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This book contributes to an increasingly important branch of critical security studies that combines insights from critical geopolitics and postcolonial critique by making an argument about the geographies of violence and their differential impact in contemporary security practices, including but not limited to military intervention. The book explores military intervention in Libya through the categories of space and time, to provide a robust ethico-political critique of the intervention.
Much of the mainstream international relations scholarship on humanitarian intervention frames the ethical, moral and legal debate over intervention in terms of a binary, between human rights and state sovereignty. In response, O'Sullivan questions the ways in which military violence was produced as a rational and reasonable response to the crisis in Libya, outlining and destabilising this false binary between the human and the state. The book offers methodological tools for questioning the violent institutions at the heart of humanitarian intervention and asking how intervention has been produced as a rational response to crisis.
Contributing to the ongoing academic conversation in the critical literature on spatiality, militarism and resistance, the book draws upon postcolonial and poststructural approaches to critical security studies, and will be of great interest to scholars and graduates of critical security studies and international relations.
List of contents
Introduction: Libya's 'model intervention' 1. Humanitarian Intervention and R2P in Critical Perspective; From Humanitarian Intervention to R2P; The critique of intervention and R2P: a view from where? 2. Space, time and insecurity: Challenge hegemonic liberal space-time; Outlining a critical spatio-temporal methodology; Challenging progressive liberal time 3. Their History, Our Speed: Precision and Speed in Virtuous War in Libya; The need for speed in military intervention ; Humanitarianism from a great height: grey battle lines in the virtuous war 4. Bombs, Torture and Migrants: The Colonial Present in Libya; Colonial entanglements and the making of the Libyan state; A two-dimensional 'Gaddafi's Libya' and multidimensional geographies of violence; Coming in from the cold: Arms, torture and migration in the deal with Gaddafi 5. Geographies of the uprising: rag-tag rebels and military deficiencies; Imaginative geographies of the Libya conflict; 'Rag-tag rebels': juvenility, fear and threat; Libya's political space post-Gaddafi; Coda: Contestation and disorder 6. Voices of Resistance; Voices of the uprising, rebuilding the state; Conclusion: When a war is not a war, and resisting humanitarian intervention
About the author
Susannah O’Sullivan teaches International Relations at the University of Bristol and University of Leicester, UK. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2015.
Summary
Most scholarship on humanitarian intervention frames the ethical, moral and legal debate over intervention in terms of a binary, between human rights and state sovereignty. This book outlines and destabilises this false binary in the debate, between the human and the state.
