Power in practice: Negotiating the international intervention in Libya
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Author | Vincent Pouliot,Rebecca Adler-Nissen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066113512702 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of
International Relations
2014, Vol. 20(4) 889 –911
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066113512702
ejt.sagepub.com
E
JR
I
Power in practice: Negotiating
the international intervention
in Libya
Rebecca Adler-Nissen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Vincent Pouliot
McGill University, Canada
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.
Keywords
Competence, diplomacy, emergence, Libya, power, practice theory
Corresponding author:
Rebecca Adler-Nissen, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, Copenhagen, DK-1014, Denmark.
Email: ran@ifs.ku.dk
512702EJT0010.1177/1354066113512702European Journal of International RelationsAdler-Nissen and Pouliot
research-article2014
Article
890 European Journal of International Relations 20(4)
Introduction
In 2011, an international military operation helped remove the Gaddafi regime in Libya.
To some, in particular liberal internationalists, the intervention reflected the power of the
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine since the end of the Cold War (Bellamy and
Williams, 2011). Critical theorists (Bush et al., 2011) dismissed the operation as a badly
construed cover for Western interests in the region, while realists concluded that a ‘neat
realist narrative,’ with its focus on military capabilities and balance of power, could not
account for the Libya intervention (Krasner, 2013: 339). Regardless of how we approach
the intervention, there remain many unanswered questions when it comes to the multilat-
eral diplomatic process behind it. For instance, how did France and the United Kingdom
(UK) manage to overcome American reluctance to intervene? Why did deeply skeptical
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, including Germany and Turkey,
eventually support the military operation? How were BRICS1 countries, despite two
potential vetoes and a relatively strong coincidence of interest at the United Nations
Security Council (UNSC), ultimately kept at bay? Finally, what pushed European Union
(EU) member states to prepare a humanitarian mission that everybody knew would never
be carried out?
At the theoretical level, these questions raise a larger issue in the study of world
politics: how does power work in practice? More specifically, what makes one country
more influential than another in multilateral negotiations? Why do certain states appear
surprisingly powerless on the world stage, while others punch above their weight?
Existing International Relations (IR) theories provide structural answers to these ques-
tions, but we still lack a clear understanding of the concrete workings of power in
international politics. Take a classic example, neorealism: as effective as the distribu-
tion of material capabilities may be in shaping outcomes, the theory remains indeter-
minate unless we can explain how positional forces actually translate into power
dynamics around the multilateral negotiating table. While IR theories may help iden-
tify who pulls the strings of multilateral diplomacy, they are less useful to understand
how strings actually get pulled.
This article fills a gap in IR studies by theorizing power in practice. The practice per-
spective explores world politics, including organizations, communities, professions,
policy making, and state interaction, from the perspective of everyday performances that
embody shared knowledge (Adler and Pouliot, 2011; Neumann, 2002). One of the most
common criticisms of IR’s recent turn to practice is that it tends to overlook power.
Specifically, some find the approach too agency-oriented (Hopf, 2010: 345). We agree
that a practice approach should not ‘obscur[e] the broader context in which practices
occur’ (Duvall and Chowdhury, 2011: 348). Yet we also observe that structural perspec-
tives in IR problematically fail to explain three relevant facets of power dynamics:
(1) how structural resources translate into actual influence;
(2) how endogenous resources may also be locally generated (or undermined) within
the social process itself; and
(3) why many political outcomes significantly differ from strictly distributional
determinations.
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