Genocide Topic Open Thread
US policy toward genocide - This is a new area that has been suggested in a paper by Ben Voth (US Policy Toward Genocide). Kelly Young will be leading the effort to investigate this area. He has developed this topic paper. NOTE: The link was updated on 3/5 to reflect the final and updated paper. Please confirm that you have the final version.
The concern about topic overlap is valid, but has not been that important in recent topic selections. WMD-Treaties-Europe included very similar cases and although Kyoto was ignored largely on the Treaties topic Treaties-Energy.
And for some offense- overlap might make the high school-college transition easier.
Are there wordings of resolutions that would be better for debate that are foreclosed by the concern about topic overlap from previous high school topics? If we want a genocide topic just going as strong as possible might be the best option.
Petit was arguing for a strong military topic approach to the China topic, could a Genocide topic be writen to say, the US needs to bust some knee caps and use the miltary to stop this short list of genocides?
The topic would include force beyond knee caps, but my point is this; a genocide topic could be the chance for a real pure miltiary topic which would be refresing.
Hi Dan,
No, this is not the topic for a hardline military affirmative. While part of my concern was topic overlap, the literature is also severely hamstrung by our current military overstretch. If you want a hardline military topic, I imagine that the military reform topic paper that may be offered for next year would be much better suited. It was suggested to me to try to find some sort of "foreign policy doctrine" change angle to this topic, but the literature is not very good for that kind of topic. The best affs by far are "sending peacekeeping force to nation x" types of aff, not doctrine changes.
The concern about topic overlap, however, is a bit more significant for this topic than the nuclear posture topic. The HS peacekeeping topic was in 2004, much more recent than the 2001 WMD topic. Also, we aren't just talking about "some" overlap. In this instance, it would be virtually a complete overlap with the peacekeeping topic.
I understand that there's some value to ease with overlap and transition to college. However, that's probably resolved more with having more foreign policy topics generally (we already know the types of das, generic cps etc) and not a near replication of topic many debated just three years ago.