1Whether referring to the artificiality of its (post-)colonial construction or to the fragmentation of its sovereignty since 2011, the weakness of Libya’s statehood is a recurrent theme in policy and scholarly discourses. Observers have often highlighted how modern Libya appears as a “failed state” almost by design (Haddad, 2015; Campanini, 2017): the haphazardness of its borders, resulting from colonial struggles and constraints, contributes to explaining that sub- and trans- national identities – whether tribal, regional, or religious – tend to obfuscate and supersede state belonging. The latent conflict that has been ongoing since the demise of Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya has only magnified the salience of domestic cleavages, to the detriment of national(istic) feelings and commonalities. Furthermore, it is argued, Libya has throughout history often lent itself to become a laboratory for the experimentation and implementation of political and economic models imported from – if not imposed by – abroad (Baldinetti, 2010; Costantini, 2018; Vandewalle, 2018; Sensini, 2019). Imperial colonisation, oil-fuelled de-colonisation, neo-liberal reforms, post-conflict state-building and today’s geopolitical competition on Libyan soil have all contributed to enhancing the country’s dependency from outside powers, and eroding, if not emptying, its domestic sovereignty.
2Scholarly explanations of Libya’s unfulfilled statehood vary, tending to reproduce disciplinary boundaries. Historians emphasise how Libya’s subsequent rulers, from the late Ottoman Empire (Anderson, 1986) through colonial Italy and to the Gaddafi regime (Vandewalle, 2018) failed – or feared – to establish an efficient bureaucracy, thereby sowing the seeds of the country’s enduring “statelessness” (ibid.). Students of African politics instead highlight the weight of the international system. Libya’s masters recurring obsession with borders (Cresti and Cricco, 2015) contrasts with the enduring salience of cross-border flows and ties that make of Libya a quintessential example of Africa’s extraversion (Bayart, 2000). The tension between the quest for international recognition and borders sanctuarisation, on the one hand, and the shallowness of its domestic sovereignty, on the other, is said to make of contemporary Libya a quasi-state (Jackson, 2011) highly vulnerable to the shocks of the international system (Clapham, 1998).
3These explanations are not devoid of analytical strengths, in as much as they rightly expand the framework to apprehend the processes of state formation and transformation that underpin Libya’s current fragilities. Time-wise, historians have the merit of pointing to the need of a longue-durée approach capable of unearthing the enduring influence of the legacies inherited from the past. Space-wise, political scientists stress the usefulness of multi-scalar approaches that complement the analysis of Libya’s problematic statehood with a focus on sub- and supra- state dynamics of contention.
4Nevertheless, theoretical shortcomings are also conspicuous. Longue-durée and multi-scalar perspectives that are mobilised to expose the construction of Libya’s statehood – as precarious and contested as it may be – tend to rely on sharp analytical dichotomies – such as state and non-state, domestic and international, inside and outside, dependence and independence – which, however, are also socially constructed. There is a problematic tension in questioning the alleged artificiality of Libya’s state construction by assuming the “naturality” of Libya’s tribes, regions, and religious tendencies, or even that of other countries’ statehood, outside of Libya.
5Building on these observations, the article aims to provide a plausible explanation of Libya’s unsettled statehood by combining multi-scalar analysis, longue-durée perspective, as well as consistent social constructivism. In particular, it adopts the perspective of critical geopolitics to explore the spatial discourses that across history have shaped “Libya”, as well as its internal constituents and its external environment. The article argues that the enduring influence of competing spatial imaginaries which in Libya overlap and collide underpins a hegemonic struggle over the identity and authority of/in Libya. As such, the perspective of critical geopolitics can complement the existing scholarship on the construction of Libya’s national identity, othering and belonging (Ahmida, 1994; Baldinetti, 2010), by looking at the contested construction of Libya’s state identity, othering and belonging.
6Given the diversity of uses – and abuses – connoting geopolitics and its critical variants, the next section clarifies the meaning, relevance and methodology of the critical geopolitics approach employed in this article. The subsequent sections offer a review of some important spatial imaginaries that have contributed to representing, constituting and apprehending Libya as a subject and an object of international politics: ancient geography’s environmentalism; Italy’s imperial colonialism; Gaddafi’s pan-Arabism and, later, pan-Africanism; and Turkey’s pan-Ottomanism. This set provides an analytical framework, devoid, however, of any claim of exhaustivity or substantivity. In highlighting the discursive construction of Libya, the exploration of these spatial imaginaries and the illustration of the refractions between external projections and internal projects, macro and micro scales, state and non-state actors, will contribute to questioning the sharp categorical divides of the prevailing literature about state (un-)making in Libya.
7Critical geopolitics emerges in the framework of the social-constructivist turn in international relations (IR), and shares with it a post-structuralist taste (Power and Campbell, 2010). As such, critical geopolitics challenges the claim of traditional geopolitical thinkers – such as Ratzel, Mackinder and Hausofer – to found a grand-theory or grand-strategy of international politics (Dalby, 2007), and it agrees instead with IR constructivism that key security notions – including identity and otherness, belonging and threat, order and disorder – are not natural feats displayed before the eye of an allegedly neutral observer, but are in fact discursively constructed (Tuathail and Agnew, 1992).
8To that constructivist acquis, critical geopolitics adds a peculiar sensitivity to one specific type of discourses of security relevance: that is, geography, or the writing about the spatial deployment of political phenomena. Enacted in texts, spatial illustrations and cartography, such discourses contribute to vehiculating and (re-)producing spatial and geopolitical imaginaries (Guzzini, 2013). The critical approach to geopolitics thus undertakes to map the historically contingent uses of geopolitical discourses in order to capture the underlying geopolitical imaginaries, with two primary objectives: scrutinising the intersections, overlaps and divergences of different interpretations of the same territory, in order to study their contribution to security frames and conflict dynamics (Lacoste, 1976; Bilgin, 2004) and unsettling the naturalisation of such imaginaries to deconstruct the spatial assumptions of international relations (Agnew, 1994).
9Arguably, such an approach is especially relevant today, in light of the perplexing return to fashion of security discourses and analyses imbued with geopolitical tropes (Guzzini, 2013). From the comeback of “great power competition” in US security doctrines (White House, 2017), to Ursula von der Leyen’s pledge to lead a “geopolitical Commission”, the rhetorical iteration of the return of/to geopolitics – just as analytically ambiguous as politically performative – epitomises some of the main manifestations of an emerging new international (dis-)order (Raineri, 2022). This translates in a decline of multilateralism and the parallel rise of (claims to) spheres of influence, whose shape and stretch is constituted through power projections, discursive framings, and spatial imaginaries.
10Within this framework, Libya arguably occupies an important place, sitting at the intersection of rival geopolitical imaginaries and competing spheres of influence that overlap and collide here, including EU border externalisation, Turkey’s hinterland strategic depth, NATO southern stability projection, Russia’s longing for the warm seas, the Mediterranean offshoot of China’s Belt and Roads Initiative, and the periphery of a contested Arab world. The convergence of these vectors has few parallels in the international system, and contributes to emphasising how critical geopolitics can be valuable in shedding lights on the inherent fragilities of Libya state (un-)making in a volatile international environment. While stressing the constrictiveness of projects and projections of/on Libya by outside actors, the article’s conclusion also explores how Libyan domestic actors have mediated and subverted foreign discourses imaginaries as part of a hegemonic struggle over Libya’s identity and place in the world.
11Adhering to such an approach entails the need to expand the body of geopolitical discourses worth scrutinising so as to capture concurring and/or competing spatial imaginaries – as comprehensive and elusive as they may be – expressed in scholarly, media and popular discourses (Guzzini, 2013). Different sources of evidence have thus been examined. The textual archive includes strategic doctrines, scholarly productions (history, geography, anthropology) and selected media content. Ethnography is also mobilised to grasp geographically embedded empirical insights: between 2015 and 2021, I carried out several tens of semi-structured interviews with political and tribal leaders in Libya and the broader region (Niger, Mali, Tunisia, Italy), in the framework of different projects sponsored by European research institutions; extensive discussions on issues of borders, identity and security have enabled the inference of the underlying spatial and geopolitical imaginaries, which often remained implicit. The combination of qualitative evidence and area expertise provides a valuable background knowledge to uphold nuanced interpretations of the body of written and oral discourses about Libya’s geopolitics and its underlying spatial imaginaries, that the article undertakes to investigate.
12Before colonial times “Libya” was far from being a well identified object – let alone subject – of international politics. Ancient geographers used the term Libya to denote the desert land stretching south of the Mediterranean. Whether comprising the whole of North Africa, in the case of Herodotus, or just the part between the Nile valley and Numidia (Tunisia), in the case of Leo Africanus, Libya was seen as separated from “black Africa” by a ridge of sand (Lydon, 2015).
13Ibn Khaldun’s social theory has long provided the framework to apprehend and categorise the main spatial features of this environment, in which the dialectics between the gravitation centres of orderly urban capitals and the centrifugal tendencies of recalcitrant tribal networks was compounded by racial hierarchies. Khaldun posited a sharp dichotomy between urban (hadari) and rural (badawi) spaces, both geographical and normative: the former was the abode of Islam, where (Islamic) law and order made trades thrive; the latter was instead the space of Bedouins, unruly communities roaming in the wilderness (badiyya) (Campanini, 2017).
14Since the 16th century, the Ottoman domination was by and large confined to the Mediterranean shore and its main towns. Further inland, although the Sublime Port laid claims to sovereignty over the entire Sahara Desert, stretching as far as the source of the Nile and the Lake Chad, local autonomy remained largely unchallenged, and Ottoman control was more nominal than actual (Ahmida, 1994; Cresti and Cricco, 2015). City-centred provinces (vilayet) of Barqa and Tripoli articulated the Ottoman administration, while the rapid obsolescence of the toponym “Libya” illustrates the fragmentation of this space. The rural hinterland was part of the Ottoman Empire’s spatial imaginary almost exclusively as an apolitical space of confinement and exile (Seni, 2021), thereby showing the legacy of Ibn Khaldun’s frames.
15Since the mid-19th century, the rise of the Senussi order contributed to overturning this spatial imaginary and its ethical connotation. Like other more or less contemporary religious orders – from Wahhabism in (today’s Saudi) Arabia to Mahdism in Sudan – the retreat into the desert appeared to provide an opportunity of purification and righteous Islamic practice, in the face of the rising European expansionism and the decay of the Ottoman rule. Away from the corruption of urban centres, desert regions acquired the patina of religious revivalism, and in some cases of political revanchism, on the example of the Prophet’s first followers (Joffé, 1996). From the first monastery (zawiya) built on the hills of Derna in 1843, the Senussi order spread inland across the Sahara, through the construction of a network of zawiyas across a wide territory from Cyrenaica to the Southern fringes of the desert. Although some degree of jurisdictional centralisation was apparent, the power exercised by the Senussi in Libya was hardly territorialised. The articulation of zawiyas, their leaders, and their followers was based on networks of allegiances, featuring individualised positions and varying degrees of proximity and/or separation. This ordering structure clearly departs from the spatial imaginary of modern territorial states, which hinges on a sharp inside/outside dichotomy whereby uniformity prevails within the boundaries of the community – however defined – while a radical break separates those outside.
16The dichotomy between attraction and repulsion of the desert spaces in Libya’s hinterland was also instrumental in catalysing early colonial projects. On the one hand, the drive to fight desertification, reconquer drylands to a European-led “development”, and make the desert green (again?), fuelled the colonial hybris, not least in North Africa (Davis, 2007) and in Libya (Cresti, 1996). On the other hand, the penetration in Africa of European infrastructures (railways), values (anti-slavery) and spatial imaginaries (colonial borders), led to a curtailment of trans-Saharan trades, which had represented a major lifeline of Libya’s pre-colonial economy. The reconfiguration of socio-economic networks that ensued increasingly turned Libyan coastal towns in cosmopolitan hubs embedded in Mediterranean flows, while escapism and resistance brewed in an increasingly marginalised desert hinterland.
17It is only in November 1911 that the name “Libya” is officially used for the first time to denote all the formerly Ottoman territories between Egypt and Tunisia, when Italy proclaimed its sovereignty there following the colonial occupation. The southern borders of the new entity, however, remained elusive, and subject to the mires of competing colonial powers. The British claimed that Kufra and its area were part of their Egyptian protectorate, while France hoped to annex Sebha and its region to its West African empire. Nevertheless, in the run up to the first World War, Italy managed to negotiate the recognition of its territorial claims in Libya in exchange for its siding with France and the United Kingdom (Cresti and Cricco, 2015). At the end of the war, the Treaty of Versailles sanctioned the definition of Libya’s southern borders, with the inclusion of Ghadames – the pivot of the desert – and Tummo – the gate to the Sahel. In the subsequent years, however, Italy’s control on Libya remained shallow, especially in the southern parts of the colony – now called the Fezzan – which in fact remained for long under military administration.
18The advent of the Fascism marked a significant turn in Italy’s approach to Libya, as well as, most significantly, in its overall geopolitical imaginary. That the development of geography in Italy was functional to colonialism was already apparent during the liberal phase of post-unitary, pre-fascist Italy: the Italian Geographical Society (SGI), for instance, started lobbying for colonial expansionism and exploration in East and North Africa since the 1870s. But it was above all Fascism that gave impetus to geographic discourses, with the explicit purpose of developing the “geographical consciousness” of Italy and its empire (Atkinson, 1995). Aiming to support Italy’s colonial ambitions, throughout the 1920s and 1930s the regime spared no effort to sponsor geographic talks, conferences, institutions and journals. New publications included the Corriere Africano, Africa Italiana, Impero Italiano. The most prominent expression of the Fascism’s geopolitical imaginary, however, is undoubtedly the review Geopolitica, issued monthly between 1939 and 1942, and directly sponsored by the Fascist leading intellectual and longstanding Minister of Education Giuseppe Bottai.
19What is, then, the underpinning geopolitical and spatial imaginary that one can infer from these geographic discourses? And what is the role and the place of Libya in it? I argue that one can identify two main frames, and that Libya has a central place in both.
20One frame focuses on the Mediterranean Sea, which is presented, borrowing the language of the German political geographer Ratzel, as the “living space” of Italy and its empire (D’Agostino Orsini, 1940), that is to say, the natural environment of Italy’s expansion and empowerment. Mussolini famously argued that Italy was imprisoned in its own space, that Malta, Corse, Tunisia and Cyprus were the prison’s bars, Suez and Gibraltar the gates, and Great Britain the guard. Arguably, then, Libya represented the first step of a process of “emancipation” and enhancement, with the Balkans, Greece and Egypt being the next in line. The vindication of the Mediterranean under Italy’s leadership was presented as a combination of “natural” geographic feats and political voluntarism, thereby stressing the conscious differentiation between descriptive geography and policy-oriented geopolitics. The geographic feats, allegedly objective, included the framing of the Mediterranean as a connector, rather than an insulator (an idea which has recently come back into fashion, see for instance Horden and Purcell, 2000), as well as Italy’s pivotal position in it, as the chief editor of Geopolitica Giorgio Roletto famously argued (reported in Antonsich, 2009). Nevertheless, the injection of political voluntarism became necessary in light of the recognition that the unification of the Mediterranean was not based on ethnic uniformity nor blood ties, but needed to be constructed socially and culturally. Within this geopolitical imaginary, Libya had a key role, in as much as it supplied both a vital “fourth shore” in the Mediterranean, matching and strengthening Italy’s pivotal position, but also a laboratory to further cement the complementarities between Mediterranean peoples: the upholding of immigration from Italy and the proclaiming of Mussolini as the “sword” (protector) of Islam by Libyan tribes in 1937 testify to these efforts.
21The second frame is much broader in scale. It asserts the notion of “Eurafrica”, a sort of “Monroe Doctrine of Fascism”, as Marco Antonsich (1997) acutely remarked. The term Eurafrica was first coined by the Austro-Hungarian nobleman Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in the 1920s, but it only came to prominence in the 1930s through the works of the Italian professor of colonial geography and future contributor to Geopolitica Paolo d’Agostino Orsini (1934), until it was eventually relaunched in a 1938 article on Geopolitik by Karl Hausofer. The Eurafrica doctrine maintains that, while Asia and America are self-sufficient continents, Europe and Africa are bound in a joint destiny because of their interdependence: Europe has the technology and manpower that Africa needs for its development, while Africa has the resources Europe requires to prosper. From this perspective, Europe should not be seen as the westernmost peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, but as the northernmost tip of a unitary Eurafrican space. The centrality of the Mediterranean is further accentuated: it should not be viewed as a barrier separating two continents, but as an internal sea – as its very name tells – welding Europe and Africa together. This geopolitical imaginary was further compounded by the grandiose project – as illustrated in Geopolitica’s maps (Antonsich, 1997) – of building a dense railroads network across the two continents, of which Rome and Tripoli would have represented the respective terminals. Stressing the liaison (dangereuse) between inter-continental railways and geopolitical thinking (Heffernan, 2000), the reliance on inland transportation was meant to help undercut the British encirclement of the Mediterranean gates, undermine the Franco-British colonial grip on Africa, and build a new world order led by the Axis powers.
22In fact, the geopolitics of Eurafrica remained an imaginary one. Budgetary constraints confined the development of the railroad in Libya to a handful of kilometres around the main coastal towns. As Stefano Maggi (1997, p. 68) notes, “despite the intense propaganda of newspapers and colonial reviews, nothing more than pencil sketches superimposed on topographic maps was attempted throughout the colonial period”, also because of the sabotages by the anti-colonial guerrilla in Libya’s hinterland. One could therefore conjecture that the whole Eurafrica doctrine was a mere rhetorical device of the Fascist regime, construed to galvanise the German ally’s southern projection in support of Italy’s geopolitical mires, and draw Hitler away from his adventurous Eurasian piercing in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the depiction of Libya as the main gate of Europe’s control of and projection into Africa left a lasting legacy.
23With independence, Libya became an international (“geopolitical”) subject in its own right. As such, it was no longer confined to be the object of someone else’s geopolitical imaginary, but started to develop its own “imagined community”, and to project its own views on the outside space. The Senussi monarchy initially appeared to proceed in the direction of a greater fragmentation and recognition of regional autonomies, as enshrined in the federalist constitution of 1951. But the discovery of oil reverted the process, pushing towards centralisation (Vandewalle, 2018).
24Since 1969, the advent of the Gaddafi regime further projected Libya onto the international stage. Although Gaddafi’s views of international politics proved at least as unpredictable and volatile as his conduct of domestic affairs, one can analytically discern at least two main geopolitical imaginaries that the Colonel contributed to popularising: pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism (Joffé, 2005).
25In the wake of Egypt’s Nasser and its ideology, Libya’s “Great Revolution” of 1969 explicitly asserted the Arab identity and belonging of Gaddafi’s Libya. At home, this translated into the nationalisation of oil resources and the promotion of (forced) Arabisation policies aimed to homogenise the state and its constituency. Incidentally, this approach meant the denial of Libyan minorities’ rights, including the forcible change of Berber toponyms and the downgrading of Tamasheq to the status of dialect (Kohl, 2014). Abroad, the promotion of pan-Arabism prompted Gaddafi’s attempts to federate Libya with like-minded Arab republics, including Syria, Egypt and Sudan. The outlining of a Middle-Eastern convergence pivoted in the Mediterranean was part of a deliberate attempt to challenge (neo-)colonial geopolitical imaginaries about the region’s identity and otherness, and its related security-priorities (Bilgin, 2004). But it also resonated with the enduring imaginary of a “white” Africa north of the Sahara insulating Europe from the rest of the “black” continent.
26Pushed throughout the 1970s, these endeavours proved quite ephemeral. Gaddafi’s unapologetic sponsoring of Arab irredentist non-state armed groups – such as Abu Nidal, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Polisario Front and the Islamic Legion – soon alienated Arab statesmen and Libya’s neighbours in particular (Vandewalle, 2018). In the late 1970s and 1980s, as Egypt’s and Algeria’s relations with the US normalised, Libya’s isolation was further entrenched by diplomatic and armed skirmishes with neighbouring countries – Egypt in 1977, Chad in 1978-87, Tunisia in 1980-85 and Morocco in 1986 (Joffé, 2005). And when in 1992 the UN Security Council imposed harsh sanctions on Libya, no Arab leader came to the fore to shield the Gaddafi’s regime.
27This event provoked a remarkable shift in Gaddafi’s geopolitical imaginary, with the demise of pan-Arabism and the rise of pan-Africanism. While the latter had long been part of Gaddafi’s foreign policy repertoire, the deterioration of the relationship with neighbouring Arab countries led the Colonel to accentuate Libya’s African belonging. Actively advertising his own familiarity with the nomads from the interior, Gaddafi seized the opportunity of the international embargo to cement transactional relationships with trans-Saharan smuggling networks in order to informally refurbish the main supply lines to the country (Shaw and Mandang, 2014). At the same time, Libya de facto condoned irregular immigration, as a way to both source cheap labour and earn Gaddafi a reputation of liberality and generosity vis-à-vis sub-Saharan Africans. These shifts incidentally helped reframe the Tuareg’s position in Libya, bringing them from the margins to the centre of Libya’s construction. And while the nationality policies remained haphazard and opportunistic, the granting of citizenship and labour permits was somehow relaxed (Kohl, 2014). Libya also leveraged its considerable oil wealth to sponsor Africa-oriented regional organisations. The Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD) was a free-trade area founded in Tripoli in 1998, initially grating membership to countries like Mali, Niger, Burkina-Faso, Chad, Central African Republic, Sudan and Eritrea and – significantly enough – only observer status to North African countries. Gaddafi also tapped into his longstanding ties with the ANC (Africa National Congress) to strengthen the partnership with post-apartheid South Africa and promote the transformation of the Organisation for African Unity into the more proactive African Union in 2002. By fostering a pan-Africanist geopolitical imaginary, Libya managed to make itself a centrepiece of African integration, in spite of its peripheral geographic position.
28Underpinning these oscillations, historians have noticed the weaponization of (the research into) the country’s past to legitimise Gaddafi’s preferred geopolitical imaginary. Since its establishment in 1978, the Libyan Studies Centre, Libya’s leading historical research institution, has frequently changed focus, and even name, to adapt to the country’s volatile (geo-)politics: at first, it dealt primarily with Libya’s anti-colonial struggle, which was incidentally qualified as jihad (Baldinetti, 2010); then, it strived to substantiate claims of Libya’s Arab and Muslim identity (Anderson, 1986); and eventually the focus on trans-Saharan caravan trade led to (re-)discover Libya’s Saharan roots and its intimate ties with sub-Saharan African countries (Lydon, 2015).
29These developments contribute to explaining the reluctance of African countries, and – by contrast, the rush of Arab countries – to endorse the 2011 UN Security Council resolution which paved the way to the international intervention against Gaddafi in Libya.
30Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, geopolitics has provided a powerful repertoire of discourse to legitimise the construction of the new Republic of Turkey and its (claimed) position in the world (Bilgin, 2007). Implicitly confirming the polysemy of the geographic “reality”, a variety of approaches to geopolitics developed and thrived, especially since the end of the Cold War, in a competition to frame the foreign policy orientation of Turkey (Akturk, 2015). In all of them, however, Libya long remained remarkably “absent from the collective imaginary of republican Turkey” (Seni, 2021, p. 149).
31With the advent of Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) to power in 2002, the repertoire of the pan-Islamist geopolitical imaginary arguably gained prominence (Ozkan, 2014). While seeking a further integration in the Western-led liberal order, Turkey increasingly tried to build and leverage its own soft power to posture as the protector of the “oppressed” Islamic communities in the broader region, weather in Palestine, the Balkans or Somalia. In 2011, the Arab Springs marked the apogee of this approach, as well as the beginning of its decline. As North African authoritarian rulers were toppled, Turkey appeared to provide a model combining a democratic regime, a moderate Islamic leadership, and a booming economy. Yet subsequent events brought the pan-Islamist project to an abrupt halt: al-Sisi’s coup in Egpyt in 2013, the backsliding of the Syrian revolution in 2014, and the militarist turn in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates – all demonstrated the diplomatic isolation of Turkey, and the futility of soft power in an increasingly polarised regional environment.
32In the wake of these challenges, the failed coup d’Etat against Erdogan in July 2016 prompted a shift in Turkey’s politics, which became more authoritarian domestically, and more assertive internationally. The alliance between Erdogan’s AKP and the far-right MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) prompted a change in the multi-faceted repertoire of Turkey’s geopolitical imaginaries, with a reorientation from pan-Islamism to pan-Ottomanism. From this perspective, Turkey depicted itself not as the bulwark of norms such as humanitarianism, compassion and freedom of religion extending to the umma of Islamic believers, but as the historic and geographic centre of a (imagined?) community linked by ethnic ties and shared ancestry. Underpinning this geopolitical imaginary, Turkish ideologues promoted the concept of vatan – homeland – which resonates with ideas of immemorial origins and domestic refuge. The appeal to the vatan was then increasingly mobilised to legitimise Ankara’s assertiveness wherever the purported heritage of Ottomans’ Turkey and Turks-descendants was allegedly threatened, from the Caucasus to North Africa, from the Balkans to Central Asia. It was also used to articulate Turkey’s claims to sovereignty over maritime spaces: the coining of the concept of mavi vatan – the “blue” vatan – helped convey Turkey’s longstanding feelings of encirclement and stranglement – one could speculate, of its “living space” – stemming from a division of international waters that Ankara deems unfair (ICG, 2020).
33The rise of pan-Ottomanism and the emphasis on the vatan provides the key for interpreting Turkey’s resurrecting interest in Libya, after more than a century of substantial disregard. The articulation of discursive tropes resonating with a pan-Ottoman geopolitical imaginary proved instrumental in helping Ergodan justify Ankara’s intervention in Libya vis-à-vis Turkish domestic audiences. While strategic communications targeting Libyans put forward Turkey’s endeavour to uphold Libya’s sovereignty and protect civilians, before the Turkish Parliament Erdogan stressed Libya’s centrality to: defend Turkish national interests in the region; thwart the attempts to encircle Turkey’s core; protect the population of Turks descendants living in Misrata against the threats by Turkey’s enemies and their local allies; and uphold the historic bond between Tripolitania and the Ottoman Empire (ICG, 2020; Seni, 2021). At the same time, the intervention was negotiated in parallel with – if not in exchange for – a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Ankara and Tripoli on the redefinition of the maritime borders in the Eastern Mediterranean. Making explicit reference to the mavi vatan doctrine, the MoU challenged Greece’s and Cyprus’s sovereignty in the sea, to the advantage of Turkey and Libya. Arguably, the spatial framing underpinning Turkey’s soaring stakes in Libya cannot be overlooked.
34The article has reviewed some of the most prominent geopolitical imaginaries on, by and about Libya, from pre-colonial times to date. The exploration of their trajectories and relations can help de-naturalise the main spatial assumptions about “Libya”, its constituent parts, and their place in the world. At the same time, it can shed lights on some important drivers of the Libya’s unsettled state-making and its unresolved fragilities.
35The enduring legacy of Libya’s competing geopolitical imaginaries in fact points to a plausible constitutive factor laying at the root of the ongoing polarisations and conflict dynamics among domestic actors. One could track down the stalemate of the constitutional drafting process to competing views of Libya’s statehood as a unitary or aggregated entity, which alternatively surfaced in the spatial and geopolitical imaginaries prevailing between 1850s and 1950s. Similarly, the struggles for identity, citizenship and minority rights recognition, which have fuelled violence in Libya’s borderlands since 2011, appeal to the persistent legitimacy of the spatial imaginaries of transborder connectivity which, for different reasons, both the Senussi order and Gaddafi’s pan-regional views had fostered (Kohl, 2014). One could even go as far as speculating that the non-territorial messianism of the Senussi order’s network has inspired terrorist groups in their attempt to spread a radically different yet traditionally legitimised spatial and political order in Libya, emanating from hideouts in the desert (Kadercan, 2021).
36On the other hand, the reference to competing geopolitical imaginaries can help illuminate the divergent approaches of the international actors intervening in Libya, and of their Libyan proxies struggling for recognition. The focus on the geopolitical imaginary of pan-Ottomanism provides a persuasive interpretation of Ankara’s military intervention in Libya and of its aggressive revanchism in the Easter Mediterranean. Yet Turkey’s undertaking resonates ambiguously with Libya’s complex history and the diverse geopolitical imaginaries it conveys, in as much as the legacy of the Ottoman empire is associated with both anti-colonial resistance and pre-colonial subjugation. The articulation of identity/othering constructions, security perceptions and geopolitical imaginaries helps explain the heterogeneous sorting of Libyan armed groups in the context of Turkey’s armed intervention.
37Europe, for its part, appears to have resumed, possibly without fully realising it, the old geopolitical imaginary of Eurafrica. After a long eclipse, the term was first reintroduced in security discourses by Nicholas Sarkozy (Antonsich, 2009). The then-French President – who would later become the main advocate of the 2011 military intervention against Gaddafi – relaunched the Eurafrica trope in the framework of the establishment of the Union for the Mediterranean, stressing that common challenges and opportunities tied Africa and Europe together, and thereby framing the Mediterranean as a pivot of connection between the EU and its southern neighbourhood in Africa. One could conjecture that this move was also an attempt to balance the EU policy towards the Eastern neighbourhood, allegedly hegemonized by Germany, in an implicit contest of geopolitical imaginaries pitting Eurafricanism versus Eurasianism. The main features of the Eurafrica template are also evident in the contemporary process of EU borders externalisation towards the south: pivoted in Libya (Bialasiewicz, 2012), it fosters the fusion between internal and external security (Bigo, 2000), and therefore between Europe and its African outside. At the same time, an implicit hierarchisation of North-South relations persists in Eurafrica’s geopolitical imaginary, and underlies Europe’s obsession with controlling and filtering flows emanating from Africa across the Mediterranean. This ambivalence provides opportunities for Libya’s armed actors who take advantage from posturing as Europe’s gatekeepers, from Gaddafi’s informal networks to today’s combination of armed factions and para-state coast guards. Leveraging material and symbolic resources from abroad, these actors actively undermine the (re-)construction of a unitary Libyan state which could do without them.
38It is also interesting to note how the intervention in Libya in 2011, by triggering Europe’s demand for greater strategic autonomy, paved the way to the appointment of a “geopolitical Commission” and increasingly marked the projection of the Union’s foreign policy towards Africa, the latter being now subsumed in an imaginary sphere of influence of the EU (Raineri, 2022). At the same time, the analogy between the Saharan heartland of Africa and the Central Asian steppe that classical geopolitics considered the pivot of world politics (Lacoste, 2011) has contributed to making of Libya’s Fezzan the centre of gravity of regional competition. Regional state powers such as France, Italy, Turkey, Chad and the Arab Emirates compete to build their own (patronage) networks and stretch their influence among armed groups in the region, which in turns exacerbates centrifugal tendencies.
39One can therefore conclude that the persistent influence of geopolitical imaginaries about competing spheres of influence – of which Libya often happens to represent the contested frontier – has contributed to exacerbating the (un-)making of the Libyan state, quod erat demonstrandum. In this framework, critical geopolitics challenges the obsolete yet widespread view of Libya’s marginality in the international system, by unsettling reified conceptions of order and belonging. It is precisely Libya’s position at the periphery of rival geopolitical imaginaries and asserted spheres of influence that makes of it a crossroad of strategic vectors, a hotspot of collisions, and therefore a centre of concern.