The Politics of Crisis and the Crisis of Politics: Evaluating the November 2015 Topic

Like many others, I was particularly struck in early September by the photographs of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian three-year-old whose lifeless body washed onto the shores of a Turkish beach.¹ The visceral photos of Aylan's drowned body - as well as heart-wrenching videos of his father's grief - brought the crisis with Syrian refugees to the public consciousness. Perhaps in response to Aylan and other victims of the Syrian crisis, the November 2015 Public Forum Debate topic reads, In response to the current crisis, a government should prioritize the humanitarian needs of refugees over its national interests.

Although I began this article with a discussion of Aylan Kurdi, I could have just as easily begun with the story of Cristian Omar Reyes, an orphaned eleven-year-old refugee from Honduras who watched his father get murdered and an eleven year old neighbor girl get "clubbed over the head and dragged off by two men who cut a hole in her throat, stuffed her panties in it, and left her body in a ravine across the street from Cristian's house."²

The difficulty in defining "the current crisis" is that so many events can be - and regularly are - labeled a crisis. This article will analyze the rise of modern crisis politics and explain the implications for those politics in terms of interpreting the resolution.

What isn't a crisis?

In 2004, Giorgio Agamben published an analysis of modern crisis politics in his book, The State of Exception. Agamben argues that modern politics are characterized primarily by crisis because of the political advantages in labeling certain events crises. For example, gruesome torture and unprecedented suspensions of civil liberties are universally unacceptable as a matter of normal course. However, in the face of a crisis - the War on Terror - both torture and suspension of civil liberties became accepted (and in many cases, widely supported) forms of government action.³ they are significantly less unacceptable when done in response to a crisis. In that context, Agamben suggests that the sweeping expansion of government power in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Centers was precisely a result of crisis politics. The framing of terrorism as an unparalleled crisis threat - distinct from "normal" violence that does not justify exceptional conduct⁴ - gave apparent legal and social justification to the United States" subsequent atrocities.

The political advantages and power that flow from the use of crisis rhetoric are substantial enough to incentivize creating permanent crisis. Agamben argues that the framing of political events as crises has become so common that "crisis" is the norm, rather than the exception, which Agamben terms "the state of exception." For the purpose of simplicity in this article, it is useful to understand the state of exception as a permanent state of crisis where extreme (or "exceptional") tactics (like mass surveillance) become commonplace features of everyday life. In short, in the modern era anything can be a crisis.

Debaters can use this argument on topicality debates when seeking a restrictive interpretation of the term crisis. When an opponent terms something a crisis, it may be strategic to argue that crisis rhetoric is overblown and overly applied.

The Seven Signs of the Apocalypse: Identifying Specific Crises

1. The Environment: Global warming and environmental degradation are causing and contributing to massive refugee flows. Directly, rising sea levels literally make land uninhabitable by turning it into ocean-floor while environmental disasters - such as tsunamis - destroy whole towns and cities. Indirectly, climate change and pollution have degraded key ecosystems and eliminated swathes of arable land as desertification creeps into population centers. As land cannot support people - either because it is literally not "land" anymore, or because it is otherwise uninhabitable - those people move and become refugees. Governments could prioritize the needs of environmental refugees by addressing the root cause of the problem causing these people to become refugees in the first place: a "reduce warming" aff is topical. Because reducing substantially warming likely has deleterious economic consequences, it requires prioritization over national interest.

2. Conflict: Both war and the human rights atrocities that sometimes accompany war cause people to flee in order to avoid harm. Though not the only example, Syria is an obvious example - Syrian citizens wish to avoid being violated or killed, and so they flee to surrounding countries. Any major conflict that is currently producing refugees is arguably topical.

3. Political Persecution: Distinct from outright war, some countries persecute people who hold a particular political view. For example, in Fatin v. INS, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit considered political persecution of activists who sought gender equality in Iran. Persecution of women's rights activists is a regularly litigated issue in asylum law.⁵ The EU similarly recognizes asylum based on persecution for holding any political opinion.⁶ As a result, many refugees seek asylum for political persecution. Ironically, xenophobia has led to the election of a substantial number of neo-Nazis to the European parliament.⁷ Affirmatives dealing with political persecution might claim focus on analyses lauding the social benefits of free speech. Such affirmatives might also claim value in promoting the right to speak freely as an independent normative good. They might also simply argue "European neo-Nazis bad."⁸

4. Oppressive Persecution: Though related to political persecution, this type of persecution deals with targeting based on identity or other immutable characteristics. For example, Uganda imposes felony criminal penalties for the "attempt to commit homosexuality" and the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality".⁹ In Darfur, the Arab Janjaweed militias slaughtered of hundreds of thousands of Black Africans,¹⁰ leading many to seek and receive asylum based on racial persecution. These affirmatives may deal with the transnational significance of oppression.

5. Economic Crisis and Food Insecurity: Numerically, the biggest crisis of the modern era is poverty.¹¹ The United Nations relatedly estimates that 795 million people suffer from food insecurity.¹² The basic inability to subsist and survive because of destitution leads many to leave their homes seeking a better life. An affirmative here could argue for international action to house economic refugees and integrate them into the host states" domestic economies.

Conclusion

Champion debaters understand the dynamics - including political opportunism - involved in labeling specific events as a crisis. As debaters argue whether particular events qualify as "the current crisis" referenced in the resolution, they should keep in mind the vast number of events that can reasonably be termed a crisis. Champion debaters who defend a particular crisis will robustly justify their specific choice; and champion negative debaters will be just as prepared with a response.

References and Footnotes

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[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/image-of-syrian-boy-washed-up-on-beach-hits-hard-1441282847

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/a-refugee-crisis-not-an-immigration-crisis.html?_r=0

[3] Two notes about the scope of this claim are worth making. First, crisis politics only made torture and suspension of civil liberties more palatable such that even purported leftists supported them in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Centers. While crisis politics are not a perfect political panacea (in that some still resisted the expansion of state power after the WTC attack), those people are the exception rather than the rule. Second, the rejoinder that torture and the suspension of civil rights have both declined in recent years supports the point about crisis politics: their use is less acceptable as the sense of urgency surrounding the War on Terror has diminished.

[4] In the United States, drunk driving, medical errors, and food contamination kill more people every year than were killed in the WTC attacks - and it is not close. See, e.g., http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-terrorism-statistics-every-american-needs-to-hear/5382818. (citing CDC figures to show death by food poisoning is 11,000% more likely than death by terrorism).
To be sure, punitive torture of drivers, doctors, and grocery store clerks would greatly deter the feared misconduct (DUI, errors, and contamination, respectively). Yet the idea of solving these problems by torture is not only repugnant, it is unimaginably ridiculous. What explains this disconnect? Despite being objectively more lethal than terrorism, these forms of violence are not characterized as crises - and thus exceptional responses are proportionately less acceptable.

[5] See, e.g., http://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/FINAL%20%20Gender%20Related%20Asylum%20Claims.pdf

[6] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32011L0095&from=EN

[7] To add insult to injury, one neo-Nazi - who overtly denies the Holocaust - is currently sitting on Europe's Civil Libeties Committee. http://www.euractiv.com/sections/eu-elections-2014/neo-nazis-eu-parliament-appointment-ultimate-insult-jews-303380

[8] See, e.g., id. ("There was another attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse, France in 2012. French Jews are emigrating to Israel in record numbers because of fears of rising anti-Semitism from the far right and extremist Islam.")

[9] I"m serious. http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/02/Anti-Homosexuality-Act-2014.pdf

[10] The slaughter was so pervasive that it was formally labeled genocide by the United States in 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8364-2004Sep9.html

[11] Oxford University calculates that about 1,600,000,000 (1.6 billion) people live in poverty. For context, that's the population of the United States five times over with 100,000,000 people to spare. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/weve-been-measuring-the-number-of-poor-people-in-the-world-wrong/373073/

[12] http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/2014/en/