Abstract
Barmin examines the political, social, economic, ethnic, ideological, regional and international dimensions of the Libyan Revolution, its internal and external causes and studies the developments, implications and results of this remarkable event. By the time the Libyan revolution erupted in 2011, against the background of the Arab Spring events in Tunisia and Egypt, the Gaddafi regime was running an ineffective oil-based economy that lacked a strong private sector. Economic disenfranchisement of the youth, which became the key demographic driver of the revolution, and unequal distribution of wealth, created fertile ground for revolutionary sentiment to take root. The revolt was accompanied by numerous uncoordinated demands, which highlighted the spontaneous character of the revolution. The author points out that the tribal nature of Libyan society added an extra layer of complexity to the conflict, whereby the tribes co-opted by the Gaddafi regime served as his strongest support base and allowed the regime to hold out for a long period of time. Similarly, the existence of parallel chains of command and elite units that were loyal only to Gaddafi overshadowed the regular armed forces and insulated the regime from an internal military coup but at the same time such a situation weakened the Gaddafi regime.
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Notes
- 1.
On revolutions in these countries see Chapter “The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Birth of the Arab Spring Uprisings” (Kuznetsov, 2022), Chapter “The Arab Spring: Causes, Conditions, and Driving Forces” (Grinin & Korotayev, 2022b), Chapter “Egypt’s 2011 Revolution. A Demographic Structural Analysis” (Korotayev & Zinkina, 2022), and Chapter “Revolutions, Counterrevolutions, and Democracy” (Grinin & Korotayev, 2022a, in this volume).
- 2.
Estimates provided by Abdul Rahman Al Ageli.
- 3.
See Chapter “The Arab Spring: Causes, Conditions, and Driving Forces” (Grinin & Korotayev, 2022b, in this volume) for more detail.
- 4.
One of the facts often cited to illustrate Cyrenaica’s run-down state under the Gaddafi regime is the fact that Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city of one million people, had only one sewage treatment plant built in the seventies, while most waste used to be flushed straight into the sea or the city’s lake (see Time, 2011).
- 5.
See, e.g., Chapter “The ‘Color’ Revolutions. Successes and Limitations of Non-violent Protest” (Mitchell, 2022, in this volume).
- 6.
On the revolutions of the Arab Spring, their common features and peculiarities see Grinin et al. (2016), Grinin et al. (2019), as well as Chapter “Introduction. Changing yet Persistent: Revolutions and Revolutionary Events” (Goldstone et al., 2022), Chapter “The Arab Spring: Causes, Conditions, and Driving Forces” (Grinin & Korotayev, 2022b), Chapter “The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Birth of the Arab Spring Uprisings” (Kuznetsov, 2022), Chapter “Egypt’s 2011 Revolution. A Demographic Structural Analysis” (Korotayev & Zinkina, 2022), Chapter “The Arab Spring in Yemen” (Issaev et al., 2022), Chapter “The Syrian Revolution” (Akhmedov, 2022), Chapter “The Extent of Military Involvement in Non-violent, Civilian Revolts and Their Aftermath” (Rasler & Thompson, 2022), Chapter “The Arab Spring. A Quantitative Analysis” (Korotayev et al., 2022a) and Chapter “Global Echo of the Arab Spring” (Korotayev et al., 2022b, in this volume).
- 7.
On the possible long-term negative consequences of democratic revolutions in unprepared for democracy countries see Chapter “Revolutions, Counterrevolutions, and Democracy” (Grinin & Korotayev, 2022a), Chapter “The Arab Spring: Causes, Conditions, and Driving Forces” (Grinin & Korotayev, 2022b), Chapter “Revolutions and Historical Process” (Grinin, 2022), and Chapter “Revolutionary Waves and Lines of the Twentieth Century” (Grinin & Grinin, 2022, in this volume).
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Barmin, Y. (2022). Revolution in Libya. In: Goldstone, J.A., Grinin, L., Korotayev, A. (eds) Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86468-2_28
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