Split on the ground, intact on paper: Libya’s enduring limbo |
More than a decade after Libya fractured into rival administrations, the country remains split in practice—but not on paper. What prevents this fragile de facto partition from solidifying into a formal division, and why have external powers quietly accommodated it? As Libya drifts between paralysis and managed dysfunction, the real question is no longer whether it is divided, but whether it could ever be officially—and why that outcome remains unlikely.
Libya’s endurance as a formally unified state is less a product of national consensus than of mutually reinforcing constraints. None of the competing authorities—the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU), the eastern government aligned with the House of Representatives, nor Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA)—can afford the political or economic cost of openly declaring a break. Each relies on a narrative of national legitimacy while foreign sponsors themselves prefer a fragmented but nominally intact Libya that protects their interests without forcing them into the responsibilities of state-building.
Yet the persistence of this limbo also reflects the deeply interdependent nature of Libya’s political economy. The country’s oil wealth—its only functioning national glue—cannot be cleanly divided without triggering financial collapse for all sides or even war. The Central Bank, the National Oil Corporation, the judiciary and the public salary system still operate in a national framework. Even when blockades or shutdowns occur, they serve as bargaining tools rather than steps toward secession. In effect, Libya’s factions survive by holding the state hostage while remaining dependent on its unified institutions.
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While historical and geopolitical forces kept Libya formally unified, internal leadership dynamics have shaped the country’s contemporary limbo. The small nationalist elite that pushed for a united,........