Libya: Past, Present and Future

Anas El Gomati (Sadeq Institute) and Mary Fitzgerald (King's College London) give a talk on Libya for the Middle East Centre seminar series. Chaired by Dr Usaama al-Azami (St Antony's College). Libya's February 2011 uprisings offered an early example of the dangers of the regional upheavals when met with the military might of a recalcitrant dictator. The civil war that ensued and ultimately led to the killing of Gaddafi in October 2011 marked the beginning of a challenging transition that has been held back by repeated set backs, complex civil wars, wars by proxy, and shaky ceasefires. The future remains uncertain but deserves our attention and careful consideration. Speaker biographies: Mary Fitzgerald is a researcher specialising in the Euro-Mediterranean region with a particular focus on Libya. She has reported on and researched Libya since February 2011 and lived there in 2014. An Associate Fellow at ICSR, King's College London, she has conducted research on Libya for International Crisis Group (ICG), the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), and United States Institute of Peace (USIP) among others. Previously a journalist, her reporting on Libya has appeared in publications including the Economist, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, and the Guardian. She is a contributing author to an edited volume on the Libyan revolution and its aftermath published by Oxford University Press. Anas El Gomati is the founder and current Director General of the Tripoli-based Sadeq Institute, the first public policy think tank in Libya's history established in August 2011. He has held several positions in the region and Europe, as a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, Lebanon and visiting lecturer at the NATO defence college in Rome, Italy. He is a frequent commentator on Libya and the MENA region on Al Jazeera, BBC, France 24, Sky News.He is the author of 'Libya's Islamists and Salafi Jihadists - the battle for a theological revolution' of the edited volume 'The Arab Spring Handbook' (Routeledge Press 2015). He is the co-author of 'the conversation will not be televised' ‘a divided gulf, anatomy of a crisis’ on the role of gulf states across North Africa (Palgrave 2019).