Dr. Youssef Mohammad Sawani
For over a decade, international commentary on Libya has been trapped in a patronizing loop. It’s time to emerge from that narrative.
Whenever a new political deadlock paralyzes Libya or localized clashes between powerful rival militias break out on the streets of the capital Tripoli, the global policy establishment dusts off its favourite phrases: “failed state,” “security vacuum,” and “primordial tribalism”.
This lexicon serves a very specific purpose. By framing Libya’s fragmentation following the fall of the previous regime of Muammar Qaddafi as an inevitable product of native institutional incapacity and ancient internal feuds, the international community achieves a convenient double victory. It blames the victims of the crisis while completely absolving the outside architects of Libya’s ongoing paralysis.
The reality on the ground is far more calculated. Libya is not a broken state suffering from a spontaneous institutional breakdown. It is a highly functional system of “managed chaos” in an undeclared modern theatre of tutelage where a domestic kleptocratic cartel and foreign powers work in tandem to lock the country in a state of permanent instability.
This ensures that Libya’s vast sovereign wealth remains easily extractable and its population permanently disenfranchised. To understand how Libya arrived here, we must dismantle the comfortable myths of the post-2011 era and look directly at the raw mechanics of what has become a highly lucrative “Cartel State”—a governance structure where formal state authority is captured by armed groups and political elites or cliques that treat national resources as their own spoils.
The Myth of the Humanitarian Rescue
The baseline narrative of modern Libya began in 2011 with the NATO-backed intervention under the United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine. Framed as a noble rescue mission to save civilians from the security apparatus of the Qaddafi regime’s reported violent suppression of protesters during the 2011 uprising and his explicit threat to ‘cleanse‘ opposition-held cities (much similar to Srebrenica), the R2P intervention was framed as a triumph of global moral conscience. In practice, it was a geopolitical bait-and-switch.
Once the regime collapsed, the international coalition did not stick around to help; Libya was in a fragile situation beset by a security vacuum and the mushrooming of armed militias. The coalition here could have shepherded the country toward a viable sovereign transition. Instead, they packed up leaving behind a structural vacuum that was immediately hijacked by regional capitals. Far from safeguarding the Libyan people, this selective intervention turned the country into a testing ground for foreign weapons and proxy ambitions.
Regional powers such as Turkey, the UAE, and Russia used Libya as a laboratory for advanced drone warfare and the deployment of mercenaries like the Syrian fighters and the Wagner Group to project influence without the political cost of direct state-on-state confrontation. Sovereignty was reduced to a conditional luxury dependent entirely on how local well-armed actors aligned with the strategic desires of outside capitals.
Today, this manifests in a state of soft occupation where thousands of foreign mercenaries from Russian paramilitary networks to Turkish-backed forces and external intelligence agencies permanently dictate the security landscape. The mechanics of occupation via mercenaries in Libya function as a privatized multi-layered system where foreign patrons outsource their strategic ambitions to local Libyan militias and foreign combatants. This creates a soft occupation where state sovereignty is effectively bypassed by these entrenched networks.
The Mechanics of the Cartel State
This artificial environment of managed instability birthed a predatory domestic model: the Cartel State which capitalized on decoupling the country’s current legislative and executive bodies from popular representation. Libya has experienced a decade-long political impasse where un-elected transition-era leaders entrenched themselves as permanent fixtures prioritizing the protection of their own power and financial interests over the democratic mandate of a populace that has not had the opportunity to vote for its representatives since 2014.
The major political factions locked in a power play are the Tripoli-based internationally-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) and the eastern-based House of Representatives (HoR) and its Government of National Stability (GNS) in alliance with the Khalifa Haftar-led Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF, a.k.a. Libyan National Army) maintain a loud superficial theatre of ideological warfare.
Behind closed doors, however, they share a deep mutual interest in preserving the status quo. By keeping the country divided, these elites can indefinitely postpone national elections while monopolizing the state’s financial pipelines. This profound lack of democratic legitimacy has incentivized these entrenched factions to treat the state’s finance and monetary institutions as a prize to be seized and the true nature of this arrangement was laid bare during the explosive 2024 political warfare over the Central Bank of Libya (CBL).
When the Government of National Unity and the Presidential Council, without the approval of the House of Representatives, forcefully removed the Central Bank governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, who had previously restricted government spending by blocking out-of-budget expenditures, this triggered a retaliatory oil shutdown by eastern factions exposing the fundamental truth of the Libyan crisis: the state is not “failing” but is being actively fought over as a financial prize—a vast, state-managed oil and gas reserves coupled with a highly centralized financial control over these revenues.
This makes the Central Bank and the National Oil Corporation (NOC) the ultimate keys to the treasure enabling whoever controls them an almost complete monopoly and control over the nation’s wealth without the need for taxation or popular consent as the case with rentier economy. The international community working through the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) swooped in not to implement a democratic resolution but to broker another elite power-sharing deal over bank leadership.
UNSMIL mediated a narrow deal between rival political elites to resolve the 2024 CBL crisis, therefore, effectively restarting the broken status quo by allowing competing factions to carve up the bank’s leadership and board positions among themselves. They managed the crisis just enough to get the oil flowing back to international markets while leaving the kleptocratic structure completely intact. By treating the CBL crisis as a technical issue that could be managed via board appointments, the international community avoided the difficult work of addressing how Libya’s political economy actually functions.
They achieved the immediate objective of oil flowing back into international markets, but they did so by reinforcing the power of the exact same actors who had caused the crisis in the first place. This implied that the next crisis is merely a matter of time. This systemic reality was formally confirmed in a March 2026 UN Panel of Experts report which explicitly concluded that Libya’s armed groups have entrenched themselves as the dominant drivers of governance exerting a “coercive and cartel-like control” over the nation’s economic institutions. Nowhere is this explicit exploitation more visible than in the energy sector.
Libya sits atop Africa’s largest proven oil reserves, yet, there exists an opaque production-sharing agreement bypassing competitive bidding. State-sanctioned fuel smuggling networks and deliberately convoluted central bank letters of credit systematically divert billions in subsidized fuel to foreign markets allowing entrenched political and militia factions to siphon off national wealth while maintaining a veneer of institutional legitimacy enriching an oligarchic elite and their foreign sponsors.
The Libyan people, meanwhile, are reduced to price-takers in their own land. Following successive central bank devaluations of the dinar, citizens endure runaway inflation, chronic electricity blackouts and critical cash shortages. While billions of dollars in oil revenues (As of June 2026, Libya’s crude oil production has reached approximately 1.49 million barrels per day) flow through a centralized pipeline directly into the hands of the cartel, ordinary Libyans plunge into artificial poverty.
Following the Central Bank’s 14.7% devaluation of the Libyan dinar in January 2026, inflation has surged into the double digits reaching approximately 14% by mid-year. This economic strain is compounded by a sharp increase in the cost of essential goods with the national Minimum Expenditure Basket (MEB) spiking by over 10% in April 2026 alone further eroding household purchasing power amidst chronic cash shortages at banks and ATMs. This is a highly sophisticated transnational extraction racket operating under a veneer of international diplomatic legitimacy.
De-exoticizing the Social Fabric
When international observers try to explain this breakdown, they invariably fall back on Orientalist tropes, pointing to Libya’s “tribal nature” as the fundamental barrier to a modern democratic state. This analysis fundamentally misreads Libyan society. Traditional kinship structures and local social networks are not primitive relics causing state failure.
Historically, they have been the literal bedrock of societal resilience. When the centralized state collapsed in 2011, it was these organic local networks functioning through deeply embedded codes of collective liability and conflict mediation that prevented total societal dissolution. The tribe in Libya has historically acted as a conscious civic shield against centralized authoritarian overreach and foreign occupation. These structures, most notably the Wisemen and Elderly and Notables Councils that emerged nationwide, stepped in to act as the primary authorities in the absence of a functioning judiciary and adjudicated everything from property disputes to blood feuds.
In the Nafusa Mountains, regional councils successfully mediated complex inter-tribal tensions between groups like the Mashahiya and Zintani that the central government could not reach. Meanwhile, in Libya’s neglected south, social councils unified their communities to provide basic services where infrastructure had disintegrated. These grassroots initiatives demonstrated that even as the formal state apparatus failed, Libyans utilized deeply embedded social frameworks to prevent total societal dissolution.
However, we must draw a sharp line between this authentic socially cohesive fabric and the opportunistic armed groups dominating the current landscape who inverted the state into an upside-down relationship: Whereas the government should command the security forces, the security forces in the new Libya were dictating to the government how it should perform, ensuring that any political arrangement is contingent upon their approval and continued access to state wealth.
It needs to be highlighted that the militias running rackets in western regions, particularly Tripoli, or controlling smuggling routes in the margins are not “tribal warriors”. They are hyper-modern mercantile appendages of the Cartel State itself. When they wear tribal names, they do that purely as camouflage to mask raw economic predation and racketeering. By labelling these heavily armed state-subcontracted criminal networks as “tribes,” or considering them representatives of regions, ethnicities or cities, the international community perpetuates a harmful narrative that blames indigenous culture for a political crisis that was manufactured by an international security vacuum.
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Dr. Youssef Mohammad Sawani is Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of Tripoli, Libya, and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow, International Centre for Dialogue Initiatives (New York). He is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research and Policy Integration in Africa (IRPIA), and an Advisory Board Member at Lawyers for Justice in Libya (LFJL).
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