Libya by Jacob Mundy (review)

Libyan politics have long been and remain the least well-researched in the Middle East and North Africa. It is not that nothing has been written on the country but. during both the era of Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi (1969–2011) and today. most foreign academic and policy-oriented literature has been produced by researchers with little or no access to the country. During Qadhafi's four-decade-long rule this meant that most contributions on Libya did not even attempt to shed light on contemporary Libyan society. Those that did found it mostly impenetrable and instead focused on the black box of the Qadhafi regime or its foreign policy. After a brief opening in 2011. which allowed for insights into the revolution and the subsequent transitional process. access became more difficult again amid escalating violence in 2014. Only a handful of foreign researchers have continued to regularly visit the country since then. Of those. Frederic Wehrey is as yet the only one to have published a book on Libya since 2011—a remarkable first-hand account that gives the reader a close feel for developments in the country. without attempting to provide a detailed analysis.¹

A comprehensive overview of Libya's trajectory since 2011 should therefore come as a welcome contribution to fill a yawning gap. Jacob Mundy's book seeks to provide such an overview. as well as to "rethink Libya" (p. 7) and its 2011 uprising in light of the conflicts that have developed since then. Mundy's account of developments is smooth and easy to follow. with some exceptions—notably the chain of events leading up to the escalation of civil war in 2014. which is muddled and incomplete. Several of the book's core arguments. however. are not sufficiently fleshed out. Throughout. Mundy argues that the localism that has defined much political and military organization since 2011 was rooted in social networks—"locally organized coalitions" (p. 52)—that had served to manipulate or evade Qadhafi's state. This is an interesting argument. but Mundy does not back it up with evidence. Persuasively making this case would require dealing with strong evidence to the contrary: Qadhafi's Libya knew no leaders who could voice demands in the name of corporate groups; local communities were divided and lacked strong leadership. yet apparently united overnight when the 2011 uprising erupted.

Among the elements the book advances to explain Libya's downward trajectory after 2011. Mundy emphasizes insufficient Western security assistance to the transitional authorities and the failure to deploy a United Nations stabilization force after Qadhafi's demise. which. he argues. could have prevented Libya's collapse (p. 81). Mundy does not address the obvious arguments against a stabilization force that were made back then and remain pertinent today. Most notably, that such a force would have been highly controversial in Libya and would have severely undermined the National Transitional Council's claim to overseeing a Libyan-led transition, thereby dramatically reducing the prospects for success. And he does not mention that there was no shortage of attempts to provide security assistance to the transitional governments, which were too divided internally to put such offers to good use. Indeed, Mundy neglects a key aspect of the conundrum posed by the armed groups after 2011: it was not so much that "Libya's interim authorities had no other choice but to … placate their armed antagonists" (p. 132); rather, the armed groups had their representatives in the transitional governments and competed among each other within state institutions.

Unfortunately, the book contains numerous factual inaccuracies. Mundy falls victim to many of the false or misleading claims introduced by sloppy journalists and subsequently reproduced by the international media—reliable media coverage on Libya being as rare as serious academic research. Among such myths is the assertion that in August 2014, "the House of Representatives fled to the far east of the country" from Tripoli, "convening in a ferry docked at the port of Tobruk" (p. 163). In fact, the House of Representatives (HoR) had been supposed to...