Libya and Syria both descended into civil war. In Libya, the outcome has so far been an unstable political vacuum. In Syria, the death toll may exceed 500,000. Millions have been displaced, in refugee flows that have fueled challenges to liberal democracy in Europe. Now, the Syrian revolution faces outright defeat.

These facts—a success rate of only one in four and all the resulting deaths —present a troubling conundrum. Do we still believe that oppressed people have the right to resist? Or should we question whether a decision to rebel can really be justified?

One method for answering that question is to re-read philosophers on the subject, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, both from the 17th century. In the minds of pro-democracy people, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) and its arguments for freedom and the right to resist oppression loom large. Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, wrote Leviathan (1651), a great defense of absolute monarchy. You might think Hobbes would simply discourage today’s freedom struggles, but the important insights his work offers into the dangers of rebellion aren’t necessarily the ones we might expect.

Hobbes’s arguments were worked out against the backdrop of political conflict in mid-17th-century England. He believed the excitement raised among parliamentarians by the revival of ancient republican ideals of “free government” had led them to tear down the walls that protected them. Aiming for the best they brought about the worst: civil war. What they should have done instead was settle for a middle way: a government that, while not ideal, at least held off the danger of widespread violence within the state. Personal security should have been prized higher than dubious ideals of freedom.

Transposing this argument to modern Syria, we seem then to have clear advice: It would have been better for the Syrians of 2011 to let things be, no matter how oppressive Bashar al-Assad’s regime was. And as for us liberals, if we cheered on the Syrian protesters like good Lockeans in 2011, we ought to have learned our lesson by 2018 and should now be shaking our Hobbesian heads in despair at our earlier naiveté (and theirs).

I think we can learn a lesson from Hobbes, but I’m not convinced that this is it. His political thinking points to a much more nuanced analysis.

The foundation of Hobbes’s theory of sovereign authority is what he calls the “Right of Nature”: All individuals can be expected to employ whatever means best preserve them against lethal threats, and everyone, he thinks, is permitted to do so. For people living in a world without government—the “Natural Condition”—the best means might include robbery, violence, and the preventive killing of anyone who could pose a threat. But in a society enjoying the benefits of a sovereign government with enough power to impose peace between citizens, the same Right of Nature dictates a different strategy. Such a government, whether republican or monarchical, overcomes the problem of mutual distrust between unprotected individuals by enforcing laws and agreements, making it possible for people to enjoy a peaceful, comfortable life. Thus, people should obey the government.

It’s the latter strategy that seems to recommend non-resistance against a regime like Assad’s. But Hobbes entered an important caveat to his theory. If the reason for obeying government is self-preservation, then what if the government itself threatens your life? In these circumstances, he thought, self-preservation may dictate forceful self-defense. Hobbes therefore concluded that individuals retain the right to defend themselves against actions by the state that threaten their lives.

So, in fact, he suggested three strategies for preserving yourself, each suited to a different context and each morally justified by the Right of Nature. The first is preventive attack in the Natural Condition. The second is passive obedience in a sovereign state that protects you. The third is self-defense in a sovereign state that attacks you. How would these three strategies have played out across the population in Syria in 2011?

Let’s assume that before the outbreak of violence in 2011, most citizens would have been best advised to follow the second strategy—to obey a sovereign Syrian state that protects them. Even so, things changed suddenly in February 2011.

The trouble began when security forces arrested 15 teenagers in Daraa, accusing them of graffitiing their school with slogans such as “the people want to topple the regime.” Terrified by rumors that the detained children were being tortured, demonstrators demanded their children back, and protest spread to other parts of Syria. The regime resorted to force and, on March 18, security forces shot (approximately) four people dead, and wounded hundreds in Daraa. By late April, escalating violence brought the city under full-scale military siege.

Hobbes takes the unusual view that even people engaged in wrongdoing (such as unprovoked armed resistance) have a moral right to defend themselves against state violence. If even wrongdoers have this right, then those who are innocent certainly do. And he thought their rights extended to protecting their children, too. Hobbes explicitly argues that it would be both morally and psychologically too demanding for political philosophy to insist that parents acquiesce in their own children’s imprisonment, torture, and possible death.

From a Hobbesian perspective, the danger for a government using force against members of its own population is that it is therefore likely to create an ever-widening category of people who are thereby released from the duty to obey the government. This is true even if —unlike in Syria—state security forces only intend to harm those who (in Hobbes’s view) wrongfully rebel. Any large-scale use of force almost always causes unintended harm to innocent people when they are mistaken for legitimate targets or exposed to risks of collateral damage. This means that, for every person the security forces deliberately threaten, others will also feel threatened.

The moral and political legitimacy of any regime depends on maintaining a wide enough social base that feels under an obligation to follow its commands, but this base can be diminished in two ways. First, spontaneous opposition might occur even if the regime hadn’t initiated any threat against its members’ lives. Second, defensive opposition includes those who haven’t rebelled spontaneously but who find themselves threatened by the regime and needing to defend themselves from it.

The more force a regime like Assad’s uses against its opponents as a whole, the more it expands the population engaged in defensive opposition. And if it keeps intensifying its violence as the opposition grows, then it will progressively eat away at its social base by forcing more and more people to change strategy from obedience to self-defense. If the government persists in doing this, then eventually the ratio between the regime’s social base and its opponents will reach a point where the country has fallen into full-scale civil war.

For Hobbes, civil war constitutes the death of the body politic and the greatest danger to those trying to survive within it. The need to avoid it was the reason why he doubted the idea of deliberately seeking political revolution. But avoidance of civil war is also the aim which ought to motivate governments, on his analysis, in their decisions about how to rule. Hobbes’s theory of rightful self-preservation helps identify errors that a regime like Assad’s should have avoided.

The philosopher’s analysis thus suggests that many people finding themselves in the spiraling cycles of violence that began in 2011 had no credible alternative and were therefore justified in resisting a regime that actively threatened them. We really can’t condemn those people. But what we can condemn is the government because it has failed its chief objective, which was to prevent the outbreak of civil war. Assad’s mismanagement of violence itself helped create and then expand the basis for legitimate defense against the regime and, hence, for wider rebellion and civil war.

So, what would Hobbes do now? After seven years of fighting, Syrian forces have recently retaken Daraa and are close to a complete victory over rebel forces. Now, it might seem tempting to think that Assad has made good on his mistakes and that a Hobbesian analysis would point towards a renewed obligation to obey the regime in Syria. But I think this conclusion is doubtful.

Hobbes argues that political obligation begins in a covenant by which individuals commit to obedience for the sake of protection. It is highly doubtful that a leader who has laid waste to vast swaths of his country, massacred hundreds of thousands of his own people, and secured victory over domestic opponents only with the military assistance of at least two major foreign powers (Iran and Russia) could offer to surviving Syrians a credible partner in a new social contract.

Syrians may not presently have any alternative to turn to. But Assad doesn’t even have the minimal legitimacy of a Hobbesian monarch, let alone anything that would merit the approval of a Lockean. Viewed in the unforgiving light of Hobbes’s political theory, his regime remains the problem; it is unlikely to have become the solution.

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It wasn’t the Axis’s invasion of their ancestral homeland that concerned these Bedouins, however, but rather their mistreatment by their own government. With the outbreak of the war, they had been thrown into a prison reserved for foreign subjects, and their families were suffering gravely in their absence. Accordingly, they demanded an explanation for why they were being punished as if they were strangers in their own native land.

“We are your subjects,” the Bedouins contended, “and if the government does not want us to be its subjects, we implore you to let us know the name of a state we can join in order to request compensation for our families.” They concluded the petition on a similar note of sarcasm: “We truly believe that we do not belong to the Egyptian government; for, if we did belong to it, adhering to its laws [as we do], it would not subject us to [such] treatment as foreigners.”

Why did the Egyptian government view its own desert-dwelling Bedouin population with such suspicion and contempt? After all, shouldn’t the native inhabitants of Egypt’s desert domains, which comprise roughly 90 percent of the country’s land surface, have counted as being just as Egyptian as inhabitants of Cairo or the Nile Valley?

The answer to these questions lies in the complex history of Egypt’s formation as a modern territorial nation-state.

Nations must never be taken for granted. They do not exist from time immemorial as naturally bounded and cohesive social units, but rather are actively made (and often re-made) to serve particular political projects in particular places at particular times. Even Egypt—ostensibly one of the most ancient political civilizations on the planet—underwent dramatic transformations in the late 19th and 20th centuries before it emerged as a modern nation-state like the one we know today.

One such transformation involved the projection of a unified territorial identity from the center of power (Cairo) into the furthest reaches of the state’s sovereign domains, including the Western Desert. While other nation-states underwent similar transformations, the Egyptian case contained some particular elements that would turn out to be consequential for the country’s region and its history.

My own interest in the territorial dimension of Egyptian nationhood began nearly a decade ago, on a 10-hour bus journey across Egypt’s Western Desert to the remote oasis of Siwa. As I stared out my window at the endless barren expanses, I began to wonder how all of this beautiful wasteland became part of Egypt in the first place. My sense of bewilderment only grew when I arrived in Siwa, which lies only 30 miles from the Libyan border and has an ethnically distinct population that more resembles that of some Libyan regions. (Siwans are of Berber descent and did not speak Arabic for much of their history.) The Egyptian history I had studied as a graduate student, focused as it was on Cairo and the Nile, had little to say about the incorporation or political status of such far-flung places.

So I set out to craft a comprehensive modern history of the vast region I came to call “the Egyptian West.” My foray into the archival sources yielded many surprises. For starters, I learned that Egypt’s western border had gone undefined for most of the country’s history, and that the first modern political map attempting to delineate such a border—an Ottoman map from 1841—went missing for the better part of a century. Although various statesmen periodically noted its absence—Lord Cromer, the British consul-general of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, surmised that the map was “supposed to have been lost in a fire which destroyed a great part of the Egyptian archives”—no one seemed especially vexed by this. In fact, Egypt’s marginal borderlands were typically ignored in the cartography of the period. When they were represented at all, they were left intentionally fuzzy.

The powers in the region—Britain and the Ottoman Empire (still technically sovereign over Egypt)—actually conspired not to define the border, lest it provoke unnecessary legal or diplomatic controversy. This stance became particularly thorny during the first decade of the 20th century, when the Italian government—seeking to lay the groundwork for its colonial occupation of Libya, which would begin in 1911—repeatedly pressured the British to draw a western border.

But the Italians’ protests fell on deaf ears. Citing “the peculiar position in which Egypt stands with regards to Turkey [the Ottoman Empire],” the British agreed with the Ottomans that it was better policy to leave the border ambiguous. A bona fide border between Egypt and (Italian-controlled) Libya would not be defined until well after World War I, in 1925, following a diplomatic treaty that was signed shortly after the elusive 1841 map resurfaced at the eleventh hour. (It had been found deep inside the Ottoman archives, in Istanbul.)

Nations are not made merely by drawing borders around sovereign territory, however; they must also to some degree incorporate and assimilate their heterogeneous populations into a unified political community. In Egypt, this process began in the last quarter of the 19th century, but it had mixed results.

Law was one institution that the government attempted to use as an instrument of assimilation. Beginning in the 1870s, the government passed a series of reforms that aimed to streamline jurisdiction and legal practice across the country, including the deserts and western oases. But it was not long before the government reneged on this project and ceded judicial autonomy to the inhabitants of the country’s vast borderlands.

In the case of the town of Siwa, one official tried to explain the government’s striking about-face by citing the remoteness of the oasis as well as the fundamental distinctiveness of its people. “The town is far from Egypt by a distance of approximately twenty days traveling by camel,” he argued. “It falls in the middle of the desert, and its people have different customs and (linguistic) conventions, and tastes that diverge completely from those of the Egyptians, by virtue of the fact that they are pure [Bedouin] Arabs.” Here is one clear case of the modernizing Egyptian state succumbing to the extreme challenges of standardizing its institutions across the full expanse of its sovereign territory; Siwa was simply too far and too different to be folded into the Egyptian national judiciary at this time.

There would be other such cases. In 1905 and again in 1908, the Egyptian government passed legislation that sought to place its administration of the country’s various Bedouin tribes on firmer footing. The new laws—undertaken in large part to counter the trend of many Egyptians falsely claiming Bedouin descent in order to demand the exemption from military service that the tribes had long enjoyed—strove to “organize [the Bedouin tribes] in an administrative fashion approaching the organization of towns and villages.”

When it came to actually enforcing the new laws, however, the government—again hard-pressed to exert its sovereign control in the sparsely inhabited deserts—was forced to cede considerable power to the local tribal leaders themselves. Despite the veneer of formality added by the legislation, Egypt’s Bedouins were still being treated as a people apart.

So it probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when the Western Desert Bedouins found themselves in jail at the start of World War II, and being treated by their government like a dangerous fifth column. The Egyptian government’s internment of its people is best interpreted as a reflection of its own lack of faith in the mechanisms through which its territorial sovereignty had been asserted in the country’s western borderland. Egypt might have clarified the limits of its territorial statehood with the 1925 border treaty with Libya, but it had by no means woven an enduring social fabric for the collective nation within those boundaries.

The Egyptian state’s antagonistic relationship with its own Bedouin population continues to this day. This is clear in the Western Desert, which has emerged as a haven for militant groups reportedly linked to the Islamic State. The Egyptian government’s heavy-handed response has led to some grave mistakes, none more egregious than the security forces’ aerial assault on what turned out to be a caravan of Mexican tourists on a Bedouin-led desert safari, killing 12 and wounding numerous others. The now years-long Egyptian military campaign in the Sinai Peninsula, nominally waged to root out the Islamic State as well as Al-Qaeda, is another sign of enduring conflict in the borderlands.

In these present-day events are echoes of the particular history of the country’s emergence as a modern territorial nation-state. Moments of significant political upheaval, from World War II to the complicated fallout of the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, have always seemed to foster contests over territorial sovereignty in the country’s borderlands. And what we see today is not so different from what the Egyptian government was struggling with over a century ago, when it first sought to consolidate the nation at the margins of its sovereignty. As a result, what it means to be Egyptian in the country’s desert borderlands remains an open question.

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“Hi. My name is Saif. I’m from Libya.” That’s how he introduced himself to his fellow graduate students during our first seminar at the London School of Economics and Political Science. We were all enrolled in the political philosophy program. Saif was better dressed and a little older-looking than most of us, but he didn’t otherwise stand out. LSE is a cosmopolitan school that attracts all sorts of students–even the sons of erratic North African strongmen.

It was only a few months into the Michaelmas term (or first term) that I realized Saif was in any way related to Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. He’d in many ways tried to fit in. He rarely spoke of his family, and, apart from being unmistakably wealthy, behaved much like the rest of us. When he introduced himself, his full name was always “Saif Al-Islam.” Full stop. After I figured out that Saif’s father was Muammar Qaddafi, a number of things about Saif started to make more sense: the designer clothes, the Bentley and driver waiting in the narrow street outside after our seminars, the guards that accompanied him everywhere.

When Saif was just another student, he didn’t much impress me. After I learned who he was, I didn’t want to start acting differently. (Some of my peers did seem to court him. I remember one Scandinavian from another program who studied with Saif and talked about weekend trips with Saif, presumably paid for by Saif.)

Saif was a quiet man who rarely said much during seminars and lectures. Although he was Muslim, Islam seemed to be a hat he could wear or remove as needed–and in London it wasn’t much needed. He dressed in the latest fashions from Paris and Milan, and, while I never saw him drunk, he seemed perfectly willing to consume alcohol in moderation.

Frequently, after class, a group of us would take our discussions across the street to the upstairs room of the George IV pub, where one of our older professors, a leader in game theory and a contemporary of John Rawls, could often be found holding court, double vodka in hand. Saif sometimes joined us and seemed to enjoy himself, but he was always reserved.

For me, these informal pub discussions, many of which lasted late into the night, were the high point of my LSE experience. I loved provocation and a good argument ad absurdum. Most of my fellow students seemed to feel the same way. For Saif, though, it must have been a little different. While the rest of us were arguing about the ideal theoretical way to run a government, Saif was going to run an actual government. For us, LSE was a source for intellectual stimulus and gratification. For Saif, it was a trade school.

Coffee with Saif

One day, near the end of our first year, I went to coffee with Saif. By then I’d grown used to the presence of one or two bodyguards everywhere he went. Saif placed an order at the counter and went off to find a table, leaving one of his guards to pay. He was beyond money, it seemed. What would it be like, I wondered, to have a driver and an assistant with you at all times to get you whatever you wanted? A middleman between you and the world? Probably not too bad.

At the time, I’d started work on a thesis, and I tried to explain the argument to Saif. It concerned the nature of governmental legitimacy, and I got quite animated as I tried to summarize the ideas of the anarchist Robert Paul Wolff. Saif seemed unimpressed. At one point, he pointed out that in the real world it is impossible to get any large group of people to come to unanimous agreement. I didn’t hesitate to agree. My interest was only in political theory, I said. I didn’t care much about application. This seemed to disturb Saif. He saw no reason to write a thesis that couldn’t be used for something practical, and his own thesis (if I remember correctly) concerned the role of non-governmental organizations within a government. Abstractions were clearly of minimal interest to him.

Although Saif’s English was good, he spoke slowly, as if summoning all his mental powers to come up with the correct word. When I’d first met him I’d thought he might not be all that smart. His deliberate, measured speech combined with his obstinately practical interests struck me as pedestrian. Looking back, however, I see Saif differently. He spoke slowly because he wasn’t confident in English, and he was practical because he was next in line to rule a country of six million people. You could say we had different interests.

Saif’s Party

The first-year seminars came to an end in the summer of 2003, and, after our written examinations were complete, Saif threw a party at a posh club in Mayfair. All the professors and graduate students from our program were invited. All came. By then, we’d heard the rumors about Saif’s pet tigers and falcons, not to mention the stories of his love life. He had reportedly offered to fly one of the prettier girls in our program on his private jet to his yacht in the Mediterranean for a weekend. No one was going to miss this party.

When I gave my name at the club entrance, I was escorted past velvet ropes upstairs to a VIP area. The cast of characters was familiar: classmates and professors whom I’d normally see in utilitarian and well-lit lecture halls. But now they looked as if they’d been placed onto the set of rap video. Dancing models in miniskirts roamed the area pressing drinks on guests. An Austrian friend and I started ordering shots of Johnny Walker Blue Label, mainly because it was the most expensive thing we could think of at the time. Things just went downhill from there. I recall trying to talk about my thesis with my 60-year-old advisor while sitting on a circular leather bed.

Eventually, Saif appeared, and all of us sat down at a long table to a lobster dinner with plenty of champagne and wine. Saif thanked us for coming and made some remarks about how much he appreciated the LSE and the philosophy department. I think we clapped. Then we dug into the lobster. It was opulence on a scale I’d never seen, a modern-day reincarnation of Plato’s Symposium made possible by a bottomless well of North African oil. I remember thanking Saif profusely at some point, my words slurred by wine and Johnny Walker Blue. Clearly, Saif, unlike me, was sober. I sensed he was judging me. I don’t remember how I got home.

Saif returns–on the air

A few weeks after Saif’s party, I went to Spain to write my thesis, and then I enrolled in law school back in the United States. I had Saif’s email address and figured I’d drop him a line if I was ever in Tripoli. The opportunity didn’t come up.

This February, rebellion began to overtake the Arab world, and before long Libya was swept up in it, too. On February 20, 2011, after protests had begun and several dozen Libyans had been killed in violence, my old classmate showed up on the airwaves to deliver an address. Saif billed it as an extemporaneous speech with no notes, “a speech from the heart and the mind.”

Eight years earlier, on the rare occasions when Saif would say something in class, he’d speak haltingly, and his thoughts were often disjointed or incomplete. All of us would listen intently, though; we really wanted to hear what he had to say. It was the same way with his speech. It was disjointed and muddled, but I wanted him to keep talking. I wanted to understand.

Newscasters were already broadcasting snippets from Saif’s speech and denouncing Saif as a war criminal equal to his father. I couldn’t feel that way. Instead, I was trying to square the liberal-minded Saif I knew with the repressive Saif I was seeing on my screen. What I saw during the 40-minute speech was two Saifs at war with each other. I saw the thoughtful Saif I knew from LSE, the Saif who genuinely desired change and progress in Libya. I also saw the frightened Saif, son of Col. Qaddaffi , the Saif who rightly feared for his own life and was being forced to prove his allegiance to his family.

The contradictions in the speech also made perfect sense to me. Saif was speaking to more than one audience. One message was to his family: You should have listened to me and implemented reforms. Nevertheless, I will stand by you. Another message was to the people of Libya: A stable Libya under my father is better than the short, nasty and brutish alternative–a life of civil war.

Saif undoubtedly sensed the gravity of the position he was taking and the possibility that he could be tried at the Hague. For Saif’s father, defying the West was an easy choice; he’d been doing that since the 1960s. For Saif, it was much harder. Saif knew the West, and he seemed to embrace its ideals.

As Saif repeated the words, “Remember what I’m saying very well,” I sensed that he’d already resigned himself to his fate. What he wanted now was to put his position on record and let history decide the rest. Later, when he promised committees where “everyone can agree on new laws and a constitution,” I thought of my discussions with him about unanimity and the basis of legitimacy. I wondered how much, if at all, they’d influenced him.

Doug Flahaut is a business bankruptcy attorney and amateur mountaineer. He lives in Echo Park, CA.

*Photo of the LSE Library courtesy of Mal Booth.

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