Libya in the fragmented international order (5/5)
Since the Arab Spring of 2011, Libya has not been undergoing 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, on the contrary, triggered a long sequence of fragmentation, where armed violence progressively replaced the State as the principle of power organization, as in Sudan.
This series offers a structural reading of the Libyan war as a stabilized and coherent system in itself, embedded in regional and international rivalries, and now capable of eliminating any political alternative that would not fit into its logic.
From the moment Libya ceased to be an effective sovereign state, it became nothing more than an international object. Not a central issue, far from it, but an available space, open to indirect strategies, opportunistic investments, and influence games at a low political cost. The Libyan war is not prolonged despite the international order, but because of it, or, more precisely, due to its increasing fragmentation.
The first illusion to dispel is that of a frontal competition between great powers for control of Libya. None of them genuinely seek to govern the country, nor even to durably stabilize its institutions. What is at stake is more diffuse: the exploitation of a void, the normalization of exception, and the acceptance of a “manageable” and “stable” conflict.
Russia fully fits into this logic: in this sense, its involvement in Libya is neither ideological nor structuring in the classic sense, but pragmatic, modular, reversible. Through paramilitary networks, advisors, and implicit security agreements, Moscow secures strongholds, levers of nuisance, and a disproportionate capacity for influence compared to its real investment.
Libya indeed offers Russia several simultaneous advantages, as it allows for projecting a presence in the Mediterranean without massive official commitment and also provides a training and testing ground for hybrid devices. Finally, it constitutes a space where the weakening of the Western normative framework becomes visible and exploitable. Every blocked resolution, every ineffective ceasefire, every aborted political process contributes to establishing the idea that the liberal international order is no longer capable of imposing constraints outside its immediate perimeter.
In fact, Russian strategy has no need for a victory stricto sensu. It aims for the durability of instability, an ideal condition for a power that seeks less to administer than to exert influence - as was more or less the case in Syria. A pacified Libya would be a normed, framed, less accessible space. A fragmented Libya is, on the contrary, a flexible playground. A godsend for Moscow.
The case of China
China, for its part, adopts a radically different but equally structuring posture. Beijing intervenes neither militarily nor politically in a visible manner, and adheres to its doctrine of non-interference, avoiding sharp positions, while maintaining open channels with all actors. But one should not be mistaken: this apparent neutrality is not an absence of strategy. It merely reflects a long-term calculation, in the pure tradition of the Chinese dragon, attentive, patient, and resilient.
Moreover, for China, Libya is a space of potential interest, without being an immediate theater of projection. Resources, infrastructure, and geographical position indeed matter more than the current political configuration. Thus, Beijing can afford to wait, true to itself. As long as the conflict does not hinder its essential interests, the status quo is acceptable to it. Fragmentation, in this sense, does not constitute a problem for it, but a transitional state compatible with future economic integration, when conditions are met.
This positioning has a major indirect effect, inasmuch as it neutralizes any dynamic of international constraint. In the absence of a consensus among powers capable of imposing real costs, declarations, symbolic sanctions, and UN processes lose their deterrent capacity - as is the case in all territories transformed into festering sores. Here, as everywhere in the current world configuration, international law flounders outside of grand principles.
Iran rubs its hands together
Without being a central actor in the Libyan issue, Iran, for its part, has benefited so far, as in Sudan, from this configuration, since each lasting peripheral conflict contributes to the dispersion of Western attention, to the erosion of pressure capacities, and to the normalization of entanglement. For Libya, like other theaters, contributes to an international environment where the multiplication of crises makes each of them more difficult to deal with decisively.
Iran does not need to be present to profit from this dynamic: it simply needs the international order to be busy elsewhere, fragmented and unable to prioritize. Libya thus becomes a satellite conflict, whose very existence contributes to a global strategic blurring. “Create their many Vietnams,” Guevara said. Tehran doesn’t even need to do it. The mullahs’ regime watches and rubs its hands together.
A disunited and hesitant West
Faced with this, the West appears disunited, hesitant, structurally weakened. The United States oscillates between disengagement and minimal management. After the 2011 intervention, no political investment commensurate with its consequences was therefore made. Libya has thus become a secondary issue, managed intermittently and without a long-term vision. Priorities have shifted. Ukraine, the Middle East, Israel and Iranian nuclear issues, the Indo-Pacific and Latin America now relegate Libya to the background.
Europe, for its part, has never spoken with one voice. Chronic and habitual divergences between member states, energy interests, and migratory concerns have prevented the emergence of a coherent strategy. The stabilization of Libya is regularly invoked, but rarely considered as a demanding political project. The “European misfortune,” with its multi-speed diplomacy, in all its splendor…
This combination of Western withdrawal and opportunistic engagement by non-Western powers is not without producing a cumulative effect: Libya becomes a strategic blind spot, too unstable to be integrated, but also still manageable enough to be treated as an absolute emergency. In this context, diplomatic processes follow one another, but without ever modifying the fundamental parameters: international conferences are fond of communiqués, nothing more, and ceasefires succeed one another like tactical pauses, with no horizon of a lasting solution. As for unity governments, they are temporary arrangements, devoid of coercive levers… and thus ideal for managing the continuity of the conflict, since no one has an interest in ending it.
It is clear that Libya does not suffer from an excess of contradictory interference, but from a global tacit convergence towards the acceptance of instability. Each actor finds, in the short or medium term, sufficient interest to avoid a radical reset. Libya bleeds, yes, but with the blessing, if not a certain sadistic satisfaction, of all parties.
Seif al-Islam: the assassination that closes the field of possibilities
The assassination of Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, on February 3, 2026, nevertheless marks a certain silent, but decisive, rupture in the bloody conflict. Until his death, Seif al-Islam occupied a paradoxical position: politically neutralized, legally challenged, militarily without his own apparatus, but symbolically available. His mere existence maintained the hypothesis, however fragile, of a third path: neither the continuation of the militia system, nor authoritarian restoration based on regional balances, but a form of reinterpreted continuity, capable of capturing a still vivid social memory.
This option was not mainstream, and probably not viable, but it still existed as a latent variable in the Libyan “system,” and forced armed actors, regional patrons, and external powers to contend with an additional uncertainty: that of a return of politics through the detour of the past. The son kept alive the specter of a return to the father’s “order.” Seif al-Islam’s elimination closes this breach. In this context, it is more than a man who was assassinated. It is the illusion of the eternal return to the “mythical golden age” maintained by all dictatorial dynasties.
But, beyond that, this murder also says something fundamental about contemporary Libya, inasmuch as it confirms that the political field there is no longer simply constrained by violence, but is delimited by it. Any figure likely to introduce a symbolic recomposition escaping the existing armed balances becomes, by definition, incompatible with the “system.” Seif al-Islam did not directly threaten any camp militarily. The threat he posed was much deeper: he introduced a dissonance and a possibility of rupture, even regressive, in an order based on controlled fragmentation.
His disappearance does not, however, cause an immediate shift and does not redistribute the cards of power. It does, however, produce something more lasting. In this case, a confirmation that post-2011 Libya can no longer be thought of as an open transitional space. It is a locked territory where only configurations based on force, regional alliances, and external interests are tolerated. With the liquidation of Seif al-Islam, the past can no longer be mobilized as a political resource, and the future is no longer negotiable outside of armed power relations.
In this sense, his assassination acts as a final revelation, as it confirms that the Libyan war is not just a prolonged conflict, but it is a stabilized system, capable of eliminating any alternative that would not fit into its logic.
This is where the cursed cycle that began in 2011 closes. Instead of paving the way for the long-awaited blossoming of spring, the fall of Muammar Gaddafi inaugurated an era where sovereignty itself proved impossible with the disappearance of the Leviathan - and, ironically, the ultimate confirmation of this reality lies in the elimination of his son.
Rather than moving towards reconstruction and democracy, Libya has become a territory administered by default and maintained in a form of conflicted but agreed-upon equilibrium. Yet, peace is not impossible there. It is, more cynically, incompatible with the rationalities currently at play, a victim of the cold cynicism of realpolitik. As long as no one has an interest in it, will Libya remain nothing more than another brutal laboratory of contemporary conflict?
And the Libyans, in all this? “The Libyans? Well, too bad for them!”
Read on the same theme:
2011 or Libya in the post-state era (1/5)
The Libyan conflict: an excessive “militiarization” of politics (2/5)
“Two Libyas” and an elusive sovereignty (3/5)
Libya, a regional festering sore (4/5)