So often many of us use the word “understudied” to describe Libya as a topic in different fields of research. I myself have done so on this blog (probably quite often) and I hear colleagues do the same. In this post, I want to make one kind of attempt to quantify this. Not to complain (more than I already do), or propose any particular solution, and certainly not to validate the idea that quantity of research on a topic somehow indicates better, more useful research. Rather, just as an informal exercise, get some more precision about what “understudied” might really mean, as a complement to the (rather vague) impression many of us have. To do this, I’ve decided to look at general venues of research in which a Libyan-related topic might be reasonably expected to appear, and make a rough calculation about what percent of work in those venues relates to Libya. I focus on early-modern to contemporary Libya here (ancient Libya already has good coverage through several dedicated journals).

Case #1: Annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association

The main (US-based) conference for specialists in the Middle East, mostly modern but often including early modern topics; it bears mentioning that North Africa has usually (again, impressionistically) been underrepresented at this conference. Given the large contigent of politics and international relations papers that get presented at MESA, one might expect this venue to have a higher proportion of Libya-related papers than venues in other fields.

MESA has made conference data back to 2009 available online. With the assistance of my programmer friend Ahmed (also Libyan, for data bias purposes naturally), we pulled all the abstracts and titles from their site, and sorted through them. The method is as follows: a paper counted as “directly about” Libya if a Libyan-related topic was the main focus of the paper (based on the abstract, or title). A paper counted as “includes Libya” if the main topic was something else, but it mentioned Libya in the abstract, e.g. as part of a comparison. When looking at papers, it was not only the keyword “Libya” which was used, but also other keywords such as names of cities (e.g. “Tripoli”), political leaders (e.g. “Qaddafi”), and so forth. This may leave out a few papers (it wasn’t possible to read every abstract carefully!), but it is unlikely that there would be a significant number of papers about Libya but not including any of these major keywords. (Note that I think this search does not include roundtables, which are a regular feature of MESA meetings; it may, as in 2020, improve the representation of Libya somewhat.)

2009 (total papers 231): includes Libya 3, directly about Libya 1
2010 (total papers 223): includes Libya 1, directly about Libya 0
2011 (total papers 254): includes Libya 3, directly about Libya 1
2012 (total papers 197): includes Libya 4, directly about Libya 0
2013 (total papers 278): includes Libya 4, directly about Libya 2
2014 (total papers 276): includes Libya 5, directly about Libya 2
2015 (total papers 218): includes Libya 4, directly about Libya 2
2016 (total papers 311): includes Libya 10, directly about Libya 4
2017 (total papers 244): includes Libya 3, directly about Libya 2
2018 (total papers 257): includes Libya 11, directly about Libya 3
2019 (total papers 305): includes Libya 8, directly about Libya 6
2020 (total papers 344): includes Libya 13, directly about Libya 4
2021 (total papers 260): includes Libya 7 directly about Libya 4
2021 (total papers 260): includes Libya 13, directly about Libya 6

In sum, the most important and largest North American venue for gathering to present research on the Middle East and North Africa has what amounts to exceedingly minimal discussion of Libyan topics.

Case #2: International Journal of Middle East Studies

IJMES has been published since 1970, with 4 issues appearing per year. Try as I might, I could not turn up very many articles dealing with Libyan topics, even when expanding keyword searches to include all sorts of alternate spellings. I found only 4 articles with the word “Libya” in the title, and another 8 dealing with a Libyan topic, for a grand total of 12 articles appearing over 212 journal issues containing on average at least 10 articles each. That is 0.005%. (I’d be happy to be shown how these figure are wrong on my end.)

Case #3: Journal of North African Studies

One would expect a platform dedicated to North Africa to have comparatively more work (again, not including book reviews) focusing on Libya, and JNAS does clear this low bar ever so slightly. It has been publishing up to 6 issues per year since 1996. To find relevant articles, I did title, abstract, and full-text seraches for keywords such as “Libya”, “Tripoli”, “Cyrenaica” and a few others, and skimmed the titles and abstracts. Despite the journal’s founder, George Joffé, being particularly interested in Libya, the number of studies focusing on that area is still seemingly rather low. It is also interesting to look at the number of articles published before and after a watershed event:

JNAS pre-2011 articles on a Libyan topic: 18
JNAS post-2011 articles on a Libyan topic: 34

How does this figure as a rough percentage of work published by JNAS? To make a quick calculation: an average issue seems to have about 10 articles, there are an average of 5 issues per year, for 26 years (not including 2023). That makes for approximately 1300 total articles. In that light, the number of articles focusing on a Libyan topic is indeed still pretty low: 0.04%.