'This thesis interrogates NATO’s claim to have acted responsibly when intervening in the Libyan crisis in 2011- Engaging with a conceptual framework inspired by the work of Jacque Derrida, this thesis analyses NATO’s use of institutional memory in the production of its claim to responsibility, or to have done the ‘right thing’, when intervening militarily in Libya. As such, this thesis utilizes a form of critical discourse analysis to examine the construction of NATO’s institutional memory; something this thesis finds to be intertextually constituted through a combination of both institutional and cultural texts. Found to be imbued by a colonial framework — that which, historically, works to relegate, silence and marginalise the subaltern other — this thesis finds NATO’s institutional memory to be contingent in NATO’s production of responsibility in Libya. This is demonstrated through an engagement with three principal themes: origin, familiarity, and futures. Examining these themes allows this thesis to reveal how NATO’s institutional memory is constructed as possessing a singular, linear, and hegemonic status, thereby effacing alternative understandings of the past, present, and future in order to convey a certainty of knowledge about them. It is this certainty of knowledge that NATO then applies in the production of its responsibility, enabling that responsibility to be produced as equally knowable. Criticising this finding, this thesis argues that memory (and thus responsibility) cannot be as certain as NATO impresses in its dealings with Libya. Stressing that the responsible decision always requires a necessary and unavoidable engagement with the political, this thesis concludes by contending that NATO can never actually know whether it has made the responsible decision or, indeed, what the nature of that decision is. Instead, NATO must live with its responsibility/irresponsibility: the condition of the responsible decision if there is to be one.