Morality as a Catalyst for Violence: Responsibility to Protect and Regime Change in Libya

ABSTRACT

How did the global Responsibility to Protect become a legitimising vehicle for regime change in Libya? Many analyses have concentrated on implementation mistakes and failures, but the militarisation of morality and its transformation into an element legitimising warfare has not been systematically studied. Following Jabri’s work on discursive hegemony, this article analyses the politics of justification provided by France, the United Kingdom and the United States for intervening in Libya. Three rhetorical mechanisms have been crucial in legitimising the assault on the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya: first, regime change was defined as a universal interest through the Manichean representation of Gaddafi opposed by a unified Libya (universalisation); second, contradictions in the resort to violence have been marginalised and alternatives to militarisation have been ignored, such in the case of the African Union’s roadmap (simplification); third, the media and scholars have perpetuated dominant narratives portraying Gaddafi as a ‘mad dog’ of the Middle East (reiteration). The article reveals that regime change did not emerge just from operative (mis)calculations, but rather from political and strategic goals pursued since the beginning of the crisis. The interveners used indeed hegemonic liberal discourses to forge the permissibility of regime change.

Acknowledgements

I conducted research for this article while benefiting from a postdoctoral fellowship provided by the A. W. Mellon Foundation, at the University of Cape Town. This paper has been presented at the 13th National Conference of the South African Association of Political Studies, and in Seminars at the University of Milan, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and University of Cape Town. I would like to thank all the participants in these discussions for their valuable feedback. I also wish to thank Nail Berry, Zwelethu Jolobe, Annette Seegers, as well Politikon’s anonymous reviewers, for insightful comments during the preparation of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For ‘moral internationalism’ in this paper I imply what Orford defines as non-intervention and human rights principles as core values of contemporary international politics and international law, see Orford 2013.