Aybike Piyade
From the Arab spring to civil war: the role of international actors and the crisis of statehood.
The concept of security includes foreign policy analysis, regional studies, and so on. The crisis sub-title, however, cannot be considered separate from security studies.
These two areas have traditionally centered on the state, and analyses have been state-centered. When considered in this context, moments of crisis in international relations are often seen as areas that characterize areas of inter-state economic, political, or military problems and find meaning under the umbrella of security. Especially with the end of the Cold War, state-centered crises and security perceptions began to be replaced by people-centered debates.
Of course, state-based analysis was a priority, but a different window was opened, and everything that interested the person started to enter through it. For example, human rights and humanitarian law issues occupied the top of the agenda with the efforts of the media and international non-governmental organizations.
These new developments also offered a new basis of legitimacy to armed interventions. NATO’s Kosovo operation in 1999 was legitimized for humanitarian reasons.
The Modern international system is founded on the principle of ‘sovereignty’. Since the Treaty of Westphalia, and generally agreed upon, the international system has an anarchic structure of sovereign and equal states with no central police or governmental power.
Thus, the concept of sovereign and equal states, which first emerged in Europe, spread throughout the world over time. Some researchers suggest that they could not have predicted the Arab Spring. Because, as is widely believed, because of the autocratic structures of the Middle Eastern countries and the obedience of their people to such forms of government, the idea of a wide-ranging popular uprising remained absurd.
Political structures are identified in the literature as failing states, not as a challenge to the current international system or a threat to its existence; on the contrary, they should be seen as a phenomenon that sustains the current international system and gives rise to its existence.
Furthermore, it should not be ignored that this phenomenon is reproduced every time. Because the definition of a failed State necessarily brings with it the definition of a successful state. As a result of this necessity, the ongoing progressive understanding does not lose its habitat.
The Modern system of states requires sovereign and equal states. The Modern state claims to have a monopoly on the use of force on its territory and can feel all the institutionalization necessary to govern simultaneously and intensively all over its country.
In terms of our subject matter, Libya in particular, in general, when the whole Middle East perspective is taken into account, the result is the constant tension between the modern and the non-existent.
This conceptualization is codified as a cause of existence, not a threat to the central capitalist countries that claim to be modern, in other words, capable of fulfilling the requirements of statehood.
In classical terms, the common aspect of security conceptualizations is the security of the ‘state’, which is defined as the principal actor of foreign policy. In the anarchic international system, it is recognized that the most rational way for states to ensure their security is to increase power.
Especially with the end of the Cold War, state-centered security perceptions began to be replaced by people-centered approaches. In other words, besides the classic state security issues, the security issues that human beings are involved in have occupied the agenda of international politics.
For example, we were entering a new era in which non-state actors created security problems as a result of genocide and massacre attempts, large-scale migrations and, on the other hand, refugee problems, mass problems in transportation to water or food, and the descent of armament into the local area, which we witnessed especially in post-Cold War African countries.
As a result of changing circumstances, new methods or reinterpretation of old methods have also been brought to the agenda regarding the management of crises. In this sense, there are some instruments used in global policy to prevent, manage, and solve crises and conflicts, such as the provision of arms control and disarmament, international law, international organizations, peacekeeping operations and humanitarian intervention, sanctions, and democratization.
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Economy & Politics
