ABSTRACT

The Cuban and Libyan approaches to cooperation explored in this book are ‘exceptional’ in many regards: 1 they embody a clear ‘alternative’ to Northern-led humanitarian ‘rules’, explicitly positioning themselves outside traditional conceptualisations of ‘donor states’ and officially aiming, in that process, to disrupt the power imbalances which characterise post-colonial and neocolonial North–South/donor–recipient relations. Both systems have thus aimed to ‘share what they have, rather than give what is left over’ (to paraphrase José Martí, cited inChapter 3), whether through Cuba’s solidarity with and carefully designed internationalist scholarships for citizens and refugees from around the world, or via Libya’s targeted scholarship programme for selected students from the Arab region and broader policy of facilitating the migration of Arab brothers and sisters, including in particular Palestinians, as part of a broader policy of supporting the development of sovereign and independent Arab peoples and nations which would, in turn, constitute a coherent Arab Ummah. In so doing, it can be argued that Cuba and Libya alike historically (re)constituted themselves respectively as internationalist and Pan-Arabist ‘sharers’ – as opposed to ‘donors’ or ‘providers’ – as states which have simultaneously distributed humanitarian assistance to/in the Sahrawi and Palestinian refugee camps and (re)created a central margin for refugees’ education and development.