‘No Ideas but in Things’: The Responsibility to Protect as Assemblage

Abstract

This article establishes the need to engage with the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as an assemblage in order to reckon with how material influences shape its politics. Through an analysis of the 2011 United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervention in Libya, the paper illustrates how particular tools and techniques influence R2P. The example shows how the original impetus of the intervention was mediated and translated by the particular collection of elements brought together to realise the intervention in Libya. Rather than argue this illustrates how R2P is defined by specific techniques, the article situates and then builds upon the extant literature by labelling R2P as an assemblage. In this way the article highlights how material influences and the importance of mediation are missed in the extant literature. Further, it concludes by arguing for a more productive research agenda that foregrounds empirical engagements with specific practices in order to develop the current literature.