The Libyan Crisis: In the Mirror of Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

The United Nations (UN), when established in 1945, was envisaged to provide a bulwark against threats to international peace and security. Thus the unilateral use of force, which undermined the effectiveness of the defunct League of Nations, the precursor to the UN, was proscribed. From the Cold War era and its aftermath, however, a number of states have pursued parochial interests under the umbrella of the UN, some permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) being key players in that regard. In a world, buffeted by intra-state conflicts particularly across the African continent, the UNSC has had to balance the verve for partisan outcome with the primary responsibility of the maintenance of international peace and security. An important step towards the maintenance of international peace and security was the reaffirmation of paragraphs 138 and 139 in Resolution 1674 which formalised the UNSC support for the normative concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2006. Critical to the actualization of R2P is the need for states to redefine security to include that of human security, and the possibility of applying coercive measures to ensure that states do not commit heinous crimes and crimes against humanity. In the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011, the UNSC employed a raft of measures to prevent a humanitarian carnage in Libya, one of the countries adversely affected by the Arab Spring. However, the manner of the implementation of enforcement measures, led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in Libya has triggered questions about the real intentions behind “humanitarian” intervention in Libya. The questions bother on whether the military operation in Libya was inspired by considerations of R2P or was another instance of realpolitik cloaked in R2P. Employing a qualitative analysis of existing literature, this research interrogates the aforementioned questions and concludes that, the NATO-led intervention was motivated by factors including regime change, while the use and conduct of military operations violated the laws of war, leading to increasing number of causalities. In addition, post-Gaddafi Libya remains a fragile state, adversely affected by sectarian violence. As a result, the precedential nature of the Libya intervention would adversely affect future international cooperation on R2P. Mindful that future collaboration on R2P has been hampered by the case of Libya, this research recommends, among others, that multilateralism and shared responsibility within the UNSC should be pursued to avert the dominance of a few powerful states. At the continental level, it is recommended that the African Union (AU) strengthens its conflict prevention capacities to pre-empt fault lines of conflicts across the continent. With reference to Libya, it is recommended that the international community must support efforts at post-conflict reconstruction in Libya to ensure stability and to prevent a relapse into chaos.