575Underestimating the one real threat is fatal---the false negative is what ends you.
Stein 24 — Janice Gross Stein. December 4. Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. European Journal of International Security, “Radical uncertainty and pragmatism: Threat perception and response,” vol. 10, no. 3, p. 419-435 Clopus
Other disciplines provide context to the processes of threat perception. Evolutionary psychology is particularly helpful. Footnote 33 Perception is one of the oldest practices of human beings, one that evolved over time in adaptive ways to meet both individual and collective needs. Evolutionary psychologists situate the cognitive patterns and emotions that play such an important role in threat perception within a long time frame. They consider these patterns as evolved adaptations that respond to cues with minimal cognitive effort to solve recurrent problems. These patterns provided the quick adaptive solutions that were necessary to survive and reproduce. Natural selection enabled over time the ‘representational systems able to make predictions about the situation under informational uncertainty from indirect cues’. Footnote 34 In this sense, evolutionary processes are consistent with adaptive, trial-and-error processes of learning-by-doing that in iterative sequences look for ‘useful’ solutions, generate feedback, and start the process again.
Evolutionary arguments are intuitively appealing because they make sense of prevalent cognitive patterns and emotional triggers that are widely documented and considered as ‘errors’ or ‘biases’. Footnote 35 They explain why we are ‘wired’ the way we are, not as a default from a normative model of rationality, but as the consequence of natural selection to survive and reproduce over time. At the individual level, the process is fast, physiological, emotional, and only then conscious and cognitive. Evolutionary psychologists treat cognitive and emotional patterns not as bugs but as adaptive design features that may bring practical benefits even in our complex modern environment. Footnote 36
Pragmatism walks hand in hand with our understanding of these evolved processes of threat perception. To take only one example, some political psychologists suggest that conservative processes of threat perception that lead to ‘overestimating’ threat may be a design feature rather than a bug because, over time, they helped people to survive by avoiding the worst. Footnote 37 In the unforgiving world of some analysts of international politics where the consequences of anarchy, rather than society, anchor many analyses, these evolutionary arguments resonate. Drawing on error management theory, Johnson argues that, in particular contexts, these evolutionary processes privilege certain kinds of problem frames and judgements to avoid the worst mistakes and are consequently adaptive. Footnote 38 Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of the United Kingdom before World War II, made an almost-fatal mistake because he and many of his colleagues did not commit the fundamental attribution error. Rather, he underestimated the threat that Hitler’s Germany posed to the United Kingdom. There are better odds of survival, Johnson concludes, if leaders overestimate threats many times but avoid underestimating the one serious threat to their survival. Ours is an unforgiving world where the costs of one serious false negative, he argues, far exceeds the costs of numerous false positives. Footnote 39
Pragmatists would reframe the question by asking whether that process of overestimation ‘worked in the world’ under that specific contingency. They would eschew the generalisation that overestimating threat is adaptive, pay a great deal of attention to the specific relationship, the contingencies, and the context and be more comfortable with the radical uncertainty that precludes many generalisations as universal over time. Footnote 40 Much depended on the story Churchill as well as Chamberlain told and the narrative each constructed about Hitler and his intentions. And as history has shown, although Churchill was wrong so many times earlier in his career, he was right this one time that proved to be so overwhelmingly important. The individual narratives of the two leaders did not change much, but collective judgement evaluated the consistency and coherence of the competing narratives as the conditions and the contingencies shifted. Those judgements by leaders of the government in the United Kingdom moved as the context changed.
576Desecuritization is the ethical hangover of European peace---untrustworthy 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.
577...or it bars engagement---but their tradition made engagement the condition of critique.
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
578Their own authors call the framework provincial---it needs revising, not obeying.
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
If theory is for somebody and for some purpose (e.g., Cox 2012), it is so, in part, because it develops in some time and some space. The contexts in which thinking and writing are done are specific, not universal. As, of course, are the contexts in which (in)security is lived and experienced. The coronavirus pandemic transformed Europe, and the United Kingdom within it, into a space and time of variegated but widespread insecurity. The health crises, seemingly omnipresent risk, cost-benefit calculations, and everyday security concerns it generated were unfamiliar to a geo-security imagination founded upon (the assumptions of) Europe’s Kantian peace. They are not so unusual in other parts of the world, or for more marginalized and insecure groups within Europe. Health insecurities, fragile economies, complex ethical navigations of social and familial relationships, and widespread conditions of risk are not foreign to all people. These conditions—experienced in heterogeneous but very real and widespread ways in even the most affluent parts of Europe in 2020—can help us to think through the limits of critical theories developed “here,”in different times, by a select few. The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on critical security theory, we argue, is therefore to highlight the peculiar and specific geo-security imaginaries formative to its context and which, necessarily, limit the universal applicability of analytical and normative frameworks. Our two chosen theoretical vehicles for assessing the pandemic’s lessons on theory’s context—securitization theory and security cosmopolitanism—are both extremely important bodies of work, associated with prominent security theorists, whose research we admire and benefit from in our own teaching and research. It is therefore important to note, explicitly, that the aim here is not to dismiss them but, rather, to help uncover (or recover) their foundations and, by so doing, to think through limitations or biases that arise. We hope, in this sense, to further their utility by infusing greater reflexivity in their use. By highlighting the blind spots, perhaps their spotlights can shine even brighter, illuminating contemporary security challenges and potential solutions. We seek improvement, not abandonment; revision, not revolution—that is our aim, rather than something more destructive. And, in so doing, we recognize that critiquing theoretical or ethical visions for their failure to anticipate (perhaps exceptional) events—or for their inability to resolve complex, perhaps intractable, ethical dilemmas—implies a high, and perhaps unattainable,
standard against which to evaluate contemporary security scholarship. 5 Our efforts, then, are an attempt to contribute to contemporary efforts at updating the landscape of critical security theory (e.g., Neal 2019). We believe these tools, in turn, can be part of building a better world, but only if the world from which they came—inclusive of its privilege— is not forgotten. This, then, is an act of remembering— of times, spaces, and people—with the aim of working toward the imagining and realization of a better future. This act of remembering is important because failing to act can be consequential. Sampson (2002), in a poignant yet often forgotten article, framed “the way we imagine international politics” as “tropical anarchy”; this being, the idea that the “rest of the world” is a fundamentally dangerous space. A Kantian peace is the necessary antithesis of tropical anarchy; the primitive space of “out there,” juxtaposed to the civilized space of “home.” As Sampson (2002) put it, much of the discipline relies not upon a Waltzian imagining of anarchy, but rather, of a bifurcated view of inside and outside, civilized and barbaric, with Europe or the West at the core of what needs protecting. Our reminder for critical security theory is that the Kantian peace is imagined (not objective), peculiar (not universal), productive (in its homogenizing of space), and relational (defined through the assumed and projected alterity of other spaces). Building critical security theory—uncritically—upon a reified Kantian peace not only exceptionalizes the insecurities faced by a majority of the world. It also serves to homogenize its formative contexts, invisibilizing the struggles of many in Europe and a broader “West” to live secure lives.
579Their field is turning inward---even they say the critique needs a new object.
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
Criticalise? A third option might be for relevant critical scholarship to use contemporary moments of convergence as an opportunity to more thoroughly divert its gaze away from the trappings of the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. Recent work in this area has pulled attention to the continuing – and often problematic – pull of 11 September 2001 and its aftermath on scholarship, arguing that we might, finally, try to ‘forget 9/11’ 100 and reorient our focus to other events, other violences. At play here is the ambiguous relationship between those attacks and the critical literatures they helped bring into being; critical literatures with parallel, but contradictory, ambitions to both de-exceptionalise 9/11 vis-à- vis other forms of violence, while also refusing to ignore the horrors brought on by the response of the Bush administration and its allies. 101 Thus, if policymakers and ‘mainstream’ commentators have taken up some of this work in highlighting the war on terror’s shortcomings, perhaps other targets now merit the attention of critical scholarship. The obvious question that follows, of course, is towards what should critical scholarship redivert its gaze, if this involves setting aside the counterterrorism discourse and policy of the world’s most powerful states? The most obvious response – and one already emerging within the field – is that it might turn its attention inwards and focus on the biases, assumptions, and exclusions of projects like critical terrorism studies. Such a claim is apparent, most obviously, in work calling for decolonising critical terrorism research – notwithstanding differences in what this might mean and how it might proceed. 102 Mohammed’s recent intervention, for instance, highlights the lack of attention to coloniality, or experiences of colonial difference, within terrorism scholarship, and the socio-institutional academic frameworks that perpetuate these silences. 103 Critical terrorism studies (CTS), in this analysis, has been as guilty as more mainstream approaches to terrorism research, meaning that it risks reproducing the epistemic and political violences it has long made an effort to critique. Rabea Khan goes further still, arguing that CTS’ emergence in response to 9/11
E.g. Stephens, ‘Beyond imaginative geographies?’; McCrisken, ‘Ten years on’.
99 Booth, Theory of World Security, p. 467. 100 James Fitzgerald, ‘Forget 9/11’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 14:4 (2021), pp. 494–7; see also Harmonie Toros, “‘9/11 is Published online by Cambridge University Press alive and well” or how critical terrorism studies has sustained the 9/11 narrative’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 10:2, (2017), pp. 203–19. Leonie Jackson, Harmonie Toros, and Lee Jarvis, ‘Editors’ introduction: What place for 9/11 in critical terrorism studies?’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 14:4 (2021), pp. 397–9. Meera Sabaratnam, ‘IR in dialogue … but can we change the subjects? A typology of decolonising strategies for the study of world politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:3 (2011), pp. 781–803. Ilyas Mohammed, ‘Decolonialisation and the terrorism industry’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 15:2 (2022), pp. 417–40. See also Khan, ‘Coloniality’.
and the war on terror inextricably tied it to those events, leading, among other things, to its unintentional reproduction of Islam’s connection to terrorism. 104 Embracing post-colonial thinking, as Chukwuma notes, may therefore facilitate ‘alternative vocabularies for explaining both terrorism and counter-terrorism in different contexts’, in the process helping to broaden ‘the purview of terrorism research beyond the threats facing western countries … including colonial and/or imperialist violence’. 105
Recent interventions into the foundational political, normative, or methodological commitments of critical terrorism research offer related efforts to redirect its critical energy and purposes, including appeals to a greater grappling with silence¹⁰⁶ and numbers, 107 as a way to escape the field’s enduring logocentrism. Such work is valuable because it facilitates bridge-building with other scholarships and their expertises, 108 at the same time as it forces academic and political attention upon hitherto-overlooked issues, regions, or conceptual concerns. Recent engagements with whiteness and white supremacy by critical terrorism scholars, 109 for instance, offer a particularly powerful example of how a recasting of attention can radically shift that which is to be taken seriously as a focus of research. The temporary rapprochement – if that is what it is – between critical scholarship and traditional (counter)terrorism knowledge may therefore provide time and space (perhaps already is providing time and space) for a ‘second order critique’ of critical scholarship itself. There is, of course, the danger of such a ‘turn inwards’ being seen as a form of academic self-indulgence – of focusing on internal academic parameters and boundaries, rather than the global harms which continue to be wrought under the auspices of preventing terrorism. Yet such a critique would fail to recognise the inherently productive nature of (critical terrorism) knowledge, seeking to expose its political functions and ideological consequences for (counter)terrorism scholarship and practice. 110 Therefore, while the immediate focus on attention may shift from direct practices of harm being perpetrated, doing so may enable CTS to identify forms of harms, discrimination, and silencing which have hitherto been ignored.
580You can only know what worked after the fact---rejection generates no feedback.
Stein 24 — Janice Gross Stein. December 4. Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. European Journal of International Security, “Radical uncertainty and pragmatism: Threat perception and response,” vol. 10, no. 3, p. 419-435 Clopus
Storytelling about what works in the world, as I noted earlier, is an important part of pragmatist thinking and, more importantly, how we in fact think about a world only partly of our making. Stories do more than build in context, contingency, and social processes and conventions. They help us to think about the future by imagining different worlds. Whether they are called stories, narratives, or scenarios matters less than the individual and collective processes of imagining possible futures, the contexts and the contingencies that could combine to create these futures, and the pathways that would take us to them. Footnote 59 Imagining the pathways to these possibilities helps to shape understanding of what practical knowledge we need to build, how that knowledge might meet each of these worlds, the signposts to watch for along the pathways, and where and when to begin a process of experimentation, probing, and learning.
Living in a world of uncertainty
A central theme of this article is the importance of acknowledging that, at times, we live in a world of uncertainty. Acknowledging uncertainty is hard to do. It pushes against powerful psychological impulses. Yet only by acknowledging uncertainty, rather than hiding it by denying it or treating it as risk, or by hiding from it through avoidance, can leaders open the door to experimentation and learning and adaptation.
In a world of radical uncertainty, pragmatists as well as evolutionary biologists and psychologists can only know, after the fact, what has worked in the world. There are no easy or obvious solutions to that wicked problem. Leaders can only guard against false certainties from their advisers and overconfidence in themselves. They can do their best to remain open to new information, challenge assumptions and advice, ask what they have not heard, actively create an environment that supports dissent, consult people who are not usually in the room who might think about the problem differently, and engage in continuous thought experiments and storytelling to imagine possible futures and the proposed responses that might work in each of these worlds. All of these are easy to prescribe and hard to do. Footnote 60 And none of them may be enough. Leaders may still fail even with iterative processes of experimentation. In a world of radical uncertainty, however, without processes that are grounded in the search for practical knowledge, failure looms large.
581States learned the script---they infiltrate, provoke, and repress.
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
First, movements may be facing more entrenched regimes—ones that have prevailed against repeated challenges by shoring up support from local allies and key constituencies; imprisoning prominent oppositionists; provoking opponents into using violence; stoking fears of foreign or imperial conspiracies; or obtaining diplomatic cover from powerful international supporters. The regimes in Belarus, Iran, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and Venezuela have proved especially resilient in the face of challenges from below. There is no doubt that activists who work in such settings are confronting grave difficulties. Yet this post hoc explanation for movement failure has its shortcomings. Many regimes—such as Bashir’s government in Sudan—are seen as immutable and resilient up until the moment that a nonviolent resistance movement topples them, after which observers claim that the regimes were weak after all. But over history, many once-stable autocratic regimes—such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet, East Germany under Erich Honecker, Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, and communist Poland—succumbed to nonviolent movements after skillful mobilizations that often marked the culmination of years of effort.
Second, governments may be learning and adapting to nonviolent challenges from below. 16 Several decades ago, authoritarian regimes frequently found themselves surprised by the sudden onset of mass nonviolent uprisings, and governments struggled to find ways to suppress these movements without triggering increased popular sympathy and support for the repressed. Elites may also have underestimated the potential of people power to seriously threaten their rule. Today, given the ample historical record of successful nonviolent campaigns, state actors are likelier to perceive such movements as genuinely threatening. Consequently, autocratic regimes have developed a repertoire of politically savvy approaches to repression. 17 One prominent strategy is to infiltrate movements and divide them from within. In this way, the authorities can provoke a nonviolent movement into using more militant tactics, including violence, before the movement has built a broad enough base to ensure its popular support and staying power.
Third, with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the United States has accelerated its retreat from its global role as a superpower with a prodemocracy agenda. Although many have critiqued this agenda as a form of neo-imperialism shrouded in liberalism, the liberal international order established by the U.S. and other leading Western nations also coincided with an expansion of human-rights regimes that produced governmental and nongovernmental watchdogs who named and shamed human-rights abuses. These trends may have opened space for political dissent in many countries around the world. 18 Daniel Ritter has argued that in the post–Cold War world, authoritarian regimes were particularly susceptible to nonviolent challenges from below because they needed to maintain the semblance of respect for human rights in order to appease their democratic allies and patrons. 19 For instance, Egypt’s dependence on foreign assistance meant that when revolution broke out in 2011, the Egyptian military was highly attuned to scrutiny from liberal democracies such as the United States. Without an activist United States—and, more broadly, without powerful champions of human rights who have real leverage or enforcement capacity vis-à-vis autocratic regimes—we would expect greater brutality against nonviolent dissidents.
582The harm is what our munitions did---denial and no compensation, not a construction.
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.
583Militarised escalation alone can’t defeat the armed groups---that’s a claim about us.
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
After launching what he called “a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS [ISIL] terrorist scum” in northwest Nigeria on December 25, United States President Donald Trump promised “many more”, reaffirming his stance that the US “will not allow radical Islamic terrorism to prosper”. The strikes occurred less than a week after the newly formed Alliance of Sahel States (AES) commissioned a joint military force comprising a 5,000-strong contingent, presented as a symbol of collective self-reliance and security autonomy, in a concerted effort to combat terrorist groups in its member states. They also followed moves by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to establish an ambitious plan announced in August 2025 to activate a 260,000-strong joint counterterrorism force, backed by a proposed $2.5bn annual budget for logistics and front-line support.
While these developments may be presented by their proponents as decisive steps against terrorism, there is little evidence that militarised escalation alone can defeat armed groups in the Sahel. Instead, they signal an accelerating militarisation of the region. Not only does this fuel emerging geopolitical tensions in West Africa, but it also, more importantly, edges the Sahel towards interstate armed conflict, posing far graver risks to regional peace and stability.
584Their tradition says force generates the support it fights---that is our internal link.
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
585Knowing can’t be separated from doing---perception and strategy are one practice.
Stein 24 — Janice Gross Stein. December 4. Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. European Journal of International Security, “Radical uncertainty and pragmatism: Threat perception and response,” vol. 10, no. 3, p. 419-435 Clopus
To answer these questions, I draw heavily on the rich traditions of pragmatism. There are important differences among pragmatist thinkers, but pragmatism can be defined broadly as a set of dispositions for making sense of the world and what works in the world. Footnote 30 The two are intimately connected. Pragmatists understand belief as a predisposition to act. The importance of an argument or proposition is in its practical consequences in the world. Pragmatism treats the world as relational and contingent where people adjust their habits to those contingent circumstances, both to make sense of the world and for understanding what works in the world. Footnote 31 Making sense of the world can be understood as an answer to the question, what is going on here? What is the story? How can we arrive at a successful answer to the problem that confronts us? Footnote 32 That successful answer, what works in the world, can be understood as an incremental, iterative, and sequential process of experimentation with options that will go some way to addressing the problem, options that are ‘useful’ rather than ‘optimal’.
Making sense of the world and understanding what works in the world are closely connected. In pragmatist thinking, knowing cannot be separated from doing; pragmatism recognises the ways in which knowledge is embedded in practice. Knowing matters when it has consequences in the world. When we think about the problem of threat perception in global politics through this lens, we see that threat perception matters when the way the threat is perceived and the way leaders respond to it have practical consequences in the world. Threat perception and strategy are intimately linked, inseparable from one another. In much of the literature in international politics, the two are analytically separated. In this pragmatist analysis, they are conjoined.
586The praxeological test is theirs---critique that can’t be tested reads as hollow.
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.
Together, these tests can, I suggest, inform the praxeological dimension of CIRT by addressing pressing challenges like climate change, for instance. Whether the purpose of theory is ‘emancipation’ of the human subject (as in Critical Theory), or ‘amelioration’ of the lived experience (as in Pragmatism), climate change presents a two-part challenge. The first is that the technical reason of a capitalist system, which values the exploitation of the environment and legitimises carbon-emitting practices for economic growth, contradicts the objective reason of climatologists who alert us to the catastrophic consequences of business-as-usual. The second challenge is that the technical reason of the climate system and the climatologists could conceivably colonise the lifeworld in ways that also threaten the human subject and harm the lived experience. In focusing on the communities of global practice that have emerged around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – in particular the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Conference of Parties (COP) – I have situated Pragmatist analysis between these extremes.
587Incremental, revisable strategy worked---Ukraine was armed with no escalation.
Stein 24 — Janice Gross Stein. December 4. Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. European Journal of International Security, “Radical uncertainty and pragmatism: Threat perception and response,” vol. 10, no. 3, p. 419-435 Clopus
President Biden and his advisers found themselves in a world of radical uncertainty as the evidence began to mount that Russia was about to invade Ukraine. An invasion would break all the norms and rules of the post–Cold War period. As it became clear that the invasion was going ahead, the uncertainty deepened. Putin’s behaviour was unpredictable, not only because no probability estimates were relevant, but because he was demonstrating his readiness to break all the constraining norms. Economists have long recognised that the usual sequence of preferences preceding and shaping choices may not always hold. At times, choice reveals preferences. Footnote 51 People do not always know their preferences. It is only after they make a choice that they discover them by reasoning backwards from their behaviour. Wartime presidents are no exception. As one astute observer remarked, ‘Putin himself likely does not know what he would do then [if he were losing the war]’. Footnote 52 It may well be that Putin is not a reliable predictor of what he will do because even he does not know how he will feel, should he face any of these contingencies. The United States had no alternative but to develop a strategy to try to manage escalation in the context of these deep uncertainties.
The president began by putting some structure into what was an undefined problem with almost no constraints. Biden first told a story of World War III, a story of a war that could erupt if US forces engaged in combat with Russians forces that could then escalate to nuclear war. Then, in an unprecedented step, he laid out in a published op-ed five boundary conditions to reduce some of the most important uncertainties. The president made public what the United States would do and what it would not do. Footnote 53 First, Biden made clear that ‘we do not seek a war between NATO and Russia’. Second, he made explicit that ‘so long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces’. Third, Biden clarified that, despite his revulsion at Russia’s unjust attack, ‘the United States will not try to bring about his [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow’. While the United States would support Ukraine to the fullest extent possible, Biden continued, ‘We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders’. Biden established a final parameter when he warned Russia explicitly against the use of nuclear weapons: ‘Any use of nuclear weapons on any scale would be completely unacceptable to the United States as well as to the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.’
Within the framing narrative of escalation that could lead to World War III and the structural parameters the president put in place to define the problem, the Biden administration then put in place a pragmatic strategy of ‘learning by doing’ that tried to further reduce uncertainty in response to Russia’s manipulation of uncertainty. The process of experimentation was incremental and inductive as officials struggled to figure out what would work. Biden early on ruled out NATO enforcement of a no-fly zone over Ukraine – despite brutal Russian attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and desperate pleas from Volodymyr Zelensky – because he judged the risk of direct engagement between NATO and Russian pilots to be too high. After that, the administration began incrementally, and at times with considerable delays, to provide Ukraine with increasingly more advanced military equipment. Officials then waited to assess Russia’s reaction. The Russian response was limited to verbal warnings and veiled nuclear threats but no military escalation outside the battlefield in Ukraine.
Early decisions to supply defensive Javelins and Stingers were followed, after Ukrainian civilian infrastructure came under relentless attack, by the decision to provide Kyiv with High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems. Even though their range was short enough that they could not reach Russian territory, a pattern of probe and wait preceded the decision. Russia railed against the provision of these longer-range rocket systems but took no action against NATO members. Over time, the United States moved by increments, with some of its allies, to supply Bradley and Marder armored vehicles, then advanced surface-to-air missiles in November and December of 2022. They then pledged to send batteries of the Patriot air defence system that arrived in Ukraine the following April. In January 2023, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany decided to supply Challenger, Abrams, and Leopard-2 tanks and then Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs, rocket-propelled guided bombs with a more extended range. Even though Russia has threatened in the past that any attack on Crimea would ‘ignite judgment day’, in May 2023, the United Kingdom followed by France, sent missiles with a range long enough to reach Crimea. That same month, the Biden administration, acceding to a long-standing Ukrainian request, also authorised the training of Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets and promised that its allies would deliver these aircraft to Ukraine in the next several months. Consistent with the parameter condition that NATO not enable Ukraine to attack beyond its borders, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov again confirmed Ukraine’s agreement not to use Western long-range weapons to strike Russian territories. Footnote 54
What had been off limits in February 2022 was on its way or promised to Ukraine 18 months later. So far, Russia has not put any strategic weapons on high alert, although it has moved tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus that, however, remain under Russian control. The pragmatic strategy of incremental learning-by-doing seems to have worked, up until now, in controlling escalation and supplying Ukraine with most of what it needed, although far more slowly than Kyiv would have liked.
Pragmatism in the world
588Case-by-case restraint is a thing the exporter already does---the frame doesn’t foreclose it.
Erickson 23 — Jennifer L. Erickson. February. Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College; researches arms control, sanctions and the conventional arms trade. Global Policy, “Demystifying the ‘gold standard’ of arms export controls: US arms exports to conflict zones,” vol. 14, no. 1, p. 131-138 Clopus
The United States may also simply stand out of the way of other suppliers. By blocking the imposition of UN arms embargoes, as the United States initially did in response to the South Sudan conflict in 2014, it left the window open for other states to arm conflict parties. Internal Obama administration disagreements about the purpose of an embargo seem to explain the US opposition to the proposed embargo, which had been supported by the other Permanent Five members at the time. In particular, some members of the Obama administration had argued that an embargo would undermine the government's ability to arm itself (Lynch, 2015), even if the US was not the supplier doing the supplying. The effect was a multi-year delay in arms embargo imposition, allowing warring parties in the meantime to stockpile weapons from other suppliers.
Finally, the United States may engage in case-by-case restraint by declaring only some weapons off-limits to a conflict-engaged recipient. Typically, such restraint policies focus on prohibiting specific categories of weapons deemed likely to harm civilians or be used offensively in a specific conflict. For example, in light of the controversies surrounding US arms supplies to Saudi Arabia during the Yemen conflict, the Obama administration temporarily stopped the export of some precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia. Going further, in 2021, the Biden administration announced a policy that it would end all ‘offensive’ weapons sales to Saudi Arabia (Biden, 2021).5 In theory, this strategy allows the United States to avoid supplying conflict zones while continuing to provide recipients with other weapons not ‘relevant’ to the conflict in question. Practically, however, few weapons are solely defensive. Symbolically, too, selective restraint sends a much weaker signal about US policy and preferences (assuming they are to curtail the conflict). Moreover, in the Saudi–Yemen case, the United States has often been accused of interpreting ‘offensive’ narrowly to permit more weapons sales (Al Jazeera, 2021; Kirchgaessner & McKernan, 2021) or simply not tracking carefully enough the role of American-made weapons in civilian casualties in order to prevent them (Wong, 2022).
Whether the United States supplies a conflict directly or indirectly, it faces two intractable and inevitable challenges in doing so. These challenges raise the likelihood that US arms supplies will undermine its arms export ‘gold standard’ reputation and its national interest more broadly.