State Building and the post-Gaddafi Libyan Crisis

mit Youssef Sawani (Dozent für Politik & Internationale Beziehungen, Universität Tripoli, Libyen)

Eine Veranstaltung der Gruppe Kritische Islamwissenschaftler:innen und Arabist:innen in Kooperation mit der Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Sachsen.

Vortragsreihe: "10 Jahre arabischer Frühling - eine kritische Betrachtung"

Libya’s conflict, which has been raging since 2011, seems to defy resolution while militias and foreign interference not only reduce the state and its sovereignty to nil, but also threaten its very existence as a united country and more importantly risk tearing its social cohesion part. Politically divided, Libya lacks nationally effective legitimate state institutions able to perform in the Weberian sense. Power-sharing arrangement has only confirmed the inability of the Government of National Accord to gain legitimacy and their failure to act in conjunction with armed militias, the real power brokers.
This lecture will provide a background of the Libyan crisis/conflict, seek to analyse its dynamics and highlight the intrinsic and perennial factors that contribute to it. The main argument of the lecture is that Libya, despite what seems to be the case, is not just a tribal and stateless society and criticize the approaches that see its ailing situation only in such projection that actually reflects orientalism and Western centrism.