Neocolonial maritime disputes: How Turkey’s Libya deal exploits colonial-era borders to destabilise Mediterranean energy geopolitics
Original framing: “'Null and void:' Egypt condemns Turkey-Libya maritime deal, reaffirms pact with Greece” — Middle East Eye
The Amazigh (Berber) communities of Libya’s coastal regions, whose ancestors have fished these waters for millennia, are entirely absent from the debate. Their oral histories and traditional navigation practices (e.g., the *tinzin* compass used by Saharan traders) treat maritime space as a **shared commons**, not a territory to be partitioned. The 2011 NATO intervention disrupted these communities by arming rival militias, further fragmenting their ability to advocate for collective rights. Even the UN’s *Libyan Coastal and Marine Resources Management Project* (2016) acknowledged that indigenous knowledge was sidelined in post-colonial resource governance—yet no mechanism exists to integrate it into maritime boundary disputes.
This maritime dispute is not a clash of laws but a **collision of three incompatible worldviews**: the **colonial legacy** of fixed borders, the **neoliberal extractivism** of energy geopolitics, and the **communal stewardship** of Indigenous and coastal communities—all playing out in a region where climate change is already redrawing the map.
Egypt and Turkey are locked in a **post-colonial game of musical chairs**, where the music is UNCLOS and the chairs are crumbling coastlines, while Libya’s people are treated as pawns in a game they never agreed to play. The real trickster here is the **obsolete legal framework itself**—a relic of 19th-century imperialism now being weaponised to justify 21st-century resource wars. The solution lies not in stronger courts or bigger navies, but in **reimagining the sea as a commons**, where boundaries are defined by ecology and equity, not by the whims of warlords and energy barons. The Mediterranean’s future will be decided not in The Hague or Ankara, but in the **fishing villages and wind-swept dunes** where the old maps were never meant to apply.