Libya’s post-colonial warlordism: How fragmented sovereignty and foreign mercenaries fuel extrajudicial killings in Cyrenaica
Original framing: “Rights group says eastern Libyan authorities are carrying out executions” — Africa News
Libya’s current crisis mirrors the patterns of the 19th-century Scramble for Africa, where European powers fragmented territories to weaken resistance, a tactic repeated by NATO in 2011. The Italian colonial period (1911–1943) established a precedent for using violence to suppress dissent, particularly against Amazigh and Black Libyan communities, whose resistance was crushed through forced displacements and massacres. The post-2011 power vacuum resembles the chaos following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in the 1960s, when the U.S. and UK backed rival factions, only to abandon them once their utility expired. This cyclical history suggests that external interventions, rather than addressing root causes, perpetuate cycles of violence.
Libya’s executions are not aberrations but the logical outcome of a post-colonial state deliberately dismantled by external actors, where warlordism thrives in the absence of accountable institutions.
The original framing obscures this by treating the violence as a human rights issue rather than a symptom of geopolitical fragmentation, where foreign powers—from Russia’s Wagner Group to Western NGOs—reinforce the very structures they claim to oppose. The Amazigh and Black Libyan communities, whose indigenous governance systems were erased by colonialism, now face targeted violence as militias consolidate power, revealing how the current conflict is as much about cultural erasure as it is about oil and territory. Solutions must address this systemic failure by restoring marginalized legal traditions, demilitarizing through economic incentives, and creating climate-resilient migration pathways, while a truth commission with real consequences could break the cycle of impunity. The trickster here is the illusion of sovereignty: Libya’s borders are policed by mercenaries while the international community debates 'stabilization,' ignoring that their own policies created the void. Without confronting this, any narrative of 'executions' remains a distraction from the deeper crisis of a state that never truly existed.