2011, Libya in the post-state era (1/5)

Since the Arab Spring of 2011, Libya has not been undergoing just any unfinished transition, but has settled into a durable state of political dissolution. Far from paving the way for a reconstruction process, the brutal disappearance of Muammar Gaddafi's regime instead triggered a long sequence of fragmentation, where armed violence has, as in Sudan, progressively replaced the state as the organizing principle of power.

This series offers a structural reading of the Libyan war as a stabilized and coherent system in itself, inserted into regional and international rivalries, and now capable of eliminating any political alternative that does not fit into its logic.

The fall of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 is mistakenly presented as a foundational event from which Libya has never managed to recover. However, this reading is simplistic, even misleading, insofar as it assumes that the collapse of the Gaddafi order would have made possible a thwarted transition, hindered by exogenous factors or by the immaturity of local actors. But the reality is more radical: Libya did not fail to rebuild after 2011, because no reconstruction ever truly began. Rather than being reformed, the state was dissolved, without a succession mechanism, replacement architecture, or durable arbitration principle.

To understand this, we must return to the specificities of the regime established by Gaddafi, which did not function at all like a classic state. Gaddafi founded his power on an extreme concentration of decision-making, accompanied by a systematic neutralization of institutions and the establishment of an unstable balance between tribes, security apparatuses, and the redistribution of oil rent. A model of tyranny, all in all quite common in the Arab world, which, despite its iniquitous nature, produced a certain order. By destroying it without the slightest thought for minimal continuity, the 2011 intervention paradoxically removed the last center of gravity capable of organizing the political field.

Thus, the fall of the tyrant did not free up the Libyan political space as logically it should have. Instead, it created a void of sovereignty. And no actor was able to establish themselves as a legitimate successor to the order established by Gaddafi. The historical oppositions, long fragmented or neutralized, had little in the way of a homogeneous territorial presence or a common institutional project capable of constituting an effective and lasting alternative. The state structures, already fragile, thus collapsed with the regime that contained them. Consequently, violence, until then monopolized and contained by the dictator, dispersed. Gaddafi's lynching, instead of purging Libya of its demons, opened Pandora's Box.

Libya entered a new phase, disjointed due to this 'institutional' vacuum left behind by the colonel-Leviathan. True to Gramsci's formula, this in-between, which was neither a classic civil war nor an unfinished post-authoritarian transition, created monsters. Within this post-state space, authority is no longer transmitted vertically. It has fragmented horizontally, according to local and regional power dynamics.

An armed recomposition of politics

The first years following 2011 have often been described as a period of nascent chaos. But here again, the term is inappropriate, insofar as what was put in place, far from spontaneous disorder, is an armed recomposition of politics. The brigades arising from the insurgency did not disappear after the fall of the regime. They became institutionalized, de facto substituting for the state structure by capturing territories, establishing their control over infrastructure, and negotiating with central authorities already deprived of any coercive capacity.

Organized from 2012, the electoral process failed to reverse this dynamic. The elected assemblies formally exist but have no monopoly on force. Legal legitimacy proves powerless in the face of military reality. The vote has therefore ceased to be an instrument of conflict regulation to become a secondary issue, instrumentalized by armed actors who do not depend on it to exercise real power. The result, as in all countries abandoned to the law of the jungle, is that politics now depends on power dynamics, and state actors must deal with those who control the ground. Stripped of its function as an organizing structure, the labeled state finds itself dis-substantialized and reduced to a space where any prospect of relief is knowingly and continuously torpedoed by para-state military organizations.

This rise in militia power was accompanied by an equally structuring phenomenon: the capture of rents. Far from unifying the country, oil thus became one of the engines of its fragmentation. Installations, ports, pipelines transformed into levers of pressure, based on the logic that whoever controls a terminal or a strategic road no longer needs to govern the entire country. Their de facto power is based on their capacity for neutralization, blocking, negotiation, and extortion.

At this stage, Libya has not, however, plunged into total war. It found itself in a low-intensity conflict, punctuated by acute crises, but structured by local balances. This situation, often described as transitional, has nonetheless gradually solidified. Armed actors have adapted, funding networks have consolidated, and alliances are made and unmade, as no central authority can arbitrate them.

The case of Khalifa Haftar

It is in this context that the figure of Khalifa Haftar emerged. Haftar's ascent does not follow any coherent ideological project. It can be defined as an attempt to recompose a military verticality in a fragmented landscape. The restoration of the state is not his concern. Haftar offers an authoritarian alternative to anomie, backed by regional support and a promise of order. This promise, however, relies less on institutional reconstruction than on security dominance. The Arab misfortune.

The emergence of Haftar confirms that post-2011 Libya can no longer be understood as a unified national space. It has become nothing more than a field of forces where political projects are subordinated to military capabilities and external support.

From this point, the Libyan trajectory is largely determined. The absence of state succession in 2011 is not a corrigible accident a posteriori. It constitutes the founding act of a lasting configuration. Beyond classic schemes, one can consider that the war no longer even aims to conquer the state, but to organize its absence.

Libya is therefore not in a classic war between factions for power stricto sensu. The protagonists of the conflict are actually waging a war against the very possibility of a central power. And it is precisely this fact that conditions everything that follows: the 'militianization,' the regionalization of the conflict, the intervention of external powers, and this unheard-of, absurd stabilization within instability.

Next article: An excessive 'militianization' of politics