1 - From the Shores of Tripoli: The Global Implications of Libya’s Post-2011 Governance Travails

Summary

For millennia, the African territory encompassed in the modern state of Libya has been a place on the margins of global history. The very name itself, Libia, was used in Antiquity by the Egyptians and later the Greeks to denote the region on the western edges of the known world, a place of desolation and barbarity, inhabited, in many literary accounts, by fantastical beasts. In the ensuing centuries, waves of conquerors and empires governed it lightly and ambivalently, focusing their energies mostly on maintaining chains of garrisons, outposts and entrepots along the trading routes that linked the Mediterranean Basin to the African interior. By the nineteenth century, the geopolitical profile of the region had increased, with the ruling Ottoman Empire devolving significant power to the local suzerains of the so-called Barbary States. Through the first half of the twentieth century, the territory of Libya continued to acquire greater strategic significance: from the Italo-Turkish War – which witnessed the first ever use of the airplane for military purposes – and continuing through the Second World War, during which tank battles raged across vast swathes of Cyrenaica (eastern Libya). Traditional narratives minimise the role of Libyan elites in this mostly European contest of the early and mid-twentieth century, although more careful historians have highlighted how local notables, tribal chieftains and guerrilla commanders skilfully played outside patrons against one another.

While the 1969 officers’ coup heralded a new era under Muammar Qadhafi, Libya continued to flit at the margins of both major events of the world and the Middle East. Despite Qadhafi's efforts to parlay Libya's oil wealth and his support to militants and insurgents across the globe into geopolitical power, he was unable to consolidate meaningful clout. Since 2011, the seminal events of the 17 February Revolution and the UN-mandated, NATO-led military intervention have spawned more than one effort to re-appraise and, in some cases, inflate Libya's global significance. The first of these is a retrospective, framing Qadhafi's decision to abandon weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in return for re-integration into the global economic order as a major world event: a validation of diplomacy's potential to ‘tame’ a ‘rogue’ regime with a mix of ‘sticks’ and incentives. Some voices have relatedly pointed to the 2011 toppling of Qadhafi, after he had relinquished his WMD programme in return for what he expected would be regime sur-vival, as reinforcing North Korea's unwillingness to relinquish its own nuclear arsenal.