This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book examines humanitarian intervention, of the possibility of ethical state violence in response to civil violence in another country. It explores the space between the material and the representational in the framing of military intervention in Libya. The book provides a genealogical and postcolonial reading of the military intervention in Libya, asking how the policy was produced as a humanitarian and ethical response to the violence in Benghazi in February 2011, and how one can look at it differently. It expresses that the military intervention has been a fundamental facet of Western powers' relationships with Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries such as Libya for many years. The book demonstrates the ways in which violence is mobilised to enforce lines of legitimate and illegitimate subjectivity.