International law and the territorial controls of non-state armed groups in Yemen and Libya (2011-2015)

International law and the territorial controls of non-state armed groups in Yemen and Libya (2011-2015) This thesis examines the paucity of international legal and theoretical frameworks that are applicable to the governance and overall status of the territorial enclaves of non-state armed groups (NSAGs), and the territorial fragmentation of Yemen and Libya by and through such actors in the years immediately following the Arab Uprisings (2011-2015). In addition to increasing our knowledge about the complex interplay between ‘sovereignty,’ ‘territoriality,’ and ‘self-determination’ on the one hand, and the state-centric nature of such prominent conceptual frameworks on the other, the thesis puts the fate of populations living within the territorial enclaves of NSAGs centre stage. This thesis thus seeks to offer an alternative to the heavily securitised lenses of studying NSAGs and their territorial enclaves in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and beyond, underscoring instead the devastating humanitarian outcomes. Beyond any ethnic claims to ‘self-determination,’ the thesis highlights that the historical subdivisions of already established states such as Yemen and Libya are often exploited by external players in a manner that evidences the continuation of colonialism by other means. Informed by the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) and ‘postcolonial’ IR theory, the thesis therefore proposes the utilisation of the conceptual framework of ‘terra nullius’ in our study of the territorial enclaves of NSAGs to 1) overcome deficiencies arising from readily available frameworks such as ‘self-determination,’ 2) accentuate the prominence of Great Power politics in all such situations of civil war and the continued existence of divisive colonial politics such as ‘terra nullius’ in our contemporary international affairs, and 3) address their largely unaccounted for humanitarian outcome. The thesis further responds to the call to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum, and by implication the generation of knowledge itself, pioneering in its methodological approach the qualitative analysis of 43,492 news reports from Yemen and Libya (18,759 reports from Yemen and 24,733 reports from Libya) using ‘NVIVO.