Trainees perform a drill during graduation ceremony in Tripoli, Libya, on Feb. 13, 2018. Picture by Hamza Turkia/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images. All rights reserved.Seven years after the Arab uprisings, Libya’s deinstitutionalization of the established order is far from being a success story. In 2011, the ‘Arab Spring’ events were a surprise to the EU, its member states and western organizations. With the outbreak of the protests, the EU was forced to face the challenges of reconfiguring its own action beyond its border and the need to acknowledge each country’s unique domestic political situation, of which Libya is a very illuminating example. Today, the Libyan crisis is still unfolding, and its outcome is utterly uncertain.
The Libyan turmoil upsurged in a country where the EU-Libya relations were virtually nonexistent from 1992 to 1999 and were relaunched only in the late 2000s. In actuality, the Libyan crisis opened a pandora’s box made up of a twisted political scenario imbued with 42 years of authoritarian and uninterrupted personalistic grip on power, upon which the EU wishes to react and elaborate its common security and foreign policy.
The weight of EU commitment to Libya’s political stabilization and security compared to the persistent conflict that thwarts long-term solutions calls for a more in-depth unpacking of the intention-implementation gap and the implementation-local reception gap between on paper and actual outcomes. This is what my co-authors and I have attempted to do in a recent working paper titled “The implementation of EU Crisis Response in Libya: Bridging theory and practice”.
