The two books under review are written by Karin Wester, a Dutch diplomat, and Wolfram Lacher, a German scholar working for a security and policy state-sponsored think tank. The authors present a largely Eurocentric interpretation of the origins of UN/NATO intervention, state collapse, and the ongoing Libyan civil war since February 15, 2011. Based on the European security and nation-state perspective, the two books reflect European interests and roles in the crisis. The NATO military alliance, which played a crucial role in the destruction of Qadhafi’s regime, was legitimized by United Nations Security Council resolutions 1970 and 1973 in March 2011. For the last 10 years, there has been a “gold rush” to conduct research in the country due to the destruction of the army and police, and the collaboration of the uprising leaders with NATO and Western powers. Many Western scholars, policy analysts, and intelligence officers flocked into Libya after four decades of inability to penetrate the country under its anticolonial, populist, and authoritarian-nationalist regime. Prior to 2011, only a few Western scholars were permitted to conduct research inside Libya. The books under review shed new light on the role of the UN/NATO politics of intervention and on the dynamics of the civil war.

Karin Wester’s book examines the evolution of the UN principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P) civilians and its application in the case of the NATO intervention in Libya on March 10, 2011. The main rationale for this UN/SC authorization to intervene was to protect Libyan civilians from a presumed and looming mass killing when Qadhafi’s army marched toward Benghazi to crush the uprising. The UN Security Council, following an appeal by the Arab League, adopted Resolution 1973 on March 17, 2011. This resolution authorized NATO forces to enforce a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace. NATO forces went further and began bombing Qadhafi’s military forces and installations on March 31, 2011. This intervention culminated in the defeat of the regime and ended with the capture and killing of Qadhafi by brutal and gruesome execution without a trial. Wester investigates the role of international actors in civil wars, and the application of human rights regardless of traditional state sovereignty. She argues that this new principle to protect was developed after the failure of the Western powers and the UN to intervene in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. After long deliberations, the responsibility to protect civilians was adopted by the UN in September 2005. Wester welcomes this new change in international law as a major watershed in protecting human rights. The Libyan case is significant from this perspective as the first case to apply this new principle.

The principle of R2P assumes that the UN has the responsibility to intervene to protect civilians in extreme cases of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (p. 3). Wester links the acceptance of the principle to protect (R2P) as the accumulation of many changes in international law, such as the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 1998, which investigates abuses against citizens within nation-states. Her optimistic narrative welcomes such acceptance as a major achievement of protecting global human rights. The author predicts that the newly accepted principle will limit traditional nation-state sovereignty in the twenty-first century (p. 22).

The book relies on UN diplomatic sources and 20 interviews of some of the main actors who were involved with the UN/SC vote to intervene in Libya (p. 9). Wester recognizes this intervention failed (p. 9) but still defends the application of R2P in the Libyan crisis. It was to save civilian human rights from another potential mass killing and genocide in Benghazi (pp. 129, 133, 251). The book is strong in reviewing and analyzing the history of the R2P concept and the debates within the UN, in addition to the use of international law after the end of the Cold War and the Rwandan genocide. Yet, her Eurocentric assumptions and reading of the Libyan case are full of contradictions, and her conclusions are unconvincing when checked critically with counterevidence.

Wester is silent about the victimized civilians due to the terror of armed groups, extremists, foreign mercenaries, and criminals. There is an absence of discussion related to the killing, displacement, kidnapping, and intimidation of Libyans after the initial NATO intervention. She also does not examine critical sources and scholarship on the hidden agenda and impact of the intervention. Instead, Wester insists that the Libyan case is a triumph of the human rights crusade despite the evidence in Libya, which contradicts her claims and makes it difficult to defend the principle to protect. First, she presents little evidence of her argument aside from the claim that the intervention was efficient and protected civilian human rights (p. 57). Second, she does not take seriously the critical scholarship against the NATO intervention, including the claim to protect civilians, and the assumption that the Qadhafi army was certain to commit mass killings in Benghazi (for example, Horace Campbell’s Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, 2013, and Christopher M. Davidson’s “Why Was Muammar Qadhafi Really Removed?” Middle East Policy 24:4, 2017). She does refer to Hugh Roberts’s long article in the London Review of Books (November 17, 2011) but dismisses it quickly (p. 98). Third, she accepts the conventional Western media and scholarship narrative of Libyan history and society, focusing on traditions, oil, tribalism, Qadhafi, and terrorism, which ignores Libya’s brutal colonial experience—or what some have referred to as the “genocide” in Libya (Ahmida, Genocide in Libya, 2020)—and the people’s struggle against imperialism. Fourth, she glances over President Barack Obama’s admission of error in regard to his decision to intervene in Libya as the worst mistake of his presidency. The failure of his administration to plan for the aftermath of the intervention contributed to extremist groups taking over the country in 2016. Wester also ignores another critical western source: The British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s report “Libya: Examination of Intervention and Collapse and the UK’s Future Policy Options” (2016). This report concluded that the NATO intervention had gone very badly and conceded that it was based on faulty intelligence, including the threat of mass killings in Benghazi in 2011.

Wester could have examined an alternative critical question: was the use and abuse of the right to protect citizens a cover for colonial, economic, and strategic calculation? In short, her uncritical claim and advocacy for the success of the Libyan case and the future application of R2P is not only idealistic but misleading if one looks at the real consequences of the NATO intervention in 2011. The suffering of the Libyan people has been documented by the annual reports produced by UN experts since 2012. The record of other comparable cases such as Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Myanmar contradict the author’s inflated optimism for future applications of R2P. In short, what is missing is a critical analysis of the UN, EU, and NATO power politics, and the filtering of worthy and unworthy victims of human rights abuse. There is no escape from the fact that the UN-authorized NATO intervention contributed to the destruction of the state and the suffering of the Libyan people to the degree that many began to miss the security and stability they had experienced during Qadhafi’s dictatorship.

Wolfram Lacher is one of the most prolific Western scholars working on Libya today. He is a senior associate at the German State Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). His book is based on extensive fieldwork on western Libya between 2012 and 2019. The focus of the book is the dynamics of the civil war in western Libya—and how its political and military actors are embedded within the process of social cohesion, alliances, networks, and fragmentation (p. 4). Lacher focuses on three locations in western Libya—Misrata, Western/Nafusa Mountains (especially Zintan), and Bani Walid—and one case in eastern Libya (Tobruk). He recognizes the limits of his case studies coming only from the western region but attributes his choices to security difficulties in the eastern, central, and southern regions. Consequently, the book material and cases do not reflect the whole country. Lacher conducted an impressive 300 interviews primarily with Libyan men, during the period between 2012 and 2019 (p. 12).

The author defends not interviewing more women by simply claiming that Libyan society is still segregated (p. 14). This is misleading because Libyan women have the highest literacy rate in Africa; are visible in the workplace, parliament, press, social media, and schools; and represented 60% of university students in all 24 universities in the country in 2017. Above all, one has to keep in mind that the uprising against the Qadhafi’s dictatorship was initiated in Benghazi and led by women on February 15, 2011. Jihadist Islamists assassinated many leading women civil activists in Benghazi, Darna, Sabha, and Tripoli.

Lacher makes three main arguments. First, he is critical of the idea of the marginalization of cities and regions to explain the complexity and politics of the civil war and fragmentation, such as the now dominant city of Misrata. Second, he is also critical of the use of rational choice theory to explain the Libyan civil war. Third, he presents an alternative contention that violence in the Libyan civil war transformed the nature of politics after 2011 (p. 62). Conflict in Libya is constrained by geography and embedded in social networks of local competing groups, made up of mobilized families, friends, and neighbors (pp. 2, 9). In other words, Lacher argues that violence created new dynamics and unintended consequences from the point of view of the competing local forces that he examined. For Lacher, the main characteristic of the civil war is the structure and process of fragmentation through local politics. For him, “the armed groups are socially embedded or insulated from their surroundings to a varying degree” (p. 106). This is the main factor that creates fragmentation and the persistence of the Libyan civil war. He presents a compelling application of this thesis to four case studies.

After 2011, Misrata and Zintan were two cities that emerged as military winners, whereas Bani Walid and Sirte were defeated and isolated. The focus on the two triumphant cities makes sense. Misrata is the third largest Libyan city, and it had networks of autonomous business civil associations and an ability to receive military supplies and commercial aid through its airport and strategic port. The western mountain city of Zintan benefited from its location to defend itself from the Qadhafi military and receive aid from across the Tunisian border. After the NATO intervention in 2011, both cities maintained strong military forces. This was an unintended consequence of the war. In contrast, the city of Bani Walid was regarded as a city loyal to Qadhafi. It remained isolated and lacked Misrata’s autonomous business associations and Zintan’s mountainous geographical defense location. Today, it continues to be viewed as a defeated city, and it is excluded from the political process. However, after the defeat of the old regime, the victorious cities of Misrata and Zintan began to compete for power and position, and they fought each other in 2014. Misrata emerged as the most powerful military force in western Libya and solidified its gains by alliances with the Islamists, Italy, and Turkey. Lacher presents the most detailed and thorough analysis of the rise of Misrata as the most powerful city in western Libya (pp. 151–162).

Lacher claims that in the eastern region, especially the city of Tobruk, there was no conflict because the regime was defeated very early on, which created a power vacuum that paved the way for the rise of the eastern regional strongman, Field Marshal Khalifa Hafter. Here, his analysis is tentative and less convincing. Lacher conducted research only in the city of Tobruk. He does not mention the violence, assassinations, and terror committed by Jihadist and extremist Islamists who took over the cities of Benghazi, Darna, and Ijdabiyya. This violent takeover in 2011, and the use of appeals to nationalism and stability, allowed Hafter to rise in the east and south as a major actor in the Libyan civil war with the help of the UAE, Russia, and Egypt. However, he miscalculated and was defeated when he attacked the capital Tripoli in 2019. The Misrata/Islamist-dominated Government of National Accord was able to deter the attack with the help of Turkish’s advisors, aid, and mercenaries.

Unfortunately, the violence in the Libyan south is largely ignored in Lacher’s account, and even the flood of thousands of illegal immigrants into Fezzan’s cities and towns is uncritically examined (p. 53). Lacher uses what some scholars now regard as problematic language to understand Libya’s current civil war, such as the term “statelessness” and the concept of tribe and “tribalism,” despite his awareness of the changing meaning of the latter concept (pp. 67–68). Like Wester, Lacher overlooks Libya’s violent colonial past, genocide, and the long anticolonial resistance. The role of NATO and other regional actors is missing in the book. Lacher mentions this “elephant in the room” only on the last page, when he writes, “Until foreign powers agree that central authority in Libya should be rebuilt rather than conquered or circumvented, Libya’s fragmentation will be there to stay” (p. 199)

This well-researched book would be more convincing if it situated its analysis of Libyan society within Libya’s history. That history is one of battling foreign intervention, the introduction of 20 million pieces of arms, illegal immigration, corruption, and the terror of armed groups and 20,000 mercenaries. Would any society facing these calamities not be fragmented and divided? Yet, what escapes many Western scholars is why with all of these calamities confronting Libyan society, it is still resilient despite the lack of state, police, and army. This speaks not just to the lack of a state but also to hidden and creative social traditions of self-governance.