The Land in Sight: Waiting for a Libyan Government

Amidst the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ of 2015 I set out to conduct what would become a series of interviews with EU officials working on a specific military migration response (operation Sophia). In this paper I revisit that series bearing the question in mind of how to represent the reality that these officials let me in on in writing for a broader audience, which is my ambition going forward. Operation Sophia has been plagued by critique from its outset. At the time, I set out to ‘get the story’ from EU officials working on the operation from their basis in Brussels. The interviews were semi-structured, bordering the unstructured. Representing what I found was like piecing together a collage: presenting a co-create image, not a seamless composition, but something appropriately rough around the edges. Along the way of this project, a recurring and central interest I receive has been after the normativity of the project, followed quietly in the margins by an interest in its style. Yet to me, the normativity of this earlier research is in its style. This normativity is about what to consider for research and what questions to ask; as well as how to ask and answer them. This project is not about evaluating or debunking, but about how to compile research into an image to look at. It is about ways of writing and seeing, and about how I can make a reader see with me. I find style is essential in achieving this. The paper thus evidently seeks to raise some questions around what it may mean to write politics -or in my case, international law- differently. It principally seeks to do so by engaging in that what it proposes. Most strongly then, the paper is an exercise in writing politics differently. Through its style, the paper seeks to achieve a more popularly accessible account of my encounter and exchanges with EU officials that leaves much of our dialogue and their reality intact.