The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya
Wolfram Lacher
Conclusions
The meteoric rise and abrupt fall of militant Islamist movements in Libya cannot be explained solely by tactical logics and even less by the power of ideological mobilisation. The search for protection, for example, could cause actors to either ally with jihadists or to distance themselves from them.
Certainly, it was important whether militant Islamists had access to resources or were denied them, whether they celebrated military victories or suffered defeats. But the fact that they were able to spread at all becomes comprehensible by their social embeddedness.
The fact that they were no longer seen as tactical allies at a later point in time was not only due to tactical calculations, but also to the fact that ties of solidarity dating back to 2011 had been shattered by traumatic experiences. The speed of both the expansion and decline of militant Islamist movements becomes easier to understand when mechanisms of demarcation and conformity are considered.
Actors searching for recognition and belonging had impulses that were triggered by key events and became self-reinforcing through the weight of conformism. And thus Libya’s militant Islamists were suddenly gone again.
For analytical purposes, this study has separated mechanisms that are often difficult to distinguish in reality. How is it possible to determine in individual cases whether someone puts on the “Islamists’ abaya” based on deliberate calculation or out of a desire to conform?
In any case, accounts of those involved and close observers suggest that both happened. It should also have become clear that tactical considerations, social relationships and the dialectic of demarcation and conformity interacted with each other. None of this is to say that ideology plays no role in militant Islamist mobilisation.
It undoubtedly does for the hard core and long-term militants. Ideology can contribute significantly to the longevity and resilience of social movements or rebel groups – regardless of whether they espouse Islamist or other ideas.
Although this study cannot conclusively explain why it did not do so in this case, a hypothesis does emerge from the approach chosen here: followers who join a group for tactical reasons, social solidarity or conformism can internalise its ideology.
However, this requires, among other things, time – in other words, the lines of conflict and balance of power that condition militant Islamist mobilisation must retain a modicum of constancy over a certain period of time.
If a conflict reaches a dramatic turning point after a short period of time, thereby fundamentally changing the positions and calculations of its actors, this can interrupt and reverse processes of ideological internalisation.
Followers who adopted ideological positions due to conformism or opportunism can easily change them again under such circumstances. This, in any case, is what occurred in Libya.
Nor does it follow that the decline of militant Islamists in Libya will be permanent. On the contrary, the analysis here would suggest that it is certainly reversible. On the one hand, there is still a hard core of long-standing Islamist – but not jihadist – activists and ideologues who are closely networked with each other, such as the Mufti and the former LIFG leadership.
They are waiting for political conditions to shift in their favour.140 On the other hand, hundreds, perhaps thousands of former members of Ansar al-Sharia and IS are being held in Libyan prisons under the most appalling conditions – and the long-term consequences of this are unpredictable. Both the Libyan and other cases prove that prisons can offer the space and place for long-term radicalisation.
Above all, however, the fate of militant Islamists in Libya shows that critical junctures can have unpredictable consequences by suddenly revolutionising generally accepted assumptions about what political stance is socially acceptable.
The war in the Gaza Strip, which began in October 2023, is the most recent example of Even if it is not ultimately a key event in Libya, it has suddenly changed the way many Libyans view Hamas: “Today, every Libyan will tell you that they hope Hamas will win. But just three months ago, Hamas was still the evil Muslim Brotherhood.”
While this study problematizes common assumptions about the drivers of militant Islamist mobilisation, it does not attempt to replace them with a supposedly more plausible model. Fashion trends are notoriously difficult to predict.
To be more precise: Non-linear developments driven by the adaptation of many to the sudden repositioning of a few actors are largely unpredictable. This realisation does not make it any easier to develop recommendations on how to deal with militant Islamists. Three conclusions, which may also be relevant for other cases, nevertheless emerge from the present analysis.
Firstly, the Libyan case illustrates that extreme caution is required with regard to labels such as “Islamists” and “jihadists” – not to mention “terrorists”. This applies in particular to contexts in which dense social networks play just as big a role in militant mobilisation as ideological proximity.
Maintaining close relationships with militant Islamists in such circumstances does not mean being one yourself. This is all the truer in societies whose austere values are sometimes difficult for outsiders to distinguish from explicitly militant ideologies. In retrospect, it becomes clear that most international coverage of militant Islamists in Libya during the period analysed here painted too crude a picture.
As a result, individuals and groups often ended up being put into pigeonholes to which they did not belong on closer inspection.
Secondly, this study shows that even those who not only make pacts with jihadist groups, but also join them, are by no means all ideologically convinced Islamists. This is not a surprising finding in itself, but merely confirms what studies have already established in many other contexts. However, the Libyan case shows that the motives for militant Islamist mobilisation can be even more diverse than previously assumed.
In addition to tactical, even opportunistic actions and reactions to grievances such as arbitrary repression, these include close social ties and the pursuit of social recognition and belonging. Thirdly and finally, these conclusions do not only apply to militant Islamists. Rather, they indicate that militant Islamists follow the same logics of action as other armed actors.
Analyses of armed groups have so far paid surprisingly little attention to the search for social recognition as a motivating factor – compared to supposedly rational interests such as power, selfenrichment or survival. Social demarcation and conformism are mechanisms at work in all group formation processes. They also matter in overall societal shifts through which political ideals and cleavages gain or lose resonance. They should be given greater consideration in order to better understand the diverse motivations behind militant mobilisation – whether Islamist or not.
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Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.
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SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs