NATO’s 2011 Invasion of Libya: Colonialism Repackaged?

Global coloniality privileges the Euro-North American-centric form of humanity, at the expense of diminishing, dismissing and obliterating anything else other than the Euro-North American-centric civilisation, in the process making Euro-North American-centric modernity a global empire. The politics of empire are problematic because they set precedence, justify and perpetuate global coloniality. This is the conundrum that confronted and enveloped Libya in 2011 with the NATO-led invasion and which continues to entangle and disenfranchise the Libyan polity today, hence the need for a decolonial epistemic approach that seeks to re-humanise and affirm all forms of humanity. The current socio-economic-politico world order is a creation and direct result of modern European thought and civilisation (modernity) and European colonialism. In turn, colonialism produced global coloniality. The turning point is that global coloniality entraps humanity to a predetermined reality modelled on Euro-North American-centric modernity. Thus, coloniality is limiting to and eliminates ‘other’ epistemological creativity; it hinders ‘other’ ontological expressions of what humanity is and could be other than the predetermined Euro-North American-centric form of being and knowledge. Modernity negates, forcibly condemns forms of humanity found in the peripheries of Euro-North American civilisation, to non-humanity. Non-human beings are of less ontological value than beings of Euro-North American ancestry.