Title:
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Remembering responsibility : NATO, memory, and intervention in Libya
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'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.
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