The Libyan Spring and NATO: an opportune responsibility

Abstract

In the context of popular demonstrations and political upheavals of the Arab Spring, this paper addresses the 2011 intervention in Libya as a case for deepening the understanding of individual-centred security policies. Drawing on a conceptual and normative approach of R2P and NATO, it seeks to denaturalize the idea that Operation Unified Protector is a success in organizational terms, in order to uncover the underlying implications of “efficiency” in running an intervention based on R2P. It argues that there is a dissonance between the normative evolution towards ethics and military deeds which blurs the significance of responsibility. This results in a twisted sense of cosmopolitanism which primarily affects the referent object of security that has been dominant in contemporary interventionism, i.e., the unsecured civilian.