By Abdullah Alkabir, Libyan political writer and commentator
Libya as microcosm of international conflict
Enduring disorder is a global feature at the current stage, as the US dominated unipolar order in the post-Cold War is crumbling. When the world order begins to collapse, new competing forces emerge, and this shift in the balance of power has not yet crystallized in a new world order. Libya is one of the countries most affected by such a shift, and it is possible through the conflict taking place within or around it, to see a microcosm reflecting the largest conflict situation at the global level.
This is how Jason Pack, an American expert on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, eyes the case of Libya in the post-Gaddafi trajectory, in his newly translated book into Arabic (Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder). He believes that Libya, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Ukraine, could remain mired in their conflicts for several years to come, as long as the world order is still fragmented, and lacks coordination of the collective action to achieve goals that will eventually benefit all.
Perhaps the extent of divergence between the major powers of the UN Security Council, and the continued failure to reach even the minimum level of consensus on many crises confirms the validity of the author’s argument. UN Security Council is the most important international institution through which policies and goals can be coordinated. However, over the past years, the Security Council failed to put the Libyan crisis, or indeed other crises on the path to a solution.
Understanding the Libyan situation is the way to understand international relations, as several regional countries struggle in Libya to secure their commercial and geopolitical interests. Egypt, Turkey, and the UAE seek to upset the regional balance of power in their favour.
With the state of collapse in Libya, Russia’s undermining of Western attempts to strengthen the system, and the inability of the European Union -due to competition among some of its member states- to maximize its own gains, the decline of the role of the global order in controlling and settling crises is clear and indeed evident. The main reason for this decline lies in what the authors call the "empty throne” or absence of a global power that imposes on everyone a clear path that takes into account different interests and balances them up. The US is losing its hegemonic power partly through competition with China and Russia, China also fails or does not want to lead the world, and there are no real poles to balance the order up. This is what the writer calls enduring disorder.
The book presents several proposals and recommendations to dissect the main causes of the conflict, especially in terms of the economy, which it considers the enduring driver of conflict and competition. The rules of the Libyan economy must be rewritten in a transparent manner. The key economic issues that provoked six years of conflict will remain, unless a new plan that takes into account expert advice and the will of the Libyan people can reformulate the economic role and put the country on the path to prosperity and development of human capital.
Within the book, there are several reviews, comments, and testimonies about the book and the Libyan crisis written by personalities who worked on various missions in Libya, such as Jonathan Winer, former US special envoy for Libya, Stephanie Williams, former deputy UN envoy, former British ambassador to Libya Peter Millett, and others.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Libya Observer
