Antonio M. Morone, Libyan intermediaries on the eve of country independence: the case of the bin Sha’ban family, in AM Di Tolla, V Schiattarella (eds.), Libya between History and Revolution: Resilience, new opportunities and new challenges for the Berbers?, UniorPress, Napoli, 2020, pp. 99-114. (original) (raw)

"Playing with Molecules": The Italian Approach to Libya

This paper aims to analyse the many ways in which Italy is trying to play with the many Libyan “molecules”, the different parties of a fragmented and collapsing country, and the possible implications of the strategy adopted by the Gentiloni government and its Minister of Interior, Marco Minniti, towards the country and the migratory crisis. Rome engaged a patient strategy of “mending” with the two main national actors and with a plethora of local players, tribes, municipalities, city-states, and militias struggling in the quest for power. For Italy, a stable Libya is crucial to manage the flow of migrants leaving the country and crossing the Strait of Sicily, to ensure energy provisions, and to manage licit and illicit economic activities in the Mediterranean. Trying to assess the resilience of this strategy is of the utmost importance in order to have a measure of which kind of responsibility Rome assumed over the past two years and what kind of accountability would be inherited by the incoming government. Indeed, the “molecular” approach carried out by the Gentiloni Government in the country should be viewed as a double-edged strategy: while the migration flow dramatically shrank over the past months, economic relations recover and informal cooperation forges new spaces for dialogue, promoting ambiguous players, without a comprehensive approach and a clear political vision, could undermine prospects for peace in the country, Italian national interests and the future of Italy-Libya relations.

Re-Centering Libya's History: Mediterranean Bulwark, Defender of Africa, or Bridge between Continents

Lamma, 2020

This paper discusses Libya's geo-historical identity from the Italian colonial period until the end of the Qaddafi regime. It specifically looks at characterizations of the country as Mediterranean or African in the different periods. By examining the historiographic discourse in Italian and Arabic as well as the political aesthetics and symbolisms connected with the colonial and the Qaddafi regimes, the article shows how varying characterizations were linked to geo-political agendas. Finally, it presents a third characterization: that of Libya as a connecting link between regions and continents, which has become prominent in more recent times.

Italy, Libya and the EU Co-dependent systems and interweaving imperial interests at the Mediterranean border

The Entangled Legacies of Empire. Race, Finance and Inequality - edited by Paul Robert Gilbert, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven, and Johnna Montgomerie, 2023

The image featured in this chapter portrays former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi greeting former Libyan president Colonel Muammar Gaddafi at Rome's Ciampino airport, on 10 June 2009. It documents Gaddafi's first visit to Italy, occurring exactly four decades after he seized power in Libya. Gaddafi's visit to Rome was intended as a celebration of the signing of the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya that took place a year earlier in Benghazi. A total of seven events took place between 2008 and 2010 in both countries, to publicly perform this new-found friendship as well as to define the different terms of the treaty, specifically, on issues like migration, oil and gas trade, as well as infrastructural development and financial investment. Moreover, these bilateral agreements addressed historical contentions while prompting a series of policies that shape the EU's relation to its Mediterranean border. This image incarnates the warming of relations between the two countries after a century of stormy dealings, but it also gained iconic status because it records an act of diplomatic defiance that sparked great controversy. What does this image and the context in which it was received tell us about Italy's relationship with its colonial past? How is this colonial past being replayed through contemporary diplomatic initiatives which open up financial opportunities in exchange for the securitization of refugees? Do Italy and Libya's postcolonial relations replay formal colonialism, or represent a new form of co-dependency?

The History of Libya and its Peoples: the Road to an Exploitable Vulnerability

2021

It is an often-committed mistake that the currently still ongoing war in Libya is being associated with Qadhafi’s removal in some way. Finding a comprehensive analysis with sources on development of the society itself is not common even today. However, as this work is going to prove, examining this issue from the Ottoman era is more than essential. Regulations and relations amongst tribes living in the three major territories evolved during the centuries, but their development curve is hardly comparable to e.g. European countries’. The purpose of this article is to show that the current civil war is fundamentally still a domestic issue, even if throughout the past five years it became exceedingly more international in nature

Writing Ottoman and Italian Colonial Libya: Intelligence Gathering and the Production of Colonial Knowledge

Hespéris-tamuda, 2020

By mid-nineteenth-century, European powers became interested in Libya as a valuable asset to their colonial expansion into North Africa. In the context of fascist Italy, explorers such as Emilio Scarin gathered geographic, demographic, and ethnographic knowledge central to the establishment of colonial settlements. However, Italian knowledge of Libya bore within it the sedimentation of decades of descriptive accounts that developed in response to pre-1911 colonial projects in Libya, such as finding a route to the Niger (LyonRitchie), opening trade relations with colonial possessions in Central Africa (Duveyrier), and determining the autochthony of Libyan and North African Jewry (Slouschz). These discursive antecedents were important to Italyʼs “Libyan colonial archive” and its colonial interests, military and economic. The knowledge produced as part of the Italian colonial occupation of Libya can be shown to have contributed to British ethnological knowledge, especially as advanced by Edward Evans-Pritchard. Focusing on Fascist rule of Libya, this article highlights how intelligence gathering imperatives drove and influenced military reports and writings about Libya and its inhabitants from the early-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. I argue that while motivated by colonial economic interests, this ethnological archive emerged in relation to and in conversation with other European colonial projects in the larger Maghrib.

The “Other” at Home: Deportation and Transportation of Libyans to Italy During the Colonial Era (1911–1943)

International Review of Social History

This article analyses the practices of deportation and transportation of colonial subjects from Libya, Italy’s former possession, to the metropole throughout the entire colonial period (1911–1943). For the most part, the other colonial powers did not transport colonial subjects to Europe. Analysing the history of the punitive relocations of Libyans, this article addresses the ways in which the Italian case may be considered peculiar. It highlights the overlapping of the penal system and military practices and emphasizes the difficult dialogue between “centre” and “periphery” concerning security issues inside the colony. Finally, it focuses on the experience of the Libyans in Italy and shows how the presence there of colonial subjects in some respects overturned the “colonial situation”, undermining the relationship of power between Italians and North Africans.