Civil Activism and the Roots of the 2011 Uprisings

Abstract

One of the most surprising aspects of the recent uprisings in Libya was the apparently spontaneous emergence of organized political activity inside a state where, for four decades, formal political action outside the repressive confines of Muammar Qadhafi’s Jamahiriyya (massocracy) system had simply not existed. In fact, the imposition of the Jamahiriyya so fragmented Libyan society that even informal structures, such as Libya’s complex tribal system or institutions linked to Islam, no longer appeared to provide a basis for political coherence. At the same time, however, in the wake of the crisis between Libya and the West, which began in the late 1980s, the innate contradictions within the Libyan state—given the repression inherent in the Jamahiriyya’s illusion of “direct democracy”—together with issues of succession and reconciliation with the outside world, began to generate opportunities for precursors to social movements to emerge. These were to seize their moment in early 2011 and provide the momentum needed to destroy the Qadhafi regime. This chapter seeks to uncover the ways in which this occurred after first setting the scene by discussing the political system that Muammar Qadhafi put in place after the “Great September Revolution” in 1969.