Introduction

For over half a decade, Libya has been ravaged by revolutionary violence, civil wars, and horrific acts of terrorism, all of which have further divided the polity, undermined the economy, fractured the state’s sovereignty, and elicited repeated foreign interventions. These waves of political instability wracking the fragile mosaic of Libya’s society were unleashed as the forty-two-year reign of Colonel Mu‘ammar Al-Gaddafi came to its bitter and bloody end in 2011. Libya’s anti-Gaddafi protestors, inspired by the successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, joined the Arab Spring in February, only to be dragged into an eight-month civil war that has irreparably fractured the nation. With military assistance from NATO and the Arab League, Libya’s revolutionary militias, the thuwar, were finally able to depose the Gaddafi regime in the fall of 2011. Elections for a transitional government were soon held in the summer of 2012. Indeed, there was much hope and euphoria surrounding the possibilities facing a new Libya, a country with vast oil resources to finance its transition. Yet successive efforts to create a viable national authority only led to increasing social, economic, and political fragmentation across the country.

The primary question that drove the country back to civil war in 2014 was the extent to which Libya’s new revolutionary forces should make any accommodation with the agents and institutions of the old regime. By the summer of 2014, Libya had two governments, both claiming electoral legitimacy and sovereignty over the country. Each was backed by unstable coalitions of militias representing a patchwork of ideologies and local interests. To make matters worse, a third government would emerge the following year. This one, however, would seek to extend the putative Caliphate of the Islamic State from the battlefields of Iraq and Syria to the scarred landscapes of Libya. In a desperate bid to hold Libya together, the North Atlantic powers backed the creation of a new interim national authority in late 2015 to lead the fight against the Islamic State and to stymie the flood of migrants and refugees leaving Libya’s shores for Europe. Though there was some success with respect to the former, Libya’s UN-backed Government of National Accord also complicated the already complex civil war that had erupted in 2014. By the end of 2017, questions continued to be raised as to whether or not Libya would become a failed state, if it were not already one.

The interesting thing about Libya, however, is the extent to which there often appears to be no relationship between political order in the country and the capacity of the central state that claims to rule it. Indeed, the Gaddafi regime was frequently accused of actively dismantling what few state structures Libya had either historically accumulated under Ottoman and Italian domination, or self-generated since independence in 1951. The historical weakness of the Libyan state was also one of the factors that allowed Gaddafi to seize control in the first place. The Gaddafi regime had easily come to power in a 1969 military coup that overthrew Libya’s monarch, King Idris Al-Sanusi. Al-Sanusi had been a feeble and increasingly unpopular ruler, one installed by British and US administrators in a rush to give Libya independence after World War II. The Allied victory over the fascist armies of Italy and Germany on the battlefields of North Africa, a victory that was aided by Libyan partisans, had led to a tripartite French, British, and US administration over the former Italian colony, Libia Italiana. There were several reasons for the haste to give Libya independence in 1951. Most Libyans would never accept a return to Italian rule and the United Nations would never abide an indefinite Anglo-American trusteeship. The occupying North Atlantic forces, keen to maintain their forward Mediterranean deployment in the emerging Cold War, found a willing partner in the Sanusi. Thus Libya managed to achieve independence under the Sanusi monarchy despite the absence of a strong nationalist movement or any state institutions outside of the colonial administration. Insofar as there was a Libyan polity to speak of, it was one that had yet to be woven together through the modern processes and technologies of statebuilding. The imposition of the Sanusi monarchy also served to retard the development of alternative political movements based upon republicanism, Arab nationalism, and Islamist modernization, all of which were viewed as antagonistic to Anglo-American interests in the region.

Prior to the establishment of an Italian colony in Libya (1911–43) and the installation of the Sanusi monarchy in 1951, Libya’s Ottoman rulers (1551–1911) had done little to create modern institutions there either. For centuries, Istanbul’s presence had been limited to extracting what little wealth it could from the dying trans-Saharan trade networks that terminated along the impoverished coastal lands between Cairo and Tunis. The autonomy of local Ottoman deputies to pursue their own economic activities, notably on the high seas, became a prominent feature in historical narratives of the period. In the final decades of Ottoman rule, Istanbul’s grip on Libya merely served to thwart Franco-British encroachment as well as Italy’s aspirations to be seen as a great European power through imperial expansion. The violence of the Italian occupation in the 1920s, which featured extensive ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide against various segments of Libyan society, helped to facilitate the creation of a plantation colony, one that could absorb large numbers of European settlers. Many Libyans did not sit idly by, yet they would pay a steep price in blood for their resistance to Italian fascism.

It is difficult to imagine how a country that had experienced such political ravages and natural disadvantages could become one of the most developed nations in Africa and the Middle East within a few short decades. But this is the magic of oil, and it transformed Libya beyond all recognition from the 1960s onward.

Oil has always been a blessing and a curse for those who rule the countries that possess it. This was certainly the case for King Idris, who had been granted one of the world’s poorest countries in 1951, surviving on base rents from Washington and London for the first decade of his rule. Though the world was awash with cheap oil in the 1950s and 1960s, the quality of Libya’s crude and the country’s proximity to Europe worked to position it favorably in the geopolitics of the age. Libya was a dependable ally of the North Atlantic world and on the “right” side of the Suez Canal, so its entry into the international oil market flooded the state’s coffers with easy money. Libya’s rapid – almost unprecedented – economic development in the 1960s helped to alleviate the country’s chronic poverty. But oil also resulted in significant social dislocation for many Libyans while the revenues buttressed the authoritarian tendencies of the Sanusi regime. In the end, the monarchy became a victim of its own success, as the modernization of Libya had created new socio-economic divisions and expectations, as well as a new international political consciousness among key segments of the population. The Free Officers’ coup of September 1, 1969, had drawn deep inspiration from events unfolding across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the Third World and Non-Aligned movements that had emerged during the tumultuous decades of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. On the whole, the people of Libya appeared to embrace the 1969 coup with cautious optimism.

What the September 1 revolution initially represented and what it would become in the years that followed radically diverged. Gaddafi and his followers could have simply enacted a political system based on military-backed single-party rule led by a charismatic and iron-willed figure, a system following the Egyptian, Algerian, Iraqi, and Syrian models. Had this been the case, Libya’s history – and the ultimate fate of the Gaddafi regime – might have been quite different. Instead, Gaddafi set the country upon its own unique path, one in which a new kind of political system, a “state of the masses” or Jamahiriyyah, would be erected. The state would be governed from the bottom up without parties or a civil society. This order putatively adapted the best practices of traditional Libyan Islamic society and applied them to modern governance.

At the same time, the fledgling Jamahiriyyah had to be defended. A framework of revolutionary committees, courts, guards, and informants would extirpate the enemies of the regime wherever they existed, at home or abroad. Over time, these revolutionary organs and the Jamahiriyyah system came to serve themselves and the regime behind them, terrorizing and dividing a citizenry whose livelihoods grew increasingly dependent upon a centrally planned economy. Arbitrary detentions, political imprisonment, disappearances, invasive surveillance, and executions all became commonplace during the darkest phases of the revolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

All of this socio-political “imagineering” in Gaddafi’s Libya was also made possible by the magic of oil. The global price of oil reached unprecedented levels from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s. During this period, Libya continued to pursue infrastructural development at a breakneck speed while also greatly expanding the size of its military apparatus. Growing tensions between the Gaddafi regime and the North Atlantic powers led Tripoli to embrace Soviet-made weaponry. Though Gaddafi would continue to profess his aversion to either the Western or Eastern blocs in the Cold War, Libya’s oil-fueled military modernization would be used for territorial expansion into Chad and attempts to subvert the interests of Washington, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh through the deployment of proxy armies and terrorist groups around the world. The zenith of Gaddafi’s international ambitions in the mid-1980s saw the disastrous defeat of Libyan forces in Chad and US military jets bomb Tripoli and Benghazi in an apparent attempt at regime change. Gaddafi’s revenge – the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people – came in late 1988. United Nations sanctions and an embargo soon followed, cementing Libya’s isolation and Gaddafi’s status as an international pariah.

The Gaddafi regime was likewise increasingly isolated from the Libyan people. International sanctions coupled with depressed oil prices from 1986 onward had gutted the state’s ability to buy political acquiescence through social spending and public employment. Efforts to liberalize the economy in the late 1980s were merely escape valves for pressures that were growing within the polity. Average Libyans, who had always trusted their immediate social environments far more than the various leaders in Tripoli, Benghazi, Rome, or Istanbul, continued to develop the local means to survive international isolation and the increasingly bunkered nature of the ruling elites. In the 1990s, the Gaddafi regime faced protest movements, military coups, tribal uprisings, and finally an Islamist insurgency that had gained experience in the Afghan campaign against the Soviets. The Gaddafi regime survived through increasing coercion as well as the traditional socio-political alliances and intra-tribal manipulations that had long underwritten its rule.

The regime’s survival ultimately depended upon its willingness to concede to international demands regarding Libya’s direct and indirect involvement with terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. Accounting for Libya’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction also helped the Gaddafi regime return to the international stage in the 2000s, as did increasing oil prices and the Libyan government’s willingness to be a partner – albeit a discrete one – in the global war on terror launched after September 11, 2001. The Gaddafi regime also attempted to renew itself domestically by promising political reforms and enacting economic ones. The face of Libyan reform was Saif Al-Islam, Gaddafi’s second son and the presumed prince héritier of the regime. Fluent in the international lingua franca of human rights and economic privatization, Saif Al-Islam helped to usher in a new age of neoliberalization that promised much but delivered little for most Libyans. It was a period in which the pretense of revolution and socialism was abandoned. In its place came the increasing visibility of the Gaddafi family’s direct control over the state and the economy, as well as the nakedness of the plundering of public assets for private gain as oil prices climbed to record heights in 2008 ahead of the global financial collapse. The putative developmental success of Libya and its billions in cash reserves suggested the wherewithal to co-opt potential opponents or to coerce them with the regime’s increasingly sophisticated and disciplined praetorian guards. In reality, a quarter of the population consisted of young men facing unemployment rates of over 30 percent. These young men would help launch their own revolution. And like Gaddafi’s coup forty years beforehand, it was a revolution deeply inspired by international events, those unfolding in early 2011 to the west in Tunisia and the east in Egypt.

The Need to Rethink Libya After the Uprising

The narrative above, which is fleshed out in more detail in Chapter 1, gives us some sense of the conditions and trends that led to the 2011 uprising in Libya and why it became a full-blown, internationalized civil war (Chapter 2). The primary focus of this study, however, goes well beyond documenting Libya’s place in the Arab Spring. The chapters that follow will first detail the aftermath of the 2011 conflict (Chapter 3) and will then examine the inability of Libya’s transitional authorities to consolidate power effectively (Chapter 4). Lastly, this book will explain the myriad civil conflicts that followed this failed transition, conflicts that effectively divided the country’s sovereignty between rival governments, that allowed the Islamic State to take root in central Libya, that precipitated a new round of discrete and overt foreign military interventions, and that created an international migration crisis along Libya’s western coast (Chapter 5). With the advantage of hindsight, this study benefits greatly from the fact that several years have passed since the fateful events of 2011 radically altered the course of Libyan history. It is this perspective that makes this in-depth study of contemporary Libya both unique and warranted.

Needless to say, this study also builds upon the work of other scholars, researchers, and institutions that have attempted to understand post-revolutionary Libya, as well as the regional and international implications of its turbulent transition to a new political reality. In the final weeks of the 2011 uprising and in the months afterward, several excellent volumes and reports were assembled or reissued in order to explain the causes of the country’s revolution. Other studies and collections soon appeared in the years that followed, providing new insights, context, and data on the events of 2011 and what significance those events held for the new Libyan polity taking shape. All of these works have had an immense influence on this book, as is made clear through frequent reference to their critical findings.

This study, however, is the first to reconsider the 2011 uprising in relation to the intractable political crises and armed conflicts that have for several years now inhibited Libya’s transition to a stable post-Gaddafi order. Backgrounded by a chapter on Libya’s unique history of state-making, state-unmaking, and state-evading (Chapter 1), the bulk of this text examines four distinct phases in the recent evolution of contemporary Libya: the significance of the 2011 uprising and the ways in which NATO’s intervention shaped the course of the war and its aftermath (Chapter 2); the consolidation of opposing factions during and after the uprising from 2011 to 2012 (Chapter 3); the growing insecurity and political instability of the transitional period from 2012 to 2014 (Chapter 4); and finally the causes and consequences of the return to open civil war from 2014 onward (Chapter 5). An important effect of these final two stages was the emergence of an Islamic State affiliate in Libya, which would go on to claim the city of Sirte – the city where Gaddafi was born and later brutally executed in 2011 – as its North African capital in 2015. The failed transition in Libya and the return to open civil war would also allow for the flourishing of clandestine trade networks, notably in human trafficking, which contributed to the largest international refugee and migration crisis since World War II.

Though largely chronological in structure, this study aims to understand the various contexts, crucial decisions, and core stakeholders that generated the most fateful turning points in Libya’s recent history. Given the ways in which the international community, particularly the North Atlantic powers, have problematically engaged with Libya’s increasingly interlocking crises since 2011 (if not years and decades beforehand), the modest aim of this study is to step back and take stock of what has happened, reconsider the reasons for these events, and suggest – by way of conclusion – other ways of understanding the historical and geopolitical significance of what has happened in Libya since 2011. While this ultimate aim might seem lacking in any practical application, a driving concern behind this study is the extent to which modern Libya has always been caught up in the agendas of others who were looking for easy answers and comforting narratives. This study is not driven by the ultimate goal of arriving at lessons learned, actionable findings, or policy recommendations, but instead it seeks to understand Libya’s recent history in relation to the larger forces that impinge upon it. These include those forces we often choose not to acknowledge and those that are beyond our ability to affect through existing social, political, and economic institutions. Just as there are no easy answers when it comes to rethinking Libya, little comfort will be offered to those who eschew responsibility for helping unmake modern Libya.

Uprising to Revolution, Civil War to Islamic State: Chapter Summaries

The process of rethinking Libya presented in this book begins by examining the emergence of Libya as a modern nation-state and the peculiar geopolitical trajectory it has followed. Contrary to most accounts, Chapter 1 presents Libya’s consolidation as a nation-state as a contingent and relatively recent confluence of events, largely occurring in the years after independence in 1951. With the slow decay and collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s and early 1900s, its grip on Libya, Istanbul’s last significant North African possession, finally gave way to Italian imperialism. Rome’s conquest of Libya commenced in earnest over a quarter of a century after most of Africa had been claimed by the European powers in the 1880s. At the time of the Italian conquest, local ambitions for republican statehood existed among the Tripolitanian elites in Libya’s western region. These ambitions contended with the dynastic claims of the Sanusi religious order in the eastern region of Cyrenaica. Both, however, were decimated as Rome embarked on its imperial project to annex and colonize the lands between French Tunisia and British Egypt from 1911 to 1943.

The idea that Libya was a modern nation-state – one land and one people, from Kufra to Zuwara, Sebha to Tobruk – was an idea that first had to be nurtured by the Sanusi monarchy when it was suddenly handed independence by the United Nations in 1951. The three pillars of King Idris’s rule were the Sanusi religious order, the Anglo-American military presence, and finally the oil boom of the 1960s. Whereas the Sanusi monarchy variously refused to engage in statebuilding or only did so haphazardly, the Gaddafi regime would embark on a process of radical state remaking in the 1970s – or what many would consider an extended experiment in state unmaking. Though basic developmental indicators suggested that Libya had indeed made profound advancements from its dismal state at the end of World War II, this was largely the result of the country’s oil wealth, which Gaddafi had also funneled into wasteful military adventures, international provocation, self-promotion across Africa, and questionable infrastructural projects like the Great Man-Made River, the world’s largest – and perhaps most expensive – water-conveyance scheme.

In the early twenty-first century, after decades of misrule, Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyyah had not created a new polity so much as it had created a terrorized populace well versed in the arts of political evasion through alternative social and economic networks rooted in their local environments. In the final decade of the regime, as global oil prices rebounded in the early 2000s, it seemed as if the Gaddafi family itself was engaging in an act of evasion. The neoliberalization of the Libyan economy and the increasing reliance on technocratic forms of governance allowed the regime to transcend the drudgery of rule by outsourcing it to experts while the Gaddafi family sought membership among the transnational political and financial elite.

Chapter 1 documents these and other contexts that help us understand the sources of furious anger that were unleashed in 2011 – the decades of repression, of social manipulation, of economic mismanagement, and of political disenfranchisement. Beyond the motivations driving many Libyans to take up arms against their government, these contexts also help us to understand how the 2011 uprising was organized at the local level. Networks for surviving the Jamahiriyyah, which had been both intentionally and unintentionally nurtured by the Gaddafi regime for decades, then turned on the regime, providing the socio-economic basis for its overthrow. Reviewing the regime’s belligerent foreign policies and its reprehensible human rights record in Chapter 1 is also important because it helps explain why the North Atlantic powers resolved so quickly to intervene militarily in Libya’s emerging revolution in 2011 despite these same powers having spent the previous decade rehabilitating Gaddafi on the international stage.

Chapter 2 examines how, when, and why various Libyan constituencies came together to oppose the Gaddafi regime – or to rally to its defense. The forces that would oppose the regime in 2011 were not exclusively the most marginalized social and political groups in country. In fact, the eventual success of the uprising partially rested in its ability to mobilize and redeploy many of the regime’s own elites and institutions, as well as the social coalitions that had long supported Gaddafi’s rule. Facilitating all of this was, as noted above, the de jure local politics of the Jamahiriyyah and the de facto local politics that had emerged alongside it as a result of the weaknesses, mismanagement, and imperfections of the Gaddafi state. These formal and informal forms of organization would not only empower the revolution to unseat the regime, they would go on to become the basic constituent elements of the various factions vying for control over the post-Gaddafi state (as Chapter 3 details).

While both sides in the 2011 uprising took precipitous measures that rapidly militarized the situation, it was undoubtedly the entry of NATO and the Arab League into the conflict in mid-March that had the greatest effect on the course of the civil war. The intervention, first of all, afforded the armed uprising and its international supporters time to reorganize and focus their efforts after the rapid collapse of the rebels’ eastern front to Gaddafi forces. Secondly, the intervention sidelined other peacemaking initiatives, notably those of the African Union, as the participating international forces had essentially equated the ultimate destruction of the state’s military capacity with regime change. Lastly, the intervention and other forms of covert assistance rendered to the rebellion provided the participating North Atlantic and Gulf states with an understanding of the forces they were assisting, those calling themselves thuwar. In some cases, this assistance would foster lasting alliances between specific Libyan constituencies and foreign patrons. With foreign special forces and intelligence agents deployed all across Libya by mid-2011 to assist with targeting and training, rebel fighters and NATO officers were working hand-in-hand to topple the regime. One location in particular, the western city of Misrata, which was subjected to a vicious siege by regime forces, would take these experiences of suffering and ultimate triumph into the post-revolutionary period. After all, it was Misratan fighters and not those who had launched the revolt in Cyrenaica who claimed the uprising’s ultimate prize at the end of the fighting in October: Gaddafi himself. Unfortunately, the 2011 intervention represented the end – not the beginning – of direct international security assistance to Libya. Having morally legitimated and militarily supported Libya’s thuwar, it would now be difficult for the uprising’s North Atlantic partners to question, let alone confront, the political forces they had helped unleash and empower in Libya.

As Chapter 3 explores, the immediate post-revolutionary situation in Libya was a time of hope and fear. The end of the regime meant a new political reality could emerge across the country. Yet the reality that did emerge was one in which various stakeholders, particularly those claiming to have suffered the most at the hands of the regime – in the 2011 war and historically – were determined to prevent the reemergence of any semblance of the old order. Guiding the transition and navigating the society’s old and new divides was the National Transitional Council, the body that had represented the revolution to the outside world but had little on-the-ground control over its various factions. The Council carried its structural incapacities and its own internal divisions into the post-revolutionary environment, a situation that had already outrun the Council’s ability to affect it. Of the various parameters defining this new political reality, one of the most tense was the growing divide between those seeking radical change and those seeking accommodation with some of the institutions and agents of the former regime, particularly high-level officials.

In order to understand the growing political cleavages bisecting the Libyan polity at the local, regional, and national levels, Chapter 3 provides a geographical tour of the major sites in the 2011 uprising: the Tripolitania region, including the capital and Misrata; the Nafusa mountains to the southwest of the capital, home of the influential city of Zintan and Libya’s Amazigh (Berber) communities; Libya’s vast Saharan interior, notably its western region of Fezzan and its various ethnic communities; and finally the eastern region of Cyrenaica where the uprising began. The purpose of this survey is twofold: first, to introduce the major players in post-revolutionary Libya and, second, to understand the ways in which the old political system and efforts to overcome it were continuing to shape post-Gaddafi Libya. A year after the uprising, international attention was largely focused on the political campaigns and politicians running for Libya’s interim parliament in the summer of 2012, arguably the country’s first truly contested election in decades. Though this vote represented an important achievement, it falsely suggested that political power now rested in the hands of Libya’s democratically elected authorities. An assault on US diplomatic and intelligence facilities in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, by Islamist militants, which resulted in the death of the US Ambassador, was a stark reminder of who actually held power in the new Libya: the revolutionary militias.

The militia problem had metastasized beyond the control of Libya’s frail central authorities. Indeed, Chapter 4 examines the proliferation of militias in Libya not as a mere symptom of the country’s growing political dysfunction but as a key driver of the chaos. In the face of instability at the national level, the response of local communities was often to embrace militias as the only means of local-level protection. Regime loyalists and others targeted by the revolutionary militias formed their own counter-militias to defend themselves and their communities. In an effort to improve their position in the post-revolutionary struggle, militias representing weak and marginalized communities seized core state assets and held vital economic infrastructures hostage. Libya thus entered an insecurity trap, one in which efforts to achieve local security only reinforced insecurity at the national level. To make matters worse, this was a situation that Libya’s interim leaders exacerbated by incentivizing more – not less – militia formation through compensation, salaries, and incorporation into formal military and security units. In effect, militias became a national jobs program for Libya’s masses of unemployed young men. While it was easy to say that militias had become a threat to order in the new Libya, it was equally important to recognize that militias were the new order.

In this intensifying context that Chapter 4 attempts to document, those who would lead the new Libya adopted increasingly polarized attitudes. A growing alliance between moderate, orthodox, and radical Islamists would become the political front for those opposing accommodation with former regime elements. In the face of this campaign to purge the new Libyan state of all those who had collaborated with the former regime, an alliance of pro-accommodation interests formed, which included actors and groups whose social and political networks often had roots in the structures of the Gaddafi regime.

Elections for a new interim parliament in mid-2014 set the stage for the definitive rupture that would see Libya descend into its second civil war in less than four years. On one side of this contest was the nominally Islamist coalition called Libya Dawn, which maintained its grip on Tripoli owing in large part to the strength of Misratan forces and backing from states like Qatar and Turkey. On the other side of the civil war were the forces of Operation Dignity, led by Khalifa Haftar, a former officer in Gaddafi’s armed forces. Haftar, having already launched a campaign to fight Islamist militancy in Cyrenaica, was backed by Libya’s internationally recognized parliament, which had fled to Tobruk amid the growing violence and insecurity in Tripoli. Haftar’s efforts soon boasted a growing list of international sponsors, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and, tentatively, Russia.

The final chapter of this book looks at this new civil war and the response of the international community. Both the war and the response of foreign interests were increasingly influenced by an altogether different development, one that few had seen coming but was, in retrospect, tragic in its predictability: the rise of the Islamic State in Sirte in 2015. Following the rapid, stunning success of the Islamic State in the Syrian civil war in late 2013 and its extension into western Iraq in the summer of 2014, Libyan and foreign jihadi fighters began to make inroads into Islamist factions in eastern, central, and western Libya. Their greatest success, however, was in the city of Sirte, which stood geographically between the Dawn forces in Tripolitania and the Dignity forces in Cyrenaica. At that time, Dawn and Dignity forces were in the process of consolidating their regional power bases before seeking a wider civil war with each other. With all eyes on Tripoli, Tobruk, and Benghazi, the city of Sirte, nominally under Misratan control, was of limited strategic concern to both sides. Islamic State activists also found a population in Sirte that had been collectively punished and marginalized for its close association with the former regime. Though the power of the Islamic State in Libya was limited, it nonetheless rested upon a political economy of rule employed by other militias across the country. The most visible aspect of this was the growing trade in human smuggling of international migrants, which became a lucrative source of funding for communities along Libya’s coastlines, Saharan borders, and interior crossroads.

In taking control of Sirte away from Misratan militias and declaring an extension of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s putative Caliphate to North Africa, the Islamic State in Libya sent shockwaves through the international community. The North Atlantic powers, which had increasingly retreated in the face of Libya’s growing insecurity and civil violence in 2013 and 2014, found themselves compelled once again to launch an intervention in 2016. This time, however, the intervention was on a much smaller scale and had a much more limited objective: the eradication of the Islamic State from Libya.

At this point, the peacemaking efforts of the United Nations to reconcile the Dawn–Dignity divide were subordinated to the North Atlantic community’s primary security interests vis-à-vis Libya: the Islamic State and the Mediterranean migration crisis. Progress on either agenda required the creation of a legitimate central authority that could liaise with foreign governments and, more importantly, consent to their interventions. The rush to create a Government of National Accord at the end of 2015 and to install a new executive body in Tripoli in early 2016 did nothing to achieve national reconciliation but it did allow the internationally supported campaign against the Islamic State to go forward. While Misratan forces bloodied themselves in a months-long fight to retake Sirte with US support, Haftar’s Dignity coalition patiently consolidated and expanded its areas of control, eventually seizing almost all of Libya’s core oil facilities and infrastructures.

With the Islamic State smashed and scattered at the end of 2016, Libya looked set for a final confrontation between Haftar’s forces and his opponents in Tripolitania. Making matters worse, Libya’s new internationally recognized head of government, Fayez Al-Sarraj, had effectively allied himself with elements of the Dawn coalition in order to take up residency in the capital. While most ordinary Libyans had long ago grown tired of the fighting and found ways to survive – and sometimes thrive – amid the uncertainty and violence, militias and local constituencies continued to hold most of the power in Libya through their abilities to act as political spoilers and economic saboteurs. Regardless of whether or not the impasse between pro- and anti-accommodationist elites could be overcome at the national level, Libya seemed to have truly become a state of the masses, one in which the people, now heavily armed, would never again let themselves be subjugated to any central authority.

Series Title

Hot Spots in Global Politics

Copyright page

Dedication

Figures

Acknowledgments

Map

Introduction

The Need to Rethink Libya After the Uprising

Uprising to Revolution, Civil War to Islamic State: Chapter Summaries