government’s response from the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisor’s visit to Barnard Castle during lockdown to “test his eyesight” (Weaver 2020), through the Health Secretary’s own extra-marital breach of social distancing rules (Walker 2021), to the “Partygate” revelations of revelry at the heart of government that generated over fifty Fixed Penalty Notice fines, including for the Prime Minister and his successor/then Chancellor (Hancock 2022). The normative preference for “more” rather than “less” security generated—or, perhaps, revealed—by the pandemic, is one that may be felt, and claimed, by people in real existential conditions such as those living on the frontlines of climate change, or struggling to feed their families, or living in inadequately heated accommodation. Securitization theory’s assumed, reified, ontology is so peculiar to a particular place and lived experience that it has helped to establish a normative “preference” (see Aradau 2004, 393) of at least questionable relevance for those not fortunate enough to have the time and space to develop their own critical security theory. As recent postcolonial, decolonial, and related work has forcefully argued (e.g., Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2020; Coleman 2021), the framework’s apparent universalism camouflages an underpinning parochialism with limited

utility beyond its European heartland—or, even, applicability to a particular European demographic. The silences of securitization theory, here, are gendered and racialized (Bertrand 2018; Gomes and Marques 2021); the normative preference for de-securitization is the ethical hangover of its formative context—a geo-security imagination premised upon the idea of a Kantian European peace (see also Nyman 2023, 676–7). This backdrop, and the silences it generates, is neither specific nor unique to securitization theory (Vitalis 2018). And yet—and to pre-empt themes returned to below—the theory’s ontological framework and normative privileging of desecuritization, clearly, risks rendering invisible a whole range of systemic inequalities and insecurities (Peterson 2021). The pandemic’s importance for critical security theory, then, was in its bringing this to the foreground, including through demonstration of the untrustworthiness of de-securitizing moves for those living lives marked by health and other insecurities. The alternative, here, was to end up sat—in a “covid-secure”space—with others potentially exhaling a deadly virus. To summarize, briefly, the omnipresence of threat— and potentially existential danger—of COVID-19 called into question important underpinning metatheoretical and normative assumptions of securitization theory. For many people in states like the United Kingdom, everyday activity was layered with new—or newly experienced— forms of risk and uncertainty. Escaping from a securitized normality to behave in a way previously considered “normal” required a paradoxically de-securitizing move that brought into being ostensibly “covid-secure” spaces void of risk to their inhabitants. What we saw was a government—augmented by the epistemic authority of scientific and other experts (Kettell and Kerr 2022)— securitizing an issue through vocalizing existential threat to valued referents, while simultaneously constructing risk-free spaces through normalizing certain practices and precautions: handwashing, social distancing, lateral-flow tests, mask-wearing, 2-week isolation periods, and so forth. Such precautions may have been absent or impossible in practice (such as, for instance, the prospects of social distancing in cramped offices), yet their articulation permitted employers to return essential and later non-essential staff to their workspaces, and their children to schools. The theoretical upshot of this is the pandemic’s demonstration that securitization is not only lacking beyond the Eurocentric context in which it emerged. It is lacking, too, within it. As a theory— irrespective of its proponents’ intentions (see Hobson 2022, 15–7)—securitization risks neglecting the perpetual and often inescapable conditions and experiences of

insecurity that define the everyday in much of the world, including inhabitants of European states who do not occupy privileged social positions. Too often, theirs was a lived experience of insecurity long before COVID arrived. The pandemic therefore highlights—and indeed often exacerbated the inequities of—the privileged context of securitization’s development, wherein danger exists, normally, somewhere else, sometime else, and primarily for somebody else.

573Critical security scholars have always chased policy---the detachment is a reversal.