Debate Advice: War is a Continuum
By: Jaya Nayar
Before reading this article, you’ll want to take a look at these two cards which both explain the idea of war as a continuum:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v8j5atum4qxpsqr/War%20is%20a%20continuum.docx?dl=0
An important concept in feminist international relations is the idea that war is a continuum. What this means is that fem IR theorists don’t view war as some flashpoint conflict that occurs and then is over with (i.e., we went into Vietnam, and then pulled out), but rather view it as an ongoing structure.
But Jaya, how can they deny the fact that two states sometimes do go to war? This argument does NOT say that state versus state conflict is unimportant or does not exist. Rather, it says that the divide between peace and war is imaginary in a world where structural violence exists since minorities perpetually live in a state of “war.”
What feminist international relations theorists call for is a human-centered approach to studying violence. This means instead of just looking at how states interact with each other, we must evaluate how humans deal with daily forms of violence. They say looking at everyday violence is a better way to evaluate national security than just evaluating it based on nationwide external threats (like Russian expansionism or terrorism), since issues of structural violence should also be seen as tremendous threats.
OK… but how do I use this in debate? It can both be a link argument and an explanation for war. As a link, the Sheperd card explains how when certain issues are seen as too minor to be war (sexual violence, poverty, etc), that’s what allows those issues to continue. It’s a method of diverting attention such that we will never be able to focus on structural violence, and will only find ourselves concerned with state-on-state conflict. Therefore, whenever the Aff or Neg tries to say “prioritize our impacts, large-scale war between X country and Y country has the largest magnitude,” you’d want to say that such a view of violence is a method of distracting from structural violence. Every time we think state-on-state violence is the most important or should be prioritized, that implicitly condones everyday violence as too minor to be war and too unimportant to be addressed. Instead, tell the judge to vote for your team and refuse to put minorities on the back burner as a way to overcorrect for the present biases in IR that ensure the dominance and exclusive focus on state versus state conflict.
As for how this explains war, there are two ways you can go for the claims in the Prugl evidence. Firstly, you can go for it as a root cause claim. Being honest, this is a little harder to win, but can be devastating if the other team drops it. Prugl does a statistical analysis to show how gender violence is a strong determinant of if a country has a high or low propensity to go to war. What this means is that everyday violence spills up to create war by promoting the idea of a masculine public sphere that makes policy-makers value qualities like aggression, associated with masculinity, and de-value qualities like diplomacy, associated with femininity. However, I personally think it’s a lot easier to go for this as an inevitability claim. Instead of attempting to explain all wars through the lens of structural violence spilling up into the public sphere, I would explain the argument as a reason why the wars the Aff tries to stop or the wars the disad says will occur as a result of the Aff are inevitable in a world where our focus in IR is always on state versus state conflict. The only way to prevent these types of war then is to shift our focus to structural violence, otherwise it’ll spill up no matter what. That’s a reason why the judge should vote for you to re-align themselves with a more productive view of IR that doesn’t just recreate the same problems as the status quo.
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