Winner of the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies 2022 This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929–1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. This book links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies. Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, directly murdered and victim to Italian deportations and internments. They were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives while remaining hidden and unexplored in a systematic fashion, and never in the manner that has allowed us to comprehend and begin to understand the extent of their existence. Based on the survivors’ testimonies, which took over ten years of fieldwork and research to document, this new and original history of the genocide is a key resource for readers interested in genocide and Holocaust studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and African and Middle Eastern studies.

A vivid and astonishing reckoning with the Gaddafi regime, from one of our most acclaimed and gifted international journalists The fall of Muammar Gaddafi, who was for forty-two years the great autocrat-madman on the world stage, is among the past decade’s most dramatic turning points. In Lindsey Hilsum, a renowned British correspondent for over a quarter century, the end of the Gaddafi regime has found its definitive chronicler. Following six individuals living through this time of unprecedented danger and opportunity, Hilsum tells the full story of the Libyan revolution—from the uprising of the early months through the toppling of Gaddafi’s regime and his savage death in the desert. For the paperback edition, Hilsum brings her analysis up to the present day—with new material on the killing of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the July elections, and the Benghazi anti-militia demonstrations—and explores what the future of Libya will bring.

In this incisive account, scholar Horace Campbell investigates the political and economic crises of the early twenty-first century through the prism of NATO’s intervention in Libya. He traces the origins of the conflict, situates it in the broader context of the Arab Spring uprisings, and explains the expanded role of a post-Cold War NATO. This military organization, he argues, is the instrument through which the capitalist class of North America and Europe seeks to impose its political will on the rest of the world, however warped by the increasingly outmoded neoliberal form of capitalism. The intervention in Libya—characterized by bombing campaigns, military information operations, third party countries, and private contractors—exemplifies this new model. Campbell points out that while political elites in the West were quick to celebrate the intervention in Libya as a success, the NATO campaign caused many civilian deaths and destroyed the nation’s infrastructure. Furthermore, the instability it unleashed in the forms of militias and terrorist groups have only begun to be reckoned with, as the United States learned when its embassy was attacked and personnel, including the ambassador, were killed. Campbell’s lucid study is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this complex and weighty course of events.

This book offers a novel and contemporary examination of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine from an international legal perspective and analyses how the doctrine was applied within the Libyan and Syrian conflicts as two recent and highly significant R2P cases. The book dissects each of R2P’s three component pillars to examine their international legal underpinnings, drawing upon diverse legal frameworks – including the laws of the UN, laws of international organisations, human rights law, humanitarian law, criminal law, environmental law, and laws of State responsibility – to extract conclusions regarding existing and emerging host and third-State obligations to prevent and react to mass atrocity crimes. It uses this legal grounding to critically examine specific aspects of the Libyan and Syrian R2P cases, engaging with some of the more traditional debates surrounding R2P’s application, most notably those that pertain to the use of force (or lack thereof), but also exploring some of the less-researched non-military methods that were or could have been employed by States and international organisations to uphold the doctrine. Such an analysis captures the diversity in the means and actors through which R2P can be implemented and allows for the extraction of more nuanced conclusions regarding the doctrine’s strengths and limitations, gaps in enforceability, levels of State support, and future trajectory. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of international law and human rights law.

It took three decades for the United States government-spanning and working assiduously over five different presidential administrations (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II , and Obama)-to terminate the 1969 Qaddafi Revolution, seize control over Libya’s oil fields, and dismantle its Jamahiriya system. This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened, and what was both wrong and illegal with that from the perspective of an international law professor and lawyer who tried for over three decades to stop it. Francis Boyle provides a comprehensive history and critique of American foreign policy toward Libya from when the Reagan administration came to power in January of 1981 up to the 2011 NA TO war on Libya that ultimately achieved the US goal of regime change, and beyond. He sets the record straight on the series of military conflicts and crises between the United States and Libya over the Gulf of Sidra, exposing the Reagan administration’s fraudulent claims of Libyan instigation of international terrorism put forward over his eight years in office. Boyle reveals the inside story behind the Lockerbie bombing cases against the United States and the United Kingdom that he filed at the World Court for Colonel Qaddafi acting upon his advice-and the unjust resolution of those disputes. Deploying standard criteria of international law, Boyle analyzes and debunks the UN R2P “responsibility to protect” doctrine and its immediate predecessor, “humanitarian intervention”. He addresses how R2P served as the basis for the NATO assault on Libya in 2011, overriding the UN Charter commitment to state sovereignty and prevention of aggression. The purported NATO protection in actuality led to 50,000 Libyan casualties, and the complete breakdown of law and order. And this is just the beginning. Boyle lays out the ramifications: the destabilization of the Maghreb and Sahel, and the French intervention in Mali-with the USA/NATO/Europe starting a new imperial scramble for the natural resources of Africa. This book is not only a classic case study of the conduct of US foreign policy as it relates to international law, but a damning indictment of the newly-contrived R2P doctrine as legal cover for Western intervention into third world countries.

In 2011, former Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party candidate for President, Cynthia McKinney, took a delegation of observers to Libya to monitor NATO�s purported humanitarian intervention. Prefaced by Ramsey Clark, this collection of essays includes scholarly and legal analysis, as well as personal accounts by witnesses to the NATO assault on a helpless civilian population it had a UN mandate to protect, and the massive media propaganda campaign that made it possible. It responds to the many questions left unanswered by a complicit mainstream media, such as: � Why Libya, not Bahrain, Yemen or Egypt? � What was life in Libya like under Qadhafi? � What is the truth about the so-called �Black Mercenaries”? � What was the role of Western NGOs and the International Criminal Court? � What about Africom�s Plans for Africa? � What did it have to do with Liby�a independent central bank, its oil, its plans for an African currency, its efforts to free African states from the coils of the Bretton Woods Institutions? Cynthia McKinney and other contributors to this volume were in Libya during the period of the NATO bombardment of Libyan cities, and were among the few independent voices to report on the tragedy.

The world watched as the bud of the Arab Spring was buried under the cold darkness of the Libyan Winter.

In 2005, the international community made a landmark commitment to prevent mass atrocities by unanimously adopting the UN’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) principle. As often as not, however, R2P has failed to translate into decisive action. Why does this gap persist between the world’s normative pledges to R2P and its ability to make it a daily lived reality? In this new book, leading global authorities on humanitarian protection Alex Bellamy and Edward Luck offer a probing and in-depth response to this fundamental question, calling for a more comprehensive approach to the practice of R2P – one that moves beyond states and the UN to include the full range of actors that play a role in protecting vulnerable populations. Drawing on cases from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, they examine the forces and conditions that produce atrocity crimes and the challenge of responding to them quickly and effectively. Ultimately, they advocate both for emergency policies to temporarily stop carnage and for policies leading to sustainable change within societies and governments. Only by introducing these additional elements to the R2P toolkit will the failures associated with humanitarian crises like Syria and Libya become a thing of the past.

An original reconstruction of the evolution of and international diplomatic response to the 2011 Libyan crisis, which draws on a diverse range of sources including in-depth interviews with politicians and diplomats to understand the real-world application of the UN's 'Responsibility to Protect' principle.

The Making of Modern Libya is a thorough examination of the social, cultural, and historical background of modern Libya. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida examines the reaction of the ordinary Libyan people to colonialism and nationalism, from the early nineteenth century through the end of anticolonial resistance, to the rise of the modern Libyan state in 1951. Weaving together insights drawn from Arabic, French, English, and Italian sources, he challenges Eurocentric theories of social change that ignore the internal dynamics of native social history. Among other things, he shows that Sufi Islam, tribal military organization, and oral traditions were crucial in the fight against colonialism. The political and cultural legacy of the resistance has been powerful, strengthening Libyan nationalism and leading to the revival of strong attachments to Islam. The memory of this period has not yet faded, and appreciation of this background is essential to understanding modern Libya. This new edition also investigates Libya's postcolonial nationalist policies, bringing the argument up to the present.