Albert Woodfox was incarcerated for forty-three years and ten months in Louisiana’s prison system, almost entirely in solitary confinement. His memoir, Solitary, foregrounds an intense entanglement of antiblack captivity and carceral confinement within the prison plantation known as Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. This chapter articulates critical moments in Albert’s life that transcend the boundaries of narration and description in order to uncover his knowledge of social death and slavery’s carceral afterlife. From internalizing and accepting racialized abuse at the hands of the criminal legal system during his youth, to witnessing mass captivity and racial terror inside Angola’s prison plantation, to facing a lifetime of separation from kin while surviving political retaliation under the torturous conditions of prolonged solitary confinement, Albert’s narrative reveals how the logics and architectures of slavery’s past endure as the social foundations to present-day mass incarceration.

The USA as a prison where Black people are confined inside a barbed wire of stereotypes – an idea memorably articulated by Malcolm X in 1963 – is influentially explored in works by Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, a three-man mini-tradition within prison writing. Circumstances leading to Baraka’s experience of solitary confinement (memorably chronicled in his 1979 poem “AM/TRACK”) are the subject of the first third of the chapter. Etheridge Knight, who in prison forged his own poetic path out of tools provided partly by Malcolm and Baraka, is the subject of the next third. The Knight-inspired Reginald Dwayne Betts, a lawyer-poet who was incarcerated as a teenager, is the focus of the rest of the chapter (except for a brief examination of Baraka’s son, Ras, a significant political leader). All four men articulate secrets of survival in the coils of carceral culture and model alternative ways of imagining justice.

This chapter critically engages Assata: An Autobiography by former Black Liberation Army operative and political exile Assata Shakur. The argument examines how Shakur develops psychologically and politically as both a Black revolutionary and a Black revolutionary woman. The chapter offers close readings of the political messages shared throughout Assata then contextualizes Shakur’s frameworks by turning to her experiences as a runaway teen in the Village in New York City. Her story – from childhood until her time being held as a political prisoner – compels attention to how blackness and gender collide and at times collapse. This chapter illustrates how her political communiqué “To My People,” broadcast by Shakur while incarcerated, was informed by the lessons on Black gender and sexual vulnerability she learned from Miss Shirley, a transgender woman who was her surrogate caregiver during her time living in the Village.

Realist narrative genres, such as memoir and autobiography, are the most prevalent women’s prison writing. Contemporary readers rely on these narrative elements in order to believe stories. However, when the writer disassociates during a traumatic event and does not remember details that would ground their telling in recognizable details, their narratives cannot reliably reference them. As incarcerated women authors grapple with what they’ve suffered and what they’ve done, their narratives inevitably intersect with social realities that form the background violence that created the conditions for the discrete, traumatic events of harmdoing. While carceral culture essentializes people into stagnant categories of worth – good/flawed, criminal/victim, innocent/guilty – incarcerated women’s stories show how facile these conceptions are, how much harm they cause, and that incarceration does nothing to address these issues and often actively prohibits healing.

The use of the no-fly zone in the Bosnian civil war remains both underexplored and puzzling on several different levels – for one thing, many otherwise comprehensive accounts reserve only passing mention for what appears to many an unimportant by-product of US foreign policy (or lack thereof; Drew, 1994; Owen, 1997; Burg and Shoup, 1999; Holbrooke, 1999; Chang, 2011). This may be part of a larger trend: biographies and historians’ accounts tend to focus on only a few policies of the early Clinton presidency, and then ‘jump’ to 1995. Scholarly work focusing on the diplomatic, economic and military instruments used in the early stages of the conflict tend to discuss the no-fly zone as one of the many steps in a strategy of coercive diplomacy (Owen, 1997, p 151), with scarce acknowledgement of the intricate political processes surrounding this specific instrument. And yet, a focus on the Bosnian no-fly zone offers both a theoretical perspective on White House decision-making processes, as well as a richer empirical account of deeply flawed American foreign policy toward Bosnia, as it moves beyond broad narratives of ‘containment’ and ‘circumvention’ (David, 1995) to look at the details of foreign policy creation in 1992 and 1993.

The hesitant position of the Bush administration vis-à-vis Bosnia may appear puzzling. The dominance of the US in the international system arguably reached its peak in the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union had crumbled and left the US unrivalled economically or militarily. The US was the only power with the ability to project and the willingness to identify interests globally.

The no-fly zone in the 2011 Libya intervention, and its subsequent non-use in Syria, are best understood by examining it as a result of the ideational competition within the Obama administration amid an uncertain, though less permissive international environment. This analysis builds on previous case studies by treating ideas as an intervening variable that mediates between systemic conditions and state behaviour. Unlike earlier chapters on Iraq and Bosnia, this analysis must rely less on primary sources, as many relevant documents remain classified. This restriction limits the direct evidentiary support for the arguments presented in this chapter. Despite these limitations, a detailed examination has been conducted using a careful triangulation of secondary sources alongside a variety of both edited and unedited materials. This approach provides a comprehensive view of the administration's decision-making process. While this chapter cannot conclusively prove its interpretation of events or entirely rule out alternative explanations, the richly detailed narrative constructed from available sources should allow readers to assess the plausibility of the arguments made and form their own conclusions about the events surrounding the implementation of the no-fly zone in Libya.

Scholarly discussions on the 2011 intervention have covered aspects such as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) norm (Bellamy and Williams, 2011; Chesterman, 2011; Nuruzzaman, 2022), alliance management (Davidson, 2013) and decision making within the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, 2014; Martin, 2022). Further discussions draw parallels with other international conflicts like those in Côte d’Ivoire and Syria (Kildron, 2012; Rees, 2022).

Much like with Iraq's no-fly zones, the debate about the potential use of a no-fly zone in Syria is often mentioned in broader literature about US intervention, yet rarely occupies the central focus it might seem to warrant given its role in American politics at the time. While the near-contemporaneous Libyan conflict resulted in direct US military action, Syria saw a protracted civil war where the possibility of a no-fly zone was repeatedly raised and rejected (Phillips, 2016; Zenko, 2016b). Extant scholarship on (the lack of) US intervention in Syria tends to focus on Obama's ‘red line’ in association with the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons. The US foreign policy establishment grappled with numerous contrasting ideas about how best to respond to the humanitarian catastrophe and complex conflict in Syria.

Moreover, as protests against President Bashar al-Assad escalated into civil war in 2011, comparisons to Libya quickly surfaced as both cases shared elements of government brutality against demonstrators turned rebels. However, Syria, unlike Libya, was more strategically complex and involved major global powers such as Russia, which directly supported Assad. Despite calls from Syrian opposition groups and US allies such as Turkey for the creation of no-fly zones to protect civilians from aerial bombardments, the US hesitated (Zenko, 2011a). The reasons for this hesitation lie not only in the lessons learned from Libya but also in the evolving dynamics of American foreign policy and broader systemic considerations as the wider international environment had begun to shift.

As recently as March 2022, in an address to Congress, Ukrainian President Zelensky pleaded: ‘Is this a lot to ask for, to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine to save people? Is this too much to ask?’ Recalling Martin Luther King's famous speech, he continued: ‘I have a dream, these words are known to each of you today. I can say, I have a need. I need to protect our sky.’ Despite considerable public debate, the Biden administration remained steadfast in its opposition to a no-fly zone for fear of uncontrollable escalation should NATO jets patrol the skies of Ukraine. Zelensky knew of these concerns, but he also knew of the seemingly inescapable grasp the no-fly zone continues to have on the imagination of both Washington decision makers and the American public.

The no-fly zone holds a curious place in US foreign policy. Whenever American decision makers considered military intervention abroad in the last four decades, the no-fly zone was not far from their thoughts. In four major cases, the instrument was in fact employed – to detrimental, at times downright catastrophic effect. This assessment is mirrored in relevant scholarly and policy literature, and backed by empirical evidence. The Iraqi no-fly zones are seen as ineffective at best, and irrelevant at worst, in preventing Saddam Hussein's crackdown against Kurds and Shias or coercing him into cooperation with the international community. The Bosnian no-fly zone is usually considered a failure: not only did it not effectively protect civilians or compel perpetrators of violence, it may have created a false sense of security in Bosnia's doomed ‘safe havens’.

In this book, I demonstrated the utility of neoclassical realist approaches, and particularly the use of ideas as intervening variables in the foreign policy executive’s decision-making process, to answering theoretical and empirical questions about the American use of no-fly zones. While ostensibly employed for the protection of civilians in intra-state conflict, relevant scholarship tells us that no-fly zones are not, in fact, suited to this purpose. Why have US foreign policy decision makers continued to discuss and employ them?

I developed a neoclassical realist framework employing ideas and ideational competition as an intervening variable in the transmission belt from an uncertain international environment to foreign policy choice. Decision makers use ideas to guide their interpretation of uncertain systemic conditions, and to wield them as tools of persuasion in foreign policy deliberations. Decision making in the US foreign policy executive is then best understood as a competition between diverging ideas about US interests and appropriate response strategies to the scenario at hand. Under pressure to act quickly, decision makers suggest no-fly zones not to solve the problem or manage the conflict itself, but to patch over these intra-administrative ideational divides. I investigated and provided confirmatory evidence for this causal mechanism in detailed case studies on US foreign policy across four administrations.