Power in practice: Negotiating the international intervention in Libya

Abstract

How does power work in practice? Much of the 'stuff' that state agents and other international actors do, on an everyday basis, remains impenetrable to existing International Relations theory. This is unfortunate, as the everyday performance of international practices actually helps shape world policy outcomes. In this article, we develop a framework to grasp the concrete workings of power in international politics. The notion of 'emergent power' bridges two different understandings of power: as capability or relation. Emergent power refers to the generation and deployment of endogenous resources -social skills and competences -generated in particular practices. The framework is illustrated with an in-depth analysis of the multilateral diplomatic process that led to the 2011 international intervention in Libya. Through a detailed account of the negotiations at the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union, the article demonstrates how, in practice, state representatives translate their skills into actual influence and generate a power politics that eschews structural analysis. We argue that seemingly trivial struggles over diplomatic competence within these three multilateral organizations played a crucial role in the intervention in Libya. A focus on practice resituates existing approaches to power and influence in International Relations, demonstrating that, in practice, power also emerges locally from social contexts. 891Taking international practices seriously, we argue, helps address these shortcomings. The everyday performance of international politics is not a mere epiphenomenon of deeper structural forces; it is also a generative force in and of itself. Central to our framework is the notion of 'emergent power,' which refers to the endogenous resourcessocial skills or competences -generated within practices. Through a detailed account of the multilateral negotiations on Libya at the UNSC, NATO, and EU, we demonstrate how state representatives use various tactics to wield influence by establishing themselves as skillful diplomats, while undermining similar claims by their opponents.Importantly, we do not claim to account for the Libyan war, in the sense of identifying all its multifaceted causes. Instead, our more limited purpose is to provide an account of the intervention, centered on multilateral diplomacy. In IR, most theories tend to explain military interventions by inferring the belligerents' interests, derived from the international structure (e.g. balancing), domestic politics (e.g. diversion), or norms (e.g. humanitarianism). There is no doubt that interests, norms, and structural forces played a role in the Libya case, but our argument operates on a different analytical plane. In tune with practice theory, we refrain from using motives, which are often empirically intractable, as explanatory variables. Instead, we zoom in on the actual moves performed by national diplomats at the UNSC, NATO, and EU in order to reconstruct the dynamics of influence that gave the i...

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