Libya

Jacob Mundy

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509518760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Libya is teetering on the edge of collapse, having become a new haven for terrorist organizations and an epicenter of the refugee crisis. Few could have imagined that the uprising against the longstanding regime of Mu'ammar Al-Gaddafi would expose a polity deeply fractured by internal divisions. Fewer still could have predicted the intractability of the conflicts that emerged in the wake of this revolution.

Jacob Mundy's Libya is the first book to explain the political, security, and humanitarian crises that have engulfed Libya – Africa's largest oil-exporting country – since the Arab Spring of 2011. Examining the roots of the anti-Gaddafi revolution and the failures that resulted in the country's descent into chaos, Mundy identifies new centers of power that coalesced in the wake of the regime's collapse. The more these rival coalitions vied for political authority and control over Libya's vast oil wealth, the more they reached out to external actors who were playing their own "great game" in Libya and across the region. In the face of such a multifaceted crisis, the future looks grim as the international community seems unable to bring peace to this divided and conflict-ridden nation.

1
State of the Masses

Since 2011, a series of political crises and violent conflicts have torn apart the Libyan state and fractured its polity. But the challenge of creating and sustaining political order in modern Libya has always been difficult. Those who have attempted to rule this vast and austere landscape, whether foreign empires or local leaders, have always faced an unforgiving territory.

Throughout history, the harshness of the environment has put severe limits on indigenous political and economic activity. Libya today is the world’s sixteenth largest country by land mass and yet ranks among the world’s least densely populated. Most of the land – 95 percent – is desert, and the desert is growing. In the center of the country, along the coastal edge of the Sirtica plain, the Sahara spills into the Mediterranean, effectively dividing the north of the country into two zones with small pockets of arable land in the west and even smaller ones in the east. Throughout history, these agricultural zones mainly supported semi-nomadic forms of pastoralism and limited amounts of plant cultivation. Agriculture was otherwise always a challenge; there are no perennial rivers in Libya to speak of and the annual rainfall is a quarter of that recorded in neighboring Tunisia. And while over 60 percent of Tunisian land is available for agriculture, Libya has only been able to raise that figure from 6.3 percent to 8.7 percent since independence, owing in large part to the industrial-scale exploitation of massive underground aquifers in the Sahara starting in the 1980s. Oil, however, is largely responsible for the rapid growth of Libya’s population since 1960 by providing the state with the financial resources to import what could not be made domestically. The population of postcolonial Libya has climbed from 1.4 million to current estimates of over six million. This period also witnessed the rapid urbanization of the population, from below 30 to nearly 80 percent.¹

While there are undoubtedly environmental factors that have inhibited local statebuilding enterprises in Libya throughout the ages, the country’s modern history is one of near constant political and economic disruption. Libya’s major population centers in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica had always lived in the shadow of their respective neighbors to the west and east, Tunis and Cairo, which were respectively seized by France and Britain in the late 1800s. Moreover, Libya’s population declined in the 1800s during the late Ottoman period, coinciding with the collapse of trans-Saharan trade following the outlawing of slavery. Italian colonization from 1911 onward also left its mark on Libyan society. The country’s indigenous population halved during the three decades that followed owing to migration, dispossession, conflict, and the genocidal policies of the Italian occupiers and their turn to fascist modes of rule.²

Figure 1.1. Population of Libya, 1960–2016.

Source: World Bank.

What also has to be recognized is that Libya’s formation as a modern nation-state arose out of several geopolitical contingencies, notably the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rapacious colonization of Africa by Europe’s industrializing nations in the late 1800s, the global realignments of power during the 1914–45 period, and the new security imperatives of the North Atlantic states during the early Cold War. It thus makes little sense to ask why Libya never developed into a coherent nation-state prior to the establishment of its contemporary territorial boundaries, as well as the socio-political elaboration of its polity at the hands of competing external forces located in Istanbul (Constantinople), Rome, London, Paris, and Washington. Any insistence that Libya has always been impoverished, underdeveloped, and politically fragmented first has to contend with the fact that Libya never was a geographical, social, or political reality until relatively recently. The cartographic demarcation of Libya, beginning in the late 1800s at the hands of expanding French and British empires, brings into focus the extent to which the country is an artifact of modern geopolitics rather than an outcome of centuries or millennia of internal gestation.

Statebuilding on Sand: Ottoman Imperialism and Italian Colonization

As noted above, Libya’s borders took shape as Western European powers began to seize African lands from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. The establishment of a French protectorate over Tunisia and a British one over Egypt set in motion the process of delimiting Libya’s frontiers from the Mediterranean to the coastal interior. In the Sahara, however, Ottoman assertions of sovereignty were much more ambiguous.³ It was not until after World War I that French ambitions in West Africa and British ambitions in the Sudan had formally delineated Libya’s desert frontiers. By the time these were finalized in the 1930s, the country was under full Italian control. Rome’s late entry into the game of North African imperialism had begun with the Italo-Turkish war of 1911, roughly fifteen years after Ethiopian troops routed Italian forces in East Africa. Having only recently unified as a modern nation-state, Italy pushed into Libya for obvious reasons: geographical proximity and geopolitical positioning vis-à-vis the other European powers. The rise of industrial capitalism has also created population surpluses that Italian leaders were eager to enlist in the national economy rather than see them go to the Americas. Those who harbored Italy’s ambitions in Libya, which had been clear since the late 1800s, also attempted to marshal a new nostalgia for the lost greatness of the Roman Empire. Libya became the “Fourth Shore” of Italy, a reference to its Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, Ionian, and now North African coasts. The imposition of Italian rule also grew in parallel with the rise of fascism and the tyranny of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship, which was relentless in its persecution of Arab and Amazigh (Berber) resistance in Libya. The most infamous of these cases was Omar Mukhtar’s eight-year insurgency in Cyrenaica (1923–31), which was met with horrific acts of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment by the occupying Italian forces.⁴

The initial success of the Mukhtar insurgency owed as much to classical tactics of indirect guerrilla warfare as it did to the social, economic, and political networks of the Sanusiyyah. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Sidi Muhammad Al-Sanusi (1787–1859), a prolific religious scholar from western Algeria, the Sanusiyyah was a Sufi order that originally developed in Saudi Arabia. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a period of intense Islamic revivalism in the face of the decaying Ottoman Empire and increasing European penetration in the Middle East. Eventually settling in Cyrenaica in the 1840s, Al-Sanusi found a region relatively ungoverned by Ottoman authorities, as well as a population that was open to his brand of fundamentalist yet socially active mysticism. In the decades that followed, Al-Sanusi, his descendants, and his adherents – Al-Sanusiyyah – would create a network of dozens of lodges (zawiyyah) up and down the future Libyan–Egyptian border, eventually reaching into the Fezzan and as far as lake Chad. What Al-Sanusi’s order networked together in these religious establishments was not simply an archipelago of centers for spiritual guidance and learning; these lodges were in fact sited in relation to the movement’s growing economic influence on trans-Saharan trade. The Sanusiyyah’s economic power translated into political power as well, a fact that Ottoman administrators eventually came to understand and accommodate. Where Sanusiyyah power was its weakest was where direct Ottoman rule was strongest: in and around Tripoli. To the limited extent that urban classes, educated elites, and cosmopolitanism had developed in Tripolitania during the late Ottoman Empire, it was in Tripoli that modern notions of Arab nationalism and Islamic reform began to affect the thinking of future leaders of the Misratan and Tripolitanian republics. The Sanusiyyah, by contrast, began to look more and more like a hereditary dynasty by the time of the Italian occupation, with the leadership of the order having passed to Sayyid Idris Al-Sanusi, the grandson of the order’s founder and the future king of Libya.

Following the Italian victory over the Ottomans in 1912, there were initial yet short-lived efforts by Rome to work with local authorities, particularly the Sanusiyyah and the leaders of the Tripolitanian Republic. By the time Mukhtar launched his insurgency in the early 1920s, Sayyid Idris was exiled to Cairo and the Tripolitanian Republic was void. Indirect Italian rule was in fact giving way to complete annexation, just as happened under France in Algeria. Like the Ottomans, the Italians had implemented successful strategies to divide the society and thwart resistance. In these new contexts of direct rule and settler colonialism, there was little room for the Libyans themselves, who were largely marginalized from what limited employment the colonial economy had to offer in terms of governmental administration, territorial security, or the plantation system.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Hot Spots in Global Politics
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Map
• Introduction
• 1: State of the Masses
• 2: Uprising and Intervention: Libya in Revolt
• 3: State of the Martyrs
• 4: Hegemony or Anarchy?
• 5: Libya on the Brink
• Conclusion
• Chronology
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement