Abstract Spaces for Intervention in Libya and Nigeria.

This article analyzes how the concept of "ungoverned spaces" in Nigeria and Libya is socially and politically constructed to justify international counterterrorism interventions. Combining dialectical and decolonial frameworks, it argues that these spaces are abstracted through unifying rationalities—cognitive, normative, and operational—that simplify complex local realities, erase historical and socio-political contexts, and legitimize state and foreign violence. In Libya, NATO’s 2011 intervention and subsequent international efforts framed the country as a fragmented, ungoverned territory requiring external governance, while in Nigeria, counterinsurgency against Boko Haram has been shaped by narratives that dehumanize and other the group, facilitating expanded military violence often in collaboration with global powers. The article highlights how these interventions perpetuate colonial patterns of knowledge, power, and being, outsourcing local security problems to global actors while subcontracting global security agendas to local forces, thereby producing and sustaining the very conditions they claim to resolve.