1

MA in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, 26th

September

2014.

The discursive application of R2P in the case of Libya (2011 – ) as an

exercise in neoliberal governmentality: resilience and empowerment

for whom?

By Benedicte Sørum

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the Degree Master of Arts in Critical International Politics

(Specialist), Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, September 2014.

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Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide an in-depth analysis of the workings of the R2P-

language in a case where the principle has been used as a guideline for action. Taking R2P’s

emphasis on preventively empowering subjects through the promotion of human security as a

point of departure, it identifies how such empowerment can be seen as an act of power. The

discursive application of R2P in the case of Libya will be analysed through the lens of

neoliberal governmentality, and it will be argued that the discourse of empowerment enabled

actions that were primarily targeted at securing the biohuman and thus did not necessarily

contribute to protect the Libyan people outside of the pre-defined categories, neither during

the intervention nor in the post-intervention phase. Moreover, the specificity of the neoliberal

governing technique is that it responsibilitises its subjects and thus the UN and NATO could

conduct certain actions in Libya without being held responsible for them. Hence, the

dissertation finally argues that the preventive paradigm of R2P can be seen as a way of

empowering the resilience of the intervening powers and the neoliberal style of governing

itself, and not necessarily the populations ‘receiving help’. As it can be claimed that the

paradigm of prevention in the broader context fails to immediately react to the mass atrocities

it originally states to be occupied with, there are grounds for questioning this approach.

Keywords: ∙ Responsibility to Protect ∙ Libya ∙ Humanitarian Intervention ∙ Governmentality

∙ Biopolitics ∙ Resilience ∙ Empowerment

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Table of Content

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………2

Table of Content……………………………………………………………………………...3

Introduction, Rationale & Research Question …………………………………………….5

Chapter 1: Understanding the central themes of the R2P-language ................................. 11

1.1 R2P as a synthesis ........................................................................................................... 11

1.1.1 Human Security: Prevention from bottom-up……………………………………..14

1.2 Current Literature .......................................................................................................... 15

Chapter 2: The Foucauldian Critique of R2P & Methodological Considerations ........... 19

2.1 Neoliberal governmentality: the search for adaptable, responsible subjects……...……20

2.2 Applicability to R2P and methodological considerations………….…………………..24

Chapter 3: Telling the stories from the external engagement in Libya, 2011 – .............. 29

3.1 The Grand Narrative……………………………………………………………………29

3.2 The Invisibilities in the Grand Narrative……………………………………………….33

Chapter 4: Analysis: The discursive intervention in Libya as an exercise in neoliberal

governmentality ..................................................................................................................... 37

4.1 A feasible case for the creation of adaptable subjects……………………………….….39

4.2 The feasible case turns out to be non-feasible ……………………………..………….47

4.3 Empowerment and resilience for whom?........................................................................51

Conclusion ……………………..…………………………………………………………....55

Bibliography …………………………...……………………………………………………57

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“Liberalism is not a dream which clashes with reality and fails to insert itself there. It

constitutes – and this is the reason both for its polymorphic character and for its

recurrences – an instrument for the criticism of reality” (Foucault 1981: 355-6).

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Introduction, Rationale & Research Question

The 2011 military intervention in Libya and the character of the following post-intervention

engagement have been celebrated as a ‘model intervention’ for protecting civilians (Daalder

and Stavridis 2012; Bellamy 2011). Through Resolution 1973 (17 March 2011) it was the

first time that the United Nations Security Council had authorised the use of military force

for human protection purposes against the will of a functioning state (Bellamy 2011: 825).

Conducted under the banner of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), it was not the political

concerns of the Libyan authorities or the intervening states that mattered, but rather the

“legitimate aspirations of ordinary people” who requested the fall of the Gaddafi-regime (The

White House 2011b; Bellamy 2011). The principle of R2P, which was formulated in a 2001

report written by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

(ICISS), is characterised by its claim to be ‘people-oriented’ instead of ‘state-oriented’: by

redefining sovereignty to be a matter of responsibility, it moves beyond the world of clashing

principles for the sake of being able to boost human security in conflicts where life is seen as

threatened. In this way, the Libyan civil war was perceived by the UN, NATO and the

intervening powers to be a tailor-made case for R2P-action: It was seen as a part of the so-

called ‘Arab Spring’, reflecting the agency of the subjects on the ‘Arab Streets’ (Roberts

2011). Hence the intervention was conducted as a way of assisting and empowering the

Libyan people instead of pacifying them as an act of domination. This was signified both

through the NATO air raids as an act of empowerment, and the emphasis on handing

responsibility back to the Libyan population as soon as the mission was over, stressing the

importance of ‘national ownership’ in the process of promoting ‘good governance’

(UNAMSIL 2011). In this way, the Libyan intervention responded to the critiques raised

against the liberal interventionist doctrine characteristic of the interventions in the 1990s and

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the beginning of the 2000s, emphasising this doctrine’s neo-colonial tendencies (Chandler

2012).

By discursively distancing itself from the doctrine of liberal interventionism, R2P does not

only represent a ‘new era’ in the sense that ‘humanitarian intervention’ has been

institutionalised and made part of the UN-system of legitimate conduct, but as the ICISS-

report itself notes, R2P represents a “rather larger language change” (ICISS 2001: 9). Based

on this, this dissertation is interested in the role of the language in the specific case of Libya,

and whether the language contributes to identifiable different outcomes compared to

interventions conducted ‘before R2P’. While the narrative presented in the paragraph above

depicts the R2P-language as a valid measure for deciding the legitimacy of the Libyan

intervention, it will be argued that there are strong grounds for a further investigation of what

this language of legitimacy made possible in Libya. The distinctiveness of the Libyan case is

exactly that it, in contrast to previous interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq,

was deemed ‘successful’ (Chandler 2012: 221). By observing how the R2P-discourse enabled

certain forms of actions during the NATO air raids and a particular type of engagement in the

post-intervention phase, it will argued that the R2P-language exerted a form of power that can

be seen as conducive to a neoliberal style of governing populations, which in Foucauldian

terms can be called neoliberal governmentality. Thus, the research question that will be

analysed in the following chapters is:

How does the discursive application of R2P in the case of Libya constitute an exercise in

neoliberal governmentality, and what are the repercussions for the stated objective of

protecting the 'people'?

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In analysing these two intertwined questions, the dissertation builds on the understanding of

neoliberal governmentality as a way of promoting the life and well-being of subjects that are

perceived adaptable to a liberal form of rule. By representing a form of knowledge as power,

it does this by discursively emphasising the subjects’ free agency and responsibility for its

own life, and by developing indirect techniques for controlling subjects “without at the same

time being responsible for them” (Lemke 2001: 201, emphasis added). From this perspective,

‘human security’ can be understood as being promoted in accordance with a biological

conception of the human, of which it needs to become “something other than what it was”

(Edkins 2000: 10) in order to be resilient in an unsecure world (Chandler 2012; Reid 2010;

Pugh, Gabay and Williams 2013). Here, R2P is perceived as a principle reflecting a

neoliberal governmentality existing within global governance1, in which the discourse of

empowerment, national ownership, good governance and responsibility are representing

changing tactics of governing, but not necessarily changing goals (Joseph 2009: 420).

By analysing how central terms such as empowerment and responsibility were applied in

Libya, it will be evident that the intervention was not necessarily driven by the prime

objective of protecting civilians as such, but of securing the Libyans that were perceived as

adaptable to a liberal form of subjectivity and rule. Here, the argument will be twofold,

following the time-development of the external engagement. First it will be argued that the

decision to intervene under the banner of the responsibility to protect “fellow human beings”

reflected pre-intervention evaluations of the feasibility of creating adaptable subjects in Libya

(The White House 2011a). This can be claimed on the basis of how the conflict-picture was

depicted as a clear and compelling opposition of Gaddafi versus freedom-fighting rebels

(Socor 2013; Roberts 2011; Kuperman 2013). Moreover, by drawing boundaries between

1 Global governance can be understood as a network of international organisations, non-governmental

organisation, corporations, etc., that is not necessarily global in its character but at least universal in its

aspirations of promoting liberal forms of subjectivities and rule (Vrasti 2013).

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‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ Libyans, the language was also able to distinguish between

the Libyans worth protecting and not. Second, while the actions conducted during the NATO-

intervention can be said to be reflecting pre-intervention evaluations about the feasibility of

promoting adaptable subjects, the post-intervention international engagement can be said to

represent the other side of the same coin: following the complexity of the post-intervention

conflict-picture, the ‘international community’ has responded by emphasising the Libyan

people’s responsibility (UNSMIL 2011). This is in spite of reports noting the same types of

violence as before the intervention (Human Rights Watch 2011; Human Rights Watch 2014).

However, the essential characteristic of the neoliberal governmentality is that by

responsibilitising its subjects, it is able to freely exert control over its subjects without being

held accountable for its actions. By depicting the bombing of Libya as an act of empowerment

and emphasising the concepts of national responsibility and ownership in the post-

intervention phase, the UN and NATO were relinquished of responsibility and blame (Pugh et

al. 2013). Thus, the R2P-language has as one of its main characteristics the production of a

‘zone of indistinction’: a situation in which all actions accompanies an act of prevention for

making life secure (Agamben 1998; Edkins 2000). Thus, it can be claimed, like a British

Member of Parliament does, that if the external engagement in Libya was a success, it was

because “it was hardly an intervention at all” (The Guardian 2011a; Chandler 2012: 221).

Moreover, while the responsibility to protect is characterised by its acknowledgement of the

‘other’, it can be claimed that the ‘international community’ is just as distanced from the

‘other’ as under the doctrine of liberal interventionism, and that the preventive/post-

interventionist paradigm (Chandler 2012) is primarily empowering the resilience of the UN,

NATO, and the neoliberal form of conducting military intervention.

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Thus, while the current debate about R2P is often characterised by the pinpointing of R2P’s

absence in many of the world’s ongoing intra-state conflicts, in which the starting point is the

question of selectivism and inconsistency of action, this dissertation’s rationale is to analyse a

situation in which R2P actually has been applied as a guideline for action. Libya is chosen as

a case because of its uniqueness in the sense that it represents an R2P intervention which was

characterised as successful. By moving in this direction, we might also be able to discover

interesting aspects about how the R2P doctrine is currently being used, which can provide

alternative explanations to questions of selectivism. While it has been written extensively on

the concept of R2P, many studies do not address the particularities of its language. By

combining studies of discourses of resilience with the concept of biopolitics applied to the

case of Libya, it adds some new perspectives to the current literature. Moreover, it follows the

development of the external engagement in Libya up to today, and can thus hopefully add

new, valuable insights.

In order to be able to discuss the research question, the dissertation will proceed cumulatively

in four chapters. The first chapter, ‘Understanding the Central Themes of the R2P-language’

is dedicated towards the first part of the research question, focusing on what the ‘discursive

application of R2P’ means. Here, it will be emphasised how R2P should be understood as a

synthesis which moves beyond the clashing principles of the ‘international’ in favour of the

promotion of human security. This is followed by a section delineating the existing literature

on R2P, which will be compared to the approach this dissertation is taking. Thus, the

literature review works as a natural transition to the second chapter, ‘The Foucauldian

Critique of R2P & Methodological Considerations’, which discusses the concept of discursive

(bio-)power through the lens of neoliberal governmentality. Here I will also critically discuss

the methodological implications of using this approach, and take into account the critiques

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that have been raised against the use of Foucault’s governmentality in the study of

International Relations (IR). Having delineated how the governmentality approach creates a

methodological framework for analysing empirical data in the form of ‘representations’, the

third chapter, ‘Telling the Stories from the External Engagement in Libya’ will first present

the mainstream narrative of the Libyan intervention, and thereafter point out certain

invisibilities in this narrative. The fourth and final chapter, ‘The Discursive Intervention in

Libya as an Exercise in Neoliberal Governmentality’, will analyse how the visibilities and

invisibilities can be coherently explained within the governmentality approach, and the main

arguments presented above will be discussed. The conclusion will emphasise how R2P’s

discourse of prevention in many ways fails to immediately react to the mass atrocities it

originally states to be occupied with, and then discuss whether the BRICS countries’

suggestion of the Responsibility While Protecting (RwP) can provide a useful perspective to

the continuing debate about the R2P.

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Chapter 1: Understanding the central themes of the R2P-language

The aim of this conceptual section is to construct a coherent framework for how the R2P-

language can be understood. This is necessary in order to clarify what is being referred to in

the first part of the research question regarding ‘the discursive application of R2P’; how does

the discourse of R2P differ from previous discourses of humanitarian intervention?

The next sections will argue that R2P can be conceived as a synthesis that unites contradictory

perspectives: First, it seeks to solve the dispute of the ‘intervention dilemma’ between

sovereignty and human rights. Second, and following the first point, it intends to create a

balance between ‘too much’ and ‘too little’ intervention, by intervening to prevent a new

Rwanda, but still answering the critiques of liberal interventionism as doing ‘too much’.

Thus, the synthesis constitutes a shift from a focus on the ‘international’ to a global concern

for ‘common humanity’, in which the former’s concern with state power and politics are

removed from the discourse in favour of the latter’s emphasis on the de-politicised subject of

human security. After having scrutinised how the R2P-language can be understood, the

following section will discuss the existing literature on R2P, and compare the literature to the

perspective that this dissertation is taking.

1.1 R2P as a synthesis

First and foremost, R2P can be understood as a synthesis that seeks to solve the contradictory

elements of the ‘intervention dilemma’. As Kofi Annan has noted: “if humanitarian

intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a

Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend

every precept of our common humanity?” (ICISS 2001: VII). Thus, R2P redefines

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sovereignty from being the autonomous state’s right, to be a matter of responsibility: A state

only enjoins the prerogative of sovereignty if it is able and willing to protect its own people. If

it fails to do so, its sovereignty “yields to the international responsibility to protect” (Ibid.:

XI). The principle was unanimously adopted as a formal UN principle at the UN World

Summit in 2005, and is based on the principle that the ‘international community’ should

primarily respond to R2P-eligible conflicts through peaceful means. However, if such

measures prove to be ineffective, the UN SC has the authority to launch military operations

by air, sea or land (UN 2005:31; UN 1945). An essential point is that the ICISS claims that

the reformulation of the meaning of sovereignty does not constitute a break with the classical

definition of sovereignty as territorial autonomy and non-intervention. Here, the report

stresses the point that states are after all ought to be an agent of its people. Thus, with the

implementation of R2P, ‘internal’ and ‘external’ sovereignty are perceived to no longer be in

opposition, but complimentary (ICISS 2001: 13).

By removing the oppositional boundary between sovereignty and intervention, R2P can be

perceived as a principle giving greenlight to the use of military force. However, it is in this

context that we need to look at the second aspect of the synthesis, which concerns the attempt

to find a via media between ‘too little’ and ‘too much’ action. R2P is not only a response to

previous failure in the form of inaction; it also seeks to confront the inadequacies of the

doctrine of liberal interventionism, representative of the interventionism in the 1990s, and

also especially characteristic for the 2003 intervention in Iraq (Pugh et al. 2013). The doctrine

of liberal interventionism can be characterised by the view that liberal states have a moral

obligation “to rescue victims of tyranny and anarchy” (Tesón 2003: 94). Moreover, from the

point of view of the ‘liberal peace thesis’ – the assumption that liberal democracies do not go

to war against each other – liberal states have a right to intervene in ‘failing states’, thus

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securing the ideal of a (liberal) international peace (Doyle 2005; Tardelli 2014). This

approach has been criticised for doing ‘too much’ in two ways, which are critiques that R2P

can be seen as a response to. First, by emphasising Western states’ rights, interventions

happen much too often. R2P replies to this by emphasising that military intervention should

only be conducted in “exceptional cases” which “shock the conscience of mankind” (ICISS

2001: 31). Here, decisions to intervene are evaluated from the point of view of ‘human

security’ – a concept that is scrutinised in the below section (ICISS 2001: 17).

Second, R2P is also a response to liberal interventionism as doing ‘too much’ in the post-

intervention stadium. By imposing liberal institutional frameworks of democracy and the free-

market from top-down, critics have noted that the local population are deprived of their

agency and that relations of dependency to the intervening powers are being created

(Robinson 1996; Chomsky 1999; Rosenberg 2005). Thus, the ICISS-report is at pains to

stress that interventions for human protection purposes should not be confused with a form of

neo-colonial imperialism. Here, “this responsibility has three integral and essential

components”: the responsibility to prevent, react and rebuild after the event (ICISS 2001: 17).

However, the responsibility to rebuild must be directed towards handing power and back to

the respective society and to those who live in it, as they “in the last instance, must take

responsibility together for its future destiny” (Ibid.: 45). In other words the responsibility to

protect also involves a responsibility to give responsibility back to local authorities, under the

label of “local ownership” (Ibid.: 43). Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stipulates

that such a notion of responsibility is in line with the “ever-increasing commitment around the

world to democratic government”, as it sends the message that state authorities are

responsible for their actions (Ibid.: 13).

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Thus, the replacement of ‘right’ with ‘responsibility’ involves not only a responsibility on

behalf of the ‘international community’ towards the ‘other’; it is a matter of acknowledging

its agency, and consequentially its responsibility. Furthermore, as pointed out in the

discussion of the intervention dilemma, such an understanding is allegedly preserving the

principle of sovereignty by building state capacity from bottom-up. The stated goal is to

achieve “good governance” and “rule of law”, defined as transparency, security, participation

and the preservation of fundamental freedoms (UN 2014a; ICISS 2001: 60). As the report

notes, such an understanding of sovereignty and responsibility is vindicated by the ever-

increasing impact of the concept of human security, which will be scrutinised in the following

section (ICISS 2001: 13).

1.1.1 Human security: prevention from bottom-up

Human security is a broad concept that nonetheless underpins R2P in a distinctive way. The

idea denotes the shift in emphasis from traditional forms of state security, managed through

defense and armaments, to securing the “legitimate concerns of ordinary people who seek

security in their daily lives” (UNDP 1994: 22; Booth 1991). Within this discourse, the human

is depicted in de-politicised terms in which security means human development through

“access to food and employment, and to environmental security” (ICISS 2001: 15). Human

security is thus occupied with the right to life instead of the right to kill (Foucault 2003), and

could thus be seen as clashing with the coercive and violent power of military intervention.

However, it is here necessary to go back to R2P’s depiction of intervention, which is only

exercised in “exceptional cases”, constituting an “act of self-empowerment” and the emphasis

on handing power back to the local population as soon as the cause of the violence is

removed. Here, Chandler’s argument that R2P is presented as an act of prevention rather than

intervention is interesting. By moving away from the ‘rights-logic’ of liberal interventionism,

15

R2P moves beyond the world of clashing principles, and can thus be usefully characterised as

‘post-interventionist’ (Chandler 2012: 216).

R2P can be seen as a synthesis as it unites the contradictions of the intervention dilemma, as

well as the opposition of “too little” and “too much” intervention, with the objective of being

better able to protect people in need, but also to prevent further violence by building human

security and hold local actors responsible. As the next sections will demonstrate, much of the

current literature does not sufficiently address how this language differs from the language of

liberal interventionism.

1.2 Current literature

Although R2P seeks to distance itself from the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’

connected to the liberal interventionist paradigm, most of the existing studies of R2P have –

for better or worse – seen the principle as an attempt to institutionalise ‘humanitarian

intervention’ as part of the UN system of legitimate conduct. Here, the dominant narrative has

been that of depicting the principle as an example of the fight between altruism and great

power politics. It will be argued that these perspectives are not sufficient in addressing the

particularities and power of the R2P language. Thus, concepts and research stressing the

power of discourses underpinning R2P are evaluated to be more valuable in answering the

research question of how the discursive application of R2P in Libya constitutes an act of

neoliberal governmentality (Barnett and Duvall 2005).

Building on arguments from both realism and Marxism, David Chandler argues in a 2004

article that rather than representing the moral shift away from the rights of sovereignty, the

principle symbolises the evolution of international security after ‘9/11’ and the dominant

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position of the liberal peace thesis (Chandler 2004: 59). Other authors, representing the liberal

approach to IR, do not see R2P as a result of the international balance of power, but rather as

a moral principle that nevertheless gets suppressed either because of lack of political will

(Chesterman 2003) or because of the organisational structures of the UN. For example,

studies such as Alex Bellamy (2006), Williams and Bellamy (2005) and Wheeler (2005)

argue that the outcome of the UN 2005 World Summit – where R2P was adapted as a formal

UN principle – worked against the ICISS’ wishes of creating an effective and universal

principle. Since R2P-actions are dependent on the consent of the UN Security Council, it is

ultimately the interests of the members, and particularly those of the veto powers that decide.

This perspective has been used to explain current issues of selectivism with regards to Libya

versus Syria (Buckley 2012). In spite of these inconsistencies, several authors (Bellamy 2011;

Bellamy and Williams 2011; Achcar 2011; Daalder and Stavridis 2012) have argued that the

intervention in Libya was legitimate, arguing that it constitutes a ‘new politics of protection’

that is less motivated by Western interests (Bellamy and Williams 2011: 825).

Except from the perspective Chandler takes, a common feature of the above mentioned

research is that they are all problem-solving: they symbolise a firm belief in R2P as a

legitimate instrument for measuring reality without questioning this measure itself (Cox

1981). Rather than asking whether the Libyan intervention was legitimate, this dissertation

investigates what the discourse of legitimacy makes possible. As such, the research question

provides a basis for constructing a critique of the kind of questions that a ‘problem-solving’ or

a liberal approach would ask. As this dissertation investigates the effects of the R2P-

discourse’s conception of the ‘human’ or the ‘other’, it will build upon research that focuses

more specifically on the language of discourses that take the ‘human’ as its referent object

(Watson 2011). The way ‘human’ is depicted and used in the discourse is important because it

17

can create changing perceptions of subjects and intervention. Although approaches such as

realism and Marxism re-introduce power and politics to liberalism, they primarily depict the

language as an ideological conceal for underlying material factors, rather than seeing the

language as constituting a powerful tool in itself. As such, these approaches are not

scrutinising how the R2P-language differ from earlier forms of ‘humanitarian intervention’.

More specifically, building on Foucault’s concept of governmentality – ‘government in the

name of truth’ – this dissertation argues that R2P’s depiction of the ‘human’ needs to be seen

as part of a neoliberal governmentality that is motivated by the promotion of the security and

well-being of subjects adaptable to liberal governance. Here the governmentality approach is

used as a way of analysing how the R2P-discourse and biopolitics are intertwined. It is about

how discursive mechanisms reflect, enable and structure attempts of forming the biopolitical

subject including the repercussions of such attempts. In studies of discourses of

‘humanitarianism’ and ‘human security’ in post-Cold War global governance, authors such as

Reid (2010), De Larrinaga and Doucet (2008), and Vrasti (2013), advance the argument that

the ‘human’ should be understood within the framework of the biohuman, in which the

language of humanitarianism enables the act of biopower: control over populations in

specific.

The last three years have evidenced an increase in studies that focus on how the central

elements in the R2P-discourse enable such policy. Here the human security discourse of R2P

has been studied within the paradigm of resilience – understood as the “inculcation of the

agency of the ‘other’” and the subject’s ability to adapt to external challenges or threats

(Chandler 2012: 217; Pugh et.al. 2013). David Chandler argues that by framing interventions

as an act of empowering individuals instead of saving passive victims, this discourse is also

18

placing more responsibility on the subjects, and less on the ‘international community’. This

argument coincides with his previous studies of the development of R2P, in which it today is

primarily occupied with prevention – the building of sovereignty from a society-centered

bottom-up perspective – rather than breaking sovereignty through protection as intervention

(Chandler 2009; Chandler 2010a; Chandler 2012: 216). Here, I build on Chandler’s work on

resilience to study the intervention in Libya, and argue that: first, the depiction of R2P-

interventions as an act of empowering individuals reflects notions of the biohuman, in which

the individual needs to adapt to a liberal form of rule and life in order to become secure. By

combining studies of discourses of resilience with the concept of biopolitics applied to the

case of Libya, it adds some new perspectives to the current literature. Moreover, it follows the

development of the external engagement in Libya up to today, and can thus hopefully add

new, valuable insights.

Having compared existing literature on R2P with the approach this dissertation is taking, the

next chapter will present and scrutinise the notion of a neoliberal governmentality, as well as

the methodological implications and challenges that follow from using this approach.

19

Chapter 2: The Foucauldian critique of R2P & methodological

considerations

The previous chapter demonstrated that this dissertation builds on literature that focuses on

how “naming can be an act of power” (Larner and Walters 2004: 2). This chapter expands

upon this perspective by addressing Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which re-

introduces power and politics to the de-politicised discourse of R2P. The first part of the

chapter will outline the specifics of the governmentality approach, which will work as a

foundation for understanding what an ‘exercise in neoliberal governmentality’ means. It will

be argued that the neoliberal governmentality can be characterised as being occupied with the

promotion of life and the well-being of subjects adaptable to liberal governance, and that such

promotion is both reflected in, and justified through, specific discursive mechanisms.

The second part considers the methodological implications and challenges of employing the

governmentality perspective to the study of R2P, including a critical evaluation of the aims of

applying this perspective as part of critical theory in the social sciences. I also consider some

of the critiques that have been raised against the ‘scaling up of Foucault’, including its

application to studies of non-Western cases. I argue that such criticism can be used as a way

of reflecting upon the potential that lies in the governmentality model: It is arguable that the

strength of this approach lies in its flexibility, and thus it works as a comprehensive tool for a

detailed analysis of the complexities of the power relations at play in the case of Libya. It is

able to do so by delineating how governmentality works in a complex interrelationship with

disciplinary and sovereign forms of power. In specific, the neoliberal form of

governmentality, which involves a relocation of responsibility from government to the

governed, is viewed to be of specific relevance for the analysis of R2P in Libya. Although the

sovereign is seen as having the well-being of its population as its end, such relocation of

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responsibility means that although governmentality ‘fails’, the neoliberal discourse might

work in favour of the power of external intervening states as well as in favour of the

maintenance of the neoliberal way of rule as a way of conducting military intervention.

2.1 Neoliberal governmentality: the search for adaptable, responsible

subjects

This dissertation focuses on liberal or more specifically neoliberal governmentality as being

concerned with two specific, strongly intertwined, goals: first, the promotion of life and the

well-being of subjects adaptable to liberal governance, and second, the promotion of these

subjects’ agency by emphasising the importance of their own responsibility and resilience

(Reid 2010; Chandler 2012; Lemke 2001; Joseph 2009: 415-6). However, in order to

understand the way in which such subjects are being promoted, it is necessary first to

understand the central role of the power-knowledge nexus within this model. Analysing the

genealogy of the modern state from Ancient Greek to modern neoliberalism, Foucault

understands liberalism “not simply as a doctrine, or set of doctrines, of political and economic

theory, but as a style of thinking quintessentially concerned with the art of governing”

(Gordon 1991: 14). ‘The art of governing’ comprises a particular type of representation;

building on certain types of knowledge, government constructs a specific discourse through

which the exercise of power is ‘rationalised’ and enabled (Lemke 2001: 191). The essence of

‘the art of governing’ is the existence of a relation of adequation between the sovereign’s

knowledge and the freedom of its subjects (Gordon 1991: 15). Consequently, governmentality

can be understood as ‘government in the name of truth’ (Ibid.: 8).

21

In addition to the importance of the power-knowledge nexus, governmentality has

populations as its main target, and governs the subjects through “the conduct of conduct”

(conduire des conduits) (Foucault 1994: 237; Foucault 1991: 97). Thus, the main objective is

“not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its

condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.” (Foucault 1991: 100). As the

wording implies, ‘conduct of conduct’ describes a type of governance that takes place from a

distance; it deploys already existing micropowers “as a general mechanism of overall

domination” (Joseph 2009: 415-6; Foucault 2001: 123). As such, governmentality can be

distinguished from both sovereignty and discipline, in which the former is concerned with

territory and the latter delineates more coercive forms of power (Joseph 2009: 415; Foucault

1991). This should however not be confused with a situation in which governmentality

replaces all other forms of power, which the next methodological section will point out.

The liberal way of rule, characterised by its idea of free conduct and limited government

interference – is a prevalent feature of governmentality (Joseph 2009: 416). Foucault’s

conceptualisation of neoliberal governmentality is of particular relevance to the study of R2P.

Lemke notes that this style of government exercises not only direct intervention, but also

indirect techniques for controlling subjects “without at the same time being responsible for

them” (Lemke 2001: 201, emphasis added). In this manner, neoliberal governmentality

distinguishes itself from Keynesian types of intervention that emphasised the importance of

centralised government activity in order to secure the common good of the welfare state. The

neoliberal approach to governing involves a new form of responsibilisation, in which

responsibilities for social risks are no longer matters of government accountability, but

problems of “self-care” (Lemke 2001: 201). Individuals are depicted as free from state

interference, but are still expected to obey the “competitive rules of conduct” (Joseph 2009:

22

417), as a key aspect of the neoliberal mentality is the convergence it endeavors to achieve

between a responsible moral subject and an economic-rational individual (Lemke 2001: 201).

Hence, an ‘empowered’ or ‘resilient’ subject naturally embodies both of these characteristics.

In addition, this notion of responsibility within the ‘post-welfarist regime’ has to be seen in

relation to what Dean calls performance government (Dean 2010: 202). The performance

government delineates current demands of efficiency, speed, transparency and the provision

of results. In such a context, it can be argued that the character of the language becomes

increasingly important (Pugh et al. 2013; Dean 2010).

Foucault’s concept of governmentality has throughout the last decade been increasingly

applied to analyses of world politics. Here, the valuable perspectives of biopower and

biopolitics have been used in studies of human security and humanitarianism. In post-war

liberal global governance, concepts such as ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘human security’

have marked the politicisation of what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” – the life existing

outside of the political categories (Agamben 1998: 4-9; Reid 2010: 392).2 By using the

concepts of biopower and biopolitics to describe this process of politicisation, scholars have

been able to identify how the ‘human’ is not a human without pre-fixed ideas of what it is

ought to be. As Jenny Edkins points out: governmentality is occupied with adaptive life, that

is, life “exposed to a demand for adaptability posed by liberal governance to the point of

becoming something other than what it was” (Edkins 2000: 10, emphasis added). Reid puts

forward the same type of argument, emphasising how the evolutionary powers of the

biohuman have increasingly been put forward as a framework for how to tackle disasters

2 Agamben (1981) disagrees with Foucault in that it was with the rise of the modern state that natural life

becomes part of the strategies of state power, in the form of biopolitics. According to Agamben, natural life is

included from the very beginning through inclusion by exclusion, and thus “sovereignty is the originary structure

in which law refers to life” (Edkins 2000: 5). However, the general framework of Foucault’s concept of

neoliberal governmentality in specific, with the emphasis on the concept of responsibility, is evaluated as highly

useful for understanding the multiple workings of the R2P-language.

23

(Reid 2010: 395; Watson 2010). Like David Chandler, he stresses how ‘human security’

builds on a biologised conception of the human, in which the search for adaptive, resilient

behaviours constitutes the driving force behind military interventions. Here the failure of

maladapted populations is seen as not only threatening themselves, but also “the biopolitical

foundations of global governance since their suffering produces economic dislocation as well

potentially of political violence” (Reid 2010: 391).

As such, global governance is not only promoting adaptable subjects in cases where it is

evaluated as feasible, but it naturally also “refuses to recognize the suffering of the lives

which fail to live up to the biohuman criteria” (Reid 2010: 394). Ingrained in the model of

promoting adaptable subjects as a way to tackle disasters is the production of a “zone of

indistinction” – a term originally coined by Agamben (1998). Governmentality, like sovereign

power, claims the existence of a state of emergency. However, while sovereign power

engages with a state of exception, governmentality operates through a state of emergence.

Here, the promotion of liberal subjects creates certain inclusions and exclusions, in which

some are exposed to the demands of adaptability, while others can be exposed to death.

However, within a zone of indistinction these aspects become invisible; we can no longer

distinguish between security and insecurity as both life and death are controlled by the

purpose of creating a liberal form of life3 (Edkins 2000: 10).

Governmentality, the production of a ‘zone of indistinction’ through ‘emergence’, can be seen

as a particularly subtle approach for analysing the conceptual and discursive move away from

so-called ‘top-down’ approaches to military intervention and development. Without making

the assumption that global governance is united by one single rationality, current development

3 Although R2P uses the term of ‘exceptionality’, its language can be more usefully seen in relation to the state

of emergence. This has to do with its focus on prevention rather than intervention, in which ‘prevention’ is

promoted through the emergence of a new form of life for the subjects.

24

discourses and tactics within global governance can be seen as being driven by a post-liberal

or neoliberal rationality (Dillon and Reid 2001; Vrasti 2013; Joseph 2009; Chandler 2012).

Here, attempts at promoting adaptable subjects are done through new discursive strategies,

characterised by ideas of local ownership, engagement of civil society, as well as partnership

as opposed to dependency and domination (World Bank 2002; Joseph 2009: 420). As the next

section will demonstrate, this post-liberal or neoliberal rationality can be seen as highly

applicable to the study of R2P. Here I will also consider the methodological implications and

challenges of using this approach.

2.2 Applicability to R2P and methodological considerations

While R2P aims at empowering ‘people’, it is necessary to note that R2P relocates power to

the people only ‘in a roundabout way’, as Marx elegantly put it when he was contrasting

political emancipation with human emancipation in On the Jewish Question (Marx [1844]

1975: 266). Power is relocated in a roundabout way in the sense that the criterias and

framework for achieving the goal of saving and empowering humans are already set in an a

priori rationality – the R2P. It can thus be argued that a significant amount of power rests

within this principle, and hence that it has the power to “define the (im)possible, the

(im)probable, the natural, the normal, what counts as a problem” (Hayward 2000: 35). As

such, R2P can be seen as an example of Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘government in the

name of truth’; supporting the argument made by Basaran, R2P constitutes a particular

rationality that “governmentalises” the UN system and represents “a subtle play on UN law”

(Basaran 2014: 207). R2P can be understood as an attempt to adjust UN law for the sake of its

completeness, and presents itself as an act of justice rather than injustice (Basaran 2014: 207-

8). As Foucault himself points out, this is about “employing tactics rather than laws, and even

25

of using laws themselves as tactics – to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain

number of means, such and such ends may be achieved” (Foucault 1991: 95).

The neoliberal governmentality approach as presented above is, overall, suitable to study the

workings of the language of R2P: through the de-politicised language of human security it has

the well-being of populations as its main target. Moreover, as a synthesis of contradictory

principles and arguments, R2P presents itself as a more discrete and ambiguous approach than

the anterior doctrine of liberal interventionism. In addition, R2P fits well with the description

of a neoliberal rationality, in that R2P depicts the ‘other’ as individuals with agency instead of

passive victims.

Analysing R2P through governmentality creates several methodological implications and

challenges. First and foremost, as the research question is concerned with the effects of the

‘discursive application of R2P in the case of Libya’, the methodology can be characterised as

a discourse analysis, using Libya as a case study. This is a part of the qualitative method in

social sciences, aiming at a deep analysis of the language in a specific case instead of

measuring quantitative data in order to make generalisations (Silverman 2006). It involves

subjective interpretations, and should not be seen as providing blanket ‘answers’, but rather as

an alternative interpretation and contribution to the debate. Using discourse analysis, the

essential task is to analyse how central words and statements work as representations of

reality (Ibid.). More specifically, as governmentality is concerned with how language

constructs a certain reality and sees power as an effect of language, the dissertation is

concerned with how the framing of the intervention in Libya, through terms such as

‘empowerment’ and ‘responsibility’, produces a certain reality which has certain power

relations as its effects. Here, I will analyse how the Libyan military intervention and the post-

26

intervention engagement has been narrated in UN reports and resolutions, international media

and in statements and speeches of central intervening actors. It focuses on how the grand

narrative of the external engagement in Libya has produced certain visibilities and

invisibilities.

Moreover, such an analysis should be seen as part of the perspective of critical theory in IR,

which according to Robert Cox seeks to challenge existing power relations in international

politics by way of creating a basis for resistance to, and emancipation from, these structures

(Cox 1981; Chandler 2010b: 535). However, scholars such as David Chandler (2010b) and

Jan Selby (2007) have warned about the potential pitfalls of using the governmentality

approach, arguing that Foucauldian IR sometimes does not live up to the emancipatory aims

of critical theory. David Chandler argues that there is a tendency that “the discursive framing

of the global is not deconstructed beyond the ‘critique’ that confirms that power does indeed

operate at the level of global discursive practices and that states and their citizens are

constructed as subjects through/of this power” (Chandler 2010b: 136). Foucauldian

governmentality can be seen as representative of what Barnett and Duvall calls ‘productive

power’, in which discourse “is socially productive for all subjects” (Barnett and Duvall 2005:

56). Thus, it distinguishes itself from structural forms of power where relations of domination

are said to benefit the structurally empowered (Ibid.). Chandler argues that because of this,

Foucauldian approaches to IR tend to reinforce the prominent narratives of the difficulties of

holding power to political account, and are turning a promising critique into something that

looks more like an apologia (Chandler 2010b: 141).

However, as Carl Death is at pains to stress, governmentality can be seen as having more in

common with critical realist readings of IR; its focus on power relations within liberal

27

governance as well as the struggles within the ‘political’ vindicates this point (Death 2011:

22). Moreover, governmentality should not be seen as replacing other forms of power, but

rather as a central element which operates in an interrelationship with sovereign and

disciplinary forms of power (Foucault, 2007: 107-8; Death 2011: 20-1; Chandler 2010b). This

aspect is vindicated in research of Edkins (2000) and Dillon and Reid (2000), which sees

global government as a hybrid form composed by governmentality and sovereignty. Yet, the

governmentality perspective excludes clear realist principles of national interests of the

intervening states, as it is not, as an example, focusing on geopolitical aspects of the case

study. This does not mean that these aspects are unimportant, but rather that the

governmentality approach is evaluated to have a broader explanatory potential.

In addition, Jonathan Josepth (2009, 2010) challenges the relevancy of applying

governmentality to studies of non-Western states and subjects on the basis that

governmentality fails in non-Western societies. In specific, he claims that governmentality

scholars might more beneficially restrict their analysis to areas like the EU, whereas “[i]n

other parts of the world the management of populations may have to rely on cruder

disciplinary practices” (Joseph 2010: 239; Death 2011: 17). However, based on the case

material of this dissertation and what it aims to demonstrate, I support Carl Death in his

argument that “governmentality is an approach to analysing global politics, not a form of

power that either works or doesn’t work” (Death 2011: 31). For example, the promotion of

‘liberal subjects’ may have identifiable implications that structures global politics in particular

ways in terms of certain mentalities, perceptions and practices, visibilities and invisibilities

that benefit some and work in the disadvantage of others (Ibid.: 26). Thus, whether such

promotion ‘succeeds’ or not, it might “tell us something interesting about contemporary

global politics” (Death 2011: 1; Löwenheim 2008: 268). Analysing governmentality “through

28

its failure” will be an essential point in the upcoming analysis of the Libyan intervention

(Joseph 2009: 427).

Having delineated how the governmentality approach creates a methodological framework for

analysing empirical data in the form of ‘representations’, the next chapter will present the

mainstream narrative of the Libyan intervention. This narrative can be seen as creating certain

visibilities which also leaves certain aspects of the intervention invisible. These visibilities

and invisibilities will work as the basis for the analysis of the discursive intervention in Libya

as an exercise in neoliberal governmentality.

29

Chapter 3: Telling the stories from the external engagement in

Libya 2011 –

3.1 The grand narrative

The grand narrative paints a picture of the Libyan intervention in which the UN and NATO

acted in line with its responsibility to protect civilians, but also lived up to its responsibility of

handing responsibility back to the Libyan people. Hence, the claimed success should be seen

in line with the R2P-synthesis: the intervention was about saving human beings in accordance

with the de-politcised language of human security, answering to the quests made by the

people, rather than being driven by the political concerns of the intervening states.

The grand narrative of the external engagement in Libya, starting with the NATO intervention

in 2011 under the banner of the R2P, cannot be understood without seeing the uprisings in

Libya as part of the ‘Arab Spring’ (Dalacoura 2012: 63; Roberts 2011). The term expresses

the view that from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, the Arab people took

to the streets and fought for freedom and democracy. Most of all, the revolt in Libya was

believed to be people-centered and illustrated Arabs with agency (The White House 2011b).

As the following analysis will demonstrate, it is also within this context that the intervention

was conducted: it was an act of responding to the people’s request. In contrast to Egypt and

Tunisia, where the revolutions managed to overthrow Mubarak and Ben Ali respectively, the

Libyans were seen as in need of external assistance, managed in partnership with the ‘Libyan

people’, represented by the anti-Gaddafi rebels (ICG 2011; UN 2011b).Following this

narrative, peaceful protests against Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year long regime started on 15

February 2011 in the city of Benghazi, quickly spreading across the country (Dalacoura 2012:

65; ICG 2011). The protests were led by the Interim National Transition Council (NTC),

30

consisting of returned exiles and defectors uniting in their fight for a ‘new’, ‘liberated’ Libya

(Roberts 2011). The Council entered the role as being the political face of the revolution

(BBC 2011a). Although regional, tribal and other divides clearly existed, the civil war leading

up to the 2011 intervention was not an ethnic war where Libyans fought against each other

(Chivvis, Crane, Mandaville and Martini 2013: 2). Thus, the conflict appeared as a clear

between the people – also in international media depicted as ‘revolutionaries’, ‘liberal

democrats’ and ‘freedom fighters’ – and the brutal Gaddafi-regime on the other (CNN 2011;

Roberts 2011; Kuperman 2013: 107).

As a response to the protests, Gaddafi ordered the national army to forcefully crush the revolt

(Al Jazeera 2011a). On 25 February the UNSC established the International Commission of

Inquiry in Libya. It concluded that the attacks by the Gaddafi-government could be

characterised as crimes against humanity and war crimes, and that there had also been

“violations by opponents to the regime”, but not to the extent of crimes against humanity (UN

2012: 8). The international community initially responded to the violations committed by the

Gaddafi-forces through peaceful means, and declared “the Libyan authorities’ responsibility

to protect its population” through Resolution 1970 (UN Security Council 2011a; ICRtoP

2012). However, as Gaddafi refused to cooperate or back down, the anti-Gaddafi opposition

requested international assistance and the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya. The request

was met on 17 March through Resolution 1973, which authorised the no-fly zone and in

addition urged the international community “to take all necessary measures to protect

civilians” – the diplomatic authorisation of the military intervention (UN 2011b; ICRtoP

2012).

31

Hence, when NATO started its military mission in Libya on 31 March, known as the

“Operation Unified Protector”, it was seen as a last resort to prevent a ‘new Rwanda’ (The

White House 2011a; NATO 2012; USA Today 2011). Moreover, when presenting Resolution

1973 in front of the Security Council, the Foreign Minister of France, Alain Juppé, noted that

Libya was a part of “a wave of great revolutions that would change the course of history” and

hence that the “will of the Libyan people” was respected through the intervention (UN

2011b). In a similar manner, Barack Obama declared that a failure to act in Libya would be

“a betrayal of who we are” and a betrayal of “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings”

(The White House 2011a). After seven months of engagement in Libya, NATO had managed

to gradually weaken the Gaddafi-forces, and on 20 October Gaddafi was killed by the rebels

(NATO 2012). The NTC, who was recognised by the UN as the legitimate provisional

authority and representative of the Libyan people, subsequently announced the end of the

conflict (Roberts 2011). Moreover, as Gaddafi was viewed to be the main source of the

violence committed against civilians, NATO concluded its mission on 31 October and

considered it to be a military success, and has not been present in Libya after (NATO 2012).

Thus, it was not only the horrors on the ground and the following decision to act that were

seen as corresponding with the R2P-principle; the effects of the intervention and the whole

framework guiding the actions in Libya have by several commentators, politicians, and

central actors been characterised as a new and successful model for protecting civilians. For

example, the U.S. permanent representative to NATO and the Supreme Allied Commander

Europe wrote in the March/April 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs that “NATO’s operation in

Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention. The alliance responded rapidly to a

deteriorating situation that threatened hundreds of thousands of civilians rebelling against an

oppressive regime. It succeeded in protecting those civilians” (Daalder and Stavridis 2012,

32

emphasis added). Compared to interventions such as that of Iraq 2003, this ‘model

intervention’ involves a short-term military engagement directed towards protecting civilians

rather than regime change, with the goal of being able to hand responsibility back to the

people (Chivvis et al. 2013; UNSMIL 2011).

The ‘model intervention’ in Libya has been characterised as a light-footprint approach to

intervention and post-intervention engagement, distinguished by the above mentioned points

and the fact that no post-conflict peacekeeping forces were deployed in Libya. Instead, the

international community has focused on assisting in capacity-building society and state

through the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). Its mandate comprises the

provision of advice and technical support within the areas of democratic transition, rule of law

and human rights, and security sector reform, including the empowerment of “all parts of

Libyan society, in particular women, youth and minorities” (UNSMIL 2011; UNSMIL 2014a;

Chivvis et al. 2013: 14). First and foremost it stipulates that “all UN activities for the Libyan

people are guided by the principle of national ownership” (UNSMIL 2011). Here UNSMIL

emphasises that it is “the primary responsibility of national authorities to identify their

priorities and strategies for post-conflict peace-building” (UNSMIL 2014b).

Thus, the conventional wisdom regarding the intervention in Libya has been that of a

successful mission that managed to prevent a new Rwanda, remove the cause of the violence

(Gaddafi), and foster a democratic human rights environment by supporting local ownership

and responsibility (Kuperman 2013: 108). However, this narrative ends with the end of the

military intervention and the alleged liberation of the Libyan people, and disregards essential

elements of the military intervention as well as the security situation today. Thus, the next

section will identify some of the invisibilities in the grand narrative, which is necessary in

33

order to analyse the R2P discourse in Libya from a neoliberal governmentality perspective.

Thus, after having presented both of these perspectives, chapter 4 comprises an in-depth

analysis of how the governmentality perspective makes it able to make sense of these

visibilities and invisibilies in a coherent explanation.

3.2 The invisibilities in the grand narrative

As the media’s coverage of Libya decreased and the intervention largely faded from public

attention, researchers have found certain invisibilities or apparent ‘inaccuracies’ in the grand

narrative of the military intervention in Libya. In a 2013 article published in International

Security, Alan J. Kuperman argues that the mainstream narrative rests on “two demonstrably

false premises”: that Gaddafi started the violence by attacking peaceful protesters and that the

NATO intervention’s primary objective was to protect civilians (Kuperman 2013: 108). First,

contrary to most Western coverage, many of the Libyan protesters were armed from the

beginning of the uprisings, and the Gaddafi forces only responded forcefully as the violence

increased (Ibid.: 108-9). When the Gaddafi forces started to respond violently on 17 February

in Benghazi, it hit many unarmed protesters, who became ‘human shields’ for the rebels.

However, there is evidence that government attacks overall aimed at targeting the rebels

narrowly (Kuperman 2013: 110; Al Jazeera 2011b).

In addition Kuperman demonstrates that the depiction of the military intervention as a ‘last

resort’ is misleading. The day after Resolution 1973 was adopted, Gaddafi announced a cease-

fire. The NTC stated that it would however not accept any cease-fire before Gaddafi had left

power (National Public Radio 2011; Kuperman 2013: 115). Thus, NATO began the bombing

campaign and continued to provide the rebels with military aid throughout the conflict

34

(Kuperman 2013; Roberts 2011). The most exposing observation that Kuperman presents in

order to explain why the military intervention was not primarily about protecting civilians is

NATO’s bombing of Sirte, Gaddafi’s home town. Less than two weeks into the intervention,

NATO started the bombing of the Gaddafi-forces in Sirte even though they did not constitute

a threat to civilians, as the citizens of this town supported the regime (Kuperman 2013: 114;

BBC 2011b; The Guardian 2011b). All of the above mentioned findings are supported by

Hugh Roberts, the former Director of the International Crisis Group’s Africa Project, who

already in November 2011 revealed that “the story was untrue” (Roberts 2011). Kuperman

and Roberts’ major point is that although central actors such as Obama argued that the attempt

to topple the regime was for protecting people, the intervening powers made decisions that

contributed to a large number of deaths (The White House 2011a). Although the death toll has

varied and no reliable number exists, according to these studies the death toll was exaggerated

from the beginning (Kuperman 2013: 110-111). According to UN estimates it was 1000-2000

before the intervention, but around 11,500 as of January 2013 (Ibid.: 123).

An additional essential aspect that is largely excluded from the grand narrative is the post-

intervention security situation in Libya and the ‘international community’s’ role in this

context. The toppling of Gaddafi led to what was perceived as a democratic transition: In

2012 the NTC handed power over to a democratically elected General National Congress

(GNC), which was replaced by a democratically elected Parliament in 2014, as the GNC’s

mandate expired (UN 2014b; UN 2014c). However, the fall of Gaddafi created a political and

security vacuum where it became evident that the perceived binary opposition between

Gaddafi and ‘the people’ was in fact a struggle between various tribal, regional and Islamists

fractions, each seeking influence over parts of the Libyan territory and the country’s future

(Miller 2011). As such, the provision of military aid to the anti-Gaddafi rebels contributed to a

35

situation in which a large amount of weapons are distributed among different militias in post-

intervention Libya (Socor 2013). The Libyan authorities lack any authority or mechanisms to

control the violence and provide stability for the majority of the Libyan people not engaged in

the fighting, and has in addition informal connections to some of the fighting groups (Socor

2013; Chivvis et al. 2013). In 2012, Human Rights Watch reported that leaders of the city of

Misrata were committing crimes against former Gaddafi supporters that were so systematic

and widespread that it could be charactersied as crimes against humanity (Human Rights

Watch 2012). In August 2014 the security situation has deteriorated as the Libyan Dawn

Allience (LDA) – led by militias from Misrata and the town of Zintan – engaged in attacks on

civilians in its struggle for control over Tripoli, demanding the reconvening of the GNC. US

officials have blamed the United Arab Emirates and Egypt for conducting air strikes against

the LDA. According to Human Rights Watch the violence committed by LDA amounts to war

crimes, and the violence was so threatening that UNSMIL staff had to be pulled out of the

country (Human Rights Watch 2014; Reuters 2014; Vice News 2014).

While the alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Gaddafi-forces

spurred a sense of responsibility, today the responsibility of the Libyan actors is upheld (The

White House 2011a; UN 2014c; UNSMIL 2014b). Dismissing the opportunity of a foreign

intervention, the UN’s appointed special representative for Libya, Bernadino Leon, asserts

that the country needs international support to back “Libyans who want to fight chaos…

through a political process” (Vice News 2014).

The findings presented by Kuperman and Roberts, combined with the character of the post-

intervention international engagement, can on surface be seen as contradicting with the grand

narrative. However, the essential point that the upcoming analysis will demonstrate is that

36

these apparent contradictions can be viewed as mirroring the perplexities of the R2P-

language. The grand narrative presents the intervention as an act of empowerment as opposed

to an act of power. However, by analysing the discursive intervention of R2P in Libya

through the lens of neoliberal governmentality, it will be possible to demonstrate how the act

of empowerment can be seen as an act of power. Analysing the external engagement from the

2011 intervention until today, it will become evident how the decision to intervene as well as

the post-intervention form of responsibilisation can be seen as reflecting the intervening

powers’ evaluations of the possibility and feasibility of creating adaptable, liberal subjects.

Here, it will be analysed how the attempts at promoting such subjects had certain power

relations as its effects.

37

Chapter 4: Analysis: The discursive intervention in Libya as an

exercise in neoliberal governmentality

The rationale for this analysis is to identify how it is possible to make sense of the two stories

from Libya within a coherent explanatory model. Both of the narratives in the previous

chapter present itself as a form of truth; while the grand narrative depicts the intervention in

Libya as a new, successful ‘model intervention’ for protecting civilians, Kuperman and

Roberts claim on the basis of their findings that the grand narrative rests on “false premises”

and that “the story was untrue” (Kuperman 2013: 108; Roberts 2011). However, rather than

seeing the two stories as contradictory, they can demonstrably be viewed as a coherent

product of the perplexities of the R2P-language, and the rationality underpinning it. Thus, this

chapter will provide an in-depth analysis of the research question, asking how the discursive

application of R2P in the case of Libya constitutes an exercise in neoliberal governmentality,

and the repercussions of such a govermentality for the stated objective of protecting the

‘people’. Here, I will emphasise what kinds of actions the R2P-discourse enabled, what kind

of perceptions it produced, and how the grand narrative can be maintained.

In order to answer these two intertwined questions, I build on the interpretation of ‘neoliberal

governmentality’ as comprising specific discursive mechanisms that both enable and reflect

the rationale of promoting the life and well-being of subjects adaptable to a liberal form of

rule. The discourse of neoliberal governmentality is characterised by its promotion of the

indvidiuals’ agency by emphasising the importance of their own responsibility and resilience

(Reid 2010; Chandler 2012; Lemke 2001; Joseph 2009: 415-6). Thus, neoliberal

governmentality is able to exert control over populations “without at the same time being

responsible for them” (Lemke 2001: 201). By depicting the governed individuals as actors

38

with agency, they are seen as emancipated from external control and domination. Yet, the

upcoming analysis will demonstrate that this can be seen as a construction in which the

inclusion and exclusion inherent in the labelling of the subjects as ‘responsible’ or

‘irresponsible’ reflects biological conceptions of the human. Hence, the Libyan intervention

involved the empowerment of the ‘people’, comprising those who were perceived to be

‘responsible’ or have a potential for becoming resilient. At the same time, the Libyans

depicted as ‘irresponsible’ can be seen as being included in this model through exclusion, in

which many of these subjects became exposed to death as part of the process of promoting a

certain way of life.

It will be argued that while the actions conducted during the intervention can be understood as

a result of the pre-intervention perceptions of the feasibility of creating adaptable subjects in

Libya, the character of the post-intervention engagement testifies changing perceptions of

what has been happening on the ground. Here it can be claimed that the post-intervention

context, which is characterised by high levels of violence, revealed that the assumed

feasibility was miscalculated. Thus, this time the international community chooses to not

provide the Libyan ‘people’ with military assistance or peacekeeping forces, but focuses on a

political solution where the responsibility primarily lies with the Libyan people (UNSMIL

2011; Vice News 2013; UN 2014c). Hence, the type of actions conducted during the

intervention and the character of the international engagement in the post-intervention phase

can be interpreted as representing two sides of the same coin: the ‘responsibility to protect’ in

Libya can be seen as primarily targeted at securing the biohuman and thus did not necessarily

contribute to protect the Libyan people outside of the pre-defined categories, neither during

the intervention nor in the post-intervention phase.

39

However, by depicting the intervention as an act of prevention and responsibilitising the

subjects, the intervening powers are relinquished of responsibility and blame (Pugh et al.

2013: 198). The grand narrative of the success-story can be maintained because, as Chandler

argues, the R2P-language is constructed in such a way that the success is regardless of the

final outcome and of whether the stated mandate of protecting people is achieved or not

(Chandler 2012: 221). In this way, the moral connotations of the R2P-language can to a great

extent be seen as obfuscating the real demands of interventions in current global politics;

demands of efficiency, speed, transparency and the provision of results (Dean 2010; Pugh et

al. 2013). The aspects of location of responsibility and the stated objective of protecting the

people will be discussed more comprehensively in the third and final section of the analysis,

by asking: resilience and empowerment for whom?

It should be noted that since it is arguable that the governmentality failed in terms of

promoting adaptable subjects, the upcoming analysis should not be seen as a critique of the

effects of the successful insertion of a neoliberal rule in Libya, but rather as a critique of the

rationality and priorities underlying the discourse. Moreover, the interpretations put forward

in the following paragraphs are not meant to provide blanket answers for why it was decided

to intervene in Libya, or why Libya was prioritised over other cases such as Syria. However,

what this perspective is able to shed light on is how the language was able to structure actions

and outcomes of the intervention.

4.1 A feasible case for the creation of adaptable subjects

The intervention in Libya was, as Obama argued when justifying it for the American citizens,

not about regime change, but about what the Libyan people wanted (The White House

40

2011a). The application of the R2P-discourse in Libya reflected a turn from the doctrine of

liberal interventionism characteristic for the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and

Iraq (Chandler 2012: 221). The 2003 intervention in Iraq spurred a debate that questioned

both the legitimacy and efficiency of ‘humanitarian interventions’. Here, the depiction of the

intervention in Iraq as an act of saving Iraqi victims from the Saddam Hussein-regime and

flagging both the Western right and power to do so had identifiable outcomes in terms of the

questioning of the real motives for intervening and the continuing Western responsibility for

securing the Iraqi state and the people’s future (Hamoud 2012; Chivvis et al. 2013).

In fact, rather than acquiring and preserving power on behalf of the powerless by overrunning

the Gaddafi-regime, the external intervention in Libya worked in reverse (Pugh et al. 2013:

198). In Libya, in contrast to Iraq, there was a perceived popular movement asking for change

and a despot killing its own people in response. In this way, the Libyan context was tailor-

made for the general language of the R2P-doctrine, which takes as its point of departure “the

perspectives of those seeking protection or assistance” rather than of those conducting the

intervention (ICISS 2001: 15). By supporting the “democratic revolution that would change

the course of history” in Libya, the intervention did not break with Libyan sovereignty, but

was assisting the roots to the future of Libyan sovereignty (UN 2011b). However, it can be

argued that this concerned the emergence of a particular form of sovereignty, where a

particular type of people were recognised and protected. The problem with the grand

narrative is that it accepts the R2P-language since the former critiques of humanitarian

intervention are already addressed and ostensibly solved within this model. However, R2P,

which can be seen as governmentalising the UN-system and public perceptions about ‘right

conduct’, has as a consequence of the synthesis the power to draw new boundaries of

41

inclusions and exclusions and to determine whose lives are worth saving and not. It has the

power to do so while at the same time maintaining the validity of the concepts being used.

To understand these aspects, it is useful to see the decision to intervene in Libya as reflecting

a specific kind of risk evaluation in which Libya was evaluated to be a feasible case for the

creation of adaptable subjects. Looking at how the conflict-picture was depicted and the

concrete actions done by the intervening powers, it is arguable that there are strong grounds

for claiming so. As demonstrated in the section of the ‘grand narrative’, the Libyan conflict

presented itself as a clear and compelling narrative of the fight between an evil despot on the

one hand and the majority of the population on the other. Compared to cases such as Syria,

where the uprisings and the following civil war has been characterised by rivalry between

groups within the opposition, the Libyan opposition appeared as united in building the new,

liberated Libya (Guiora 2011; Buckley 2012). Thus, the UN and NATO evaluated the chances

for a successful outcome of the Libyan intervention to be reasonable, but we have to ask the

question: reasonable prospects for what kind of success?

The application of the R2P-doctrine in Libya signified that it was a distinction between the

‘responsible’ and the ‘irresponsible’, as the reason for intervening was that Gaddafi and his

forces acted irresponsibly towards his people. However, observing the actions done by the

intervening powers, it was not only the Gaddafi-supporting combatants that were viewed as

irresponsible, but also Gaddafi-supporting civilians. The bombing of Gaddafi-forces and

‘Gaddafi-civilians’ in Sirte and the rejection of Gaddafi’s cease-fire proposal demonstrated

that it was not necessarily the objective of averting violence that was primary, but rather

protection of the future of the ‘responsible’ Libyans. Put in another way, the intervention in

Libya reflected the pre-intervention evaluations of the reasonable prospects for success in

42

terms of saving the people that were perceived to be adaptable to liberal governance. On the

road towards this goal the irresponsible Libyans were included in the model through exclusion

by being exposed to death; as Reid puts it, this is about “letting die” the lives which are seen

as dangerous to the interests of biohuman life (Reid 2010: 394).

The argument of feasibility can be strengthened by looking at the claims noting that the death

rate was exaggerated from the beginning and the provision of military aid to the rebels (The

Guardian 2011b; BBC 2011b; Kuperman 2013; Roberts 2011). These are the critiques that

have been put forward by Brazil and the rest of the BRICS; the responsibility to protect,

which appears as narrowly result-oriented, should also include a responsibility while

protecting (ICRtoP 2013). Moreover, it can be argued that an acceptance of Gaddafi’s cease-

fire suggestion would put the demonisation of him into question (Roberts 2011). Just as the

NATO-led bombings killed civilians, Gaddafi was responsible for civilian deaths. However, it

is the lack of nuances, the depiction of the Libyan conflict as a struggle between the ‘good’

and ‘bad’, and the repercussions of such a representation that need to be scrutinised. In Libya,

it appeared as the responsibility while protecting remained secondary to the responsibility to

protect, and the compelling narrative of the ‘irresponsible’ versus the ‘responsible’

underpinned and supported this approach.

The crucial difference between the R2P-discourse and the liberal interventionist doctrine is

that in spite of the coercive power of the military intervention, which forcefully distinguished

between the human and the biohuman, the grand narrative of empowering the people could be

maintained. The bombing of Libya was in the name of empowering the people, as the Libyans

supporting the Gaddafi regime were not part of the ‘Libyan people’, and thus “could not be

among the civilians to be protected, even if they were civilians as a matter of mere fact”

43

(Roberts 2011). By depicting the bombing of Libya as an act of empowerment, and defining a

state of emergency through emergence – the emergence of a new, liberated Libya – the

intervening powers could operate through a ‘zone of indistinction’ of which “killing to make

life live” seemed normal (Dillion and Reid 2009). In fact, the R2P-synthesis can be seen as

having the production of a ‘zone of indistinction’ as its main governing technique, as the

synthesis is characterised by its lack of distinctions in terms of moving beyond clashing

principles, as well as by its application of law as tactics for acting out justice (Foucault 1991:

95).

By taking the responsible Libyans with their own agency as its point of departure, the

discursive application of R2P in Libya can usefully be seen as an act of prevention rather than

intervention, and can in this way be more closely associated with the state of ‘emergence’

than the state of ‘exception’. In contrast to earlier ‘humanitarian interventions’ that have been

conducted within the framework of the ‘war against terrorism’, the external engagement in

Libya was never portrayed as a war (De Larrinaga and Doucet 2008: 519; Chandler 2012).

R2P-engagement operates in a different register, and can be seen as coinciding with Dillon

and Reid’s argument that the liberal way of war “directly reflects the liberal way of rule”

(Dillon and Reid 2009: 16). The latter, just as the former, is continuously changing and

adapting, and is today emphasising the importance of “governing through contingency” – the

recognition of the fact that life is in its nature uncertain (O’Malley 2010: 502). The Libyan

intervention can here be seen as a way of promoting the subjects’ resilience to make life less

uncertain, which coincides with a specific kind of neoliberal governmentality existing within

international organisations and actors of ‘global governance’.

44

As Wanda Vrasti points out, this governmentality is not necessarily global in its character but

at least universal in its aspirations; it constitutes a reaffirmation of liberal capital as a

universal truth and as a way to make life more certain, and it is promoted where it is

considered feasible (Vrasti 2013; Reid 2010). Such an understanding of the Libyan

intervention can be expanded upon by taking into account the arguments made by Tagma,

Kalaycioglu and Akcali in the 2013 article “’Taming Arab social movements: Exporting

neoliberal govermentality”. Here, the external engagement in Libya can be understood within

the broader framework of external engagement in the context of the ‘Arab Spring’. While the

grand narrative depicted the intervention in Libya in moral terms, flagging the necessity to

prevent a new Rwanda, this article demonstrates that international organisations and actors

have been the most engaged in Arab countries recognised as ‘stable’ or ‘adaptable’, and the

least in countries where people are threatened by severe violence and death. Using the EU as a

case study, it demonstrates that the engagement has been greatest in Egypt and Tunisia as

these societies are “marked by particular conditions, such as the existence of a burgeoning

civil society and a middle class, upon which the techniques of neo-liberal governmentality

might be more conveniently applied” (Tagma et al. 2013: 376, emphasis added; Joseph 2010:

235). Furthermore they argue that the lack of such conditions in other Arab societies can

explain why the EU supported the strategy of intervening militarily in Libya and has so far

not made any serious effort to contribute in resolving the conflict in Syria (Tagma et al. 2013:

376).

Thus, the military intervention in Libya can be understood as just another technique of

preventively securing the biohuman, portrayed as prevention and building responsibility

through declaring the ‘state of emergence’. In Libya the use of (preventive) military force was

deemed necessary as the Libyan conflict quickly became a more war-like conflict compared

45

to the turmoils in Tunisia and Egypt (ICG 2011). Nevertheless, it was not as complex,

disorganised and violent as the Syrian case, and thus a success in Libya was viewed as

feasible (Guinora 2011). Such emphasis on feasibility can be seen as contrasting with the

moral connotations of the R2P-language. Envisioning a ‘scale’ of ‘Arab-Spring-countries’

from the adaptable to non-adaptable is certainly not in line with R2P’s claimed objective of

reacting to the ‘exceptional cases’ “that shock the conscience of us all” (ICISS 2001: 75). It

needs to be noted here that questions of humanitarian selectivism and inconsistency are

complex matters, and this analysis is not dealing directly with questions of selectivism as

such. Moreover, some scholars (see for example Brown 2003) argue that feasibility and

selectivism is moral, in which decisions to intervene militarily have to be made on a case to

case basis, depending on risks of collateral damage or increased violence.

However, the essential task is to identify how the neoliberal rationality works, and how the

building of ‘sustainable’ human security is perceived within this model. As we have seen,

R2P is in fact more about emergence than exceptionality. As David Chandler notes, from the

point of view of the ‘post-interventionist’ paradigm of resilience, human security cannot be

sufficiently promoted through reactive responses, but has to be encouraged through

preventive measures. Here it is targeting the perceived causes of the conflict rather than

focusing on the consequences of it (Chandler 2012: 223). Thus, in order to morally act to

prevent a ‘new Rwanda’ and build human security long-term, ‘good governance’ is deemed

necessary, which in Libya has been understood as supporting democratic transition, rule of

law and the recreation of markets in order to create economic growth and sustainable

development (UNAMSIL 2011; UNSMIL 2014a) However, since R2P is subject- and

bottom-up oriented, good governance and responsibility have to start with the promotion of

the “responsible moral subject and an economic-rational individual” (Joseph 2009: 417;

46

Lemke 2001: 201). As Pugh et al. (2013) argues, the preventive paradigm of R2P

demonstrates a developmentisation of human security instead of securitisation of

development.

Thus, from the perspective of the paradigm of prevention/‘post-intervention’ or

‘developmentisation of security’, feasibility and selectivity are not deemed immoral. To the

contrary, the point is to promote moral subjects where it is possible to do so. Nevertheless,

looking at how the priorities lying within this strategy enabled the production of something

that looks like a hierarchic scale of ‘Arab Spring-countries’, as well as the inclusion of some

Libyans and the exclusion of others, the discourse contributes to new forms of domination in

line with the prioritisation of the biohuman over the human. In addition, while those Libyans

who were deemed ‘responsible’ were depicted as ‘liberal democrats’ and ‘freedom fighters’, it

was never questioned whether the intervention actually was in “the will of the people” (as

claimed by the UN) (Roberts 2011; UN 2011b). Although flagging the language of

‘responsibility’ as part of the importance of democratic principles and “greater popular

freedoms”, it did indeed give itself the right to define who were included in the idea of the

‘Libyan people’ and who were not (ICISS 2001: 13; Roberts 2011). In fact, the question of

who the ‘responsible’ rebels actually were might have turned out to be the most pressing

question in the post-intervention phase. While the actions conducted during the NATO-

intervention in Libya can be said to reflect pre-intervention evaluations about the feasibility of

promoting adaptable subjects, it can be argued that the post-intervention external engagement

represents the other side of the same coin: following the complexity of the post-intervention

conflict-picture, the ‘international community’ has responded by emphasising the Libyan

people’s responsibility. Thus, it will be argued in the next section that when the ‘feasible’ case

turned out to be ‘non-feasible’, it appeared as the international community’s responsibility

47

also ceased. Furthermore, just as the grand narrative could be maintained by producing a

‘zone of indistinction’ during the intervention, it could also be sustained and upheld in the

post-intervention phase. However, in the post-intervention phase this ‘zone’ can be seen as

obfuscating the distinction between ‘national ownership’ and something that looks more like

the ‘international community’s’ indifference.

4.2 The feasible case turns out to be non-feasible

As the previous section demonstrated, the grand narrative of the Libyan intervention could be

maintained by defining who the Libyan ‘people’ included, and by emphasising their own

agency as responsible individuals. Thus, the immediate declaration of success in Libya can be

seen as a consequence of the perceived victory of those categorised as ‘the people’, in which

the death of Gaddafi was perceived by many external commentators as the beginning of a

Libyan democracy and human rights culture, i.e. liberal democracy (Daalder and Stavridis

2012). However, in terms of producing adaptable, liberal subjects, it is arguable that the

neoliberal governmentality has failed in Libya. By helping the opposition rebels to overthrow

Gaddafi, the military intervention contributed to the production of a political and security

vacuum, where it became clear that the alleged unified people were in fact a composition of

different groups seeking influence over Libya’s future (Miller 2011). Moreover, it also

became clear that Gaddafi had way more support in the population than what the grand

narrative claimed. This is partly explained by the longevity of the intervention and the civil

war, in which it took several months before the rebels were able to overthrow Gaddafi

(Roberts 2011; Miller 2011; Kuperman 2013). As weapons are floating as a consequence of

the external provision of military aid during the intervention, the result is that the majority of

the Libyan people are to a great extent suppressed by movements of counter-insurgency,

terrorism and counter-terrorism (Vice News 2014; Socor 2013). The UNSMIL’s emphasis on

48

the promotion of representative democracy and rule of law to tackle the post-war challenges

has not seemed to serve its cause (UN 2014b; UN 2014c; UNSMIL 2011). As the previous

section demonstrated, the post-interventionist paradigm of prevention and so-called

‘developmentisation of security’ was already from the beginning based on inclusion through

exclusion. Thus, selecting the NTC as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people

naturally led to animosity and feelings of exclusion. Moreover, the organising principle of

representative democracy has not seemed to succeed, which the current Libyan Dawn

Alliance’s occupation of Tripoli is an example of (Human Rights Watch 2014; Vice News

2014).

A remarkable feature throughout the external engagement in Libya has been the claim to help

‘the people’. In the post-intervention phase, the UNSMIL is still claiming to assist the people

by emphasising national ownership and responsibility for the future of Libya. It can be argued

that, just as the concept of ‘the people’ was demonstrably based on inclusion through

exclusion during the intervention, the same is the case in the post-intervention phase. The

question then becomes: who are the ‘international community’ assisting in the post-

intervention phase? There has been reported that the violence in post-intervention Libya is on

the same levels as before the intervention: both in 2011 and in 2014 Human Rights Watch has

reported about crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against former Gaddafi-

supporters and against civilians. However, while such crimes were important enough for the

responsibility to protect before the intervention, the UN has not provided the Libyans with

any peacekeeping forces after NATO left the country and are today not considering any

foreign intervention (Chivvis et al. 3013: 1; Vice News 2014). This resembles Hilary

Clinton’s response to the Syrian conflict in 2011, where she stated that “Syria's future is up to

the Syrian people” (Guiora 2011: 267).

49

It can be argued that both the decision to use military protection in 2011 as well as the lack of

such engagement in the current situation demonstrate changing perceptions of what was

happening on the ground: With the post-intervention situation the clear and compelling

narrative of Gaddafi versus the people became blurred, and the feasible case of creating

adaptable subjects turned out to be non-feasible, or at least, more costly and exhausting. Thus,

both the intervention and the post-intervention demonstrates that the claim to be ‘helping the

people’ was always perplex, and demonstrated that the responsibility to protect was not

necessarily about protecting the human but the biohuman. However, although the neoliberal

governmentality has the well-being of the biohuman as its main objective, such a failure does

not necessarily mean that the governmentality has failed as such: the responsibility to protect

was only an effort in assisting the ‘responsible’ Libyans from the beginning. Thus, as they are

already responsibilised, the failure of creating ‘human security’ is depicted as local

irresponsibility, and a matter of ‘national ownership’ to the problems. Hence, regarding the

previous paragraph’s question about whom or what the ‘international community’ is helping

through the promotion of national ownership, it can be argued that it is first and foremost

assisting in the maintenance of its own discourse and the ‘neoliberal way’ of conducting a

military intervention.

In this way, the intervention in Libya can be seen as successfully following earlier U.S.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s recipe for “creativity” and “risk taking” in warfare,

in which he encouraged interventions to be proactive instead of reactive, and to act like

“venture capitalists” (U.S. Department of Defense 2002). The discourse applied in Libya can

be said to be benefitting the standing of the intervening powers and the UN after failures in

Iraq and Afghanistan (Dean 2010: 202; Pugh et al. 2013; O’Malley 2010). The intervention in

50

Libya can thus be seen as a combination of a mentality still occupied by promoting the

resilience of the biohuman, but also as a result of the experiences from Iraq and Afghanistan,

as both Barack Obama and David Cameron emphasised that “we will not go down that road

again” (Pugh et al. 2013: 195; The White House 2011a). In Libya the notion of “you break it,

you own it” has not been held up to the same extent as in Afghanistan and Iraq, as the

narrative holds that it was not the international community who ‘broke it’, and the conflict

was never something that the interveners ‘owned’ (Hook and Spanier 2010: 296). The

intervention also escaped the notion of ‘doing too little’ as a part of the short-term project of

‘freedom from fear’, in contrast to the broader concept of ‘freedom from want’ (Chandler

2012: 222). By understanding the intervention as an act of prevention, the engagement did not

have an end point that was compared to the status quo ante, but instead it delineates an

ongoing process that is open-ended (Ibid.: 224).

Inherent in the discourse of R2P is the notion that life is uncertain in today’s globalised world,

which contributes to a situation in which it is difficult to hold (political) actors into account.

By focusing on the strategies for solving the ‘uncertainty of life’, including the way the

intervening powers have been able to legitimise these strategies, it is this notion that this

analysis has taken as the basis for critique. It has demonstrated that the intervention in Libya

can be seen as an attempt at securing the biohuman, and thus the Libyan people were exposed

to a demand for adaptability or death during the military intervention, and to something that

resembles a sense of indifference in the post-intervention phase. The next section will

demonstrate how the concept of responsibility should not only be seen as a way of legitimise

these actions, but also as a way of holding central actors on the external side into account.

Although the governmentality approach is distinguished by its warning of not “look for the

headquarters that presides over its rationality” (Foucault 1998: 95), the intervention was

51

conducted by states representing the UN and the NATO-alliance which were originally

claiming a ‘responsibility to protect’ human beings.

4.3 Empowerment and resilience for whom?

The R2P-synthesis removes earlier boundaries of power-politics in order to shed light on and

appreciate the agency of ‘the other’, as well as acknowledging the responsibility towards the

‘other’. The interpretation put forward in the two sections above is that the external

engagement in Libya does not necessarily contradict with the ICISS report’s claims: The R2P

can be seen as having its roots in an ontology in which responsibility lies with the individual

and not with the external world, and in which the individual’s problems are seen as a result of

its own mistakes and errors, and not as effects of the characteristics of the external world.

Moreover, as this analysis has demonstrated, while the agency of the Libyan subjects was

emphasised, there was a specific kind of responsibility and subjectivity that was encouraged.

Thus, by understanding the Libyan intervention within the framework of neoliberal

governmentality we have been able to illuminate that the actions conducted in Libya have had

repercussions that cannot be said to be in line with ‘protecting the people’. As the next

paragraph will demonstrate, while this ontology sees the individual’s problems as matters of

self-care, the external actors conducting the intervention are privileged by a form of

exceptionality, in which the importance of democratic accountability and responsibility seem

to not be applicable to them.

The specificity of the neoliberal governmentality is that regardless of whether its goal is

achieved or not, the responsibility is placed on the governed subjects, which paradoxically

leads to a lack of responsibility on behalf of the international community, the UN, and the

states supporting the intervention. Thus, it is possible to claim that the ‘preventive’ approach

52

in Libya has in this way contributed to making the external actors resilient and empowered.

Through this approach, the ‘performance government’ becomes resilient by discursively

answering to what is demanded by it, and can be seen as empowered compared to the

situations in the aftermath of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The vulnerable

subject, on the other hand, is no longer depicted as a victim, and thus their suffering is no

longer a matter of external responsibility. In addition to the justifications in the grand

narrative, one could claim that the current Libyan situation might have been the same without

an intervention as many of the ‘Arab Spring’ countries are also characterised by movements

of counter-insurgency as part of the political vacuum created through the fall of the previous

leaders (New York Times 2013). This, however, obfuscates the responsibility that the

intervening part originally has by conducting the intervention in the first place and by

supporting the language that first and foremost flags the international responsibility to protect

equal human beings of value irrespective of political categories. In addition, such an

explanation does not take into account how the R2P-language was able to define who

constituted the Libyan ‘people’, and thus influence the conflict to a great extent. There is an

inherent contradiction in the way R2P defines democratic accountability and responsibility.

While Kofi Annan in the ICISS-report makes it clear that the application of responsibility also

sends the message that state authorities are responsible for their actions, this is something that

does not concern the ‘international community’ (ICISS 2001: 13). In this way, the power-

knowledge nexus is all-encompassing in its claims.

Hence, it is arguable that the ‘international community’ is still as distanced from the ‘other’ as

under the doctrine of liberal interventionism. Nonetheless, there is something particularly

contemptuous about the R2P-doctrine, and how it is being used as a way of inclusion through

exclusion. It originally states that military interventions should only happen in “exceptional

53

cases”, but since the original ‘intervention dilemmas’ are obscured or even irrelevant from an

R2P perspective all the actions can be seen as accommodating a process of empowerment and

prevention (Chandler 2012: 218). The intervention started this process, followed by the post-

intervention external engagement of capacity-building, building of good governance, and

empowerment of individuals to make them resilient. By framing it as an act of prevention and

responsibilising the subjects, the ‘exception’ becomes the rule, which creates a new form of

‘zone of indistinction’. This type of ‘empowerment’ resembles Hanna Arendts critique of the

abstract rights of man, which can be seen in relation to the abstractedness of R2P, originally

about securing the biohuman. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she wrote about the rightless

that "their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them;

not that they are oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them." (Arendt 1951: 293;

Rancière 2004: 299). It can be argued that the daring tone of “nobody wants to oppress them”

describes R2P, exemplified through the case of Libya, particularly well. The quote grasps the

essence of the synthesis, which is ostensibly created to fight oppression and domination by

making the objects of intervention into free agents. However, as noted, when these subjects

fail to live up to the biohuman criteria, they are not subjected to direct oppression, but rather

left in “the dark background of mere givenness” and ultimately of indifference (Arendt 1951:

297; Rancière 2004: 299).

Consequentially, the neoliberal governmentality can also be used to hold the actors

conducting the intervention into account. This can be seen as the final stage of critiquing a

mentality that empowers subjects only in a particular way, and under particular

circumstances. Analysing the R2P-discourse as a representation of this mentality, it has been

possible to demonstrate how this language has had the power to define who the Libyan

‘people’ included, what kinds of subjects that were primarily worth saving, and finally how it

54

has had the power to strengthen the resilience of the intervening states, the UN, and the

neoliberal form of rule in itself. Thus, working in the opposite direction of the liberal

approach, which primarily sees security- and development challenges as a result of aspects

internal to the state or the governed subjects, this analysis has sought to provide a critique of

the mentality driving the external engagement in Libya. In the following conclusion, I will

summarise my main findings and discuss whether the BRICS countries’ critique of the

exceptionality inherent in the R2P-principle can add a useful perspective to the continuing

debate about R2P.

55

Conclusion

While much of the existing literature on R2P depicts it as an ideal principle which

nevertheless gets suppressed in its encounter with the political reality of global politics, this

dissertation has analysed a situation of which R2P has been applied as a guideline for action

and used the principle itself as a tool for critiquing the external engagement in Libya, 2011 – .

Starting with the understanding of the R2P-language as a synthesis which is created in order

to be better able to promote human security in situations where life is threatened, the

dissertation proceeded with discussing the perspective of discursive power in comparison with

the existing literature on R2P. This worked as a natural transition to the second chapter, which

scrutinised the concept of discursive power through the lens of neoliberal governmentality,

and considered the methodological implications of using such an approach. The third chapter

presented the empirical material as ‘representations’ of reality, which was the basis for the

analysis in the fourth chapter, which consisted of an in-depth analysis of the research

question.

Here, it was argued that the R2P-language of preventively empowering the subjects through

the promotion of human security reflected and enabled the goal of securing the biohuman.

First, the decision to intervene in Libya can be seen as a result of the pre-intervention

evaluation of the feasibility of creating adaptable subjects. Here the language of responsibility

and empowerment enabled the inclusion of some Libyans and the exclusion others. Second,

the character of the post-intervention engagement can be seen as reflecting the other side of

the same coin, in which the emphasis on the Libyan people’s responsibility and ownership can

be said to reflect the perceptions that the Libyan case turned from being a feasible to a non-

feasible case. Thus, while the discourse was able to determine who counted as the ‘people’

during the intervention, in the post-intervention context it looks like the majority of the

56

Libyans are included in the concept of the ‘people’ through exclusion, where they are

subjected to something that resembles the ‘international community’s’ indifference. In both

the intervention and post-intervention phase, the language of responsibility and empowerment

served as a way of depicting the Libyan subjects’ problems as a matter of self-care, which can

be seen as strengthening the resilience of the UN, NATO, and the neoliberal form of

conducting military interventions. However, as pointed out, the identification of such

responsibilisation can also be used as a way of holding external actors accountable for its

actions. This can be seen as the final stage of critiquing the neoliberal style of governing

which first and foremost holds the assumption that the external states and international

organisations can no longer be held into account, while demanding a particular form of

responsibility from the governed subjects . Moreover, since it can be claimed that the Libyan

case (but also arguably the Syrian one) was primarily about securing the biohuman, it can be

argued that the paradigm of prevention fails to immediately react to the mass atrocities it

originally states to be occupied with.

The ‘exceptionality’ inherent in the R2P-model has been challenged by the BRICS countries,

which in the aftermath of the Libyan intervention has suggested that the ‘responsibility to

protect’ should also be accompanied by a ‘responsibility while protecting’ (ICRtoP 2013). As

these countries are representing different perspectives and values compared to the

predominantly Western-inspired neoliberal approach, such suggestions can potentially be

valuable for the future development of R2P. An interesting approach for further research

would be to investigate how or whether the suggestion of the RwP can improve the relations

between those who govern and the governed, or whether the problematic relationship between

these two levels will be reinforced in new forms through such an approach.

57

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