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In Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Matteo Capasso provides an alternative analysis of Libya鈥檚 history and regime under Colonel Gaddafi leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. The book offers a compelling counterargument to the mainstream narrative of Libya as a stateless, authoritarian and rogue state by focusing on international and geopolitical dynamics impacting Libya鈥檚 governance.

Q.1 Your book argues against the dominant western analysis of Libya under Colonel Gaddafi as a dictatorship, completely dependent on its economic legitimacy from oil. To quote:

鈥�This book has cautioned readers from rushing to define the Jamahiriya as an umpteenth authoritarian regime in the Arab world that crushes and controls its people. The significance of this issue lies in how the increasing repressible characteristic of the regime inevitably reflected wider power鈥�. 

What do you mean by wider power dynamics?

When you pick any book on the political history of Libya, you are bound to encounter the argument that Qaddafi鈥檚 Libya (not the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya or the Libyan government) was a stateless society, governed ruthlessly by a dictator who was aiming to disrupt the US-led international order.聽 In the book, I define these arguments as a conceptual tryptic, including the ideas of statelessness, authoritarianism and rogue state. The book starts off questioning the use of these analytical frameworks and instead proposes to address questions of political legitimacy and authority via the study of the everyday. To do so, however, brought me to face another problem, namely the fact that most academic studies approach the 鈥榚veryday鈥� with an overemphasis on the agency and power of the people. This, in turn, has led to dismiss a bit too quickly the impact of global and structural factors; and this is where I come to answer your question. While the everyday gained prominence and became a privileged site for studying politics in the Arab region, especially in the aftermath of the 2011 mass uprisings, these analyses 聽remain disconnected from long-standing international dynamics of politics and political economy. In other worlds, how were these states integrated in the wider international political economy? Did the political projects pursued by the Libyan government, especially in the aftermath of the 1969 revolution, challenge the interests of Western geopolitical forces? Why was Libya progressively subject to military assaults and geopolitical pressure?聽 If one ignores鈥攔ather conveniently鈥攖hese aspects, it ends up to square one, basically explaining the politics of the country as the result of internal factors. In this manner, one not only delinks the socio-political formation of countries in the Global South from the international world, but also ends up flattening out its hierarchies existing.

Q.2 How can al-Fatih鈥檚 policies be described as anti-imperial and the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC)鈥檚 governance model as socialist? Can we argue that government-led accumulation and despotism simultaneously have a more macro vision of anti-imperialism? Some would say this is a contradiction.

This is a great question, Farwa. I think there are two fundamental points to be raised in order to answer it. First, there is the question of time, which entails providing an analytical explanation to the gradual transformation of al-Fatih. The government was neither despotic nor socialist from beginning to end. In forty-two years, major political and economic changes took place, which reflected the necessities to manoeuvre a changing international order, i.e., the unipolar rise of the US, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of political Islam in the region, and so on.

For instance, whereas the Libyan government tried to pursue and implement redistributive policies and projects of regional cooperation in the first two decades after the 1969 revolution, these policies were gradually reversed by the late 1980s. The revolution had struggled to overcome its dependency on oil revenues, and the working masses had not become self-productive. At the same time, the military confrontation with the West, as well as the imposition of the sanctions created the necessary grounds for delegitimizing the Libyan government at home and abroad, thus defeatism鈥攏ot revolution鈥� became the name of the game. Yet, while the funding and support of liberation movements鈥攁nd by this, I mean the use of direct violence鈥攈ad been a major goal pursued by the RCC, it changed completely in the 1990s. By then, Libya was pursuing a strategy of what we now call as 鈥榤ultipolarity鈥�, namely diversifying its own political-economic integration and alliances, with a specific focus on the African continent. As you can see, these are two different strategies of anti-imperialist policies, which show the necessity to adapt oneself to the changing geopolitical system, but also produce very different results.

Second, contradictions will always be present; yet, as Mao-Tse Dong would argue, what form they take is as fundamental. There is no doubt that the thirteen-years military debacle in Chad, one of the most understudied proxy wars, gave a major blow to the Libyan government. Faced by a military alliance combining Western geopolitical forces (France and the US) together with Israel, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, what were the prospects of coming victorious from that war? Did the Libyan government miscalculate its strategy in Chad? Similarly, if the events of 2011, as history has shown us, turned out to be an imperialist aggression against Libya, why did the Libyan public struggle largely to grasp its nature? As I show in Chapter 3, the ideological and educational grip of the government over the population had progressively failed.  

I think these are examples of how a more productive discussion could be developed in order to gauge the limitations, successes, and defeats of a country of the global South that was wrestling to regain its right to political, economic, and social development.

Q.3 Libya鈥檚 exemplary record in providing free health and education services are now an important reference point of its move towards domestic welfarism. How was this achieved and what led to its demise. 

Once again, there is so much confusion when it comes to Libya, even among leftists. Today, there is a plethora of social media posts rallying the achievements of pre-2011 Libya, where鈥攚e are told鈥攈ealth care, education, and all kinds of other social services were provided with little or no costs by the government. Is this true? Yes and no. This is where we must proceed with an historical analysis of the changing material conditions. For instance, in the aftermath of the 1969 revolution, there are no doubts that the government poured millions in establishing a model of economic development that reached out to the most disadvantaged sectors of society. Unless you ask someone descending from a family of wealthy landowners whose properties were confiscated and redistributed, the economic policies pursued by the government were of a truly progressive nature.  By the mid颅-1980s, these policies boosted economic development in Libya and raised the general standard of living. The rate of infant mortality witnessed a massive reduction, the average intake of calories per day was the highest among the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting countries, and life expectancy had increased from fifty-five to sixty-four years old over the course of eleven years. The government had fulfilled many of its promises, transforming slums and unhealthy dwellings into modern tenements, building a wide range of infrastructure and construction projects, such as an artificial river, transport and communication networks, and providing free healthcare and education. These policies translated into a large consensus around and support for a model of political and economic development that challenged the idea of a state-centric and market-oriented world political system.

If you fast-forward the status of the infrastructural development to the 1990s-early 2000s, the situation has changed drastically. From the increasing stealing of public money by private actors to an UN-imposed decade of international isolation, the services provided by the government were not of the same quality. As I trace in the book, Libya never ever reached the levels of poverty and disenfranchisement that Tunisians or Egyptians were experiencing by 2011, yet Libyans were nonetheless dissatisfied because they aspired to see Libya become like Dubai, not Egypt.

Q.4. The book makes an interesting link between US- led sanctions on Libya and the deepening of unequal exchange relations under dependency theory. Can you explain this?

Starting with the US-led unilateral sanctions in the 1970s and then becoming UN-led multilateral ones (1992-2003), Libya fell under the grip of sanctions for more than two decades. Now, as much as mainstream academic analyses tell us that sanctions had a minor impact, this is not the case. Take, for instance, the US ban on spare parts related to the aviation industry. This ban imposed major financial costs on the nascent Libyan sector. The US monopoly over the aerospace industry functioned as part of the process of unequal exchange of technology and impeded the healthy development of a service that was vital to Libya鈥檚 economy. That is, Libya was heavily reliant on the import of products and foreign skilled labour. When a country is prevented from harnessing its resources for national and regional developmental goals, then these economic measures aim effectively to keep a relationship of economic dependency. Once again, by the 1990s, this type of technological control could not be exercised by the US anymore, since European states and other countries had broken its monopoly over the aviation sector. However, the UN-imposed multilateral sanctions had different types of consequences. By 1994, just two years into the UN sanctions鈥� regime, as many as nine thousand medical patients had to be treated outside of the country, since Libya was not allowed access to the necessary equipment to treat them. Medical staff reductions, at the same time, had seriously impaired the functioning of the health services, which were strongly dependent on the expertise of foreign doctors. Archival documents from the United Nations reveal the extent of the impact across several industrial sectors, including oil, transportation, and agriculture. Meanwhile, inflation had reached record rates, at 42 percent in 1993, peaking at 50 percent in 1994.

I am now working on a paper that will hopefully be published soon on the nature of sanctions on Libya, and I would argue that sanctions operate as one among many forms of imperialist warfare, which were unleashed to maintain the dominance of US-led imperialism in the Arab region, and the global South at large. In this regard, sanctions remain a fundamental tool of the imperialist 鈥榮ecurity doctrine.鈥�

Q.5 Libya鈥檚 pariah governance model and identity as an Arab as well African state also deserves attention to regional influences. If we pay attention to Gulf States as class states, following Adam Hanieh, Libyan aspirations based on the Dubai model tell us something about the role of empire in forming consumerist construct. What did Dubai mean for Libya and Libyans? Similarly, what did Libya mean for African states?

This is the focus of Chapter 5 in the book, in which I trace the rise of consumerist desires, as well as the fantasy of turning Libya into the Dubai of North Africa. The book shows that these fantasies are a reminder of the rise of the global to the surface of the mundane, specifically the triumph of global capitalism with Gulf characteristics. These fantasies were symptomatic of the gradual defeat of another vision for the future that had initially sought to build an alternative model of development, largely reflecting the sociopolitical context then prevailing in the wider 1970s African and Asian postcolonial resistance. However, this political model not only showed its internal limitations, but also collapsed under the constant threat of war and sanctions by Western geopolitical forces. Consequently, these more progressive policies that had been pursued were abandoned, metamorphosing into more repressive policies and rising socioeconomic inequalities for the Libyan people. In such a context, meaning in the early 2000s, capitalist modernity was being desired, while the contribution of these same Western-led forces to the defeat of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya was being ignored/forgotten.

At the same time, the Dubai model competed with another vision of the future that another segment of the Libyan elite was pursuing, namely the Sirte model. In 1999, an official meeting was hosted in the Libyan city of Sirte to proclaim the establishment of the African Union. I describe the model of Sirte, in other words, as incarnating the aspirations of the regime to turn Libya into a bulwark of African regional development. The Libyan government pursued a foreign policy of diplomatic expansion and economic investment toward the African continent. These policies further hindered normalization with the US in particular, because, for example, Qaddafi lobbied the African Union to reject the presence of the US African Command Army (AFRICOM) on African soil, forcing them to relocate their headquarters to Frankfurt, Germany. The Gulf monarchies, on the contrary, have embraced a progressively normalizing stance towards the Zionist-Israeli occupation of Palestine, encapsulated in the signing of the recent Abraham Accords. Also, Libya sponsored and supported the launch of the first African-owned communication satellite, whose creation put an end to lucrative subcontracts for Western countries. And, as we now know thanks to Wikileaks, Libya was planning the launch of important monetary changes for the African continent. It had, in fact, accumulated 143 tons of gold that were intended to be used to establish a Pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden dinar; the plan was designed to provide the francophone African countries with an alternative to the French franc.

Q.6 Where does Libya stand since 2011?

Libya has become one of the numerous theatres of wars in the region, created by US-led capitalism/imperialism in order to maintain its dominance. In 2011, the country was destroyed by a NATO-led military coalition, largely backed by Gulf countries. Since then, Libya no longer has a national security apparatus that acts independently without foreign meddling, and its major financial portfolios are still subject to international sanctions, which will be presumably lifted鈥攁s the so-called international community repeats鈥攐nce the war ends.

Since the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab world has been the protagonist in a passage from an equilibrium between economic and military imperialism, where the ideology of economic 鈥榞lobalisation鈥� had the upper hand, to a militaristic and technological form of imperialist expansion, where war and pauperisation are pursued, as in Libya and Syria. The war in Libya continues because it is part of a new geopolitical balance, in which鈥攄espite the decline of US hegemony鈥攏o other country is dominating. The corollary for Libya is that its integration into the global economy has also changed. How? Via war, militarism, border missions and death, which have imposed themselves as the new mechanisms of social reproduction and capital accumulation at the global level. In such a scenario, futile are the international actors鈥� calls for an arms embargo and ceasefires. Why? Because wars and their consequences are becoming the new terrain of social reproduction for a US-led imperial capital that struggles to remain alive. As I explore in my recent article, have increasingly become a paradigmatic form of investment opportunity through which the global South is being framed and integrated into the global economy, where armaments, drones and technological infrastructures of surveillance can be tested, perfected and reused at home. Finally, there is another fundamental element to this question, which is directly related to our work as academic. The military-industrial complex in which Libya has fallen also has an academic dimension; that is, since 2011, there is an increasing attempt by so-called security and thinktank experts to occupy the space of knowledge production on Libya. This is not the result of coincidence. This is part of a political economy of war that fosters a certain discourse and in which alternative鈥攁nd more critical鈥攖ypes of analyses are rejected, if not outrightly attacked.

 is a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester in the UK. Her research focuses on comparative development, Industrial policy, corporations, economic geography and the changing landscape of development assistance. She tweets at .