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What is a Critique?
How do you structure a Critique?
How do you answer a Critique?
Critiques for this topic!!!

A critique is an argument that indicts either the system(s) that the topic or team supports or the language or rhetoric that the other team uses. What that means is that when you run a critique you are claiming that the resolution, the affirmative case, a negative argument, or the other team's language either causes bad things to occur or continues a bad belief system (e.g. racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.). When you run a critique, you are making an argument that a certain type of language or belief system should be removed from society in general and the debate round specifically. You make the case for why the language or belief system causes harm, and then you ask the judge to reject the resolution or the other teams arguments in this round so that harmful language or belief system can be challenged and eliminated from our society. It is much easier to show you how these arguments work than to explain them. Let me show you how to structure the argument and then give you some examples.

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How Do You Structure A Critique?

The structure of a critique looks like a combination of a disadvantage and a topicality position. Here is how it goes.

Subpoint A -- Link to the topic, resolution or language

You must read evidence that either the resolution, the other team's argument, or the other team's language causes something bad to occur (ie - Policies against Weapons of Mass Destruction are a ruse to label nations that do not agree with US policy as "Rogue Nations").

Subpoint B -- Impact

You must show that by adopting the other team's position, affirming the topic by voting affirmative, or allow the other team to use that language will cause bad things to occur. (ie - Labeling Nations as "Rogues" leads to bad US Foreign Policy and the unnecessary slaughter of other nation's armies).

Subpoint C -- Voting Issue

Unless you are able to find a piece of evidence that says something like "Must Reject Every Incident Of Racism", you will need to write out an explanation for why the judge should vote for you based on impact of the critique (See Example Critiques below)

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How Do You Answer A Critique?

Here are some generic answers for critiques.

Non-unique - This language is used in the literature of the topic.
Empirically Denied - This language is used in every debate round on this topic and the impacts of the critique have not occurred.
Irrelevant Issue - The ballot only asks who did the better job of debating, it does not ask for an evaluation of the language used.
Unfair - Because of the wording of the topic every affirmative would automatically lose.
Destroys the marketplace of ideas - To vote against us simply for using this language destroys the marketplace of ideas that debate is meant to foster.
Ballot is Irrelevant - Voting against us does not ensure that our mindset will change. Now that the position has been argued, we now have consciousness and promise never to use that language again.
Punishment paradigm violates the critique - The other team is asking you to punish us for using this language, but the critique is based on the use of language as punishment being bad. They violate the principles of their own position.
You should not endorse a particular "truth". The judge's role in this round is to judge who does the better job of debating not to put their seal of approval on what they consider acceptable language.
Turn: Undermines education and truth seeking. Debate must be a forum where the truth can be discovered. Shutting down intellectual discourse by voting against certain language violates that principle.
Turn: Position asks you to make take an authoritarian stance. The critique is asking you to reject an authoritarian mindset by acting as an authoritarian and voting against us. That undermines any lesson that we may learn from the critique.

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Critiques For This Topic!!!

"Rogue Nations" Critique
Guinea Pig Critique
Terror Talk Critique
Borders Critique

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"Rogue Nations" Critique

) US Labels Nations Seeking Weapons Of Mass Destruction As "Rogue Nations"

Childs, June 8, 2001

Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington was looking at what new challenges might emerge to the interests of the United States and its allies. And a focus became so-called "rogue states": usually developing countries, essentially hostile to the United States, which were suspected of pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programmes, and probably also of sponsoring terrorism, and which did not subscribe to what Washington regarded as the norms of international behaviour.

[Nick Childs - World Correspondent, BBC, The New Boogeyman, June 8, 2001]

) Labeling Of "Rogue Nations" Creates Bad Foreign Policy

Childs, June 8, 2001

But Washington too, under the Clinton administration, also came to find that demonising the rogue states was not useful when it too tried to engage in dialogue with, for example, the authorities in North Korea, or moderate elements in Iran. As one US State Department official put it, the term rogue state "made for a good soundbite, but not for good policy".

[Nick Childs - World Correspondent, BBC, The New Boogeyman, June 8, 2001]

) Rogue Nations With WMD Is A Fictional Creation Used To Increase Military Spending

Klare, 2000

This imagery, although hastily manufactured in response to the sudden collapse of Soviet power, proved surprisingly effective, tapping into American fears of nuclear weapons and malevolent Third World leaders. The Rogue Doctrine played particularly well on Capitol Hill, where several prominent senators, including Sam Nunn of Georgia and William Roth of Delaware, had already begun describing weapons-seeking states in the Third World as an emerging peril. By the spring of 1990, senior Pentagon officials and many members of Congress had begun using a common analysis and terminology to describe the threat posed by a new type of enemy. From 1990 on, the general model of a "rogue state" ruled by an "outlaw regime" armed with chemical and nuclear weapons became the standard currency of national security discourse. All that was required was the emergence of a specific "demon"-a particular ruler of a specific state-to bring the newly developed doctrine into vivid focus and thereby forestall an even more terrifying enemy, the Congressional advocates of a peace dividend, from launching a full-scale attack on the U.S. military establishment.

[Michael Klare – , Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New Foreign Policy, Hill and Wang Publishers]

) Increased Military Spending Will Allow US To Destroy Other Nations Armies At Will

Klare, 2000

Such images have obvious attractions for the military in that they highlight American advantages in firepower and technology, while limiting the risk to soldiers on the battlefield. In a sense, the "postindustrial battlefield" represents a distillation of all the lessons the Pentagon would like to extract from Desert Storm, while excluding all those it would prefer to avoid. There are no politics on the postindustrial battlefield, no requirement for troops to remain on the ground for more than a few days at a time, no impassioned ethnic warriors who must be fought face-to-face and house-to-house; instead, there are only symbolic representations of enemy units on a screen, to be "zapped" by self-aiming, standoff weapons fired by distant operatives who never witness the bloody aftereffects of their actions.

[Michael Klare – , Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New Foreign Policy, Hill and Wang Publishers]

Voting Issue: The affirmative team is perpetuating a foreign policy myth that is being used to justify the slaughter of thousands of innocent people. As a moral imperative you should reject this myth and the resolution, and you should vote for the negative team in this debate round.

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Guinea Pig Critique

) US Foreign Policy Makes US Soldiers Guinea Pigs

Blum, 2000

And in the decades between the 1940s and 1990s, what do we find? A remarkable variety of govemment programs, either formally, or in effect, using soldiers as guinea pigs-marched to nuclear explosion sites, with pilots then sent through the mushroom clouds; subjected to chemical and biological weapons experiments; radiation experiments; behavior modification experiments that washed their brains with LSD, exposure to the dioxin of Agent Orange in Korea and Vietnam...the list goes on...literally millions of experimental subjects, seldom given a choice or adequate information, often with disastrous effects to their physical and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even monitoring.

[William Blum – Former member of US State Department, Rogue State: Guide to the only world superpower, Common Cause Press]

) US Foreign Policy Is A Mask For Murder And Destruction

Blum, 2000

A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still saving countries and peoples from one danger or another. The scorecard reads as follows: From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.

[William Blum – Former member of US State Department, Rogue State: Guide to the only world superpower, Common Cause Press]

Voting Issue: The affirmative team is perpetuating a foreign policy system that is being used to justify the slaughter of thousands of innocent people and a system of torturous experimentation on American Soldiers. As a moral imperative, you should reject the affirmative policy and the resolution, and you should vote for the negative team in this debate round.

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Terror Talk Critique

) WMD Terrorism Is A Rhetorical Creation

Sprinzak, 2000

In fighting suicide bombers, it is important not to succumb to the idea that they are ready to do anything and lose everything. This is the same sort of simplistic reasoning that has fueled the widespread hysteria over terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The perception that terrorists are undeterrable fanatics who are willing to kill millions indiscriminately just to sow fear and chaos belies the reality that they are cold, rational killers who employ violence to achieve specific political objectives. Whereas the threat of WMD terrorism is little more than overheated rhetoric, suicide bombing remains a devastating form of terrorism whose complete demise is unlikely in the 21st century.

[Ehud Sprinzak is dean of the Lauder School of Government, Policy, and Diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, Rational Fanatics, Foreign Policy, Sept/Oct. 2000]

) Focus On WMD Terrorism Leads To Bad Policy And Saps Money From Real Counter Terrorism Measures

Sprinzak, 1998

Such dire forecasts may make for gripping press briefings, movies, and bestsellers, but they do not necessarily make for good policy. As an unprecedented fear of mass-destruction terrorism spreads throughout the American security establishment, governments worldwide are devoting more attention to the threat. But as horrifying as this prospect may be, the relatively low risks of such an event do not justify the high costs now being contemplated to defend against it. Not only are many of the countermeasures likely to be ineffective, but the level of rhetoric and funding devoted to fighting superterrorism may actually advance a potential superterrorist's broader goals: sapping the resources of the state and creating a climate of panic and fear that can amplify the impact of any terrorist act.

[Ehud Sprinzak is dean of the Lauder School of Government, Policy, and Diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, The Great Superterrorism, Foreign Policy, Fall 1998]

) CBW Terrorism Scares Will Lead To More Death And Costly And Ineffective Policies

Sprinzak, 1998

There is neither empirical evidence nor logical support for the growing belief that a new "postmodern" age of terrorism is about to dawn, an era afflicted by a large number of anonymous mass murderers toting chemical and biological weapons. The true threat of superterrorism will not likely come in the form of a Hiroshima-like disaster but rather as a widespread panic caused by a relatively small CBW incident involving a few dozen fatalities. Terrorism, we must remember, is not about killing. It is a form of psychological warfare in which the killing of a small number of people convinces the rest of us that we are next in line. Rumors, anxiety, and hysteria created by such inevitable incidents may lead to panic-stricken evacuations of entire neighborhoods, even cities, and may produce many indirect fatalities. It may also lead to irresistible demands to fortify the entire United States against future chemical and biological attacks, however absurd the cost.

[Ehud Sprinzak is dean of the Lauder School of Government, Policy, and Diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, The Great Superterrorism, Foreign Policy, Fall 1998]

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Borders Critique

Foreign Policy Is A Concept Used To Divide Up And Classify Important And Unimportant Parts Of The World

Simon Dalby-Chair of International Governance, Amsterdam, Netherlands, A Critical Geopolitics of Global Governance, Presentation at Intl Studies Assoc, March 14-18, 2000

Geopolitics is a matter of serious consideration in the halls of power, in the institutes for studying foreign policy as well as in political speeches that invoke geographical languages to specify the world in particular ways that have political effect. "The world is actively 'spatialized,' divided up, labeled, sorted out into a hierarchy of places of greater or lesser 'importance' by political geographers, other academics and political leaders. This process provides the geographical framing within which political elites and mass publics act in the world in pursuit of their own identities and interests" (Agnew, 1998: 2). But in doing so geopolitical reasoning frequently simplifies and obscures the subtleties and local circumstances of political struggle, war and, more recently, of globalization.

Use Of Foreign Policy Blinds The US To The Needs Of The International Community

Simon Dalby-Chair of International Governance, Amsterdam, Netherlands, A Critical Geopolitics of Global Governance, Presentation at Intl Studies Assoc, March 14-18, 2000

These concerns are increasingly melding with larger current concerns in the geographical discipline that explain how spaces are anything but natural phenomena (Lewis and Wigen, 1997). This thinking shows that the geographical constructions of everything from large scale maps that define property boundaries, to the small scale maps of states and empires, are modes of reasoning with powerful political effect. This challenge suggests that geopolitical categories are much more deeply problematic than earlier dismissals of geopolitical reasoning on simple ideological grounds understood (Ó Tuathail, 1996).

Such considerations focus attention on how important spatial assumptions are to modern discussions of administration, whether at state or other "levels." Territory is basic to conventional political, legal and social science definitions of states. Jurisdiction is first and foremost a territorial matter in the modern world. At the largest of scales the taken for granted political constructions of North and South, developed and developing, zones of peace and zones of turmoil, failed states, and so on structure how governance is usually considered. As even writers in The Economist magazine (1999) now understand, when discussions of global problems appear in policy deliberations and scholarly texts these geopolitical categories shape the discussion by providing the ontological categories, that literally "geo-graph," or "write the earth."

The conceptual inadequacies of these ontological schemes are often immensely politically productive. The ability to specify the world in simple geographic terms has political utility when these terms are accepted as the common sense parameters for political reasoning. In terms of American foreign policy in the 1990s the basic distinction between democratic and non-democratic states structured many of the discussions. Coded in terms of zones of peace and zones of turmoil, danger could be specified as external; its origins somewhere out there beyond "our" borders. Categories of rogue states defined particular places as in need of military containment. Such cartographic practices suggest a separateness to them, and their place, that operates politically to remove obligation and responsibility across these borders (Campbell, 1993). The specification of states in terms of these categories shapes the policies that are deemed appropriate by the rich and powerful who make state foreign policy, and by most other people who use these categories.

US Must Deconstruct Its View Of Geopolitics To Eliminate Its Ethnocentric Bias

Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Department of Geography, Virginia Tech, UNDERSTANDING CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS: GEOPOLITICS AND RISK SOCIETY, Journal Of Strategic Studies, 1999]

Critical geopolitics is relevant to policy making in that it can help deconstruct the persistence of such stereotypical geopolitical conceptions and notions in popular and political culture. With its sensitivity to geographical difference and its critique of ethnocentrism, it forces strategic thinking to acknowledge the power of ethnocentric cultural constructs in our perception of places and the dramas occurring within them. Critical geopolitics is also cognizant of how technologies of time-space compression like global media networks transforms the strategic value of places in the global information age. Ostensibly marginal geopolitical locations like Bosnia can become symbolically strategic after a while if images of genocide and chaos are persistently projected from the region by Western television networks and media outlets. As I have argued elsewhere, this is precisely what happened with Bosnia and, I would add, is currently happening with Kosovo.

Should Adopt A Critical Geopolitical View To Deconstruct The Current View Of US Foreign Policy

Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Department of Geography, Virginia Tech, UNDERSTANDING CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS: GEOPOLITICS AND RISK SOCIETY, Journal Of Strategic Studies, 1999]

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