Libya: Teetering Between War and Diplomacy The Islamic State’s Role in Libya’s Disintegration

This analysis explores post-Qaddafi Libya as it becomes a failed state, alongside international efforts to mend its internal rifts and restore an effective government and thereby halt its national disintegration. Attaining a modus vivendi amongst the internal rival political and military actors looks to enable a war effort to loosen the grasp of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which infiltrated Libya’s Mediterranean coast in 2014 and gained a strategic foothold in the heart of Libya and nearby its oil ports – Libya’s economic lifeline. An internal agreement looks to rebuild the state security system that can confront the continuing tribal, ethnic, Salafi-jihadistic, and criminal militarisation of Libya, which also contributes to its bloody chaos. This exegesis focuses on the brief but challenging period of 2014-2016 in terms of the threats to Libya’s governmental and territorial integrity, outlining the principal junctures and actors.     

The Impact of Political Change on the State of Academia Including Academic Freedom in the Arab World: Libya as a Case Study

ABSTRACT

Furthering Western style academic freedom has been challenging, as Arab countries, especially Libya, have known only autocratic regimes throughout their modern existence. Amidst its current political and social upheaval, Libyan society is drifting towards the unknown. The problem addressed in this study is the impact of political change on the state of academia but, more specifically, academic freedom. Since the intervention in Libya by NATO states, many academics have lost their jobs. Some have become refugees outside of Libya as a direct result of the appropriation of most of the governmental posts in the country by religious and political radicals. The research questions reflect ways in which the new inserted de facto leaders of post-transitional Libya have impacted life on Libyan campuses and academic freedom.     

EU-Libya Cooperation on Migration: A Raw Deal for Refugees and Migrants?

Libya's emergence as a key jumping-off point for entry intoEurope by sea has created a sense of urgency within the EU,which seeks to prevent arrivals from this new point of departure,and has led to the initiation of EU–Libya cooperationon migration. This article argues that the EU is failing toadopt an integrated approach to migration management in Libya,despite its repeated assurances to the contrary. It examinesEU–Libya cooperation, still in its early stages, and analysesthe experiences of refugees and migrants in Libya and on theirjourneys to Europe. Both elements strongly indicate that thecurrent approach, which focuses on border control and surveillance,is likely to meet with limited success in achieving the EU'saims of stemming the flow of irregular migrants arriving fromLibya in Italy and Malta, protecting the human rights of thosein transit and ensuring humanitarian outcomes for them.     

Security and informality in Libya: militarisation without military?

ABSTRACT

The article interrogates the analytical purchase of the concept of militarism in the case of Libya, and its relationship to securitisation. While Libya is often associated with widely securitised threats to the international order, its military institutions have been viewed with suspicion and ambivalence across different phases of Libyan history, making of Libya an uneasy fit for standard categorisations of militarism. This prompts the question of whether and under what circumstances militarism can occur without and even against the military. Drawing on a historical-sociological analysis, the article shifts the focus to micropolitical dynamics and extra-institutional agency with a view to unpacking the complex entanglement of formal and informal armed actors in Libya’s hybrid security governance. The concepts of informalisation of militarism and militarisation of informality are used as analytical lenses to reconstruct the partial, failed, contested and hijacked attempts to build ‘modern’ military institutions in Libya. I suggest that the repertoire of militarism is not so much an end in itself, but a resource mobilised by local and international actors in a contentious field of state-building practices.     

Bureaucratic Roles and Positions: Explaining the United States Libya Decision

This analysis examines the decision-making process of the Barack Obama Administration that led to the American decision in March 2011 to intervene in Libya. Its focus is whether the bureaucratic politics model of foreign policy decision-making can accurately explain the situation. In this case, finding mixed empirical support for the explanatory power of bureaucratic politics, it contributes to the further development of the model for foreign policy decision-making.     

利比亚战争的相关影响及启示

持续6个多月的利比亚战争是冷战后西方干预非洲内部事务的最新案例,其产生的影响和相关启示至少有以下六个方面：1．利比亚战争反映出西方干预弱小主权国家内部事务的新模式,是当前全球力量由西向东转移过程中的必然产物;2．非洲国家担忧殖民主义和种族主义可能会借利比亚战争借尸还魂,对非洲的自主外交和一体化进程构成冲击;3．后卡扎菲时代的利比亚有可能出现“向北看”和“向东看”,而不再是卡扎菲时代的“向南看”;4．围绕利比亚战后重建的大国利益博弈,再次暴露出国际关系中“强者为王”的丛林法则迄今尚未退出历史舞台的严峻现实;5．利比亚战争造成的武器大量扩散还客观上使得恐怖主义在非洲趁势蔓延,这不仅使非洲的和平与安全成为利比亚战争负效应的牺牲品,而且还使美国借机进一步加强其在非洲的军事存在;6．对西方借利比亚战争挤压中国在非洲的生存空间和影响力的动机不可不察。中国作为国际社会中的一支重要力量,可以也应该在利比亚战后重建中发挥积极作用。     

Conflict dynamics in post-2011 Libya: a political economy perspective

After the fall of the Qadhafi regime Libya has become a theatre of conflict and violence. In the midst of the vacuum left by the sudden collapse of the old regime, various groups have come to contest their role in a new Libya. Illicit trafficking and the exploitation of oil resources have contributed to this struggle by empowering certain actors over others and by exhausting the capacity of the state. This article investigates the derailing of the Libyan transition and the opening of a new phase of conflict from a political economy perspective. It engages with key arguments developed in the literature on the economic causes of war and shows that the conflict in Libya challenges some of their conclusions. The establishment of areas of de facto sovereignty—warlordism—suggests two key factors explaining the discrepancy between theoretical arguments and empirical evidence: the problematic and contested definition of state and non-state actors in Libya; and an emerging political economy which is best described as an overproduction of governance rather than a lack of it.     

Evolving norms of protection: China,Libya and the problem of intervention in armed conflict

This article examines the influence of civilian protection norms on China’s response to the 2011 crisis in Libya. It argues that Responsibility to Protect—an emerging norm commonly associated with the Libyan case—did not play a major role in China’s abstention on Resolution 1973 (2011) authorizing international intervention in Libya. For China, Responsibility to Protect is merely a concept and could not serve as the basis for intervention. Instead, Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, as a normative foundation for civilian protection endorsed by China, offers a more appropriate lens for understanding China’s vote. Protection of Civilians, however, does not accommodate China’s unprecedented evacuation of Chinese nationals from Libya. This operation proceeded from a third logic of Protection of Nationals Abroad, which poses dilemmas for China’s strict adherence to the principles of sovereignty and non-interference and brings to bear domestic interests and notions of protection.     

Egypt’s Foreign and Security Policy in Post-R2P Libya

Abstract

The post-intervention situation in Libya poses foreign and security policy challenges for Egypt. Egypt’s definition of the Libyan problem centres on two fundamental aspects: it is depicted as the consequence of an unfinished R2P military intervention, and perceived as part of a regional war against Islamist terrorism. All practical steps being taken by the authorities in Cairo are based on this dual framing. The implications of its positioning are, firstly, a securitised approach to foreign policy, including limited military interference and proxy support and, secondly, the emergence of a partisan position. To date, the impact of Egypt’s foreign policy line in the Libyan theatre has been limited and hence its viability risks being thrown into question.     

A. Adamishin and R. Schifter,Human Rights,Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War

The international community's March 2011 military intervention in Libya contrasts sharply to its reluctance during the preceding forty years to halt the Qadhafi regime's sponsorship of transnational terrorism and pursuit of WMD. American diplomacy, eventually supported by international sanctions, was a four decade effort to end Qadhafi's violent foreign policy. This commentary discusses how diplomacy and the American judicial process combined to achieve this successful outcome. Diplomatic and legislative efforts to compel Libya's payment to terrorism victims helped create judicial remedies enforceable in US Courts and ultimately, a bilateral claims settlement agreement that, while disappointing to the terrorism litigants, normalized relations between the Libya and the United States.     

The Libyan Debate: Coercive Diplomacy Reconsidered

Muammar Qaddafi’s decision to dismantle his Weapons of Mass Destruction programmes in December 2003 elicited an extensive debate about the role of normal versus coercive diplomacy. The normal diplomacy perspective rests on factors that cannot solve the “why know” problem, and it relies on an unsupported assumption that Qaddafi’s identity had changed. The Libyan case, however, challenges the coercive diplomacy model. Libya confronted a demand and threat to disarm, but the George W. Bush Administration issued no explicit threats, placed no time deadlines on Libyan compliance, and attached only a moderate sense of urgency to Libya’s WMD program. This study argues that the coercive diplomacy perspective needs slight modification to account for the Libyan case. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq provided implied threats to Qaddafi’s survival. The Bush Administration then used veiled threats to threaten Qaddafi simultaneously with unacceptable damage and enable diplomats to find a peaceful solution to the crisis.     

Fragmenting states,new regimes: militarized state violence and transition in the Middle East

Scholars working in the transitology tradition assume that authoritarian breakdown leads to movement towards democratization after an initial period of uncertainty. If a transition falls short of democratization, there is an assumption that a return to authoritarian normalcy has transpired. Yet, whether one looks at Egypt, Libya, Syria, or Bahrain, the emergent trend is neither democratization, a return to the old authoritarian order, or a delayed transition. Rather, the weakening and fragmenting of regimes by popular mobilizations stimulated elites’ militarization of the state apparatus and unprecedented levels of state violence against ordinary citizens in a process of regime re-making.     

Explaining (and re-explaining) political change in the Middle East during the Arab Spring: trajectories of democratization and of authoritarianism in the Maghreb

After the 2011 Arab Spring, a pressing concern is to understand why some authoritarian regimes remain in power while others fall when confronted with similar difficulties. Earlier representations of the success of authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa generated common misperceptions concerning politically effective behaviour in the region. These views, shared by local autocrats and international actors alike, led them to propose ad hoc policy reorientations in response to a contagion of popular uprisings. In their turn, these policy responses directly contributed to the failure of authoritarianism and the production of democratic revolutions in several countries of the region. Such revolutionary options, although structured by the (lack of) opportunities for contestation present in each polity, are not predicable events as they depend on elite mis-assessments of the situation to be effective (as in Tunisia, Libya). Reciprocally, when reform pathways are made available by authoritarian regimes, contestation can be channelled into non-revolutionary political action (as in Morocco, Algeria).     

Liberal intervention in the foreign policy thinking of Tony Blair and David Cameron

David Cameron was a critic of Tony Blair's doctrine of the ‘international community’, which was used to justify war in Kosovo and more controversially in Iraq, suggesting caution in projecting military force abroad while in opposition. However, and in spite of making severe cuts to the defence budget, the Cameron-led Coalition government signed Britain up to a military intervention in Libya within a year of coming into office. What does this say about the place liberal interventionism occupies in contemporary British foreign policy? To answer this question, this article studies the nature of what we describe as the ‘bounded liberal’ tradition that has informed British foreign policy thinking since 1945, suggesting that it puts a distinctly UK national twist on conventional conservative thought about international affairs. Its components are: scepticism of grand schemes to remake the world; instinctive Atlanticism; security through collective endeavour; and anti-appeasement. We then compare and contrast the conditions for intervention set out by Tony Blair and David Cameron. We explain the similarities but crucially the vital differences between the two leaders' thinking on intervention, with particular reference to Cameron's perception that Downing Street needed to loosen its control over foreign policymaking after Iraq. Our argument is that policy substance, policy style and party political dilemmas prompted the two leaders to reconnect British foreign policy with its ethical roots, ingraining a bounded liberal posture in British foreign policy after the moral bankruptcy of the John Major years. This return to a pragmatic and ethically informed foreign policy meant that military operations in Kosovo and Libya were undertaken in quite different circumstances, yet came to be justified by similar arguments from the two leaders.     

No supply without demand: explaining the absence of the EU Battlegroups in Libya,Mali and the Central African Republic

Although the sad track record of the EU Battlegroups has attracted considerable scholarly attention, analyses have largely focused on obstacles related to the provision of the Battlegroup troops and to the consensus within the EU Council, hence taking a supply-side perspective. This article calls for complementing this perspective with an analysis of the demand for their deployment. That implies analysing whether and why the EU Battlegroups were (not) considered as an option by those actors taking the initiative to intervene in a particular crisis. Applying a rational-institutionalist approach, this article explains the absence of the Battlegroups from three recent crises: Libya (2011), Mali (2013) and the Central African Republic (2013–2014). Using data from document analysis and elite interviews, it shows that once a rapid military reaction became urgent, the EU Battlegroups were not even considered as an option by those initiating an international reaction.     

利比亚经济改革:背景、进程与效果

20世纪80年代末以来,由于计划经济体制的低效率、国际石油价格波动的冲击、国际社会制裁的损害,利比亚经济长期处于衰退之中,经济危机引起了政府的合法性危机。在此背景下,利比亚进行了广泛经济改革。改革的主要内容涉及经济体制的私有化和自由化,并使政府职能由石油收入的分配者向市场经济的调节者转变;同时,大力引进外资以推动石油工业的发展。利比亚经济改革取得了令人瞩目的成就,但也存在各种各样的问题和困难。     

从社会运动到内战的演变机制 ——基于中东变局的考察

受到中东变局波及的中东国家,尽管结构背景大同小异,但各国爆发的社会运动带来的国内影响却截然不同,如突尼斯和埃及发生了较为平和的变革,而利比亚、叙利亚却爆发了内战。社会运动在不同的国家之所以产生不同的结果,原因在于抗议者能否形成跨阶层动员以及军队的立场选择。抗议者形成跨阶层动员,是社会运动得以持续并实现规模扩大的前提;在大规模社会运动面前,军队内部是否发生分裂,则决定该国是否爆发内战。就此而言,社会运动演变为内战需要两个条件,一个是形成跨阶层动员,一个是部分军队支持抗议活动或在抗议活动中保持中立。这一分析模式有助于研究者对社会运动是否会演变为内战进行预测。     

Conspiracism In and Around Libya

Abstract

The idea that there is one cohesive Islamist movement with a clearly defined plan to conquer power in Libya is a deeply flawed argument. It is one that, among other causes, is at the basis of the current divisions in the country and its civil strife. The Islamist movement in Libya, on the contrary, is a highly heterogeneous reality. Understanding this divisiveness is fundamental to the elaboration of a strategy for reunification and the establishment of law and order. Such a strategy should be based on the principle of incorporating those Islamists who accept the democratic process and isolating the more extremist ones.     

Libyan Arms and Regional Instability

As security continues to be a primary challenge in post-Qadhafi Libya, the availability of weapons to nearby opposition groups and armed insurgencies is a source of major concern for Libya’s neighbours and the international community. Uncontrolled weapons proliferation and the rise of new armed groups have gone hand in hand across various conflict fronts. While what is known about weapons acquisition dynamics does not make it possible to establish a strict causal relationship, by observing variations in the various contexts, critical factors can be identified, such as the emergence of a protection market, the multiplication of tactical options and splintering processes, which facilitate comprehension of how greater circulation of weapons is related to regional volatility and destabilisation.     

The discursive construction of intervention: selves,democratic legacies,and Responsibility to Protect in French discourse on Libya

This article analyses French executives' and lawmakers' legitimisations of the intervention in Libya with the aim of understanding the discursive construction of intervention. It investigates the arguments in favour of intervention and the oppositions they were confronted with. To these arguments belong a re-evaluated democratic legacy of France, an identification with the Libyan people, and a debate on Responsibility to Protect and the rule of law in world politics, which have a broader relevance for French actorness abroad. The article applies the Essex School discourse theory and techniques from Interpretive Policy Analysis on executive speeches and parliamentary documents for structuring the debate and for estimating the strength of ideas in their interdiscursive configuration. An ideal-typical explanation of the legitimisation of intervention and of the choice of one policy over another is made. The article argues that going to war in Libya equated to a question of cultural appropriateness.