August 21, 2011 - The Fall of Tripoli. From all appearances, the Libyan capitol has either already fallen into the hands of rebel forces, or will very shortly. Juan Cole has nice rundown of the battle for the city, and the potential larger implications for forging a government that can unify the various identities of the country. Rather than focus on the particularities of the Libyan revolution itself, I'm going to try to stay within the general direction of this blog and comment on how to approach the analysis of the event.



The events in Libya over the past six months or so highlight the intersection between comparative politics and international relations. On one hand the Libyan Revolution of 2011 is just that, a political event in the history of Libya. Such a revolution, as a political phenomenon, sits squarely in the realm of comparative politics. It could reasonably be placed within a comparative studies of other violent revolutionary events going back as far as the French Revolution. The study of revolution as a comparative exercise is, of course, well traveled territory. Scholars such as Wickham-Crowley, Foran, Gurr, Goldstone, and Skocpol, among many, many others have all added to our understanding of how revolutions occur, how they succeed, and how they fail. Studies of the Libyan Revolution will certainly find a place within that set of literature.

But the current experience of Libya is also somewhat different than the classic examples of state revolutions. As many commentators have noted, it is extremely unlikely that the rebel forces would have been able to succeed in overthrowing Qaddafi without the active military support of NATO. Since beginning their airstrikes some five months ago, the alliance has launched nearly seventy-five hundred strike sorties against targets in Libya. Notably the United States has taken a much more restrained supporting role in the operation, with most of airstrikes conducted by other NATO allies. The express purpose of the NATO operation was not the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime, but to protect civilians in Libya during the armed conflict. That standard of protection rapidly expanded to effectively include the elimination of the Qaddafi regime. That development could be read in a number of different ways. Some could see it as the first real effective implementation of the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Others could interpret it as an aggressive, and somewhat arbitrary expansion of a propensity by the West to use force to intervene in the affairs of the developing world. Regardless of the normative interpretation of the operation, it complicates the picture of the Libyan Revolution as a contained political phenomenon that can be studied strictly within the older traditional parameters of comparative politics.

Of course the international dimensions of national revolutions have long been recognized by scholars, especially those focused on revolution. Although NATO's reliance on the ideals of R2P does represent a potentially innovative aspect, the practice of intervening in other people's civil and revolutions is nothing particularly new. But recognizing the importance of the role of outside forces, who may not be operating along the same logic, or pursuing the same interests as their internal allies is vital for coming to a more complete understanding of the larger political event. This points to one of the challenges of current comparative politics - the integration of the external into the comparative analysis of largely internal political phenomenon.