Upholding Human Rights? Military Intervention in Libya and the Fallibility of the Performative

Abstract

It is widely accepted that powerful Western governments played a decisive role in the violent removal of the Libyan government in 2011. There is also a broad consensus that the stated aims of installing ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in Libya have not been achieved. This paper revisits the Western military intervention in Libya, taking as its point of departure and primary aim the exploration of its failure. This failure is deemed to be inevitable since military interventions are invariably constituted through discourse, and since discourse can never fix meaning definitively (i.e. through the logic of performativity). Exploring the fallibility of the performative in the case of the military intervention in Libya can 1) generate new insights into how Western governments’ attempts to constitute events in Libya failed to materialize, and 2) facilitate the repoliticization of the event itself. The paper pursues these aims through a poststructural discourse analysis of the broader debate on the military intervention in Libya. It shows how Western governments’ ‘human rights’ discourse was challenged in mainstream media by a ‘civil war’ discourse, which exposed some of the former’s shortcomings and blind spots. Two principal arguments are put forward. First, the paper argues that Western governments’ ‘human rights’ discourse fails due to its essentialist and universalist conception of ‘democracy,’ which cannot account for the complexity of the political situation unfolding in Libya. Second, the paper argues that the case of Libya stands as evidence of how ‘democracy’ must rather be considered as a ‘promise’ which is always ‘to come’.  It is suggested that this Derridean conception of ‘democracy’ holds out the best hope for more stable, inclusive and peaceful transitions through tumultuous democratization processes.