Abstract
This chapter examines the relations between Libya and countries in the Euro-Atlantic communities from the ousting of Muhammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011 to the present day. As this chapter shows, NATO operation Unified Protector was successful on military grounds. However, ensuing attempts to stabilise the country failed to produce significant results. The lack of meaningful EU support during the formal transition process and the interference of external actors complicated an already fragile transition. Taking stock of these lessons, Overcoming these obstacles requires involving militias in the peace process, redistributing oil revenues more equitably within Libyan society, and ensuring more effective cooperation between NATO and the EU, and among individual NATO and EU members.
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Notes
- 1.
The Libyan Dawn Coalition was created to oppose Operation Dignity and included Islamist and revolutionary factions in Tripoli, the city-state of Misrata and various cities in western Libya.
- 2.
For instance, the predominant narrative portrays the smuggling of migrants as highly profitable for criminal organisations. On the contrary, evidence shows that, despite the fact that migrant smuggling revenues are concentrated and “unbalanced” towards a small group of people in the country, their size is not such as to structurally change the local economy, and oil revenues could easily replace the revenues lost from the lack of migrants smuggling. In concrete terms, UNODC estimates that in 2016 each migrant paid about USD 3000 to leave Libya by sea (UNODC [2018], Global Study on Smuggling of Migrants, United Nations Publications, June 2018). This is equivalent to no more than USD 490 million in the peak year (about 162,000 people arrived in Italy in 2016 upon leaving Libya). By comparison, assuming an oil production at 1 million barrels per day, and a price of $70.2 per barrel (Brent price on 11 November 2018), current oil revenues exceed $25.6 billion. In sum, the smuggling of migrants from Libya equates to less than 2% of total oil revenues.
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Villa, M., Varvelli, A. (2020). Libya: From Regime Change to State-Building. In: Cusumano, E., Hofmaier, S. (eds) Projecting Resilience Across the Mediterranean. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23641-0_8
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