A Libyan Rhapsody: The Conundrum Of Libya's Security Crisis

Source: Nada Harib/Getty Images

Security and insecurity are often understood to be interpretations made within an inter-subjective realm of interaction among various subjectivities in the absence or presence of objective threats. As Keith Krause articulated, “the powerful 'sign of security' serves to structure the mentalities, values, conceptions of the self, of social order, and of the condition of security that are embedded in institutions that we encounter on a nearly everyday basis”. 

One effect of the successful security performances, is the appearance of the state as a unitary, continuous actor, and one who can claim legitimacy over those internal to it. However when the very state manifests itself in a bedlam of chaos, the question arises is, whose security actually matters? 

To solicit some clarity from this ontological conundrum, I would like to invoke the example of Libya, suffering from the malediction of a failed state. Since the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) declared a state of emergency in Libya’s capital city of Tripoli in September 2018, less than a week after a UN cease-fire went into effect. Attempts to create a unity government have met with limited success as the House of Representatives (HoR) based in Libya’s east and a key supporter of Libyan National Army's (LNA) leader General Khalifa Haftar and the GNA compete for power. With both governing bodies consolidating control over oil fields, central banks, the fractures in the Libyan state are deep enough to earn it the moniker of a ‘failed state’. In addition, the incursion of Islamic State and its attempts to use the country as a hub for coordinating trans-regional violence, any effort to create a ‘unity government’ is more bound to failure than success.

As a result of the continued fighting, the battle for control over Libya crosses tribal, regional, political, and even religious lines. However, more than the existential crisis of a nation state, the conditioned existence of the substratum of the state forms a bigger concern. As per the UN Refugee Agency estimates, more than 217,000 people have been internally displaced or trafficked and approximately 1.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in Libya.

As Ramali Khadeja articulated, Libya has a political system that is not a system. It is an ad hoc process, constructed and driven by events. While some militias are obscurely linked to Libya’s successive governments. The labyrinth of armed groups means that violence has become completely unpredictable and unorganized.  However in this chaos, one thing is certain, “men are fighting to control the country’s resources with foreign guns, while it is very dangerous for a woman to even drive around on her own.”(UNWAS) Libya’s local and regional diversity means that the citizen’s experience throughout the country is highly variable. However, among the stakeholders, most significant is the intensity of the conflict’s effect on women. While war incurred insecurity has in many instances limited women’s freedom of movement in public. Traditional and religious injunctions against women traveling without a male guardian (mahram) have been invoked in some areas.  It would also be remiss to omit the fact that women migrants and refugees in Libya are at continual risk of rape and sexual exploitation, and forced prostitution in detention. However curiously, the absence of gender disaggregated data on conflict casualties and sexual and gender-based violence among women serves to further their marginalization and the erasure of the gendered impact of armed conflict. Further, patriarchal strains of “Libya’s culture fused with the ideas of masculinity, militarism, and fundamentalism” (Khadeja) promoted by the violent conflict, gave rise to political actors with interests and objectives that specifically exclude women. 

Women played an outsize role in civil society organization and activism in Libya—indeed, nonviolent action by urban women was “central to the 2011 uprising that ousted former Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi” (UNWAS). While the active engagement of these women in the revolution empowered their political and social status, the systematic exclusion of Libyan women from the UN-led peace process suggests a different prognosis altogether. In most of the UN facilitated peace building or mediation meetings for Libya, women are a minute minority if not completely non-existent. “According to its own resolutions, the UN cannot accept this. But they do.”

On one hand there is this deliberate exclusion of a ‘body’ from epistemological focus and prevention of examining individualizing strategies employed in keeping security problems from appearing at the collective level(Hansen). While on the other, despite local armed groups often being denounced as undisciplined militias at the root of Libya’s problems, women interviewed for a Chatham House project said the fact that many armed groups were local and had a close relationship with their community was important to them. ‘There is a line the local groups won’t cross if you’re from the area. They live in the same neighborhood and have to respect the community”.—This in turn, is rather evidential of a truncated nature of the security vacuum created by the ongoing conflict in Libya. Furthermore, it presents an abysmal equation between ‘who gets to be secured’ and ‘what is being secured’.

A demolished house in Libya bears graffiti that reads, "We admire death, we are afraid to admire life," and "I love you Libya. " Source :Nada Harib/Getty Images

“A standpoint is an account of the world constituted by (and constitutive of) a collective subject, a group. It is derived from life activities and achieved in struggle. It is subversive of the hegemonic account. It is potentially the foundation of oppositional and revolutionary movement”(Cockburn)

Framing a security conflict requires a generously holistic conception of power. ‘Security’ is not just only relational, also interconnected, engaged in distinct but related oppositional practices. And in a state like Libya, where there are overlaps in the information flow between the war system and other social systems, accounting for the ‘conditioned subjectivity’ of the individuals (here the Libyan women) becomes particularly significant.

For irrespective of the great rifts in this fractured state of Libya, women’s experience of labor, subsistence and especially physical violence is uniformly mediated amongst the warring factions. And finally in this ‘constancy of lived experience amongst chaos’ there might not exist a resolution of the conundrum as being posed earlier i.e. ‘whose security that actually matters’. However in turn there emerges the question of whether the need for ‘security’ to redefine its referent object should be allowed to dominate our intellectual paradigm over the consideration of what can be articulated as the ‘threat’ and the agency of the ‘threatened’.

References

Cockburn, Cynthia. “Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2010, pp.139-157 

Hansen, Lene. “The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School.” Millennium, vol. 29, no. 2, June 2000, pp. 289–300

Krause, Keith and Michael Williams. “Security and “Security Studies”: Conceptual Evolution and Historical Transformation”, The Oxford Handbook Of International Security, March 2018, pp. 9-12

“Libya.” UN Women Arab States, arabstates.unwomen.org/en/countries/libya. Accessed 2 Feb. 2022.

Ramali, Khadeja. “How Women Are Dealing with Libya's Ever-Present Armed Groups.” Chatham House – International Affairs Think Tank, 12 May 2021, www.chathamhouse.org/2020/06/how-women-are-dealing-libyas-ever-present-armed-groups.

“Women’s Rights in Libya. ‘We Have Stamina. Our Struggle Is Our Life.’” Cordaid International, 7 Mar. 2018, www.cordaid.org/en/womens-rights-libya-our-struggle-our-life.