The 2011 Libyan Uprising and the Struggle for the Post-Qadhafi Future ed. by Jason Pack (review)

After the fall of late Libyan leader Mu‘ammar Qadhafi in October 2011, Libya scholars warned that, notwithstanding the optimism generated by the remarkable uprising that started in February 2011, “beyond Gaddafi, there exists only a great political emptiness, a void that Libya somehow will need to fill … to create a modern state.”¹ And, “it will likely take many years to overcome the negative effects of more than four decades of the One September Revolution.”² Unfortunately, close to three years after the successful uprising, Libyan prime minister ‘Ali Zaydan confirmed that Libya faces many deep-rooted problems because “the state has no police, no army, no institutions and no system. This is a legacy of 42 years of destruction.”³ He might have added that this has been an enduring legacy of the last 100 years of Libyan attempts to build a nationstate. Thus, as an improved Ottoman administration began to take hold in the early 20^th century, it was soon dismantled by Italian colonial rule after its invasion in 1911. By the end of World War II, Italy departed wartorn Libya, leaving its inhabitants with little capacity for self-governance. At independence (1951), the monarchy of King Idris began fashioning a limited, but functioning, modern state only to see it utterly destroyed by Qadhafi’s coup (1969) and eventually replaced by a “stateless” Libyan jamahiriyya which bequeathed to its current successors a more complete institutional destruction.

Is it, therefore, surprising that Libyans today are torn by a disjointed past, a confused and conflicted present, and an uncertain future? Their predicament, revealed through the uprising and its aftermath, is the overarching subject of this edited book comprising seven chapters, in addition to an introduction and an afterword. Together, they provide in-depth analyses of the key dimensions of the uprising and its continuing sociopolitical and economic dynamics. This is an indispensable book for understanding Libya’s renewed search for political community today and for the foreseeable future. Its appearance soon after the uprising began is a tribute to the editor and the authors.

In order to gain quick insights into the architecture of Libyan society and polity as it has evolved historically through the Qadhafi period and as it is today, the book may be best approached by focusing sequentially on the “Dynamics of Continuity and Change” (Chapter 2), followed by “The Rise of Tribal Politics” (Chapter 5), the“Islamists” (Chapter 7), and “The South” (Chapter 6). The next set of chapters would be “Civil Activism and the Roots of the 2011 Uprising” (Chapter 1), “The Post Qadhafi Economy” (Chapter 3), and “The Role of Outside Actors” (Chapter 4).

Most chapters are cross referenced to illustrate the interplay of underlying structural patterns that have shaped contemporary Libya and the current post-Qadhafi struggle. As explained by Youssef M. Sawani in Chapter 2, these patterns or “perpetual dynamics” involve religion (Islamic legitimacy, including more recent intermittent radicalism), tribalism (shifting tribal alliances within the hinterland and between it and an unstable central authority, historically typical of North African landscapes), regionalism (imposed by geography, distance, and divergent outlook and traditions that fuel federalist tendencies, yesterday and today), and oil (implying a rentier state and clientelistic patronage system). To Sawani’s four dynamics, I would add those generated by outside actors to include not only NATO support for the uprising, but also historical interventions and influences of foreigners. In Chapter 5, Wolfram Lacher focuses on the surprising return of tribal loyalties and politics during the uprising, confirming their resilience before, during, and after Qadhafi. Modern tribal prominence began much earlier, in 1915, when tribal alliances produced leadership and a rare moment of anticolonial unity in Libya, leading to a “reassertion of hinterland culture in national life,” that I wrote in 1983.⁴ This heritage helped sustain hinterland’s tribal influence before and after independence and paved the way for Qadhafi...