The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath ed. by Peter Cole, Brian McQuinn (review)

A recurring pattern of Libyan history has been an inability to form a fixed political system, which is a fair, if charitable, description of what is happening today. During the past century, attempts at forging national unity were ephemeral, prompted by supranational ideologies, pan-Islamism, and pan-Arabism, and did not mature sufficiently to produce a Libyan nation-state. A national convergence of divergent interests was reluctantly achieved by the Sirte Agreement in 1922 which paved the way for the establishment of the United Kingdom of Libya in 1951,¹ through a loose and ineffective federal system beset by praetorian politics, under the monarchy of King Idris (1951–69). Otherwise, sustained unity came to Libyans at the steep price of oppression, twice at the hands of dictatorial regimes, the Italian colonial Fascists (1922–43), and Mu‘ammar al-Qadhafi’s jamahiriyya (1969–2011). Failure to forge a nation-state when the opportunity arose (1943–51) was due to the fact, succinctly put by Majid Khadduri with reference to Tripolitania: “numerous political groups emerged and their leaders, vying for recognition, failed to coordinate their activities.”²

History seems to repeat itself with unprecedented vengeance today in all parts of Libya, as the country is torn by a multitude of rival militias, tribes, and local groups that emerged during the revolution to claim by force independent stakes in territory, oil, and arms, despite an initial promise of democratic governance. Fair elections were thwarted and produced the present façade of two governments, in Tripoli and Tobruk, mired in an impasse that carries the risk of returning Libya to being a mere geographic expression, as in premodern times. In this quasi-anarchic situation with many twists and turns, characterized by political assassinations, low-level warfare, and severe insecurity for the populace, it has been nearly impossible to follow the multiple networks of non-state actors and their objectives, as each community “took its own path into the uprisings and subsequent conflict of 2011, according to their own histories and relationship to Muammar Gadafi’s regime” (from the book’s jacket). Though, from a distance, the situation in Libya looks like localism run amok, editors Peter Cole, Brian McQuinn, and the capable team they assembled for this book have succeeded in putting order to the disparate dynamics of the revolution, as well as to the chaotic first-year transition that followed, mainly through reliable eyewitness reporting and analysis from the battlefield. In so doing, they provide the reader with an invaluable coherent baseline to understand the complex developments that are still unfolding today.

Thus, half the book is focused on the hesitant and often counterproductive efforts at building democratic legitimacy and agreed minimal procedural and administrative arrangements for the new post-Qadhafi era. Here, to the chagrin of Benghazi, Tripoli occupied center stage, “where the many strands of the Libyan revolution came together and where they unraveled,” (p. 55) including those woven by Islamists, tribal elements, and armed militias. The latter emerged as a decisive factor during the transition and beyond as a result of “a process . . . of registering and paying fighters, spawning a new generation of politicized, state-funded armed groups” abetted, under duress, by then-prime minister ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Kib thereby tragically assuring “Libya’s incorporation of militias into a bloated, hybrid security sector, all but outside state control” (p. 103). Of special interest in this first part of the book is NATO’s critical intervention in toppling Qadhafi, addressed by Frederic Wehrey, a leading expert.³ Recently, a debate ensued in Foreign Affairs on whether NATO’s role was misguided since it might have been possible to negotiate Qadhafi’s peaceful removal by transferring power to his reformist son, Saif, thereby avoiding the inevitable chaos that followed the killing of Qadhafi by rebel forces aided by NATO bombings.⁴ In this book, Peter Cole shows that the Qadhafi family was dismissive of popular requests for reform, with...