Introduction

While the proclaimed humanitarian-military intervention in Libya ended on 31 October 2011, five years later the country remains deeply unstable with the population facing various forms of violence and upheaval. The trial of Saif al-Islam Qaddafi in 2015, the son and heir to Muammar al-Qaddafi, resulted in a death penalty being issued by a trial controlled by the Libya Dawn Militia (Kirkpatrick 2015). This could not be carried out, however, as Saif al-Islam himself was a prisoner of an opposing militia (Kuperman 2013: 125–33) and thus beyond the reach of the court's sanctions. That the son of the former and executed dictator faced a death penalty that could not be fulfilled due to competing militias speaks to the violent dystopia that Libya has become. By 2016 Libya had come to resemble the very thing the UK Prime Minister David Cameron sought to avoid in 2011, namely ‘a pariah state festering on Europe's border, a source of instability, exporting terror beyond her borders’ (BBC News 2011). Confirmation of the acute failure of the Libyan intervention came from the centre of British power itself when, in September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee published Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK's future policy options (House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee 2016). This report found that the ‘result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa’ (p. 3).

When the current situation in Libya is considered against that in Syria – where despite the catastrophic loss of life there has been little political will towards a humanitarian-military intervention – then a basic requirement for a fundamental rethinking of interventions is required. The crises in both nations give rise to a whole range of questions with regards to why and how an intervention occurs in the first instance, of the form it takes, and in turn the extent to which the subsequent humanitarian and political ramifications of doing so are considered.