The impact of international military interventions on institutional effectiveness: The case of NATO's 2011 intervention in Libya

The odyssey of international military interventions under the blanket of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) continues to cause deleterious internal conflicts from which target states struggle to recover. In the aftermath of interventions that bomb down the very foundations of societies, every single intervening state or international entity exits, bigger wars are unleashed and institutions are shattered. International actors and organisations involved in interventions of such a tyre, have taken a laissez-faire approach to the "responsibility to rebuild" citing the excuse that reconstruction should be a domestic process. Such a political declaration makes the international community's participation in reconstruction processes optional hence plunging the target states into deeper crises. It is against this background that the thesis assesses the impact of R2P sanctioned military actions on institutional reconstruction efforts, with focus on Libya's transition case spanning 12 years. The core focus in this was to assess the nexus between R2P and institutional transformation in Libya. Supporting objectives were to examine how exogenous military interventions shape state institutional transformation, as well as to demonstrate how the 2011 Northern Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) intervention snubbed the responsibility to rebuild and its resultant effects on the state of effectiveness of Libyan institutions. Lastly, the research proffers academic and policy recommendations on practice on IMI with specific focus on responsibility to rebuild for effective post-conflict transitions. The thesis methodologically relies on the theoretical lens of the "general theory of institutional change" which captures the exogeneous conflict on institutional change, particularly how institutions change at the convergence point of external and domestic conflict. This is complemented with qualitative research rooted in the constructivist paradigm. The researcher utilised the research methods attendant to the qualitative research paradigm. There are three arguments offered in this study that represent the state of transition in Libya. The first is that there is an apparent crisis of institutions where sudden ruptures in institutional changes are typified by conflict. Over the twelve years of Libyan transition, successive governments have been formed including the NTC, GNC, GNA and GNU. All these governments share common traits such as division, incapacity to formulate and execute policy, and an overall national security crisis that threatens effectiveness in governance. The second is that the involvement of the international community in the reconstruction process has not brought stability and effective transformation to date. This proves that the international community's approach to reconstruction is executed on a piecemeal disjointed basis. The third is that the future attempts to execute the R2P ought to place the international community's role to rebuild at the core with the intervening states coming up with both domestic and foreign policies that facilitate effective transition.