Contention, Violence and Stalemate in Post-War Libya

Abstract

Post-war Libya provides an interesting case study for how weakly institutionalized political opportunity structures shape and are shaped by decisions of emergent groups, especially newly mobilized Islamist actors. For mainstream actors, these interactions produced incentives for de-escalation during dozens of violent skirmishes that took place from 2011 to 2014 that, in other contexts, could have tipped into civil war. At the same time, the stalemated environment gave Jihadist groups incentives to put down roots, husband resources and then intensify their terrorism campaigns. This article describes, decomposes and assesses patterns of contention produced by these interactions, and explains how they influenced post-war political developments.