Libya, Regional Abscess (4/5)
The Libyan war ceases to be intelligible when read solely through its internal actors. From 2014, and even more so after 2019, the conflict transformed into a theater of regional projection, where local dynamics serve as supports for strategies that largely exceed them. Libya is thus a fragmented territory, invested, used, and worked from the outside as a malleable space, devoid of effective sovereignty, and, consequently, ideal for indirect wars.
Certainly, the rivalry between regional powers alone does not explain the Libyan collapse, but it nevertheless freezes its lines, prevents any endogenous resolution, and transforms every local advance into a variable of a larger game. At this stage, the war no longer only pits Libyans against each other, but competing visions of the regional order, projected onto a territory incapable of absorbing them. The ultimate focal point, like Syria post-2011, or, before, Lebanon between 1975 and 1990.
The first fault line opposes two antagonistic conceptions of stabilization. On one side, an authoritarian, security-oriented, vertical logic, supported by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. On the other, an opportunistic and transactional intervention logic promoted by Turkey, based on a different reading of regional balances.
For Cairo, Libya constitutes a strategic lock. The long and porous Egyptian western border has long been perceived as a direct threat to national security, especially after 2011. The specter of weapons, fighters, and hostile ideologies circulating has structured the Egyptian position. Therefore, supporting a force capable of imposing a military order in Cyrenaica appears as a defensive necessity. From this perspective, Khalifa Haftar embodies less a Libyan project than a tool for stabilization by proxy.
The Emirates, for their part, place their commitment within a broader strategy of projecting influence. Libya is one of the links in a regional policy aimed at containing political Islam, structuring allied security networks, and controlling critical points of commercial and energy flows. The support provided to eastern Libya certainly responds to an ideological logic; but it is even more part of a pragmatic approach, based on anticipating long-term power relations.
Reconfiguring the Regional Equation
Facing this axis, Turkey intervenes with a different rationale. Its massive engagement from 2019 marks a decisive turning point in the conflict. For Ankara, it is not only about saving Tripoli from an imminent military offensive but about reconfiguring the regional equation. Thus, Turkish intervention combines direct military assistance, drone deployment, advisors, Syrian mercenaries, and, crucially, a maritime agreement that redefines borders in the Eastern Mediterranean. And this agreement is not a technical detail. It places Libya at the heart of an energy and geopolitical rivalry that extends far beyond its borders.
By aligning with the Tripoli government, Ankara gains legal legitimacy to challenge competing projects in the Mediterranean, weaken the Greece-Cyprus-Egypt axis, and establish itself as a crucial player in the eastern basin. Libya ceases to exist as such and to be an objective in itself - it is more than that: a strategic platform.
This regionalization of the conflict thus produces a cumulative effect, inasmuch as each Libyan camp is gradually dispossessed of its strategic autonomy. Major military decisions are no longer made in Tripoli or Benghazi but are calculated according to the red lines and interests of external patrons, and the war thus transforms into a space of indirect negotiation between regional powers, where escalation is controlled, calibrated, sometimes suspended, but rarely resolved.
The Berlin conference, initiated by Germany and the UN in January 2020, and the multiple diplomatic initiatives that followed, illustrate this impasse. They sought to re-establish a multilateral framework but encountered a bitter reality: the regional actors present in Libya have no immediate interest in a sovereign unification of the country. A weak, divided, negotiable Libya offers more opportunities than a strong central state capable of setting its own rules…
A Management Phase
The war in Tripoli, between 2019 and 2020, was in this regard a particularly revealing moment, in that it demonstrated that external intervention can alter a balance of power without producing a political solution. The failure of Haftar's offensive against the official government did not, however, pave the way for state reconstruction; instead, it confirmed Libya's transformation into a zone of conflicting equilibrium, where no actor can prevail without causing uncontrollable regional escalation.
From then on, the conflict enters a phase of management rather than resolution. Ceasefires are respected as long as they serve the interests of the patrons. Violations are tolerated as long as they do not cross certain thresholds. Libya becomes a space where war is contained, but never defused.
This dynamic also has a maritime and migratory dimension. Migration routes, ports, and departure zones for Europe have become stakes in implicit negotiations with European powers, often politically absent but present through their security concerns. Libya then serves as a buffer zone at the cost of brutal outsourcing of migration control and the invisibility of the accompanying violence.
What is happening in Libya, therefore, has nothing to do with a classic civil war. It is a regional war of position being fought on Libyan territory, inscribed in a space where the front lines are as much diplomatic as military. Welcome to the realm of extreme instrumentalization. ‘The war of others,’ Ghassan Tuéni would have said… with local cannon fodder.
In this context, there should be no illusion: any attempt to resolve the crisis as strictly Libyan is doomed to failure. As long as regional balances remain structured by rivalry, and as long as the Eastern Mediterranean is a space of energy and strategic competition, Libya will remain a field of ‘adjustment.’ The formula is undoubtedly cynical, but it perfectly describes reality. The war is maintained specifically because it fulfills a function in an unstable regional order, as it also does in Sudan. And as long as this function is not challenged, no solution, no lasting peace can emerge.
Next article: Libya in the Fragmented International Order (5/5)
Read on the same theme:
2011 or Libya in the Post-State Era (1/5)
The Libyan Conflict: An Extreme ‘Militianization’ of Politics (2/5)
‘Two Libyas’ and an Elusive Sovereignty (3/5)