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Conventional literature on sanctions tends to overfocus on measuring their political efficacy on targeted countries, accused of carrying out terrorist activities. More critically, other studies have focused on the ethical problems arising from the consequences that sanctions have on entire populations. Departing from these approaches, this article draws on Fidel Castro's concept of the "Battle of Ideas" and argues that sanctions should be studied as a form of US-led imperialist warfare over the Global South. Taking the case of Libya, the article relies on archival sources (CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], US and Libyan government, and UN documents) as well as secondary literature, and argues that sanctions act as a form of economic warfare that supplants or complements the use of other forms of warfare, including military and non-military. In doing so, the article calls for a deeper and renewed engagement with the Third-Worldist Marxist theoretical lineage, when studying the question of financial subordination, dependency, war, and imperialism in the Arab world, and the Global South at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings together two cases to contribute to the growing body of literature rethinking the study of international relations (IR) and the Global South: The Libyan Arab al-Jamāhīrīyah and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Drawing on media representations and secondary literature from IR and international political economy (IPE), it critically examines three main conceptual theses (authoritarian, rentier, and rogue) used to describe the historical socio-political formations of these states up to this date. Mixing oil abundance with authoritarian revolutionary fervour and foreign policy adventurism, Libya and Venezuela have been progressively reduced to the figure of one man, while presenting their current crises as localized processes delinked from the imperialist inter-state system. The article argues that these analyses, if left unquestioned, perpetuate a US-led imperial ordering of the world, while foreclosing and discrediting alternatives to capitalist development emerging from and grounded in a Global South context. In doing so, the article contributes to the growing and controversial debate on the meanings and needs for decolonizing the study of IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic analyses of the 2011 protests in Libya often isolate them from the US-led imperialist system and the dynamics of the world market. Drawing on a collection of interviews, archival documents, and secondary sources, this article examines the social imaginaries for Libya's future from the late 1980s. These were largely constructed from ideals of individual freedom, consumerism, and the success story of Dubai. The article demonstrates how these everyday imaginaries of the 'good life' mirrored the gradual reintegration of the Libyan social formation – and its ruling class – into the global capitalist economy during the struggle against US-led imperialism under the threat of war and sanctions. Dissecting the role of these cultural experiences in the Libyan microcosm, the article contributes to the debate on cultural political economy and imperialism in relation to the Global South. It shows the inherent limits to mobilising for political change in the periphery of the world where a framework upholding capitalist modernity emerged as an alternative to socio-economic inequalities and failing infrastructural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article I examine the Libyan case through diverse theoretical lenses. For this purpose, I inquire into the ways Libya under Qadhdhafi previously has been investigated in order to deconstruct the Orientalist vision of a ‘stateless society’ and to reveal the ideological interests that the stigmatization of Qadhdhafi as a ‘mad dog’ served. By looking at the current situation, the article inevitably interrogates the role of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and its ideological kernel that seems to parallel the incapacity of academic scholarship to move beyond the notion of ‘statelessness.’ Then, it investigates whether a continuation of the logic of exception that seemed to characterize the Jamahiriyya under Qadhdhafi is still present and, finally, it proposes the possible embracement of a new radical position through the Lacanian process of ‘subjective destitution’ or ‘traversing the phantasy,’ as elaborated by Slavoj Žižek. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to provide a historical and structural context to the outbreak of the Libyan Revolution, which began in February 2011. It does so through an analysis of the polity Mu'ammar Qadhdhafi termed aJamahiriyya. By identifying a crucial transformation within the long development of theJamahiriyyathrough what Giorgio Agamben defines the state of exception, the article demonstrates how the official discourse entered in sharp contradiction with the very principles around which the regime had framed its moral purpose since the coup d'état in 1969. This metamorphosis resulted both in the slow, yet constant, erosion of the legitimacy of the regime and in the emergence of different forms of resistance. It is in such conditions, where emerging offstage resistances, what James Scott has called hidden transcripts of power, and counter-discourses began to come out, that the paper tries to assess the significance of the popular revolt and NATO's subsequent international intervention for the future of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]