Contention, Violence and Stalemate in Post-War Libya

Abstract

Post-war Libya provides an interesting case study for how weakly institutionalized political opportunity structures shape and are shaped by decisions of emergent groups, especially newly mobilized Islamist actors. For mainstream actors, these interactions produced incentives for de-escalation during dozens of violent skirmishes that took place from 2011 to 2014 that, in other contexts, could have tipped into civil war. At the same time, the stalemated environment gave Jihadist groups incentives to put down roots, husband resources and then intensify their terrorism campaigns. This article describes, decomposes and assesses patterns of contention produced by these interactions, and explains how they influenced post-war political developments.

Acknowledgements

This analysis has benefited immensely from early discussions with Christopher Chivvis, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, and Frederic Wehrey, and from comments from Leonardo Arriola, Aurélie Campana, Youssef Chaitani, Ron Hassner, Cedric Jourde, Nicole Willcoxon and the anonymous reviewers. All errors are my own. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.

Notes

1. A list of legislation passed by the GNC can be found at: http://www.h2o.org.ly/en/project/eye-gnc.

2. The large circles in Tripoli and Benghazi are overlapping smaller circles representing violence in adjacent jurisdictions, so if anything these figures underrepresent the violence in those metropolitan areas. Nonetheless, the pictures are sufficient for understanding the diffusion of contention across Libya.

3. For example, in the depth of crisis, representatives of the government offered the leader of the PFG, Ibrahim Jadhran, tens of millions of dollars to return control of the oil facilities to the government (Coker, 2013; Crisis Group, 2015).