Libya: Lost in Transition

Abstract

The guiding concept for this special journal section is to explore the increasing normalization of Libya’s post-2011 “transition” and its reification into a new social, juridical and economic status quo. Amid constant news reports and think tank analyses of chaotic armed conflict, political fragmentation, and even wholesale “state failure,” we wanted to highlight the extent to which this protracted interregnum—between the collapse of Mu‘ammar al-Gaddafi’s decrepit Jamahiriyyah system in 2011 and the failure of any political coalition to achieve a new hegemonic order since then—can no longer be considered just that, an interregnum. So what is Libya’s new normal, and how do the contributions here attempt to account for it? In the wake of the 2011 uprisings across Northern Africa and Southwest Asia, it has become commonplace to invoke Gramsci’s now famous theorization of crisis from the Prison Notebooks as historical moments in which the old order can no longer be sustained but whose replacement cannot be established either. In the case of Libya, the crisis results from the entanglement of these two processes, and, in many ways, it has come to represent the new order itself. This is precisely where we can situate Emad Badi’s contribution to this collection. On the one hand, he historically situates Libya’s recent decade of “morbid symptoms”—to continue to invoke Gramsci—in the structures and tactics of rule that marked the Gaddafi regime’s centralized forty-two year grip on power (1969–2011). On the other hand, he also evaluates European theories of the state against these historical and contemporary realities. He finds them unable to account for the forms of order and disorder, and the ways in which governmental forms are established and challenged, in the Libyan context.