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In Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Matteo Capasso provides an alternative analysis of Libya’s 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’s 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:

‘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’. 

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’s 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.  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 ‘everyday’ 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  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?  If one ignores—rather conveniently—these 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.

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