Abstract
The 17 February revolution saw the rise of the tribe, and tribal politics, as a central factor and key explanatory variable in the civil war.1 For many, both inside and outside Libya, this was a surprising development. In the four decades preceding the revolution, the political role of tribal loyalties and tribal leaders in Libya did not attract sufficient scholarly attention. Leaving aside John Davis’s seminal work on tribal politics in Ajdabiyya and Kufra during the late 1970s, it was only in the mid-2000s that researchers began to accord more importance to the tribal factor.2 From the first weeks of the uprisings, however, tribal figures appeared on satellite television speaking for their constituencies, and the international media identified tribal loyalties as a key factor determining the course of events.
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Notes
Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
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See International Crisis Group, Divided We Stand: Libya’s Enduring Conflicts, Middle East/North Africa Report 130, Brussels, September 14, 2012.
Al-Sanusi Bsikri, “Intikhabat al-mu’tamar al-watani al-Libi wa khiyarat al-kutal al-siyasiya al-faiza,” July 23, 2012, http://studies.aljazeera.net/ResourceGallery/media/Documents/2012/7/24/201272410518348734Libyan_National_elections.pdf.
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© 2013 Jason Pack
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Lacher, W. (2013). The Rise of Tribal Politics. In: Pack, J. (eds) The 2011 Libyan Uprisings and the Struggle for the Post-Qadhafi Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137308092_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137308092_6
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