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The Responsibility to Protect: Libya and

the Problem of Transnational Solidarity
a
Ayça Çubukçu
a
London School of Economics and Political Science
Published online: 04 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Aya ubuku (2013) The Responsibility to Protect: Libya and the Problem of
Transnational Solidarity, Journal of Human Rights, 12:1, 40-58, DOI: 10.1080/14754835.2013.754291

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 Journal of Human Rights, 12:40–58, 2013
Copyright © 2013 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1475-4835 print / 1475-4843 online
DOI: 10.1080/14754835.2013.754291

The Responsibility to Protect: Libya and the

Problem of Transnational Solidarity

AYÇA ÇUBUKÇU

The first part of this article examines some of the legal, ethical, and political dimensions
of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine by engaging with cosmopolitan proposals for
its application to Libya before the international military action to enforce it was ini-
tiated in March 2011. It presents reflections of a historical kind on state sovereignty,
international community, and the political theology of humanitarian intervention while
assessing the nature of the moral imperative underpinning cosmopolitan assertions of
responsibility to save lives in Libya. Considering the official recognition of the Tran-
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

sitional National Council by the enforcers of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine as

the sole legitimate authority on Libyan territory, the second part of the article situates
this act of recognition within a history of colonial practices that include the legal mech-
anism of “the protectorate.” It also discusses the prominence of imperial affects in the
Responsibility to Protect doctrine. The third part of the article evaluates disagreements
among certain anti-imperialist commentators over the desirability of a military inter-
vention in Libya in order to reflect on the politics of transnational solidarity from an
angle that may present itself as an alternative to the Responsibility to Protect frame-
work. While calling for a renewed critique of violence, the article concludes with an
examination of telling difficulties that afflict attempts to differentiate acts of “foreign
intervention” from acts of “transnational solidarity.”

Introduction
Beginning with the February 17, 2011 uprising against Colonel Qaddafi in eastern Libya,
there were calls for the international community to intervene, if necessary with violence,
into Libyan affairs.1 A global public was told that the international community had the
responsibility to protect Libyans from impending massacres by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces,
and that Libyans were “begging” to be saved by the Security Council of the United Nations

Ayça Çubukçu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for the
Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
I would like to thank Talal Asad, Roger Berkowitz, Kerry Bystrom, Partha Chatterjee, Nicholas
De Genova, Stephen Hopgood, Mehmet Barış Kuymulu, Glenn Mitoma, Anne Orford, Neil Smith,
the editors of Jadaliyya, and former students of my Human Rights and International Law seminar at
Harvard University for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful
to audiences at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College, the
Cultural Studies Seminar at Sabancı University, the International Institute for Global Law and Policy
workshop at the Harvard Law School, and the Authority and Legitimation workshop organized by the
Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for their challenging questions and helpful
feedback. I am particularly indebted to Anthony Alessandrini and Anjali Kamat for the inspiration to
commit these thoughts to writing.
Address correspondence to Dr. Ayça Çubukçu, Department of Sociology & Centre for the Study
of Human Rights, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London
WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. E-mail: a.cubukcu@lse.ac.uk

40
 Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity 41

(Cotler and Genser 2011). An international military intervention led by the United States
and allies, the largest in operational scale since the 2003 war on Iraq, began a month later on
March 19, just as the case was with Iraq. That intervention is still taking place as I write in
September 2011, although Libya’s new “government,” the Transitional National Council,
has already declared—upon the “liberation” of Tripoli in the last week of August—its
victory in toppling Colonel Qaddafi, whose regime many Libyans had recently begun to
publicly challenge.
Similar to the case with the 2003 war on Iraq, moreover, both the proposal for and
the execution of an international military action against the Qaddafi regime established
globally visible political fault lines. Libya’s case led to passionate disagreements even
among familiar proponents of humanitarian intervention, while dividing those traditionally
opposed to military intervention along anti-imperialist lines. These disagreements prompt
important questions. If the imperative to launch an international “military operation to save
lives” in Libya was as clear as its proponents have repeatedly claimed (Obama 2011), why
was there such public disagreement over this question? What were—and what remain—the
political, legal, and ethical stakes of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine’s implementation
in this case?
In the first part of this article, “March 2011: Libya, Sovereignty, Humanity,” I consider
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

some of the legal, ethical, and political dimensions of the Responsibility to Protect doc-
trine primarily by engaging with cosmopolitan proposals for its application to Libya in the
immediate days before the international military action to enforce it actually took place.
Given that after-the-fact narratives of events tend to color, with the knowledge of later
occurrences, the stories of their original unfolding in “real-time,” I have taken care not to
alter this section substantially, which was initially drafted from late February to late March
2011, when assertions of emergency and uncertainty were constitutive of the different pro-
posals offered and the political positions taken. Also in this section, I present reflections
of a historical kind on state sovereignty, international community, and the political theol-
ogy of humanitarian intervention, while attending to the moral imperative underpinning
cosmopolitan assertions of responsibility in the case of Libya.
In the second section, “September 2011: Libya and the Problem of Recognition,” I
address the immediate aftermath of the declared “liberation” of Libya in late August 2011
and consider the implications of the recognition of the Transitional National Council by the
enforcers of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine in the context of a predictably complicated
revolutionary scene. Situating this recent articulation of the problem of recognition within
a history of colonial practices that include the legal mechanism of “the protectorate,” I
consider the prominence of imperial themes in the Responsibility to Protect framework,
including assertions of responsibility for the care of natives and the promotion of their
“legitimate government” through an order predicated on inequality.
Finally, in order to focus on the politics of transnational solidarity from an angle that
may present itself as an alternative to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, in the third
and last section of the article, “December 2012: Libya and the Challenge of Transnational
Solidarity,” I attend to disagreements among certain anti-imperialist commentators over the
desirability of a military intervention in Libya within the context of the Arab Spring. While
most of the debates I thematically examine in this section took place in the immediate weeks
before and after the military intervention, the designated date of this section anticipates the
publication of these reflections in December 2012, as well as some of the political challenges
that may remain relevant for the future of transnational solidarity in the aftermath of the
Libya intervention.2 It is in this section and the conclusion that I attempt to rethink the
problem of “responsibility” as a question of “solidarity” beyond the Responsibility to
 42 Ayça Çubukçu

Protect doctrine. In doing so, I discuss difficulties that attend attempts to differentiate acts
of “foreign intervention” from acts of “transnational solidarity” and conclude by calling
for a renewed critique of violence.

March 2011: Libya, Sovereignty, Humanity3

Falling short of some expectations and exceeding others, the United Nations Security
Council passed its first resolution regarding the crisis in Libya on February 26, 2011. With
it, the Security Council imposed an arms embargo and other sanctions on Libya (United
Nations Security Council [UNSC] 2011a). “Considering that the widespread and systematic
attacks currently taking place [in Libya] against the civilian population may amount to
crimes against humanity,” the Security Council also decided to refer “the situation” to the
International Criminal Court (ICC). A second resolution, Number 1973, followed on the
night of March 17. Mandating the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace, this
resolution called for the protection of civilians by “all necessary measures” (UNSC 2011b).
Two days later, on March 19, air strikes authorized by the United Nations began attacking
Libyan targets. Today is March 23, 2011.
Meanwhile, Libya, as an actor in global politics, is still said to be a sovereign state.
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

Both Security Council resolutions thus reaffirm the Council’s “strong commitment to
the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity” of Libya (UNSC
2011a, 2011b). Under “normal” conditions, that is, within limits, Libya is recognized as an
autonomous actor capable of self-determining its “internal” and “external” affairs without
international interference. On the other hand, the framing of the state violence unleashed
against the uprising citizens of Libya as a potential crime against humanity suggests that the
limits of state sovereignty may have been reached. What are these limits, who draws them,
and how? Which conceptions of authority are mobilized in drawing and enforcing such
limits? What is the Responsibility to Protect doctrine as a legal and normative framework,
and what is its ethical foundation?
From the perspective of “the international community,” sovereignty is a privilege it
confers onto Libya, a status with certain responsibilities attached. Among these respon-
sibilities, the Security Council recalls “the Libyan authorities’ responsibility to protect
its population.” As elaborated in the aftermath of the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion (NATO) intervention in Kosovo, when a state fails to fulfill this responsibility, the
logic goes, then the international community must take on “the responsibility to pro-
tect” the population in question (International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty [ICISS] 2001; Orford 2009).4 I will discuss this framework in greater detail
shortly.
First, I would like to pose the following question: Who makes up this international
community itself; who are its actors? Once known as the “comity of civilized nations”
(Bowden 2009), the international community is traditionally understood as a collection
of sovereign states. In the last four decades, moreover, various actors—from the Security
Council to Human Rights Watch, from the European Union to Amnesty International,
from the United States to NATO—have all spoken as the international community. Today,
many cosmopolitans would also insist that besides (or even beyond) states and institutions,
individuals, as humans, are the international community’s legitimate “members.”
If sovereignty is the recognized privilege of an autonomous state within the interna-
tional legal framework, it is neither conferred indiscriminately nor maintained indefinitely.
In fact, throughout history, various standards have been formulated and applied in deciding
the sovereign status of a given entity. While international lawyers developed “the standard
 Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity 43

of civilization” in the nineteenth century to discriminate sovereign from nonsovereign or

quasi-sovereign entities in the context of colonization (Anghie 2005), in the twenty-first
century, countless other practitioners and theorists have specified and elaborated “univer-
sal standards” which an entity such as Libya should meet if its sovereign status is to be
affirmed by the international community. Some cosmopolitans are less humble and project
their vocation as the articulation of “universal principles which must shape and limit all hu-
man activity”: These universal principles are thus the designation of “necessary boundaries
which no human activity should cross” (Held 2010: xi, emphasis added). In the cosmopoli-
tan case, what must be administered are not merely the standards sovereign states must
adhere to but “the proper limits to human diversity” as such, in David Held’s enthusiastic
cosmopolitan formulation (Held 2010: xi). (Note that a universal jurisdiction declared over
all human activity necessitates an anthropology of “humanity” in order to first define and
then to police “the boundaries which no human activity should cross.”)
Until recently—specifically, until 2008, when the United States reached an agreement
with Libya to fight as comrades in the Global War on Terror—Libya was considered a rogue
state by the United States (Cooper and Landler 2011). However, the Bush Administration
announced that it was resuming “normal diplomatic relations” with Libya as early as
May 2006. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained this move by noting “Libya’s
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism and the excellent cooperation Libya
has provided to the United States and other members of the international community in
response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since September 11, 2001”
(NBC News 2006). Before then, similar to a number of “failed states” around the world,
which were said to have failed morally, economically, politically, or effectively according to
certain “international standards,” Libya was part of the Axis of Evil.5 It had the ambiguous
status of an outlaw, a quasi-sovereignty, a dangerous entity to be sanctioned, isolated, and
contained, if not destroyed altogether.
On February 26, when the Security Council referred Libya’s case to the ICC through
Resolution 1970, it further marked its leadership as suspected enemies of humanity. The
coalition led by the United States, Britain, and France has cited this resolution, as well as
Resolution 1973—which authorized any member of the UN to take “all necessary measures”
to protect Libyan civilians—when reasoning their decision to bomb Libyan targets (UNDPI
2011).6 These states have also claimed that their actions constitute preventive attacks.
Adherents to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine may agree, as they prescribe and demand
military action on the basis of “the responsibility to prevent” atrocities, a responsibility
which must address, they assert, “both the root causes and direct causes of internal conflict
and other man-made crises putting populations at risk” (ICISS 2001: xi).
If the Qaddafi regime is the root cause of conflict however, as Obama, Sarkozy, and
the recently established Transitional National Council have all claimed, then does not the
decided solution present itself as “regime change,” whether this is effected “internally”
or “externally”? In fact, commentators have not failed to observe—some with approval
and others with apprehension—that Resolution 1973, which some Libyans welcomed with
cheers on the streets of Benghazi, anticipates this very possibility (Bennis 2011b; Fisk
2011). In either case, given that the coalition led by the United States, Britain, and France
has decided to assume the responsibility to protect Libyans—which may indeed prove
to be the “responsibility for regime change”—with which conception of authority and
responsibility are these entities acting? “Who has the responsibility to protect whom under
what conditions and toward what end?” (Mamdani 2009: 276, emphasis in original). And
why, the question must be added, is there supposed to be a responsibility to protect in the
first place?
 44 Ayça Çubukçu

Libyans are begging to be saved, we have been told. From humanitarians to neoconser-
vative ideologues, newspaper editors to heads-of-state, “the international community” has
been petitioning to save Libyans.7 As the Security Council, the Arab League, and NATO
were considering—citing the need to protect Libyans—the enforcement of a no-fly zone
among other military “options,” however, multiple analysts warned that this apparently
harmless action would entail overwhelming violence and deadly consequences (Bennis
2011a). Some international lawyers, among them Richard Falk, further asserted that a no-
fly zone would be an act of war, urging the international community to kick its “habit” of
intervention (Falk 2011a).
Meanwhile, members of the Transitional National Council of Libya, in their founding
act, have indeed “request[ed] from the international community to fulfil [sic] its obligations
to protect the Libyan people from any further genocide and crimes against humanity
without any direct military intervention on Libya soil” (INTCLR 2011a: para. 7).8 The
Transitional National Council has also claimed explicitly that “it is the sole representative of
all Libya” (INTCLR 2011a: para. 4). All Libyans request to be protected by the international
community, we have been told, without any foreign intervention on Libyan soil. But, it has
been added, Libyans would welcome an intervention from the air, perhaps even from
the sea. Two weeks ago, on March 10, when the Republic of France became the first
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

state to recognize the sovereignty of the Transitional National Council as the legitimate
representative of the Libyan people (Sitbon and Jacinto 2011), it officially affirmed the
validity of these claims. France is now scheduled to send an ambassador to Benghazi, but
she may arrive too late, or too early: Everything depends on how transitional or permanent
the new Libyan “government” will be.9
Why the indecisiveness, some have asked, before the military intervention in Libya
began to take place. Why should the international community watch as Libyans are slaugh-
tered by forces loyal to Qaddafi? If there is no military intervention, they added, how could
the bloodshed be stopped? The international community has a responsibility to protect
Libyans, it has been repeated, over and over, from “widespread crimes against humanity”
(International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect [ICRP] 2011: para. 1). Others have
focused on the plight of noncitizen residents of Libya, in the millions, some targeted and
attacked as black Africans (Maidhof 2011). And the International Red Cross has added to
the chorus: What we are witnessing in Libya is nothing but civil war, it said (United Press
International [UPI] 2011).
What is going on? And why the careful parlance? In matters of life and death, as
we should know, words have a propensity to kill. How one names the situation is critical,
implying specific jurisdictions, distinct responsibilities, and different licenses to kill. As “the
international community” intervenes militarily in Libya under a cosmopolitan obligation to
protect Libyans as humans, it is killing Libyans and others. And if the Transitional National
Council is killing Libyans and others, it is also claiming to be protecting Libyans. This is
the paradox we are not told of. Such national acts of sovereignty, recognized by the French
state or not, claim a license to kill. And cosmopolitan acts of sovereignty, recognized by
“the international community” or not, kill in the name of humanity—from the air, soil,
or sea. This is the reason one must pause, think and evaluate the “the situation” very
carefully.
But for some, the answers have been clear. To the editors of the Christian Science
Monitor, an international daily based in the United States, for instance, “the killings in
Libya have been atrocious enough to provide moral clarity” (Christian Science Monitor
[CSM] 2011: para. 10). Titling their editorial “The World’s Responsibility to Protect
Libyans,” the editors conclude forcefully: “[I]f ever a ‘responsibility to protect’ was made
 Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity 45

clear, it is now in Libya” (CSM 2011: para. 12). The world has the responsibility to protect
Libyans from the “excessive use of force” by their government, while “the world must also
act against crimes against humanity,” they claim (CSM 2011: para. 6). Having specified
the accorded task of “break[ing] a state’s sovereignty” and having named the actor charged
with this responsibility as the world, however, the editors quickly prescribe the task to “the
UN or NATO,” as if they were shorthand for the world (CSM 2011: para. 9). And yet,
the moral clarity of the cosmopolitan plea precludes the possibility of posing the question:
Why? Why this responsibility, why upon the UN or NATO, why upon “the world,” why
now, why in Libya, and not, say, not in Gaza?
The Responsibility to Protect, also known as R2P, was published in December 2001
as a report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The
Commission was officially constituted and partly financed by the Canadian government,
which commissioned 12 “experts,” including Michael Ignatieff (the former Director of the
Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University and current leader of the Liberal
Party of Canada), as well as Gareth Evans (the former Australian Foreign Minister and
former president of the International Crisis Group). The Commission’s aim was to draw
an authoritative framework specifying the principles and standards of “external military
intervention for human protection purposes” (ICISS 2001: vii). Changing the language of
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

a global debate, the R2P reformulated military intervention as an obligation, in conscious

contradistinction to a right of intervention. What is remarkable about this formulation is its
skillful mobilization of the distinction between an obligation and a right, and its partisan
resolve to decide the rivalry between the two conceptions of intervention in favor of the
former. Notably, while a right may or may not be exercised, the character of an obligation
is different: It embodies a moral imperative to act, in this case, to perform the function of
“protection,” if necessary with violence.
But who is the addressee, the subject of this obligation? And what is the foundation,
if any, of the moral imperative underpinning the responsibility to protect? Writing for The
Guardian on Libya and “the case for liberal intervention,” Timothy Garton Ash, a British
historian and recipient of the George Orwell Prize, reminds his readers on March 3 that “a
decade ago an independent commission that elaborated on the idea of ‘the responsibility to
protect’ spelled out six criteria for deciding whether military action is justified” (Ash 2011:
para. 11). Ash then specifies the six criteria—right authority, just cause, right intention, last
resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects—according to which, he claims, the
military enforcement of a no-fly zone over Libya would not be justified.
Yet, the very application of the R2P criteria to decide a specific case presumes that an
earlier question, also formulated by Ash, has already received a positive answer: “[D]o we
not have some responsibility to protect the people who have risen against [Qaddafi]?” (Ash
2011: para. 10). True, it is not absolutely clear to whom Ash refers to with the pronoun
“we” in the former sentence, or the following: “We should prepare contingency plans. But
we have not yet exhausted all other avenues, including trying to pry Gaddafi’s cronies away
from him by fair means and foul” (Ash 2011: para. 12). But he is more suggestive when
concluding that “any form of armed intervention by the West . . . would spoil the greatest
pristine glory of these events, which is that they are all about brave men and women
liberating themselves” (Ash 2011: para. 13). In other words, “we” may be the West, but
“they” are something else, and “we” have a responsibility to protect “them.” (Note that
in such pronouncements, the ambiguity of the actor—whether named the civilized world,
the West, the international community, or simply the world—obligated by a responsibility
to protect facilitates the obligation’s capacity to recruit potentially responsible subjects
towards the fulfillment of this task.)
 46 Ayça Çubukçu

As for the nature of the moral imperative presumed by the responsibility to protect and,
more specifically, by the criteria for deciding whether a case falls under such an obligation,
Ash affirms that R2P’s criteria are “essentially a modernized version of centuries-old
Catholic standards for ‘just war’ ” (Ash 2011: para. 11). It is important to reflect on this
finding—affirmed by many other scholars and practitioners—because it makes explicit the
politico-theological foundations of a cosmopolitan morality which takes “life,” for instance,
especially civil-human-life, to be a sacred possession, or an “inalienable” right demanding
protection. Another reason for reflecting on “essentially theological” standards is that the
apparent secularity (and hence “modernity”) of the paradigms of universal justice, law,
and order proposed for governing, administering, and defending “humanity” should be
questioned.
Notably, the anthropologist Talal Asad has addressed this problem. Asad has not merely
traced the genealogy of contemporary humanitarian law back to medieval Christian the-
ology and its just war principles of necessity and proportionality. He has also commented
at length, for example, on how the specific significance attributed to concepts such as in-
tention, penance, and remorse in the context of an evolving medieval Christian theology
can today find expression in the regretful apologies expressed by secular liberals for the
unnecessary and disproportionate killings of “innocents” in war (Asad 2010). Within the
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

framework of this theology, as well as contemporary humanitarian law (it is worth repeat-
ing), certain killings of persons are endorsed in principle as necessary and proportionate to
the ends pursued by a just or legal war. Operating within this very humanitarian logic, the
Responsibility to Protect, as language, doctrine, and practice, is a recent and particularly
powerful example of what Asad calls “the etiquette of death dealing.”
If I have raised the theological dimensions of cosmopolitan theory and practice as a
question, this is not only to observe how the editors of the Christian Science Monitor may
be cosmopolitans as Christians, or to note, along with the historian Thomaž Mastnak, that
medieval crusaders, too, may have been “true cosmopolitans” (Mastnak 2002: 124). I raise
the question of theology to also emphasize how, at least since the sixteenth-century colo-
nization of the Americas, “religion” has been integral to the cultural logic through which the
modern international legal order has been constituted, and international relations practiced
(Hurd 2008). In fact, scholars have meticulously revealed how Euro-Christian colonialism,
and the theological, as well as racial, cultural, moral, and political supremacisms that ac-
companied colonial practices, are the actual foundation of contemporary international law
(Anghie 2005). Without such an historical perspective, it is difficult to appreciate fully the
significance of recent advances and retreats in the battlefield of cosmopolitics—where the
sovereignty of Libya is once again contested.
We may wish to remember, for example, that the problem of “who was sovereign
and why” solidified in the violent interaction among imperial states and the “societies”
they conquered, colonized and attempted to civilize (Anghie 2005). After decolonization,
this problem has continued to persist in the “international relations” of a world legally
ordered through apparently equal and equally sovereign nation-states in the image of the
United Nations General Assembly, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the
International Monetary Fund. And tomorrow, who will determine the sovereign status of
Libya or recognize, along with France, the sovereign status of the Transitional National
Council? Who is to adjudicate this declaration of independence? How and why?
In a syndicated article entitled “The Responsibility to Protect Libyans,” reproduced by
the Wall Street Journal, a principal author of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, Gareth
Evans, the co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty,
declares in the first sentence: “Sovereignty is not a license to kill” (Evans 2011: para. 1).
 Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity 47

On the contrary, sovereignty, whether exercised in the name of humanity or that of the
nation, is a bloody license to kill. From death-row prisoners to soldiers, from police officers
to NATO commanders, a multitude can further testify to the very legality of this license,
which, of course, is no reason to accept it.
As the “the international community” intervenes militarily in Libya under a cosmopoli-
tan obligation to protect Libyans as humans, it will be killing Libyans and others. And if
Colonel Qaddafi and the Transitional National Council are killing Libyans and others, they
are also claiming to be protecting Libyans. This is one reason, only one reason among
others, why we—the author and the readers—can decide to pause, to evaluate the situation
and to judge, judge very carefully.

September 2011: Libya and the Problem of Recognition

It is now September 22, 2011. Two days ago, on the occasion of the United Nations
General Assembly’s opening session in New York City, President Obama announced that
the United States was reopening its embassy in Tripoli. Formally meeting with Mustafa
Abdel Jalil—the current leader of the Transitional National Council—Obama extended him
“a diplomatic honor never offered his predecessor,” that is, Colonel Qaddafi (Cooper and
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

MacFarquhar 2011: para. 1). According to the New York Times, Obama proudly credited
his “new doctrine” with helping to topple Qaddafi and professed Libya as “a lesson in
what the international community can achieve when we stand together as one” (Cooper and
MacFarquhar 2011). While a new Libyan flag is now raised at the UN seven months after
the beginning of the armed uprising in eastern Libya (in telling contrast to the Palestinian
flag whose recognition is also at stake at the UN this week), both the character of what has
been achieved and its lessons remain undetermined.
What is certain, however, is that neither the international community, nor all Libyans
have stood “as one” on the questions presented by the NATO action to enforce the Respon-
sibility to Protect doctrine or the Libyan “revolution” as represented by the Transitional
National Council. The most immediate testimony to the latter fact is the decision of NATO,
announced yesterday, to extend for three more months its “Libya bombing campaign” in
response to the fierce resistance still offered by “Qaddafi loyalists” to the armed forces of the
Transitional National Council (Fahim and Gladstone 2011)—despite that is, the repeated
ultimatums which the Council has issued, to various cities and towns of Libya, “to join the
revolution” immediately.
And that is not all. Inside Libya, within forces that have supported a revolution, the
legitimacy of the Transitional National Council itself remains a contested question. Former
Financial Times journalist Patrick Cockburn—writing in late August for The Independent
amidst celebrations of the liberation of Tripoli—reports that, although the “Transitional Na-
tional Council (TNC) in Benghazi is now recognized by more than 30 foreign governments,
including the US and Britain, as the government of Libya . . . it is by no means clear that it
is recognized as such by the rebel militiamen who are in the process of seizing the capital”
(Cockburn 2011: para. 4). Furthermore, the head of the Benghazi military council has called
on the TNC to resign, reportedly casting its members as “remnants of the Gaddafi era” and
as “a bunch of liberals with no following in Libyan society” (Ghannoushi 2011: para. 6).
Whether they are indeed liberals or not, the prominence of Qaddafi-era senior officials in the
leadership of the TNC—including its current leader Abdel Jalil whom Obama “honored”
at the UN this week—and their subservience to countries that have executed the NATO
mission have raised the legitimate suspicion that the TNC derives its “power and influence
from the backing of western nations” (Ghannoushi 2011: para. 2). And this, in contrast to
 48 Ayça Çubukçu

other mobilizations, formations, and forces in the many cities and rural areas of Libya that
are either outside, or at the margins of the Transitional National Council leadership, with
their competing claims to authority and different visions for the future of a post-Qaddafi
society. These claims and visions remain “unrecognized” by those who habitually speak
on behalf of the international community.
It is in this predictably complicated revolutionary scene that the enforcers of the
Responsibility to Protect doctrine have made the directorial decision to cast the recognizably
leading role of “legitimate authority” to the Transitional National Council. With their
decision, a familiar set of questions arises. These questions have repeatedly appeared
in other cases where a cosmopolitan responsibility and authority have been deployed
militarily, including prior instances of “humanitarian intervention.” As posed by the scholar
of international law, Anne Orford: “Why do international administrators recognize and
liaise with particular local claimants to authority? Upon what grounds is the choice made
to recognize one actor rather than another as the legitimate authority or the appropriate
collaborator in a territory? . . . What effects does the choice to collaborate with one group
or leader rather than another have in situations of civil war or protracted conflict?” (Orford
2011: 10).
In the case of Libya, one could observe with Phyllis Bennis, a political analyst of
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

the Institute for Policy Studies, how the recognition of the Transitional National Council
by the United States and allies gives the TNC more power while disempowering other
forces within the revolutionary movement (Bennis and Goodman 2011). Especially in the
likely scenario that the Transitional National Council also receives, as it has explicitly and
repeatedly demanded, billions of dollars worth of frozen “national assets” which currently
remain under the trusteeship of “the international community” upon UN sanctions, its
international recognition can have novel and solemn consequences. As Bennis argues,
given that Libya is now a place where everyone on all sides is armed, the turnover of these
funds to a TNC that lacks clear support from many different sectors in Libya could set the
stage for further violence and “very serious chaos” (Bennis and Goodman 2011).
Moreover, at stake in the question of why a particular local claimant to authority is
internationally recognized is not only the legitimacy of the “local collaborator” chosen for
international recognition. What is also at stake is the very legitimacy of the “international
administrators” who direct the course of such recognition, and the account they give of
their own decision and authority to do so (Orford 2011: 10). If the Responsibility to Protect
doctrine was a response to the need felt in 1990s for “representatives of international
authority to find a more coherent account of the power they exercised and the political
choices they made” (Orford 2011: 10), in the case of Libya—the first military enforcement
of the doctrine since its formulation—the given account of authority exercised by the
international community through NATO rests on an arrogation to act on behalf of humanity.
Even at the level of the UN Security Council vote that authorized the enforcement of the
Responsibility to Protect through Resolution 1973, however, the abstentions by China,
Russia, Brazil, India, and Germany should suffice to suggest that the claim to act on behalf
of a humanity that “stands as one” is not more convincing than ever before. Still at the level
of nation-states, the demand issued by the African Union for NATO to “immediately halt”
its bombing campaign (AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE [AFP] 2011)—on the same day the
military action actually began—provides further evidence of the hollowness haunting, for
better or worse, the claim that “humanity” has stood as one on the question of a humanitarian
intervention in Libya.
As I have argued above, furthermore, from the perspective of “the international com-
munity,” the question of an international intervention in Libya also involved the problem of
 Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity 49

recognizing “who is sovereign and why,” a problem whose formulation in this recent case
should be interpreted in the context of the colonial history attending this problem’s prior
articulations—beyond, that is, the 1990s. At least since the nineteenth century, it should be
remembered, particular representatives of “the native” have been granted legal personality
in the form of sovereignty precisely to enable the transfer of this sovereignty—whether
formally or informally—to colonial powers. Within such a history, the jurist of international
law Antony Anghie observes, “the only occasion when native ‘sovereignty’ or ‘personality’
is bestowed or recognized is in a context where that personality enables the native to transfer
title, to grant rights—whether trading, to territory, or to sovereignty itself” (Anghie 2005:
105).
Thus, with their enforcement of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine in Libya and
their subsequent recognition of the Transitional National Council as the sovereign native
collaborator, the United States, France, and Britain created not only an occasion to affirm
themselves as the guardians of the revolutionary wind blowing in the Arab Spring. They
also established a new legal personhood in Libya who can sign treaties and enter into
contracts (with their companies) to trade oil, to “reconstruct” the country, and, as stipulated
by the TNC, to “commit to all international conventions and protocols relating to Counter-
Terrorism” (INTCLR 2011b: para. 5). While formal sovereignty in Libya may now reside
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

with the Transitional National Council, it still remains to be seen if the prerogatives of
that sovereignty can be exercised in the legal, political, social, and economic spheres
independently from the NATO countries that assumed the Responsibility to Protect Libyans.
In fact, not only Libyans but also the Transitional National Council itself may prove
powerless to set the terms of this “protection” and the timing of its termination. It is unclear
for example, who and what Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO Secretary General, had in
mind as he declared a few days ago, on the occasion of the organization’s extension of its
Libya bombing campaign for three more months, that “we are determined to continue our
mission for as long as necessary, but ready to terminate the operation as soon as possible”
(Fahim and Gladstone 2011: para. 2). Who is to decide what is necessary and possible,
where, when, and how—and in which transitional or permanent framework?
Both the language and the legal framework of “protection” deployed in this interna-
tional intervention should thus occasion more than a passing thought on the similarities
between actual practices now associated with the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and
those political practices effected under the legal framework of “the protectorate” in the late
nineteenth century. As Anghie argues along with numerous other scholars, “protectorates
were a common technique by which European states exercised extensive control over non-
European states while not officially assuming sovereignty over those states” (Anghie 2005:
87). What is now taking place in Libya might as well be the multilateral establishment of
a new protectorate, whereby the intervening states, while reaffirming their right to grant
or deny formal sovereignty, simultaneously expand the informal zone where their own
sovereign powers can be exercised.10
It is also worth remembering that in the protectorate system and throughout the history
of colonialism, the assertion of humanitarian care for and sympathy with the natives, the
promotion of legitimate government, and the acceptance of native “invitations” for pro-
tection have all been recurring themes.11 It is precisely these imperial themes, as various
commentators have noted, which are retold in contemporary “heroic narratives” (Orford
2003) of humanitarian intervention. Nevertheless, it may still be worth repeating that hu-
manitarian care for the downtrodden, sympathy for victims, and “humane behavior” need
not entail a commitment to social or juridical equality. In fact, as the historian Thomas
Laqueur reminds his readers, “acts of humanity” themselves can produce obligations
 50 Ayça Çubukçu

and rewards that constitute a hierarchical order predicated on inequality (Laqueur

2009: 43).
But this is not all there is to say. I have made the argument elsewhere that in critiquing
cases of international intervention which are argued to protect human rights and freedoms
(as many speeches of Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron have proudly claimed in the case of
Libya12), it is not sufficient to suggest that agents pursuing a distinctly imperial project
are insincerely “instrumentalizing” these cosmopolitan ideals (Çubukçu 2011). The insuf-
ficiency of this kind of critique is especially consequential if “the continuous slide of cos-
mopolitan ideas towards empire is one of the dominant motifs of modernity,” as the critical
theorist of international law Costas Douzinas asserts (2007: 159). In this context, I suggest,
posing the problem as one of insincere instrumentalization of otherwise unproblematic
ideals occludes confronting the constitutive entanglement of cosmopolitanism—including
its assertions of humanitarian responsibility and care and promotions of human rights and
democracy everywhere—with imperial politics.
The universal ideals of cosmopolitanism, in other words, are not merely the ruse of
imperial politics. Their relationship, often mediated by violence, is more intimate and
complex than the instrumentalization thesis suggests (Çubukçu 2011). In the case of Libya,
this very complexity was a subject of debate among “anti-imperialist” commentators who
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

were divided over the desirability of a military intervention. I now turn to these telling
debates and reflect on the politics of transnational solidarity from an angle that may present
itself as an alternative to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

December 2012: Libya and The Challenge of Transnational Solidarity

To the disapproving surprise of some of his cosmopolitan friends, the just war theorist
Michael Walzer opposed the enforcement of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine in Libya
a few days after the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which authorized it (Walzer
2011). “First, it is radically unclear what the purpose of the intervention is,” Walzer found
(Walzer 2011: para. 2). This radical uncertainty pertained to three possible goals: “Is the
goal to rescue a failed rebellion, turn things around, to use Western armies to do what the
rebels couldn’t do themselves: overthrow Gadhafi? Or is it just to keep the fighting going
on as long as possible, in the hope that the rebellion will catch fire, and Libyans will get
rid of the Gadhafi regime by themselves? Or, is it just to achieve a cease-fire?” Walzer
searchingly asked (Walzer 2011: para. 2).
Tellingly, while the officially stated aim of protecting a politically unqualified human
“life” was lacking among the possible purposes of intervention that Walzer identified, what
constituted his case against intervention was a political differentiation between “Libyans
themselves,” “foreigners,” and “maybe neighbors, who share ethnicity and religion with
the Libyan people” (Walzer 2011: para. 5). Thus, when concluding that “the overthrow of
tyrants and the establishment of democracy has to be local work, and in this case, sadly, the
locals could not do it,” in effect, Walzer was implicitly mobilizing the principle of “national”
self-determination to make his case against “foreign” military intervention (Walzer 2011:
para. 5).
The principle of national self-determination has been a hallmark of anti-imperialist
politics, in both Marxist and Liberal traditions, at least since the First World War. This
principle has enshrined a political distinction between “nationals” and “foreigners,” while
internationalism and cosmopolitanism, in their various, historically specific articulations,
have served as the ground of transnational solidarity where attempts have been made to
bridge the posited gap between (self-determining) nationals and (solidarity-performing)
 Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity 51

foreigners. Although that long and complicated history cannot be reviewed here, I should
note that the allegedly clear differences between a Marxist internationalism and a Liberal
cosmopolitanism are not as easy to maintain as some analysts suggest.
While the geographer David Harvey has made a recent and impressive attempt to
critique various versions of cosmopolitanism and to reclaim his Marxist version of it (Har-
vey 2009), less convincing is the traditional view expounded by other Marxists, Timothy
Brennan for example, that internationalism and cosmopolitanism are “dialectical others”
(Brennan 2003: 48). This cannot be the case given the frequent overlap, in theory and
practice, between visions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and
the remarkable “internal” variation—to the extent that two different and coherent bodies
of thought can be said to exist in the first place—within internationalism and cosmopoli-
tanism, on the other. When different versions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism as
expounded and practiced by various theological traditions are added to the matrix along
with their anarchist, regionalist, Third-Worldist and indeed nationalist and militarist artic-
ulations, the nature of the two-headed monster proves too complicated to grasp in a single
breath.
Nevertheless, I will attempt to offer some thoughts on contemporary challenges of
“transnational solidarity”—a compromised characterization I employ for the purposes of
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

this article as a common ground between internationalism and cosmopolitanism—by briefly

examining disagreements over the intervention in Libya among certain anti-imperialist in-
tellectuals in countries that remain the leaders of this military action. These anti-imperialists,
like many others around the world who cared to think and formulate their own position,
have been politically divided on the requirements of a transnational solidarity in the case of
Libya within the context of the Arab Spring. To the extent that implicit as well as explicit
understandings of responsibility underwrote such debates on the demands of transnational
solidarity, for the case at hand, it is important to observe how these understandings config-
ured the problem of responsibility outside the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.
On April 4, 2011, in a passionate public letter addressed to the philosopher
Jean-Luc Nancy, another French philosopher, Alain Badiou, a public intellectual of the
anti-imperialist tradition declared his “sorry surprise” at the position Nancy adopted in
favor of the intervention in Libya (Badiou 2011). “Didn’t you notice right from the start,”
Badiou’s letter began to ask, “the palpable difference between what is happening in Libya
and what is happening elsewhere,” as it proceeded to contrast the “massive popular gath-
erings” in Tunisia and Egypt with the immediate appearance of weapons and “a supposed
‘revolutionary council’ led by a former accomplice of Gaddafi” in Libya (Badiou 2011:
para. 2). Noting that in Libya alone “and nowhere else, the great powers were called in to
support” (Badiou 2011: para. 3), Badiou also insisted that behind “moral and humanitarian
pretexts” (Badiou 2011: para. 5), the clear aim of the intervening great powers in Libya
was “to transform a revolution into a war” (Badiou 2011: para. 3).
But the revolution in question, to Badiou’s mind, did not (only) appear to be the one
that could take place in Libya, as he concluded by asserting that “the target of the bombers is
definitely the popular uprising in Egypt and the revolution in Tunisia, it is their unexpected
and intolerable character, their political autonomy, in a word: their independence” (Badiou
2011: para. 6). In this situation, the task of solidarity required “supporting the political
independence and the future of these uprisings and revolutions” (Badiou 2011: para. 6),
which meant, according to Badiou, “stopping the great powers as much as possible from
interfering in the political processes under way in the Arab world” (Badiou 2011: para. 5).
In contrast to Badiou’s interpretation of what the task of supporting political autonomy
and independence would require in the case of Libya, other anti-imperialist intellectuals
 52 Ayça Çubukçu

such as the Marxist scholar at the University of London, Gilbert Achcar, placed “the request
by the uprising for a no-fly zone” at the center of their decision not to oppose the intervention
executed by NATO forces (Achcar 2011a). In similar fashion, Jean-Luc Nancy, too, while
asserting that “Benghazi insurgents are asking for help,” asked as if striking preventively in
his March 2011 article which provoked Badiou, whether this was the time, “to invoke in pell-
mell fashion the collateral risks and suspicion of (more or less) hidden interests, the princi-
ples of non-interference and the heavy guilt of a ‘West’ that may, one wonders, include Libya
itself” (Nancy 2011: para. 2). Still, Achcar was less subtle when explicitly asserting, on
the day before the NATO bombing campaign began, that “from an anti-imperialist per-
spective one cannot and should not oppose the no-fly zone, given that there is no plausible
alternative for protecting the endangered population” (Achcar 2011a: para. 18).
From the middle of March through August 2011, Achcar published a series of articles
and gave numerous interviews for “alternative media” outlets commonly followed by a
transnational community of English-speaking “leftists”—such as ZNet, Democracy Now!
and Jadaliyya—whereby he responded to many critics, rearticulated his initial position
and formulated new ones. While it could be interesting to trace these “adjustments” to his
anti-imperialist position in the span of six months, that is not my purpose here. I would like
to observe, however, how Achcar’s initial characterization of Libyans as an “endangered
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

population” (hence the proper object of humanitarian sympathy and military rescue), on the
one hand, and his characterization of the Libyan uprising as a “longing for democracy and
human rights” (hence the proper subject of universal politics and transnational solidarity),
on the other, gradually yet visibly transformed (Achcar 2011a).
If Achcar’s original emphasis on “the request by the uprising” for an aerial military
intervention, in conjunction with his depiction of Libyans at once as the proper objects of
humanitarianism and the proper subjects of universal politics, echoed the narratives Obama
and Sarkozy were simultaneously offering (Obama 2011; Sarkozy 2011), this minimalist
presentation gradually gave way, by the time Achcar published his latest article in mid-
August 2011, to a “thick description” and detailed sociopolitical analysis (Achcar 2011b).13
In August, for instance, Achcar wrote in fine detail about “dissension in opposition ranks,”
on competing insurgent forces and their ideological disagreements, on the Transitional
National Council’s efforts “to satisfy the Western obsession with ‘the Iraqi example,’ ” and
the care that the Transitional National Council was taking not to offend NATO’s leaders
(Achcar 2011b). It is nevertheless remarkable that even in this piece, which demanded that
NATO fully arm “the de facto rebel authority,” Libyans still appear to be begging, this time
for weapons, along with Achcar writing in their name. Once again, the reader is invited to
witness “local forces begging NATO to provide the weapons they need and assuring that
with adequate armament they could finish the job of liberating their country very soon”
(Achcar 2011b: para. 8).
Considering such disputes over what proper transnational solidarity demanded in the
case of Libya, the first problem was to identify what it would mean in practice to support
the political autonomy and independence of a national struggle that was to self-determine in
principle. Confronted with this problem, along with Achcar (and leaders of NATO, it must
be added) some recognized a singular “legitimate authority” that allegedly represented all
Libyans and proceeded to affirm and echo its “request” for an intervention. Others—among
them anti-imperialist commentators such as Alain Badiou and Edward S. Herman, the
coauthor with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent—expressed aversion at this very
request (Herman 2011), as if the demand for intervention already compromised, in principle
and/or in practice, the autonomy and independence not only of the “national” struggle in
Libya but also of other uprisings throughout “the Arab world.”14
 Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity 53

A concurrent problem to be addressed from the perspective of transnational solidarity

was to identify and relate legitimate means and legitimate ends. In the case of Libya,
apart from certain anti-imperialists such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, several other
leaders of Latin American states, and yet others who saw in Qaddafi an anti-imperialist
to be supported against imperialist aggression in the first place, many anti-imperialists
appeared to agree with the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein that toppling Qaddafi was a
legitimate end in itself (Wallerstein 2011). For the first camp of anti-imperialists who took
the task of transnational solidarity to be mobilizing support for Colonel Qaddafi, the NATO
intervention did not present a difficult case to resolve, as the task was crystal clear: To
oppose the intervention as an illegitimate means to an illegitimate end.
For those anti-imperialists who accepted the overthrow of Qaddafi as a legitimate
end, however, there was a remaining—and divisive—question, namely, what the legitimate
means of achieving this legitimate end could and could not be. In this camp of anti-
imperialists attempting to identify the demands of transnational solidarity, disagreements
over the problem of legitimate means in toppling Qaddafi solidified in relation to three
related, if disproportionately discussed, vectors: (1) The question of a foreign military
intervention; (2) the autonomy and agency, character, and “requests” of the uprising in
Libya; (3) the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring, most notably in Egypt and Tunisia.
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

Thus, regarding the problem of legitimate means, multiple versions of the following
questions solidified. Was foreign military intervention ever a legitimate means to over-
throw a repressive regime? Was foreign intervention a legitimate means when requested
by “national” revolutionaries? (This question was especially pertinent if what was seen to
be happening was a nation-wide revolution, rather than a “civil war” between competing
loyalties in eastern and western Libya.) Did respecting the autonomy and agency of revo-
lutionaries in Libya require agreeing to support their call for an international intervention?
What would the implications of supporting a foreign intervention as a legitimate means
be in the larger context of the Arab Spring, the Middle East, or Africa? Would a “for-
eign” intervention by the “neighbors” of Libya be a legitimate means? To the extent that
anti-imperialist in this camp saw both the “political goal” of overthrowing Qaddafi and the
“humanitarian goal” of saving lives as a legitimate end, questions about legitimate means
were posed towards both ends. Finally, it is important to observe for the record that, like
the enforcers of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, no one in this anti-imperialist camp
appeared to dispute an armed uprising as a legitimate means to either end.

Conclusion
By way of a conclusion, I would like to formulate two other problems that presented them-
selves as implicit challenges in debates on the demands of transnational solidarity in the
case of Libya. These two problems can also be read as tacit configurations of the question
of responsibility both within and beyond the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. The first
problem I have in mind is the difficulty that attends any attempt to differentiate acts of
“transnational solidarity” from acts of “foreign intervention,” whereby both the adjectives
and the nouns chosen for these two designations fail to register secure distinctions. What
are the commonalities and the differences between acts of transnational solidarity and acts
of foreign intervention? For instance, are transnational petitions and demonstrations ad-
dressing human rights violations within a specific country acts of solidarity or acts of
intervention? And “humanitarian operations” themselves, are they to be considered acts of
solidarity or acts intervention? In the case of Libya, this problem was particularly relevant
 54 Ayça Çubukçu

as opponents and proponents of the international military operation defined it as an act of

“foreign intervention” and “transnational solidarity” respectively.
The difficulty of distinction here is not merely a problem of parsing sincere from
insincere motivations or intentions. Thus, for example, it is not sufficient to dismiss NATO’s
self-definition as a “solidarity” organization (NATO 2011), nor is it adequate to simply
ignore the claim that what activists on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla were doing was
an act of “foreign intervention.”15 Instead, what resides in the difficulty of distinguishing
acts of transnational solidarity from acts of foreign intervention are the mutable borders
of the political communities we imagine, the importance we attach to their “autonomy,”
and who we take to be the proper subject of politics within those borders.16 Without those
borders, as one might wish, neither the distinction between “national” and “foreigner,” nor
the distinction between “solidarity” and “intervention” would make much sense.
Finally, the last but not least of the challenges that presented itself in debates on the
demands of transnational solidarity in the case of Libya, if only through its systematic
absence, was a critique of violence.17 Such a critique could begin by addressing violence as
a means—regardless of the agents mobilizing it, be them cosmopolitans, internationalists,
imperialists, anti-imperialists, nation-states, international organizations, revolutionaries,
reformists, or solidarity activists and regardless of the ends it serves, be them legal or
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

illegal, legitimate or illegitimate, just or unjust. An exception to the absence of such a

critique could be offered by “pacifists,” but even there a critical question remains, as to
what violence is, as to what is said to constitute and not constitute violence.
I ultimately raise the question of violence not as a “mere” exercise in philosophical
thought but, in the spirit of Hannah Arendt, as a practical problem of politics and action
(Arendt 1969). Without a renewed critique of violence, I am afraid, and without living
traditions in which to make sense of its own critiques, a politics of transnational solidarity
will endlessly attempt to position itself, case by case, bomb by bomb, strike by strike,
arrest by arrest, bullet by bullet, camp by camp and will continue to do so exception after
exception, life after life. Perhaps, this is the only “solution”—which a multitude of states,
theologians, lawyers, philosophers, and revolutionaries have been willing to offer—but
perhaps it is not.

Notes
1. For “neo-conservative” calls for intervention in Libya issued from the United States, see Lobe
(2011). For an early and sober response to demands for international intervention, see Bali and
Abu-Rish (2011).
2. These challenges may prove particularly significant if the Responsibility to Protect doctrine as
implemented in Libya were to set a model for military action in the future. For two opposing
views on the precedent the intervention in Libya should and should not serve, observe the jurist
Richard Falk (2011b) in contradistinction to Kenneth Roth (2011), the Executive Director of
Human Rights Watch.
3. Parts of this section appeared as two different pieces in Jadaliyya on February 28, 2011 and
March 11, 2001.
4. Some liberals further argue that beyond its coercive capacity and responsibility to protect its
population, a state must be democratic to “earn” the recognition and affirmation of its sovereignty
by the international community (see Marks 2000).
5. See BBC News (2002).
6. The Arab League’s call on March 12 for the imposition of a no-fly zone was also cited by France,
Britain, and the United States when legitimating their bombing campaign.
7. For an exemplary NGO petition, see the one organized by Avaaz (2011).
 Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity 55

8. For biographical information about the members of the Transitional Council, see Dreyfuss (2011).
9. Reacting to news of the French recognition, a representative of the Transitional National Council
reportedly thanked the French government, claiming that the Libyan people were “very grateful”
to the French (Sitbon and Jacinto 2011). Such gratitude is not exceptional in France’s imperial
history, of course, punctuated as it is by the revolutionary violence, guidance, and occupation
offered as “liberation” and fraternal assistance to oppressed peoples. Haitians may testify to the
nature of France’s universal values and their proper application (see Buck-Morss 2009).
10. Reflecting on imperialism, Hannah Arendt once observed that “what imperialists actually wanted
was expansion of political power without the foundation of a body politic” (Arendt 1951: 135).
There is no reason to suspect otherwise today.
11. On the articulation of sympathy for the natives as a persistent feature of empires, see Stoler
(2006).
12. See, for example, Obama (2011) and Sarkozy (2011).
13. In his latest piece on Libya (at the time of writing), while he appears to be critical of NATO’s
“conspiracy” against the Libyan revolution (Achcar 2011b), Achcar manages not to mention
once his initial defense of the NATO intervention.
14. Effectively, “the Libyan revolt [was] condemned by the ‘anti-imperialists’ as ex post facto
counter-revolutionary because of Western intervention” (Proyect 2011: para. 29).
15. For a brief introduction to contrasting views on the goals of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla according
to activists onboard and the state of Israel, see the Q & A published by The Guardian (Black and
Journal of Human Rights 2013.12:40-58.

Siddique 2010).
16. To give a few more examples, consider the American volunteers of the Lincoln Brigades who
participated in the Spanish Civil War or the political practices of the Amnesty International.
17. For an extraordinary critique of violence, see the inspirational source of my comments here:
Benjamin (1921/1986).

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